I was punching around the internet this afternoon, and all of the sudden, my mind drifted to wondering whether or not Mayor Of The Sunset Strip had been released on DVD yet, or not. I was happy to find that it had indeed, and then continued my surfing, which led me to former Chicago lead singer Peter Cetera's official website. Some quick reading reminded me that I had wanted to check out the recent Peter Cetera DVD release, so I punched onward to Amazon.com to check pricing and availability for the Mayor and Cetera DVDs. I discovered that the Mayor DVD was available for a nice price at my local Borders, and from there, it was off on the magical mystery tour to see what kind of trouble I could get into at Borders.
I quickly located the Mayor DVD, and then headed over to the music DVDs, where they not only had the Cetera DVD in stock (I was thinking they wouldn't), but it was priced right at $11.99. It all sounded like a winner to me, so I grabbed Cetera and the Mayor DVD, and I was on my way back to home base to get some DVD action in.
Cetera has toured very sporadically since leaving Chicago with his most recent tour coming in the early 90s, prior to the short round of dates with local symphony orchestras in 2003 that led to this DVD. This DVD is the second live document of those dates, following a DVD that was produced following Cetera's appearance as part of the rebirth of the Chicago based series Soundstage, which airs on local PBS stations. Having never seen Cetera live, I was very stoked to get a hold of the Soundstage DVD, and subsequently, a bit disappointed.
While the Soundstage DVD has very slick production, something just didn't gel overall with Cetera's performance. It seemed a bit stilted vocally, and overall, just not very relaxed. The end result was that I didn't enjoy the Soundstage DVD quite as much as some of the other DVDs that I picked up in that series(the Michael Mcdonald and Tom Petty Soundstage DVDs are must haves!).
I was very excited to find out that Cetera would be filming a performance in Salt Lake City for both DVD and CD release, and Peter Cetera Live!, for all that I have read about it, does not disappoint. The circumstances surrounding the release of this DVD are a bit mysterious. Cetera had the following to say about the DVD at his website "ON the DVD thing, the only one that's authorized is the PBS
one...Iv'e never authorized the final SLC one ,so as far as IM concerned it
isn't.....". Word is, that Cetera was unhappy with the final product, so he did not authorize the release, and at this point, it's anyone's best guess on how it actually made it into the stores.
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