TONIGHT I AM GOING TO THE KICK-OFF SHOW FOR THE NEW "TRAIN" TOUR

Yes, Train. That band that sings sometimes very bizarre, not all together original lyrics. I have liked most of their stuff, got a couple of their cd's. My wife says that I HAVE to see them live because she saw them play at Golden Gate Park 8 years ago and says it was one of the best shows she ever saw. Since I used that exact same reasoning on her about the group Crowded House (I saw them in 1989 and then saw them again in 2007, both times in Santa Barbara) we are going to see Train tonight.

What am I expecting? Pat Monahan's voice is supposed to be tremendous live. I've seen him on some awards shows and he seems to do a great job. My wife says he does "Dream On" better than Aerosmith. We'll see if he does it tonight.

Why do we pay the insane amount of money to go see concerts? Why do we give LiveNation and Nederlander and all those idiots our hard earned money? They charge us SOOO much for just a little piece of paper. Sure, it's at least 30 bucks to see a concert, but what's with the extra 30 bucks they get for all this processing crap? It's not fair. Obama needs to go after that next.

And you can bet when he does the conservative talk show hosts will harp on him for taking money away from hard working concert promoters. All those huge radio stars are in Clear Channel's pockets, anyway, and CC owns all the ticket companies. Much money is being taken from us by the wrong people.

I'm going to see this show tonight and sing along to some somewhat well written songs and in the end my wife and I are going to have an excellent time.

That is, if I don't think about how much I paid for the tickets.