Jars of Clay/Caedmon's Call Concert Review

Fairhaven Church
Dayton, OH
April 1, 2003
by Steve Fischer

Well, what can I say? This was my third show from this tour in 18 days and it was great. We got to the church about an hour early and there was a pretty long line. We went to pick up our meet & greet passes and the ladies at will call said to wait up there and they were going to open a side door for all those with meet & greet passes. When the doors opened, that side door was still locked, so we had to go in with everyone else. But it was cool. We got seats in the 5th row right in the middle.

From there we went to the meet & greet. It was cool. Dan, Matt, and Charlie came in first and they all said stuff like "you're back again" to us. I told Dan I'd listened to the audio version of the book "The Things They Carried" that he recommended on the message board a few weeks ago. He said that Ben Mize, the Counting Crow's drummer who worked on If I Left the Zoo told him about it. We got our pictures taken with them (again) and then we went to our seats. There were some other nice people in the meet & greet and they said they're going to the same Skillet concert we are in a few days.

Glass Byrd opened up. They mentioned that the husband of the duo was the lead singer in Common Children which I didn't know. I liked some of their songs. Then Caedmon's Call came up and did the same set they'd done a couple days before. My two favorite parts of were "This World" and "Hands of the Potter". In both they had some really cool, different percussion, a big wooden box in the former and three guys playing different stuff in the latter.

Jars came out and said . . . "Just thought we'd play a few songs for you tonight". They then did Like a Child and I Need You. The first round of "Hat Songs" were Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, which had a shorter introduction, but the people were cracking up. Then was Goodbye, Goodnight. They said they wrote it when they were storing up beans and our computers were going to kill us (Y2K) and made reference to the Titanic. Steve asked if everyone knew their part. I yelled "Yes" and he said "Good, one person". The third song from "The Hat" was Blind, which I don't think I'd ever heard live. At the end they went into the Jennifer Lopez song. People were really laughing, but my wife and I had no idea what it was until someone told us.

Then came Amazing Grace (I really like this song and look forward to it being on the new album). I think it was before this song that Dan said the first song they wrote was Fade to Grey and no one understood it and they didn't either. Then the second song they wrote was Love Song for a Savior and that it was the simple gospel like this song. Then was The Valley Song and 3 more "Hat Songs". While Dan had people picking out of the hat, Steve joked that Matt was running for governor of Texas on two platforms: demolishing the Dallas/Ft. Worth airport and air conditioning the whole state. They said "The Hat wasn't kind to them". So they changed one or all of the songs picked and instead they played "Boy on a String", "He", and "Frail". Talk about 3 awesome songs they don't play much anymore all in a row! They said how they liked this tour because they've gotten to play a lot of old ones. Before Frail Matt said it was a band favorite.

They talked even more than on most shows it seemed. They even kept joking about that. They kept saying how they'd been a band for 30-some years and that this was their Farewell Tour. Then, when they came back on for the encore, they said it was an April Fool's joke. Of the 3 shows I went to, I would say this crowd was the best. They got into it and stood for more songs than the others, which I like. The concert was at a church, kind of small for a Jars show I thought, but it had to be sold out or really close. Actually, all 3 shows we went to were full or really close to it.