The San Francisco show was amazing. It was held at the Warfield Theater, which is in downtown San Francisco about 6 blocks away from Union Square. The venue is a fairly old theatre, situated directly beside one of those "adult entertainment" theatres. I was fortunate enough to be accompanied to the concert by my friend Kristy, from Chico, CA. Neither my friends or hers are big Harry fans, so this arrangement worked out pretty well!

We missed the big entrance of the band because we were being forced to wait in the coat check line to turn in our cameras. Luckily, we only missed about 3 minutes or so and walked into the auditorium just as Mark Mullins began wailing a trombone solo. After this, Harry and the band performed a few upbeat songs from Star Turtle followed by a series of ballads.

As in the other concerts on this tour, the band did a very moving arrangement of "America the Beautiful", with Dan Miller showing off his incredible range on the trumpet. In fact, Harry was also on trumpet for this song. Harry performed a cover of an old Burt Bacharach tune, "This Guy's in Love With You", giving it somewhat of a relaxed funk beat. He announced that the song would be appearing on the soundtrack of the upcoming George Clooney/Michelle Pfeiffer movie, One Fine Day.

After the ballads, the band started to pick things up again, with songs such as "Thank You" by Sly and the Family Stone, and a few others that the audience easily recognized and sang/danced along to.

However, the night had just begun. Harry announced that we were in for a treat because he had an unexpected special guest performer in the audience. He introduced her as something akin to "the best musician I know" and told us that we had better respect the talent of this woman! It turned out to be none other than the gospel singer Tramaine Hawkins. She sang a heartfelt rendition of "Amazing Grace", and to say it brought the house down would be an understatement. She had a spectacular voice and hearing her perform was a pleasure.

Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Harry introduced yet another guest performer. Instead of a gospel singer this time, the guest was Zigaboo Modeliste, the famous drummer from New Orleans featured on She, as well as selected songs from other Harry albums. I don't remember exactly what song they played, but Zigaboo was incredible. Harry joked to Ray at the end of the song, "you sure you wanna get back on the drums after that?"

The rest of the show was a lot more heavy funk tunes, with Harry on drums, bass, and basically whatever he felt like playing. They finished the show with "Whisper Your Name" (the only song they played from She), and followed that up with about a 15-minute encore, dixieland style, once again joined by Zigaboo on marching snare. Overall, the concert lasted a full 3 hours and 20 minutes, the longest show on the tour so far.

After the show, we had the opportunity to pay outrageous prices for Star Turtle merchandise, after which we proceeded backstage with our "after-show" passes. Unfortunately, Harry didn't come down to join us until about an hour later, at which time they made us line up to greet him. He signed autographs, posed for photos, etc. but really didn't have time to talk as we would have liked. It's probably because they played such a long set; by this time it was already 1 AM or so. I did get a picture taken, so hopefully it will turn out better than last time! The rest of the band did hang out for a while, chatting with the 30 or so of us who were standing around. We met Tony and Ray briefly, and talked to Mark for a good 10 minutes or so - he's a great guy, fun to talk to, and he told us about how he was looking forward to going home so he could lounge around watching the Weather Channel with his beagle...

Overall, this concert was great... The only thing that could have possibly made it better is if that drunk guy in front of us on the floor would have been publicly humiliated like the woman in Phoenix! :)