Grace Potter & the Nocturnals deliver one of Meijer Gardens’ best concerts of the season on Thursday after rain passes through. (Photos, video)
Grace Potter alternated between keyboards and guitar throughout the night.
In the end, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals chased the rain away in glorious fashion.
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Of course, that was after a deluge and brisk winds buffeted the near-sellout audience at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, a concertgoer had to be whisked away by ambulance, and a forlorn, confused duck unexpectedly swooped down and landed smack dab in the middle of the crowd.
A typical night at Meijer Gardens it was not.
“This is rock ‘n’ roll,” crowed opener and indie-rock singer-songwriter Natalie Prass as a sea of umbrellas popped open in the amphitheater packed with 1,800-plus fans.
Absolutely.
Judged solely on the merits of rock ‘n’ roll, it was truly a night to remember: The strikingly beautiful Potter and her band proved definitively that she deserves her rising status as the dynamically eclectic critics’ darling of the moment, crafting a joyously effervescent 1-hour-and-47-minute set melding folk, country, blues, pop and jam-band psychedelia with rootsy rock to fashion her own riveting thing.
Before Thursday’s show, this duck dove into the crowd and was eventually removed from the amphitheater by a security guard. It apparently didn’t have a ticket.
In fact, the last 30 minutes of her main set could qualify as one of the best half-hours ever in Meijer Gardens’ 10 years of summer concerts, starting with the band’s impressive, acid-dropping Jefferson Airplane imitation on “White Rabbit.” The group eventually thundered through impassioned renditions of “The Divide,” “Paris (Ooh La La),” and “Medicine,” and then trotted out a rollicking Madonna cover (“Like a Prayer”) for an encore, with Prass joining in on the fun.
At one point, all five band members pounded away gleefully on Matt Burr’s drumkit (and cowbell) during “Medicine,” in a graphic demonstration of a group that seems to really relish playing together on stage as it tours behind a brand new album, “The Lion The Beast The Beat,” from which the title track served as the set opener.
(As for the misguided bird that careened into the crowd, a security guard bundled it up in a blanket and carefully released it outside the amphitheater gates. Meijer Gardens couldn’t provide any updates on the
condition of the stricken concertgoer, other than to report that it involved a serious “medical issue.”)
Umbrellas and raincoats dominated the action early on.
There’s a fair amount of Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Ann Wilson, Adele and a handful of other influential female singers residing in Potter’s vocal cords, but make no mistake: This singer-songwriter from the unlikely rock breeding ground of Vermont is carving out her own path to stardom, with an indefatigable, vivacious stage presence.
With an unceasing broad grin, Potter the multi-instrumentalist vacillated between guitar and keyboards throughout the evening, whirling and dancing to psychedelic, reverb-drenched songs such as “Oasis” a la Stevie Nicks, with her flowing white wrap flapping in the breeze.
And when she followed “White Rabbit” with a spine-tingling, a capella rendering of a gospel-fired tune, I’m guessing every guy in the audience hankered to ask Potter to get married, conveniently forgetting whether they were attached or not. (Check out a full photo gallery from the show at MLive.com here, with Paul Jendrasiak’s terrific gallery of photos of Potter available here.)
In a line from “Falling or Flying,” an acoustic tune performed as a duo Thursday night, Potter advises that you should “play every show like it’s your last.”
Well, she certainly did that on Thursday night.
Email: jsinkevics@gmail.com
