Lionel Richie is a legend for a reason.
Last week, during the opening show of his tour with Earth, Wind and Fire in Minnesota, Richie became dizzy and ended the concert early. He was subsequently hospitalized. There was immediate concern about whether the 77-year-old titan of music would return to the stage. But less than a week later, he headlined a show on Tuesday night at PPG Paints Arena — and he absolutely crushed it.
Not to be overshadowed, hit factory pop, R&B and disco group Earth, Wind and Fire stormed the stage for an opening set rife with dance floor staples. From bouncy opener “Shining Star” onward, the group — with enough members to easily fill the stage, and a horn section that could fill the whole building with music — kept the disco ball rolling for almost an hour.
From the slinky sounds of “Serpentine Fire” to the slow jam “Reasons,” the veteran performers had the crowd in the palms of their hands. But few audiences I’ve seen have been as enthusiastic as during the triple-punch ending run of “Boogie Wonderland,” “Let’s Groove” and “September.”
Needless to say, between the headlines and his preceding act, Richie had a lot of momentum coming his way. When the lights went down and the crowd began to cheer, we were greeted with a video of Richie talking about his love for writing and performing songs before the man himself made it to the stage to perform — appropriately — his hit song “Hello.”
Fog rolled over the stage as the dramatic tune unspooled, with Richie’s voice providing notes of both practiced soulfulness and spontaneity. It would be a theme of the evening — and a clever bit of logistical plotting on behalf of the tour planners — that Richie would constantly roller-coaster between slow ballads and up-tempo dance jams. This began when he closed out “Hello” and went into the ’80s-tastic “Running with the Night.”
After the action-movie-montage-worthy tune, he paused to address the crowd. “I had you worried there for a minute, huh?” he asked, to a roaring laugh.
“You have no idea what I have been through in the last 24 hours, listening to my friends tell me their advice on what I should be doing,” he added, doing a couple of minutes of pretty much stand-up comedy on the ridiculous declarations from friends and fans alike.
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It goes without saying that Richie is incredibly talented as a singer and songwriter, but he’s also a consummate entertainer; he has an ease and magnetism that could win over even the most skeptical audience member, and he made an arena packed with thousands of people feel like a living room chat.
While Richie was a powerhouse solo artist in the ’80s, he started as a songwriter and singer with the Commodores in the 1970s. That wasn’t a part of himself that he was willing to leave behind on this tour, starting with an absolutely amazing mash-up of Commodores hit “Easy” and his own tune “My Love.” He would later bring out more of the group’s lasting anthems, including the saccharine and sincere “Three Times a Lady” and perpetual DJ favorite funk tune “Brick House.”
“I have the best seat in the house. I see everything. And that was absolutely the nastiest dancing I’ve ever seen in my life. If the grandchildren and the children could see Mom and Dad in this condition … ” Richie joked after the crowd’s gyrations to a mash-up of “Brick House” and the Ohio Players tune “Fire.”
It wasn’t just that number that kept the audience moving. It was during the propulsive radio mainstay “Dancing on the Ceiling” that Richie suffered his dizzy spell at last week’s show, so it’s no wonder he made Tuesday night’s version one to remember, with the singer traipsing over the stage, rafter-reaching saxophone, jets of fog shooting into the air and a rainbow of images projected on the screen behind him.
There was something spiritual about his ballads, from the building and soaring “Stuck on You” to his “duet” with the women in the audience on “Endless Love.” He also did a “virtual duet” with a video of Kenny Rogers for the song “Lady,” which Richie wrote for the country music artist whom he considered a great friend.
Before he cranked into the regular set closer, Richie took a moment to speak from the heart.
“I have been taught that if someone says ‘help me,’ to respond. I have not gotten to the point yet where when someone says ‘help me,’ I ask them what political party they are, or what skin color they are, or what country they came from.”
In 1985, a group of the biggest artists in the world got together to record “We Are the World,” a song written by Richie and Michael Jackson, to benefit USA for Africa. That was the song he ended his pre-encore set with on Tuesday night, and while it’s a corny song by nature, there was something so uplifting about it, too — especially as phone flashlights began to wink and twinkle to life throughout the arena.
As fitting as his opening song choice, Richie closed out with “All Night Long (All Night),” the world-music-influenced dance track from 1983. Strutting the stage in a red jacket, it looked like Rhchie could have kept performing all night indeed — and the audience would’ve gladly stuck around for it.