Review | The Try-Hard Train Is Right on Track for a Fun Night Out in Santa Barbara

All aboard! Cue the confetti and blow up the beach balls: Train is here to show you a rambunctious good time. Coming straight from the Pacific Pride Festival earlier that day, Saturday night’s Bowl show was the pitch-perfect capper to a feel-good afternoon.

If you’re lucky enough to get to be a certain age, you no longer care very much about being cool. Some of us revel in making our kids groan, embrace the joys of comfortable but not always fashionable fits, and relish when our partners roll their eyes. The crowd-pleasing corniness of Train is a great example of how much fun it is to be in the hands of performers who care way more about whether the audience enjoys the show than about being cool. 

There’s a secret to the so-called Dad Rock bands of the ’80s and ’90s and Train’s goofy energy certainly worked to their benefit on Saturday night. Founding member and Train front man/ringmaster Pat Monahan was a charming host from the get-go. Following a joyful performance by the Barenaked Ladies (highlights included a brilliant mash-up of “Pink Pony Club,” “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM,” “ The Gambler,”  “HOT TO GO,” “ Sometimes When We Touch,” and “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music), they opened with “She’s on Fire,” the first song on Drops of Jupiter, the band’s breakthrough album and the name of the tour that’s celebrating its 25th anniversary (or “birthday,” as Monahan called it). 

The 2012 hit “50 Ways to Say Goodbye” was up next, followed by the first of many explosions of confetti and a surprisingly dexterous flurry of catching iPhones for photos with the audience’s cameras and throwing them back, all the while with Monahan singing “If It’s Love,” a 2009 song with the lyrics “Hold our cell phones up in the air / and just be glad that we made it here alive,” which felt like a pretty fitting anthem for the whole evening. 

Then it was on to the earwormy “Play That Song,” the highly emotive “Whipping Boy,” and a cover of John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane,” with the first opener Matt Nathanson joining in.

“Meet Virginia,” one of Train’s best-known songs, was mashed up with John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,”  with Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies joining in, followed by “Calling All Angels,” another crowd favorite. REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin (apparently a Santa Barbara resident) joined Train for a cover of REO’s ’80s hit “Keep On Loving You,” and I could hardly wait to tell all my friends from high school that I saw — oh my gawd — Kevin from REO Speedwagon again!

But it wasn’t all a trip down memory lane. “We only play one new song, because we know how you feel about that,” said Monahan as he cheekily introduced “Pennsylvania Turnpike,” which comes out this week. 

There was a proposal in the audience when they sang the swoonworthy tune “Marry Me,” as is apparently quite common at Train shows, given that the band’s team was prepared with t-shirts and other swag for the happy couple. Monahan quipped that in thanks for setting up the romantic atmosphere, “All we ask in return is that you wear these T-shirts to the wedding.” Touché.

You’ve got to admire the guy’s showmanship. 

Apparently the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as we saw when Monahan’s very talented 14-year-old son Rock came out with his electric guitar and absolutely crushed a couple cover songs from Journey and Dirty Heads. 

Crowd pleasers through and through, the audience was up on its feet for the last segment of the show, which included bouncing beach balls, more canons of confetti and “Save Me, San Francisco,” “Bruises,” “Hey, Soul Sister,” “Vacation,” “Drive By” (with a bit of a “Hey Jude” outro), and as the finale, running just to the 10 p.m. neighborhood curfew, “Drops of Jupiter,” the tour’s title song.

With the echo of those oh-so-sticky lyrics in our heads — “Tell me, did the wind sweep you off your feet? / Did you finally get the chance to dance along the light of day / and head back to the Milky Way? / And tell me, did Venus blow your mind? / Was it everything you wanted to find? /And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?” —  the audience danced out into the warm summer night.

Everyone I talked to was somehow, miraculously, goofily, unanimous in their enjoyment of the show, with a collective feeling of being swept up for the night, feeling happy, and if not quite as young as we were 25 years ago when the album came out, leaving with fewer cares in the world for at least one night.