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TOUR UPDATE (9/29/2016)

written by REO Speedwagon

Hi friends,

This past week has been pretty amazing.

The LA show, our hometown gig, was at a sold out Irvine Meadows Amphitheater. The backstage was full of family and long time friends. Even though we are working, it is so cool to see everybody laughing and enjoying being together. Ours was one of the final concerts at this venerable music venue which is slated to be demolished in favor of a condominium complex. Bummer right?

So we moved on to Sacramento, the hometown of our tour mates, Tesla. The band guys took me up on my offer to introduce them as, “…the band who put the sack in Sacramento…”. We love the Teslas!

The next show was at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA. My hotel room was one of the rooms where the Beatles stayed for their final live concert in San Francisco at Candlestick Park…cool, right? One of the hotel employees gave me a guided tour of the Palo Alto area which is so ripe with intelligence and creativity. Steve showed me all around the Stanford University campus, which I would tell you more about, but my daughter, and USC student, Holly has made it abundantly clear that I am expressly forbidden to say anything nice about any other West Coast college. Come to think of it the entire Stanford campus had a strange putrid odor, (not really:).

There were two free days before tonight’s show in beautiful Boise, Idaho…so I snuck off and hopped a flight back to LA and spent 24 hours at home with my wife Lisa and my boys Josh and Shane. It was a short visit, but totally worth it.

This tour with Def Leppard and Tesla is absolutely awesome. All of us get on so well, the audiences have been as supportive as they have been huge, and I feel like we have gained fans, which is very cool at this stage of our career. These last couple weeks will be bittersweet…I look forward to getting home with my family. I miss them all so much. And yet we will miss our touring family out here and all the great people we have met and connected with.
So we will make the most of these next two weeks as we look forward to reconnecting with our family and friends when the tour winds down and we all head home on October 10.

As we speak the bus is rolling after a great show tonight in Boise, toward a weekend in Eugene, OR. and Tacoma, WA.

Hope to see you then…kc