I Saw Lionel Richie So You Don't Have to (But You Absolutely Should)

For as long as I’ve known her, my wife has maintained that the Lionel Richie concert she attended at Wembley Arena in 2007 is the best concert she’s ever seen. I’ve been dubious, to say the least. I know she saw Oasis in Hong Kong in like 2006, though that was when the Gallaghers were at their most acrimonious and Liam liked to spend sizable chunks of the set crouched and unmoving onstage with a tambourine balanced on his head, a feat intellectually impressive but practically unexciting. But the point is that I know she’s seen other acts who, in my estimation, should likely supplant Lionel at the top of anyone’s “best ever” list. Weezer, Jay-Z, Fat Dog. All world title holders. The fact that she’s seen like three hundred We Are Scientists shows and still maintains this Richie-favoring worldview is, honestly, just a little insulting.

But so I was more intrigued than I might otherwise be when she recently voiced her desire to catch ol’ Richie once more, to see if he still had it twenty years later. Intrigued, but not *compelled.* I sandbagged. I hoped she’d forget. I talked a lot about how I should probably go see the new installment in the Evil Dead franchise, which is true, I do need to see it, this is important, but yeah, that fact that I kept mentioning showtimes that directly conflicted with Richie’s show at Madison Square Garden might have been an act of obvious dissembling.

She wouldn’t be dissuaded or tricked or gaslit, though. My wife was going to see this Lionel Richie show, and if I liked being married (I do!), then I was going to have to see it, too. And so I did what any good husband would do when asked by his beloved to make a dream come true: I called Mike Mori, We Are Scientists’ booking agent. The mind reels when imagining how many marriages Mike Mori has rescued via guest list.

It turns out, Lionel Richie tickets are hard as hell to get. Somehow, in my perhaps-overenthusiastic defense of my wife’s interest in seeing the show, I managed to convince Mori that he and his wife should come along, and man, oh man, getting four tickets together was ultimately a real trial. As it happens, We Are Scientists shares an agency (the venerable and industry-dominating Creative Artists Agency) with Lionel Richie. Don’t act so surprised. Of course we are business associates with the likes of Richie and Aerosmith(!) and Dua Lipa (!!) and 311(!!!) and well now I’m just thinking about all of the guest list requests Mike Mori is going to receive now that I’ve started perusing the CAA website’s roster listing. But sounds like all of those tickets will be fairly easy to nab relative to Lionel Richie, who was, according to Mike Mori, the most difficult ticket-acquisition of his career. “Taylor Swift tickets were easier to get than this,” he earnestly reported two days before the show, at which point we began alternately planning a consolation double-date somewhere in Brooklyn, our only requirement being a bar supply potent enough to wash away the anguish of a Lionel Richie ticket just beyond one’s grasp.

But one lesson I’ve learned after twenty-odd years in the music industry is that one underestimates Mike Mori at one’s own peril. Roughly thirty hours before showtime, word came in: we were a go for Richie. The emergency-grade turnaround didn’t grant a lot of time for prep, for boning up on the setlist or refreshing on lyrics. It turns out that with Lionel Richie, no prep is necessary. Even the most casual of listeners (me) is gonna know every song on the setlist. I recall the time I swore that I only knew like four Billy Joel songs and then went down a Spotify rabbit-hole and it turned out that I knew eighty-three songs. The difference here is that Lionel Richie’s songs are good.

Oh, first a quick note about Earth, Wind & Fire, who opened the show but who would themselves be a headline act worth missing Evil Dead Burn for. In fact, I’m going to argue that Earth, Wind & Fire are likely best seen as the headliner of their own show. The crowd, already at capacity before their set started, was firmly on their side, freaking out and dancing and singing along for pretty much the entirety of the set.

