MUSIC: Stevie Wonder, Kiss light up Las Vegas
They do have something in common: mainly, the bedroom.
That’s where many of both Stevie Wonder and Kiss’ tunes end up, eventually.
Of course, they take pretty distinct routes to get there, and what separates the two is the difference between whispering sweet nothings in that special someone’s ear and whipping it out on the first date.
Still, with both in town on Saturday night, Wonder at the MGM Grand Garden arena and Kiss at The Pearl at the Palms, I caught a bit of both to see if there were any similarities between them.
And there were plenty, believe it or not.
Perhaps the main shared trait between the two was an emphasis on elaboration.
For his part, Stevie Wonder explores his tunes like he was tracing a lover’s curves, taking his time, mapping ever inch of his song lives. His tunes were dense and bottom heavy, as he played with a drummer and a pair of percussionists.
Toss in some seismically funky bass lines, and it was like getting a full body massage, such was the rhythmic force.
You expect soul firecrackers like “Higher Ground” to pack plenty of torque, and they most certainly did, but even poppier trifles like ““Bird of Beauty” were fleshed out into more concussive jams.
As for Stevie himself, his voice is still a thing of unvarnished beauty.
At times he sounded just like a broken heart feels, at others, he seemed like sunshine incarnate.
In the same way that Wonder takes the long way around his songs on stage, Kiss did the same at The Pearl, buffering everything with drum solos, bass solos, guitar solos — complete with six-stringer Tommy Thayer shooting sparks from his ax at one point — and well-received detours, like playing a bit of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” before roaring into a teeth-rattling “Black Diamond.”
Their gigs are an exercise in excess, with more explosions and high tech flourishes than a dozen Michael Bay flicks.
At The Pearl, the band came with a mix of the new and the old, pairing the fresh, yet vintage sounding “Modern Day Deliah” and “Say Yeah” from their recent disc “Sonic Boom,” with oversexed standards like “Parasite” and “Dr. Love.”
This was rock and roll at its most populist, and you could say the same about Wonder’s show, albeit in a different context, musically.
Both led the crowd in extended sing-a-longs and infused their shows with a winking self-awareness.
Wonder told some funny anecdotes about his blindness, while Kiss readily acknowledged their roles as escapist rock and roll cartoon characters come to life.
“If you came to see a rock and roll band tell you about all the damn problems in the world, you came to the wrong place,” Stanley announced at one point.
No one bolted for the exits.
Kiss and Wonder know how to give people what they want, and for their part, those people never seem to stop wanting more. The two acts’ respective catalogs are highly coital, and so it was no surprise that there was plenty of love to go around on this night.
