Review: An electric Bryan Adams rolls out the hits for an amiable crowd at Carb Day

The question was never if Bryan Adams would play his biggest hit – it was when.

When would those iconic opening chords ring through the open field? When would sweet nostalgia wash over us? When, oh when, would we sing about the fates of Jimmy and Jody and reminisce about the old six string at the five-and-dime?

The Canadian rocker let the anticipation linger until almost end of his 90-minute set, but “Summer of ‘69” was worth the wait – and just enough to keep a dwindling audience interested, if only for a few more minutes.

Adams took the stage as the headliner for the Miller Lite Carb Day concert at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Friday, where he glided through familiar favorites with a full band in tow. The show, featuring opener Soul Asylum, saw an energetic Adams give his all to a crowd that, at most times, couldn’t be bothered to keep up.

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All credit to Adams who, at 63, is still a tried-and-true rock star. The guy’s got pipes, and with a live band backing him – including total ripper Keith Scott on lead guitar – he delivered a nonstop, high-energy performance that rarely, if ever, lost its footing.

As a member of Gen-Z, this theoretically wasn’t the show for me. And as a Florida transplant, this theoretically isn’t the weekend for me, either. I lack the connection to both ‘80s rock hits and, as a group of girls standing in front of me explained, “the most exciting weekend in Indiana all year,” so I walked in ready for perfectly acceptable, if passive, experience.

Here’s the shocker, though: Bryan Adams rocks — bring-the-house-down, sing-in-a-rainstorm, smash-a-guitar rocks.

Show-stopping summer anthem aside, other highlights included crowd-pleasing power ballads “Heaven” and “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” a rocking “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You” and an impassioned “It’s Only Love,” which Adams originally recorded with the late Tina Turner. He promised to “sing his ass off” in a tribute to Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of 83 — and he delivered.

Personally, I held out hope that he’d pull the hits from his magnum opus: the “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” soundtrack. The Ontario export came through, breaking out an acoustic rendition of “Here I Am” with more soul than it probably deserved for 6 p.m. in the blazing heat.

It seemed most everyone only showed up for “’69,” if for anything at all. But concertgoers like David Wicks, a 61-year-old Columbus resident, said Adams’ entire set pleasantly surprised them.

Wicks is a 40-year veteran of the Indianapolis 500 and a longtime Carb Day attendee. He was among the many that showed up only expecting Adams’ career-defining hit, but the string of other recognizable tracks had him singing along.

“I only knew one song,” Wicks said. “Then, I knew all the songs.”

But, like a soaring beach ball that met the business end of an umbrella, whatever Adams tossed into the crowd quickly fell flat. His catalog of classic hits sparked a warm reception in their first few moments, but any enthusiasm fizzled out by the time they reached their final choruses.

An act like Adams, a good 40 years into his career, aims toward older demographics, and while the 40+ crowd received him well enough, those closer to my age were left in the dust.

“Who? Ryan Adams?” one attendee wondered aloud on the walk to the field. The girls in front of me readily admitted to having not the slightest idea who Adams was.

Opener Soul Asylum didn’t help matters, with an hourlong set that felt more like background music than a rock show. (The girls in front of me — the ones who said the weekend was supposed to be exciting — took their set as an opportunity to get some rest and sunbathe, sitting on the ground through most of the performance.) To their credit, the band sounded almost studio-perfect, but a good time does not a clean performance make.

No one seemed all that into it, including lead singer Dave Pirner, who took a swig of his Solo cup in between each song and spoke to the audience only in short spurts. He preceded a song that rhymed “funeral” and “urinal” with two jokes that elicited the most passionate reaction from the crowd all set – a groan en masse.

Not even “Runaway Train,” the band’s Grammy-winning hit from 1992, could produce anything more than a flicker of recognition. And when it came time to get the crowd ready for Adams, Pirner introduced him with all the enthusiasm of someone reading an instruction manual.

A performer like Adams deserved better than that. IMS President J. Douglas Boles hailed Adams as “one of the most exciting live musicians in rock” in a press release, and he’s right, kind of.

To describe him as “exciting” is true enough, but more accurate is “excited.” He’s fun to watch not because he’s particularly innovative or unexpected, but because he’s having fun.

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Even a diminishing audience couldn’t keep him down. The crowd started to thin out before “Summer of ‘69” was even over, and the following “Cuts Like a Knife” may as well have been a nod to how the audience was sliced by a considerable margin during its run. But there was Adams – smiling, running around, rocking out with all the swagger and style he started with.

And if he was performing primarily to the piles of trash left behind, you wouldn’t know it. As he closed with a solo rendition of “Straight from the Heart,” concertgoers’ backs to him as they flooded out of the gates, he looked like the happiest guy in the world.

Contact Pulliam Fellow Heather Bushman at HBushman@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at hmb_1013.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Bryan Adams rolls out the hits at Indy 500 Carb Day concert