>>>>Oh god no! Not Tom Petty! :o) Just kidding. He was a fav of mine back in the day. But then, so was Kansas (there was some great
>>>>music and talent - its weird how the sound changed as the band members changed)
>>>>Another great band: Dire Straits
>>>
>>>Somehow I always missed Kansas when they were touring over here - the closest I was to hearing them live was when I was passing through Stuttgart as part of a job: I stopped when their music was louder than my car... sat about half an H and listened. Another great band from that time was Styx - saw them a couple of years back again and it was a great concert. Supertramp is coming - but I'll probably miss them, but U2 a couple of days back was great, Sting is coming and Simply Red is on their farewell tour...
>>>
>>
>>I had not heard that about Simply Red. Mick Hucknall has one of the great voices in rock.
>
>Yepp, I gathered he'd like to go more for solo in the future. The last concert of Simply Red I went to [a small OpenAir location about a year ago in Mainz] instead of having another group performing as opening act Mick just came out and played some songs he liked "and wished he had written them". GREAT idea to hear some of the classic of rock and pop songs reinterpreted by a master just for fun.
>
>Bet you would have liked it
>

I bet so, too.

My favorite SR songs were "Love Fire" and "Holding Back the Years." The sad thing is I didn't see them live even though I was working in Manchester during their rise to fame. They were on tour at the time. I did see Lone Justice and Steve Earle, in exactly their heyday, in a great club in Manchester. Club Manchester? Something like that. Earle was still young and not an addict at the time, or at least he was still hiding it well. I was missing the U.S. at the time, although I liked Manchester enough. "I was drivin' into Texas with the hammer down" -- that hit home.