Honda Center – November 18, 2025
When someone calls on Sunday to say, “I have tickets for Tuesday, do you want to come?” I will say yes. And that’s how I ended up with a floor seat at Honda Center for Heart and Cheap Trick. This was my first time going to Honda Center…EVER. A little hard to believe, but true. I met my cousin at her house which on a Tuesday afternoon meant about an hour and a half drive from home. She drove the rest of the way to Honda Center. I have to say that once you get off the freeway, it’s pretty much impossible to miss the parking lot. The streets were all coned off directing us into the parking lot where, much to our surprise, parking was free! A quick walk from the parking structure to the arena, a stop at the bathroom and we were in our gifted floor seats – my first time in floor seats and as it turned out my cousin’s first time in floor seats as well.
Up first was Cheap Trick. I have liked Cheap Trick since I was a little kid. We’ve got all of their records – even the box set with the weird demos, so I was very much looking forward to this set. I had looked up the most recent setlists and was expecting them to start with Hello or Ello Kiddies, but they started with Just Got Back. Hmmm. Okay. It was clear almost from the start that Robin Zander’s voice is completely shot. They just were not good. Maybe it was just an off night…or maybe there’s a reason they are playing the fair circuit these days. They had just come from “Turlock Community Theatre” which I cannot imagine to be anything more than a small venue in an agricultural town. They played their biggest hits, of course, but then they played several songs off of their new album. No one was there for that. At least we knew when it was over because they ended with Goodnight. Once they left the stage, I turned to Heather and said, “82 year old Roger Daltry sounded better than Robin Zander.” She asked what happened to their original singer and I had to explain that was him on stage. Yikes!
Heart’s set opened with a montage of photos showing something for every year since Heart’s inception (like the space shuttle, OJ Simpson, Beany Babies, etc) which was nostalgic and fun. Then the curtain dropped and they launched into Bebe Le Strange. Heart still rocks. HARD. They were fantastic. There were a few times when I wasn’t sure Ann Wilson was going to make it to the end of the show. She was on a stool and when she returned to the stage after Nancy Wilson’s solo piece, someone helped her across the stage. But for someone who completed chemo in 2024, she did amazingly well. And most importantly, she sounded like herself. Nancy Wilson also still sounds great. It was night and day from Cheap Trick. They played all of their hits including the 80’s favorites (These Dreams, Alone…) and a few Led Zeppelin songs, which they’ve been doing for many, many years. The Nancy Wilson solo piece was a song she’d written for Eddie Van Halen, which she explained with a story about how they were on tour with Van Halen once and she had given Eddie and acoustic guitar. He called her in the middle of the night and played a piece he’d written (as she said, she’s probably the only person who ever heard it). Ann and Nancy have beautiful harmonies as only people who’ve been singing together their whole lives can and the whole band was tight and powerful, like they’ve been playing together for 50 years.
All in all it was a great night – totally worth the drive. We agreed that we weren’t crazy about the floor seats though. Even standing up (as we knew we would have to do) we couldn’t see over the people in front of us. And there were no screens. I think if they had the screens on either side of the stage we would have at least been able to see those. I noticed they had retracted the jumbotron into ceiling too. That’s helpful for those in the upper seats so their view is unrestricted. I had heard from someone who went to a show at Intuit Dome that they couldn’t see past the jumbotron. It made me realize that they removed the one at the Forum altogether when they changed it over to a music only venue. Exiting Honda Center was as easy as getting there. They coned us all back to the freeway. You just couldn’t get lost. I hope to see more shows there. They really have their act together.
And then after getting gas and a much quicker trip back home, about three blocks from my house the most LA thing happened: I heard a bazillion sirens and pulled over fast just as a Dodge charger came barrelling out of my neighborhood on the run from no fewer than six police cars. The helicoptor was still hovering over my house by the time I made it home. Too bad I haven’t managed to install the dash cam I bought almost a year ago.