VINCE GILL
WHAT separates the men from the boys in performance has less to do with inspiration than perspiration. But when you have both, that’s when legends are made.
Ask James Brown, Bruce Springsteen or country giant Vince Gill, who delivered a killer concert at Irving Plaza Thursday.
At that gig, he and his eight-man band worked a shift and a half – and worked it well.
Three hours in, 30 songs behind him, Gill smiled a wicked grin that said too much was enough and played “just one more” one more time.
Despite much of the sold-out house seein’ double and feelin’ single – in proper honky-tonk fashion – nobody went anywhere until Gill finished his last hum ‘n’ strum for his updated take on “Little Liza Jane.”
At the start of the show, Gill explained he was going to warm up with a few of his hits, and then treat the rest of the concert as a live listening party for his new disc, “Next Big Thing.”
He didn’t mention that he was going to do another set after he finished the whopping 17-song lineup of “Big Thing” – “just so nobody feels ripped off,” he said.
Except for the truly devoted, when this amount of music is packed into one show, not everyone is going to like every song.
For many, the fiddle-powered, honky-tonk two-steps like the title track to “Next Big Thing,” “One More Last Time”; “The Sun’s Gonna Shine on You”; and Gill’s tribute to Merle Haggard, “Real Mean Bottle,” were where Gill excelled.
He was also very good when he urged his wife, singer Amy Grant, on stage for the gospel rave “Blood of Jesus,” which packed a charge of the power and the glory.
Although many in the house reacted with passion for Gill’s upper-register pop-love ballads, those were the songs where the show faltered.
In the slower material, it was on old-fashioned waltzes like “Two Hearts” and “This Old Guitar and Me” where Gill’s tenor reached past mush and sap to touch heart and soul.
Whether you like country or not, you could not have watched Gill perform at this jewel box theater in Manhattan and not rank him as one of the top performers – of any genre – in American music.