Radiohead Electrify Red Rocks

Put a capital-B Band like Radiohead in a capital-V Venue like Colorado's Red Rocks, and the possibilities become limitless. Last night, the cloud-filled sky above the natural amphitheater formed the perfect backdrop for the band's ominous, rumbling guitar rock.

Opening the set with "There, There," guitarists Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway launched a three-pronged percussive attack that was amplified by the natural amphitheater's jutting boulders. By the time bassist Colin Greenwood and frontman Thom Yorke joined in, there was obviously something epic brewing.

Underneath it all, Radiohead are a rock band as capable of punk tantrums as psychedelic dreamscapes, and they were determined to prove it last night. Under scorching vertical bars of light that stretched across the back of the stage, they designed a set of musical contradictions to match that of their environment -- bouncing from acoustic simplicity to mechanical looping and layering, catchy to chaotic, whispers to yelps.

"Subterranean Homesick Alien" made its first appearance of the band's tour so far. The remainder of the set drew primarily from the rest of Hail to the Thief along with some live standards: "Kid A," "Lucky," "My Iron Lung."

But Radiohead were never just rehashing the recordings. They weren't merely reenacting old events. Rather, they were reliving these songs, each note dripping with the same pain or ecstasy felt when the pen first hit the page.

Up front, Yorke flailed as if he'd learned to dance watching Native American rituals on National Geographic. Yorke's vocal range may be limited technically, but his emotional range compensates, his voice at once fragile and powerful.

Including two encores that together lasted forty minutes, the performance ran to an impressive two hours.

Leaving the stage after ending the first encore, with "Karma Police," Yorke stopped short, returned to the microphone, offered an impish smile and led the audience in a tender, deafening a cappella round of singing. "This is what you get . . . when you mess with us."

The intensity was absorbing and exhausting. And somewhere in the midst of electro-fuzz, bleeps and buzzes, piano tickling, solo strums, spastic strobes and sweeping laser-like beams of color, the clouds had cleared.

The set list:

There There
2+2=5
Lucky
Myxomatosis
Kid A
The Gloaming
Sit Down. Stand Up
Where I End and You Begin
Go to Sleep
Paranoid Android
Sail to the Moon
Talk Show Host
Idioteque
Exit Music (For a Film)
The National Anthem
Backdrifts
A Punch-up at a Wedding
Scatterbrain

We Suck Young Blood
Subterranean Homesick Alien
No Surprises
My Iron Lung
Karma Police

Big Ideas
Everything in Its Right Place

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Song Stories

“All Along the Watchtower”

The Jimi Hendrix Experience | 1968

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."

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