I for one remained impatient for the Richie-driven portion of the evening. Perhaps part of it was E,W&F’s rather spartan stage production? Lionel Richie had near-constant rear-projected content on the massive LED screen behind him and a piano that rose from and retreated beneath the stage as needed (but left a big old hole in the stage when it was in subterranean mode and so the only real function of that elevating platform must have been one of pageantry, because it seemed like a pain in the ass if not an outright safety hazard, otherwise) plus he had pyrotechnics so hot that I myself could feel it in my (admittedly very-stage-proximal) seats, so it must have been positively searing the hair off of the poor keyboardist, positioned as he was like four feet in front of it. This might explain why he had his hood up for the portion of the show following the pyro display — probably it was to conceal the bandaging on the back of his head, dripping with burn-wound discharge and analgesic cream.

But anyway, Earth, Wind & Fire had none of that. Their very basic stage arrangement coupled with their crop of wedding-dance-ready hits strongly evoked a top-tier event band. Like, the best-ever event band. Likely they showed up to MSG and played Taylor Swift’s wedding the week before and just left all of their gear set up onstage; that kind of great event band. And like a wedding band, their primary directive seemed to be getting everyone in the room dancing, even if it meant making direct eye contact and cajoling prompts to every individual member of the 16,000-cap arena. Lots of stalking the stage, lots of pointing, lots of raising the roof, lots of pointing while raising the roof. Doing the lion’s share of this crowd work was a singer who appeared to be about 5’3” and was perhaps the most physically fit person of retirement age I’ve ever seen. As with all of the vocalists, this guy’s secondary duty (or I guess his tertiary duty, after singing and pointing) was to provide auxiliary percussion while other folks sang lead, and he took this job very seriously. Not content with simple drumstick twirls or rebound catches, this guy had a particularly eyebrow-raising performative maneuver wherein he’d pound this one crash cymbal that was positioned at the height of the crown of his head, so that when he stood just right from my perspective he looked like he was cosplaying Raiden from Mortal Kombat. But the point is that this cymbal was at head height, and this dude — this absolute lilliputian hero — punctuated the end of one particularly exuberant tune by delivering cymbal crashes with his foot. As in, he would perform his bongo parts or whatever in perfect time and, without missing a beat, finish his fill by executing a staggering high-kick right to the cymbal. I’m not a flexible guy by any means, but I’m standing here in my office now trying out high kicks and I’m hitting an imaginary cymbal at like maybe clavicle height and still I’m saying “Ow.” So congratulations to this guy who seemed like he was probably in his mid-sixties and could absolutely kick me in the face, no problem.

Thing is, I can’t congratulate that guy by name, and that’s I guess another factor that made this putative co-headline show seem somewhat imbalanced. Earth, Wind & Fire were a huge gang up there onstage, all swapping out instruments and lead vocals and kind of just acting like an entertainment conglomerate, albeit an excellent entertainment conglomerate. But then, after a brief intermission, the arenas lights cut out and the portentous bass begins to thrum and the band kicks in with the always-sort-of-ominous-to-me opening chords of “Hello,” and yeah, opening with “Hello” is just about as corny and obvious a move as you can imagine but except suddenly the hairs on my arms are standing up and then a silhouetted figure suddenly appears at the back-center of the stage, microphone in hand, and I find that I’m clapping like an idiot kid who just learned that there are Carvel Flying Saucer Ice Cream Sandwiches at this birthday party.

Whether or not this was, per my wife’s predictions, the best show of my lifetime, I have to concede this: Lionel Richie was the most effortlessly charismatic performer I’ve ever seen. Key to my beguilement is the “effortless” part. Dude pretty much acted like it was a Sunday morning in his admittedly-weirdly-laid-out apartment, that’s how easy it was. He kinda wandered around in his very sensible sneakers. He casually waved at audience members in a manner almost antithetical to Earth, Wind & Fire’s exhortations — absolutely casual and almost blandly genial, the way you might wave to a neighbor you only kind of know while you’re both picking your morning newspaper up off of the front lawn. He sang with an affect that exuded absolute enjoyment but involved not an ounce of pageantry or performative exuberance. Dude just clearly likes singing, and he’s insanely good at it, but he’s not belting or caterwauling or anything. He’s just delivering those silky-ass lines like he’s ordering a Domino’s pizza, and it’s ridiculously good and ridiculously cool, a crazy thing to be able to say about a near-octogenarian who’s wearing sneakers that appear likely orthopedically prescribed.

