Heat Hurts Enthusiasm at Sheryl Crow Show

By Jake Zuckerman

“I’m sweating like a yard dog!” screamed a heavily perspiring Sheryl Crow to a packed crowd Friday night at Ravinia Festival.

Both Crow and the crowd had to stick out 90 degree heat with plenty of humidity to go along with it until the four day heat wave that’s crept over Chicago finally broke into a moderate thunderstorm; needless to say, weather was less than ideal for the show. 

Whether it was the dreary forecast or an imperfect set, the crowd remained fairly stagnant throughout the show for the 90’s pop hero.

Crow came on stage backed by a whopping four guitarists, one bassist, one percussionist, and one keyboard player. The huge band made for a sound imbalance and her vocals tended to be drowned out throughout the show by the madhouse of guitars (including her own).

From her opening songs, Crow’s voice was barely coming through over the guitar ensemble. While the guitar work was crisp, it was too much, drowning out her voice in her radio classic All I Wanna Do.

Despite the balance issues some songs worked better than others, especially those with less guitar parts in their arrangements. When Crow played her current radio hit, Easy, the song flowed much smoother. She sang the staycationers’ national anthem singing, “Hey who needs Mexico? We’ll just stay home.”

The set continued with Crow singing about how poor she is (a claim I find hard to believe) and her various boy troubles in My Favorite Mistake, Call Me When I’m Lonely, and Can’t Cry Anymore.

The night picked up briefly with a cover of the Electric Light Orchestra’s Don’t Bring Me Down and Real Gone, the latter being the opening song from the animated film, Cars, and according to Crow, the only song that her daughters like more than Taylor Swift.

For the remainder of the set, Crow alternated between her upcoming album and her main adult contemporary hits. The set continued in hit or miss fashion, pleasing the crowd with such modern classics as Leaving Las Vegas, First Cut Is The Deepest, Picture, If It Makes You Happy, and Soak Up The Sun. However, a big miss came when she played an unreleased song, The Best Of Times. The song borrowed lyrically from Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities fairly liberally, with Crow singing “It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times.” I can only assume the classic writer would not approve.

The set closed with Everyday Is A Winding Road, after which Crow came back for an encore that felt more imposed than pleaded for. She closed out the set to the rapidly thinning crowd for good with a respectable cover of Led Zeppelin’s Rock’n’Roll.

Talking to the crowd after the show, the vibe was generally content, with a little disappointment.

“It was a pretty average show,” said Federico Prian, 19, of Highland Park.

The crowd wasn’t entirely apathetic to the show, Mike Murphy of Madison Wisconsin said, “It was an awesome show. Totally worth the drive.”

The Pioneer Press recently ran a story about Ravinia’s ‘Lawncierge’ service, comparing Ravinia to the rooftops of Wrigley due to the general good time despite limited visibility to the program. To build off of that metaphor, if Ravinia is Wrigley Field, then tonight the Cubbies lost; a common Chicago story, yet less common for the largely successful Ravinia amphitheater.