I haven't been to many concerts in my life (surprising, considering how much I like music) but the Red Hot Chili Pepper's at the Corel Centre was one of the best I've seen.

First off, you have to get a floor "seat". General admission. You can't rock to the Chilis glued to a chair. You have to funk it out with Flea and John ... and the floor was funked out. It was great.

The first opening act was a bit strange ... I'll try to find their names somewhere. The lead singer immitated Robert Plant and the lead guitarist imitated Keith Richards (except they both had big white-boy fros) and the band as a whole was so over-the-top, they probably thought they were the best rock band in the world. You have to earn that title, boys ... so go make some good music and call me in a few years. The lead singer kept throwing his mic around, jumping off the drumset and speakers, doing the James Brown shuffle (yea, it looked as bad as it sounds) and throwing the mic so it wrapped around his neck and then unwrapped. It just got tiring watching it. Their drummer saved their asses from a completely boring show. As it stood it was about 1/4 boring -- all of the songs sounded the same.

Queens of the Stone Age were the opening act. They were awesome (I'm going to pick up their CD because of it) and actually left my hearing more temporarily damaged than the much longer RHCP show did. I'm still trying to figure out if that's a good thing. They had a guest singer for two songs who kind of looked like the lead singer for Tea Party but not really ... I'll find out who he was, because he was great too. It would have been nice if they could have played longer, because the gap in between them and the Chilis was about 30 minutes and seemed long. To pass the time the crowd started the wave and it went around about a dozen times.

So RCHP comes on. We ended up pretty close, better than center ice (yes, the boards were up but not the glass) and the stage only took up about 1/4 of the arena. So we were maybe 75 feet away. Chad was wearing a personalized Ottawa Senators jersey with the arms cut off and the crowd went nuts. They played stuff mostly from the last two albums, By The Way and Californication and I was pleasantly surprised to hear many (about 4 or 5) older songs from Blood Sugar Sex Magic and earlier. I wonder if I can find a playlist online ... I'll try to find it.

In the middle of the set, John went acoustic with an old song - Eighteen by Alice Cooper - and that was great. From some of his older solo material it sounds like maybe John can't sing but he really belted out this one.

They came back for an encore after the crowd continuously cheered for 10 minutes and played "Under the Bridge" and a few others. By the end I had lost most of my voice and some of my hearing. Great show! :D