Avril Lavigne: Live at Saratoga

SARATOGA SPRINGS- She dies her hair blonde and uses an iron to keep it straight. She is engaged to the lead singer from the band Sum 41, and when she heard you can get breast cancer using it, Avril Lavigne stopped wearing deodorant.

These were some of the concerns on the minds of the dedicated followers of all things Avril. If being under this kind of fan-obsessed microscope makes life difficult, Lavigne wasn't showing any sign of it.

The soon to be 21-year-old led her bass-thumping, drum-banging and guitar-wailing ensemble onto the stage at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Sunday night, cranked it up full volume and ripped through the searing opener, spitting out the lyrics:
He was a sk8er boi/ She said 'See ya later boi' /He wasn't good enough for her...

A fiery sparkplug of a performer, Lavigne tore through a brief, but energetic set that delighted a gathering of 8,500. Many of the excitable throng of teenage Avril-ettes came adorned with men's ties over T-shirts and wore black eyeliner. There were a fair amount of equally pleased pre-teens as well, accompanied by their parents old enough to remember when The Ramones, a popular logo on their teens' T-shirts, were an unknown bar band on the Bowery.

From the opening salvo to the crowd-happy sing-along on 'Complicated,' it was a blistering 65-minute set. Lavigne slung on her guitar for '(So much for my) Happy Ending,' played piano on the tune 'Forgotten' - as the stage's deep crimson haze was interspersed by explosive white strobes - and took a turn behind the drum kit for a version of Blur's 'Song 2,' its repetitive chorus of Woo-Hoo ringing through the amphitheater.

Lavigne commanded centerstage, microphone in hand as the crowd alternately pumped their fists and waved their arms to the music, the lawn a swooning sea of neon green glow sticks and eerie orange lights that blinked from atop devil horn head caps.

Lavigne's in-between song banter was brief and to the point, much like the 18-song set itself. 'This song goes out to all the spoiled brats out there,' she announced during one particularly charged moment, introducing 'I Always Get What I Want.'

Most of the material was culled from her two albums, 2002's 'Let Go' and 'Under My Skin,' issued in 2004. She also performed a rendition of the blink-182 song, 'All the Small Things,' which out-muscled the power trio's original version for sheer rock 'n' roll joy.

Onstage, Lavigne's do-it-yourself attitude was power without pretension. Even her at-times, off-key shrill was a welcome act of spontaneity, delivered to the masses in an entertaining manner too often missing in a field dominated by the contrived Britneys and Ashleys of the world.

Her music, from the loudest rockers to the softest of ballads, was diverse as her fashion: from the top of her long blonde mane, to the scuffed bottom of her black combat boots. She wore a bright pink belt wrapped around her frame, the midsection between a pair of camouflage pants and a black mesh jersey with a T-shirt beneath it that sported a skull and cross bones and read: Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw.

Earlier in the evening, Gavin DeGraw performed a set that was as entertaining as say, being stuck in an elevator between floors. With a toothache. In fact, the 28-year-old 'performer' from the Catskills may have set a new level of uber-bland, although his stiff-as-a-corpse parody of soul-stirring classics 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' and 'Proud Mary' were pretty funny to watch.

It was a parody, right?

by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian, Aug. 30, 2005.