There’s a tradition in sports of retiring jersey numbers. It’s a way of proclaiming that a player’s achievements are unmatchable. No member of the Boston Red Sox, for instance, will ever again wear the number 9, because that was Ted’s number, and we shall never see his like again; to invite comparison is to invite embarrassment.

I sometimes think it would be a good idea if pop music did something like that. One often hears the argument that certain songs should be retired — even Leonard Cohen thinks the world doesn’t need another cover of “Hallelujah,” and he gets a paycheck every time someone records it — but right now I’m thinking about venues. Maybe not close down the actual site — although the Apollo Theater could have shut its doors after James Brown’s historic 1962 gigs there, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever top those shows, not even James Brown himself — but surely, after Cheap Trick, there’s no further need for anyone to make another live album at Budokan. It’s been done, and definitively.

And as surely as James Brown’s shadow hangs over every subsequent performer to hit the stage at the Apollo, so there is a shade across Rob Thomas’s Live at Red Rocks DVD — or, to give it its full name, Rob Thomas: Something To Be Tour — Live at Red Rocks. The jersey that Rob Thomas has donned bears across its back not a single digit, but a letter and a number; the letter U, and the numeral 2. (more…)