This casually profound mien is set up early on, during that introductory performance of “Hello.” Yes, this introduction is as classically dramatic as all get out — the LED screen, projecting a star-lit night sky, opens up, and from these heavens, shrouded in billows of smoke and masked in silhouette, is the man himself, who immediately cajoles the crowd into a call-and-response for the song’s iconic chorus. “Help me, now,” he casually implores, and when the tens of thousands of porcupine-arm-haired concertgoers deliver the mandated, “Hello, is it me you're looking for?” he laughs. He laughs at us. And it’s not a mean laugh, necessarily, but it’s not NOT a mean laugh, you know? He knew we’d know the words, and it amuses him to be able to command it. But he also doesn’t really care. It’s a pretty casual laugh, but it’s a little derisive, like you might laugh if you were playing with your dog, your dog who goes absolutely batshit for a tennis ball, and so here you are, a guy who, sure, likes your dog and doesn’t hate tennis balls or anything but certainly isn’t out there losing his own mind over a thrown tennis ball, and so you do that thing — that really weird thing that dog-owners do with confusing frequency — where you just pretend to throw the ball? And your dog — this dog who loves you more than anything in the world and trusts you beyond any reasonable level of trust considering the things you’ve had done to him at the vet’s office — your dog sprints off in the direction of the phantom ball and for maybe like ten long strides is experiencing probably the happiest moment of his life outside of finding a chicken bone within leash’s reach on the sidewalk, before he suddenly realize that the person who has historically separated him from his mother and reproductive organs alike has duped him, once again. And while the implications of the treachery dawn on him, you can just watch a pageant of emotions play out on the dog’s face – confusion, disbelief, hope of redemption. And very often the human — ostensibly this animal’s best friend, this animal’s parent — laughs. And it’s not like the person is celebrating the victory or anything. His dog is dumb and in love with humans and tennis balls and running full-speed into dirt-piles — there’s no real victory here. The thrower just laughs at the genial stupidity of this idiot, and he laughs at how badly he knows they still want the ball, despite the fact that every rule of the game has been flouted, that even the semblance of basic etiquette has been shattered. By all rights, the dog should race toward the owner and take his hard-earned ball along with his trusted person’s very hand. A lunge at the human’s throat could be forgiven. But, instead, the game is still on, and all wrongdoing is forgotten. The laugh doesn’t haunt the dog. In fact, the dog has utterly forgotten the humiliating feint, which just opens the door for his jackass owner to pull that trick again. Deceit, it would appear, is an evergreen entertainment, and the total ownership of even an unworthy opponent can be a dram too delicious to resist another sip.

And so it is with Lionel Richie. On the second chorus, he pulls it again. The script is identical.

RICHIE [with almost a yawn]: Help me, now.

US: Hello. Is it me you’re looking for?

RICHIE: Ha, ha, ha!

He does it this way every night. I’ve looked it up. The same “Help me, now.” The same triple machine-gunned “ha-ha-ha,” the word “ha” itself primly enunciated, so that it’s more of a message than an earnest ejaculation. “I brought a setlist worth of tennis balls, and you will exult when they are tossed,” that laugh says. And exult, we did. I loved it all, and like the most amiable of retrievers, immediately forgave him this one instance of domination.

