Last Night: Juanes At Toyota Center

Photos by Marco Torres

​Juanes, Antonio Orozco
Toyota Center
March 30, 2011

Right on cue at 8 p.m., the Toyota Center house lights go down and the show starts, although instead of Juanes, it's Antonio Orozco that takes the stage. That was the first tease of the evening, and a foreshadowing of the many more to come before the end of the night.

With nothing more than a guitar, a chair and a floodlight, Orozco sang a few tunes and was off the stage by 8:18, but one woman in the audience was already losing it, yelling so loudly during his set her friend changes seats to get away.

Juanes' fans were visibly excited and ready for him to show his face, but it would be 40 minutes before the 17-time Latin Grammy winner finally greets the Houston audience - tease No. 2, the classic "Keep 'Em Waiting."

​When Juanes opened with "Yerbatero," an Arabesque-flavored dance tune, the crowd didn't show an iota of annoyance at having had to wait for him. Everyone was off their seats and screaming a loud Houston welcome at the top of their lungs.

"It was amazing. It was awesome. As soon as he came out, my heart was thumping," Suzette Olivan said.

The crowd may have been so forgiving due to Juanes' pleasantly form-fitting super-tight black jeans, or the tight black jacket that was going to eventually come of before the end of the night to reveal those sexy tattoos. It could have also been the eight huge LED screens that that give "light show" an entirely new meaning. More likely though, it was the sheer passion that the Columbian songwriter delivers with each note of his guitar-driven dance ballads.

Juanes gave the crowd exactly what they came to see within the set's first nine minutes, when he started strumming the first notes of "Camisa Negra," one of his most famous tunes. His eight-member band, which included drums and a Latin percussion conga/bongo set-up, held nothing back.