Jars of Clay - Part 1

I drove straight to Mandalay Bay after work while Rick took care of getting the babysitter Aubry back to the apartment with the kids. While I was waiting for Rick to get there, I stood on the down ramp of the hotel watching the big video marquee sign in front, waiting for the Jars of Clay sign to flash. It flashed within about 2 minutes after I got out there, I missed the pictures, and it didn’t flash again for 21 minutes. Yes, I counted the minutes, because my neck was killing me from looking straight up! Plus, the Pro Rodeo is in town, so most of the ads were for country music singers – Trace Adkins, Carrie Underwood, and lots of others I didn’t recognize. I finally got my picture and headed back inside. I took these other pictures of signs outside the House of Blues, because photography is strictly forbidden inside. I had thoughts of taking a picture anyway, but a girl in front of us did and security took her out for a while – don’t know what happened, but I didn’t want it to happen to me.

Our seats were up in the balcony section because we figured general admission downstairs would be too crowded. We were on the left hand side of the top, which was cool, because when the first act – Kate York – was singing, we could see Dan from JOC sitting to the side of the stage watching. And, for a couple of her songs, Charlie from JOC played keyboards with her (so did the traveling guitar player David and the traveling drummer Jeremy). Kate has a beautiful voice, but lacks stage presence/confidence. Once she gets that worked out, she should be pretty good.

The second singer was Matt Wertz, who has lots of confidence and stage presence, but has a few moves reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite. His friend Justin that played guitar with him looks a lot like Charlie on the tv show Numbers, so Rick and I pretty much called them Napoleon and Numbers the rest of the performance. One highlight – Stephen from JOC played with them on one song. I have to admit, I like the fact that JOC encourages these artists so much.