Which, look, just to rake over this quickly-curdling simile a little more: I know these dog owners, these duplicitous ball-throwers, love their dogs. They love playing with their dogs, and they mean no harm. So, Lionel Richie was otherwise a tremendously warm and genial performer, somehow balancing upon the razor’s edge of relatable humanity and outsized celebrity. My wife works for a very large publishing house, a company operating within the league of industry-dominating publishers and therefore hosting a huge stable of celebrity dilettante authors. This company released Lionel Richie’s book (Truly: An Inspirational Journey Through the Life of a Musical Icon — one wonders if the editor offered the note that this title was maybe too humble), and a coworker of hers who’s worked with Richie has reported that he ranks among the most personable and relatable and charming of their many A-list celebrity authors. I feel like you can probably reliably judge a singer’s character by how he treat’s his book publisher’s employees.

Suffice it to say that he worked this substantial charm throughout the night at MSG. I’m not sure how regularly Richie indulges his whim for chat, but he laid the patter on thick on Saturday night, managing to deliver his banter more like a particularly engrossing neighbor at a dinner table than the usual bloviating arena-show monologuist. I’m sure a lot of this is recycled, but he managed to sound spontaneous and earnest as he eulogized Kenny Rogers before “Lady” and playfully ribbed Diana Ross for forever refusing his entreaties to come duet with him on “Endless Love” (the audience handled her parts). Miraculously, he skirted self-aggrandizement while talking about writing “We Are The World” with MJ. Mainly, though, he talked about electrolytes.

Maybe you heard about Lionel Richie’s recent episode in Minneapolis? During that show’s performance of “Dancing On The Ceiling,” he was stricken with dizzy spells, and took multiple opportunities to sit down on the stage’s tiered riders before retiring backstage and cancelling the rest of the show (along with a handful of subsequent dates). Apparently the issue was a one-off bout of fatigue. He was lively and spry throughout the show at MSG, seemingly thanks to his since-adopted regimen of electrolytes, which I guess were prescribed to be taken every fourth song? About five times throughout the evening, Richie paused to gulp a full pint of an unnamed electrolyte-rich fluid. If you’ve ever consumed Liquid IV or Pedialyte or the like, you know they suck — they’re cloying and hauntingly viscous and they just kind of make you want to barf, but you keep them down mainly because you know that if you puke this garbage out, you’re just going to have to drink more of it. Lionel Richie seems to hate the stuff as much as the next guy. Unlike the next guy, he has a microphone and an audience of unflappable fans. Every time he paused to drink his electrolytes, he expounded upon the experience. At first, it felt like he was simply addressing the elephant in the room — surely, everybody there had heard the report of his illness and had become concerned that the concert might be cancelled, maybe even wondering if the poor guy might collapse onstage before our eyes. But by the third electrolyte monologue, he was just riffing on electrolytes — what they do, who was making him take them (his bandmates delivered each dose of the fluids in turn, and they stood at his side like parents on overwatch until he’d drained the last drop), but mainly he just griped about how much he hated them. At one point, during maybe the fourth electrolyte-centric interlude, he was offered two different electrolytic options and spent several minutes debating the relative merits of each (or lack thereof: he hated both). I’m guessing that of the ninety-minute show, about thirteen total minutes were devoted to electrolyte-adjacent conversation. It started to feel like some sort of psychedelic episode, listening to Lionel Richie hold forth on electrolytes. It bordered on anti-comedy, like he was delivering some willfully-fixated bit in the backroom of Luna Lounge in 2002. It was slaying me, to be honest. Mike Mori, for his part, slowly grew aggrieved, so that by the fifth iteration of electrolyte talk he was fuming and pleading aloud for a reprieve from the incessant electrolyte chatter. Keep in mind that Mike Mori is a man who has happily(?) booked We Are Scientists for over two decades, and so presumably has a higher-than-average tolerance for protracted onstage rambling.

