Unlike the night’s co-headliner, the sweetly dark Alaska psych-pop outfit Portugal. The Man, Cage the Elephant portends an element of danger in their live performances. You know: Axl Rose might jump into the audience and punch you out; Rose might also decide an audience member looked at him the wrong way and call it a night; G.G. Allin might defecate and throw it around; Glenn Danzig might grab, and toss, your smartphone if you take his photo; and the baby-faced Shultz, a stagehand frantically following him around to give the microphone cord slack, might get too close and bob his shaggy hair in your face.
About that stagehand – he’s a busy guy. With how much exercise Shultz gets running all over during Cage the Elephant shows, his stagehand’s job – making sure Shultz’s extra-long microphone cord doesn’t get stuck on a monitor or elsewhere – appears not unlike a cat following a string it will never catch. Multiple people around me wondered aloud why a band co-headlining Red Rocks doesn’t have access to a cordless microphone, but the consensus was that it’s all part of the show, ostensibly part of the “danger” façade.
Portugal. The Man, however, played a set that was relatively reserved and refined, its best songs, such as “Modern Jesus“ and “All
Your Light,” mysteriously beamed somewhere between Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” and tastes of Traffic’s “Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.”
The moment it hit me that the aforementioned creatively dark combination equals T. Rex, Portugal. The Man wowed the capacity Red Rocks audience with a patient, gratifying Phish-
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK?
Personal Bias: When my show-mate and I saw a young man with a baseball cap over an obvious gaping head wound, blood running down his face as he nonchalantly balanced two beers and a
Random Detail: Frank Zappa’s “I Could Be a Star Now” famously said of rock ‘n’ roll, “In this business you either gotta play the blues or sing with a high voice.” Needless to say, Cage the Elephant does not play the blues, and Shultz’s soaring voice (even higher than that of Portugal’s John Baldwin
By The Way: Cage the Elephant’s jangly 2014 single “Cigarette Daydreams” – with its “looking for the answers in the pouring rain” chorus – sounded downright meaningful and magical at Red Rocks. But doesn’t everything? Maybe; but no, I’m not testing that theory by going to see Ed Sheeran later this month.