Spare Heart and Love It To Death rock the Concert Pub North

Spare Heart wows the audience with both authentication and skill

Spare Heart – A Tribute to the band Heart and Love It To Death performances at The Concert Pub North on FM 1960 in Houston, TX were filled with songs the fans love and deep tracks from the artists’ respective catalogs. It was one rockin’ night!

Spare Heart kicked off the evening with a rousing and loud rendition of Even It Up from Heart’s 1980 classic Bebe Le Strange followed up by the ever-angry rocker Heartless, which was highlighted by the driving rhythm section headed by John Hill on drums and Sean Harrold on bass.

The cover of the power-ballad cover of Alone, which, like the actual recording, kicks into high gear around the chorus. Things only got better with the nicely done keyboard playing of Jeff Ball. It served as a nice complement to the smash hit These Dreams – a beautiful rendition done by the “Nancy Wilson” of the group, Staci Butler. However, this version was a bit more acoustic sounding, which made it sound organic.

Things were kicked back into high-gear with the driving guitar forces of Staci Butler and Mike Lambert on Crazy On You, which was quite possibly the fan favorite of the night.

One of the greatest things about Spare Heartis that they do both the “greatest hits” and some Heart’s deep tracks such as How Can I Refuse, which was beautifully executed by lead vocalist and the “Ann Wilson” of the band, Linda Lambert.

Shortly thereafter,  Love It To Death – The Alice Cooper Tribute show took the stage.

The highlight of Love It To Death – The Alice Cooper Tribute show’s set was none other than No More Mr. Nice Guy. Many in the audience enjoyed the song. Some even sang along.

One of the best things about Love It To Death – The Alice Cooper Tribute show is the fact that they are authentic: lead singer Paul Byron, when in makeup and other trademarks of Alice Cooper, looks strikingly close to the real Alice Cooper. He adds authentication to the performance by doing what Cooper may do during live performances. Such as when he performs Billion Dollar Baby, he throws out fake $1 billion dollar bills containing the band logo. The audience was highly entertained.

Overall, it was a nice precursor to kick off the Halloween season.

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• Alice Cooper’s New Nightmare Reunites The Original Billion Dollar Babies And…Ke$ha? (blogcritics.org)

heart rocks with “Bebe Le Strange”

Cover of Bebe Le Strange (Exp)

Heart is one of the greatest and most enduring hard rock acts to ever come out of the influence of Led Zepplin. They prove they have learned well from the hard rock masters on their 1980 release Bebe Le Strange.

With Bebe Le Strange, sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, drummer Mike DeRosier, Howard Leese and Steve Fossen decide to abandon the occasional soft rock that made the “butterfly” portion of their previous album, 1979’s Dog and Butterfly. Instead, they crank up both guitarists Steve Fossen’s and Nancy Wilson’s amps, distort them, and let them go to town. They do this well on such songs as Bebe Le Strange & Rockin’ Heaven Down.

However, the Wilson sisters kick things into overdrive with the hit single Even It Up – which could quite easily be showing the already bare cracks within the band – romantic ones at that. According to VH1’s Behind the Music Remastered, both Ann and Nancy Wilson were romantically involved with manager Mike Fisher and guitarist Roger Fisher – Mike’s brother. Mike started cheating on Ann and Nancy started falling in love with drummer Mike DeRosier while still dating Fisher. Needless to say, shortly after the release of 1984’s Private Audition, these men left the band because nobody messes with the Wilson sisters. Needless to say, all of the drama leading up to that seems to be channeled very nicely into that track.

Overall, I would 100% recommend this album for any Heart fan.

Additionally, if you happen to live in the Houston area, Heart will be performing with british rockers Def Leppard at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavillion on Friday night at 7pm. Tickets are still available at Ticketmaster. I highly recommend you attend this because it is a show that is not to be missed.