A surprisingly wide age range of fans from all walks of life attended Bryan Adams' tour stop Monday night with fellow '80s hitmaker Joan Jett at Xcel Energy Center.
Just kidding. The audience of about 7,000 fans for the Canadian-led American Independence Day Eve concert not surprisingly fell squarely in the Gen-X-and-older age bracket.
Unlike other '80s/'90s power-ballad specialists who recently came to town — like Shania Twain, Journey and Def Leppard/Mötley Crüe (the latter tour also featuring Jett as an opener) — Adams isn't riding any kind of resurgence or attracting younger fans who know his old FM radio hits from TikTok.
Still, the fans who did attend Monday treated him like an enduring rock star. He certainly still plays the role, too — and plays it well, for the most part.
The 63-year-old singer opened with the new song "Kick Ass," which promised "kick-ass rocking music from a kick-ass rocking band." That was quite a loaded pledge.
Sure enough, he and his five-piece band delivered a lot of high-energy rock with modest oomph. They started early in the set with extra-pumped versions of "Can't Stop This Thing We Started" and "Somebody" and then later with "It's Only Love" — a song Adams dedicated with high praise to his duet partner, Tina Turner, who died in May.
"It was a great loss to the music world, and to me personally," he said.
Most rocking of all, Adams brought out Minnesota resident Brian Setzer as a surprise guest to accompany the rockabilly-flavored tunes "You Belong to Me" and "l've Been Looking for You." Setzer then led the hosts through his Stray Cats classic "Rock This Town" and stuck around for a cover of Bobby Fuller's "I Fought the Law." Butts were indeed kicked.
Then, of course, Adams' best-known anthems "Summer of '69" and "Cuts Like a Knife" late in the set rocked with gusto thanks to the crowd, which roared back loudly.
Too often, though, Monday's set reverted to Adams' mushy power ballads that are about as "kick-ass" as Pottery Barn catalogs and cute cat videos. "Please Forgive Me" came first as a tepid heart-tugger, soon followed by the 1985 megahit "Heaven" — a song so beloved that Adams let the crowd handle the first verse all on its own.
By the time he got to his big movie ballads "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)," "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" and "All for Love" — each from long-forgotten movies starring swashbuckling rogue men with unforgettably beautiful hairdos — many Gen-Xers and boomers learned the lesson tweens and teens faced at Taylor Swift a weekend earlier: Cellphone batteries drain fast when their flashlights are used to light up a four-minute song like a modern Bic lighter.
In her nearly hourlong opening set, Jett stuck to basic, bouncy and — yep! — tail-whooping rock 'n' roll. Her current three-piece lineup of the Blackhearts sounded raw and downright punky as they hit top speed near the end when they wham-bammed the crowd like the Ramones with their biggest, rockiest hits "I Love Rock 'n' Roll," "I Hate Myself for Loving You" and "Bad Reputation."
A nice contrast to their gig last year with the Def/Crüe tour, they opened with one of a handful of new songs in Monday's set, "Shooting Into Space," from an EP titled "Mindsets" that suggests Jett could land a Green Day opening slot for her next outing rather than yet another '80s nostalgia tour.