I’m no doctor, but if you asked me, the issue of electrolyte depletion might be less pressing if somebody took another look at Richie’s costuming. Throughout the night, the man was decked out in leather jackets, identical but for their color. Obviously, these were intentionally devised as stage costumes, presumably considered with no small amount of care. So I ask: somebody thought it was an okay idea to keep this guy — this 77-year-old guy who’s got to sing and cover a lot of mileage on a fairly large open-plan stage for ninety minutes at a stretch — in long-sleeved leather, all night? And then another guy was like, “Also, I’d love to blast fire behind him, fire that somehow manages to be hotter than the normal, low-temp fire that exists in nature, fire twice as hot as any earthly fire, fire so hot that an amateur journalist seated like twenty rows back gets publicly worried about the keyboardist’s head-burns — I want fire like that to blow out near this old leather-clad guy maybe twenty times over the course of the night.”

I’m just thinking maybe the problem isn’t Lionel Richie’s natural electrolyte-processing. He did look snazzy, though, and I’m not going to lie: his red option was emblazoned “All Night Long” across the back in rhinestone. I’ll admit now that I was consumed with an envy hotter than the most unhinged stage-pyro that I don’t have a glittery “After Hours” jacket.

Speaking of show-related paraphernalia, I’ve got to talk to you about the pillow situation at Madison Square Garden. When you get general backstage access at MSG (stop rolling your eyes, I’m going somewhere with this), you gain entry to a small, corporate-feeling room just off to the side of the arena that’s designed as a simple-but-sweet little pit stop. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s an appreciable perk. There are free drinks (nothing great — it’s a selection of wine and beers that you’d never willingly order on your own if you had any choice in the matter, but given arena drink prices and my personal alcohol tolerance, it can end up resulting in savings in the low hundreds of US dollars) and snacks and (most crucially) a private bathroom. But there are also weirder, less explicable details. This night’s backstage had a noodle bar, a weirdly extensive self-serve affair. There are random guitars hanging on the wall in an accessible manner, suggesting that they’re meant to be more than decorative, except who in their right might is going to pluck a Fender Telecaster from the wall backstage at MSG and start noodling, without amplification, in front of a cohort of agency attorneys and ticketing company accountants? Perhaps the most perplexing feature of the VIP room backstage at MSG, though, are the pillows. On multiple occasions (but, confusingly, not on every occasion) when I’ve been in this backstage room, the couches have been festooned with pillows bearing an advertisement for the show at hand. So, on this night there were throw pillows with what appeared to be the print ad for the heroically-titled “Lionel Richie/Earth, Wind & Fire Sing A Song All Night Long: The Tour Continues” tour. At the The 1975 show, I think the pillows were just the cover of their most recent album? Who is making these pillows, and why? We KNOW which show we’re at, and the VIP room is already special enough (bathroom and noodles). Are we meant to TAKE these pillows? Or just the pillow cover? Who pays for these? Did the artist give clearance for this expense? Did Matty Healy, the week after The 1975’s triumphant double-header at MSG, go over the accounting and balk at the line-item for “two dozen Being Funny In A Foreign Language throw pillows?” Does the artist take them home? Is Lionel Richie’s house gonna be lousy with “Lionel Richie/Earth, Wind & Fire Sing A Song All Night Long: The Tour Continues” pillows? Because, honestly, now that I’m saying that out loud, it sounds pretty rad. If Lionel Richie takes the pillows, this all makes sense.

Anyway, I just read online a second ago that some festival that Lionel Richie was set to headline in the UK (“Heritage Live” at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk) has been cancelled due to “far lower than average ticket sales.” You guys, don’t do this. Don’t live like I once lived, ignorant and willful, ignoring the petitions of loved ones. That we each were born at all is an infinitesimally improbable circumstance, but to have been born in such a time that our lives have overlapped with the performing window of one Lionel Richie? That can only reasonably be described as “miraculous.” I was wrong, and I can admit that now. Learn from my error and hear my pleas: before he succumbs to electrolytic depletion or leather-borne fatigue, go and see Lionel Richie live.

❤️‍🔥,

Keith