A short, introverted man with a lazy eye rambles out onto a stage and shuts up 18,000 people with nothing but his voice and an acoustic guitar. If that isn’t rock star power, nothing is. This was Thom Yorke’s conclusion to one of the great performances of recent memory, Radiohead’s “Amnesiac” tour of 2001. Yorke sang the then unreleased ballad “True Love Waits” to the masses of standing, quiet music fans (actually, the real fans were in the back — those up front with great seats were mostly comped by KROQ, Capitol Records, and MTV) and cemented himself a place in history.

It’s not illogical to listen to either of Radiohead’s last two albums from 2000 and 2001, Kid A and Amnesiac, and wonder why in the hell these guys are so popular. The music is nearly inaccessible, there’s hardly a structure to the songs, the instrumentation is obscure and minimalist, and melodies pop up very infrequently, almost in spite of themselves. Are Radiohead pretentious art-school experimentalists who have fooled the media into proclaiming them geniuses? Do millions of people buy their records because they just want to look hip? While these questions are valid if you’re just slogging through songs like “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushed Tin Box” for the first time, all doubts were laid to rest on August 20, when Radiohead filled the skies of the Hollywood Bowl with a perfect rock show — it was triumphant, exciting, melodic, powerful, emotional, smart, and totally convincing. There’s no question this is a brilliant rock band at the height of their talent. 

Technological frills were kept to a minimum, as a bare stage and economical lighting focused on nothing but the quintet of musicians and their instruments. A few strategically placed screens allowed fans far away to glimpse well-directed close-ups, one of which included Yorke sitting at his piano during “You and Whose Army?” leering into a fisheye lens and singing with a wink and a smile. That had the crowd roaring.

The star of the show was the music, and the band pulled out everything from The Bends to Amnesiac, playing a set list that managed to straddle the line between greatest hits and band favorites. Early stuff like “Fake Plastic Trees” and “My Iron Lung” have never sounded better, OK Computer tunes such as “Paranoid Android” and “Exit Music (From a Film)” nearly stole the show, and many of the new songs from the past two albums were transformed from electronic ambience into live force. “Idioteque” was a memo-
rable highlight, showcasing Yorke bouncing around with a tambourine, shaking his head while shouting until he almost exploded, and the bluesy rock number “I Might Be Wrong” was torn up by the rhythm section’s Olympic fever. It was a gold medal performance.

The unsung hero of Radiohead turned out to be Ed O’Brien, who, like Philip Seymour Hoffman or Dylan Baker, is the kind of character actor who does their job so well they blur into the fabric of the performance without calling attention to themselves. The finest guitar riffs and most soaring chords came courtesy of O’Brien, who was matched by Phil Selway’s intense drumming and the Greenwood brothers’ fancy bass and keyboard work. But at the end of the night, it was Thom Yorke who ended the encore by standing alone in front of the crowd, singing his heart out and his ass off, unafraid of being where he is: atop music’s throne where playing live is the reason he’s alive.