Live Review: Los Tigres del Norte at the Wells Fargo Center

Tonight, Los Tigres del Norte played a two-and-a-half hour set in Santa Rosa. If that sounds like a long time, consider that most of their concerts are 3 or 4 hours long; once, in 2009, the band played for seven hours straight.

But the band, who attracted a sellout crowd at the Wells Fargo Center, wisely maximized those two and a half hours. They played all of their biggest hits, projected clips from throughout their career on a giant screen, had the crowd on their feet and, at concert’s end, took dozens of photos with excited fans at the edge of the stage while still playing and not missing a note.

Another thing: I’d heard that in concert, Los Tigres del Norte compose their setlists on the spot, dictated by scraps of paper handed to the band by audience members. Each scrap of paper contains a song request, and the band generally gets around to playing nearly all of them.

Sure enough, that was the case tonight at the Wells Fargo Center, where a constant stream of requests were handed to the band members, often in mid-song. I lost count of how many of these requests came flooding to the stage. Between songs, the band members read from the scraps of paper, not only song titles but special dedications, birthday wishes, stories of people’s homeland and more. Call it an analog version of live-Tweeting. It definitely connected the crowd.

And then, the songs. “Golpes en el Corazon” brought a giant sing-along before the band even had a chance to start the first verse; the heartbreaking “La Jaula de Oro” caused an eruption at the first three notes on the accordion. “Somos Mas Americanos,” “Contraband y Tración,” “La Puerta Negra”—they just kept coming and coming. By the end, while the crowd clustered the stage for a veritable love-fest, it was hard to imagine that they wouldn’t return to Santa Rosa, sometime, for another marathon set.