It is only appropriate that U2 kicked off the first U.S. date of its latest North American tour with a sold-out crowd of devotees at SAP Center on Monday, including members of the San Francisco Giants, the Rev. Cecil Williams from Glide Church and big names in tech.

No other band is more closely aligned with Silicon Valley tech giants and U2’s inspirational songs from over three decades are undoubtedly good enough to make the unofficial reverend outfielder Hunter Pence jump in praise (that, he did, with Giants manager Bruce Bochy and teammate Ryan Vogelsong standing nearby). Count on a few new Bono-inspired startup slogans jotted on after party napkins, too.

But even with that social cachet, U2 continues to push the limits of arena-sized performances, this time doing its best to make the 17,000-capacity SAP Center feel like an intimate music venue. On Monday, it felt like a club gig compared to the band’s last Bay Area outing, the massive, record-breaking U2 360° Tour at Oakland Coliseum back in 2011.

PHOTO GALLERY: U2 At SAP Center

In San Jose, the band utilized an innovative setup for more than two hours with a large stage at the north end of the arena floor that was linked with a runway to a smaller stage at the south end. Above the mid-section, giant LED boards projected massive video and animation visuals.

Alternating from each stage throughout the night, fans on opposing ends of the stadium were offered a unique perspective, although it seems somewhere near half court is probably best for this show. The sequences with the LED screen were stunning, especially when Bono and the Edge climbed a platform behind the images, allowing Bono to interact with an animated streetscape and later hold the Edge in his giant hand.

The Edge. Photo by Brian Kirksey.

Musically, it was a night of nostalgia on multiple levels, first with an emphasis on songs from the band’s 2014 album Songs of Innocence, which was inspired by the band’s formative years. They started with the first single from that album, “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone),” and then an unexpected pick, U2’s first single ever “Out of Control,” before Bono introduced bassist Adam Clayton, drummer Larry Mullen and the Edge by their Dublin neighborhoods.

Bono set the tone in the first break, riffing on the tour’s iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE theme and asking the crowd: “Can you still experience innocence after all of these years?”

That’s not always an easy question with U2. At this point, multiple generations can claim U2 origin stories; the musical bookmarks from their past that brought them out on a Monday night to sing along in near-religious fervor to the group’s biggest hits.

At the same time, the band had the audience questioning: Where is our innocence after Ferguson and during the AIDS crisis? What have we learned from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the conflict in Ireland? Can we become global citizens? What is magic and what is a trick?

Perhaps, that’s what U2 does best. In the wake of thousands of glowing cell phones and selfie attempts, it’s a band that can still insert a little humanity, charity and mystery into the rock ’n’ roll juggernaut. On Monday, it was nostalgic and refreshing—and it felt a little innocent—all at once.

U2 performs again on May 19 at SAP Center before continuing its North American tour.

If his show at Mountain Winery last night taught us anything, it’s that nobody has followed Weird Al’s career like Weird Al.

The guy must have a hell of a clipping service, because he seems to have collected every single pop culture reference to him ever made, for use in his “ALTV” between-song video montages. In some cases, he’s even incorporated them into the set, as when a Jeopardy question about “White and Nerdy” Segway immediately into Al busting out onto the stage in his trademark segue for the song.

What’s even crazier is that when I saw him a few years back in San Mateo, he used just as many pop-culture clips about himself, and yet most of them were entirely different than the ones he showed last night. Is the guy secretly on everybody’s mind all the time, or what?

Well, kind of. I mean, who doesn’t love Weird Al? And what person alive the last three decades doesn’t recognize him as a cultural touchpoint of some type? Whether your generation rocked to “My Bologna,” “Eat It,” “Fat,” “Amish Paradise” or “White and Nerdy,” you know Weird Al.

Seeing him live is like a two-hour study in why he’s remained a trending topic in the back of our minds for this long. First of all, his parodies are, for a huge chunk of the show, cut down into a medley blitz, featuring about the first two-three minutes of each. And that’s always the most clever part, isn’t it? I really only need the first verse and chorus from his Rocky-meets-deli “Eye of the Tiger” parody, “The Rye or the Kaiser.” Now, when I was 10, it might have been a different story, but now that’s perfect. Same with the Backstreet Boys parody “EBay,” his REM “Stand” take-off “Spam” and the “La Bamba” parody “Lasagna”—all of which he ran through quickly.

The true fan favorites (and most elaborate costume changes) got the full-song treatment, though: both MJ parodies, “Amish Paradise,” the stormtrooper-staffed encore for his Star Wars-themed parodies of “American Pie” (which I have to admit has grown on me over the years) and “Lola.” Plus, more recent songs like the Lady Gaga parody “Perform Like This,” the Taylor Swift re-imagining “TMZ” and his version of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.,” “Party in the C.I.A.”

Second, it hit me last night how annoying it is when other artists who do musical comedy try to distance themselves from Weird Al by saying “Well, he’s a parodist,” as if this allowed them to look down on him in some way. Actually, he’s quite a brilliant comedian even when he’s not parodying songs, as his fake video interviews showed again last night. Editing himself into interviews of various celebrities made for some hilarious absurdist comedy.

Lastly, Weird Al, against all odds, still has the ability to surprise. He opened his set last night with Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio.” Not a parody of it, mind you, but the actual song, done in all seriousness. Seriousness? Now, that’s just weird.

Devfits, a side project from Pinback singer Rob Crow that mashes Devo and Misfits songs with videos of his children acting out Devo videos, turned out to be weirder and more meticulously prepared than expected last night at the Blank Club.

Crow was the sole member of Devfits. All the music was pre-recorded and he sang the songs karaoke style while wearing a skin tight silver outfit and a creepy serial killer mask reminiscent of the the human-skin mask Anthony Hopkins’s character wore in the famous scene from the Silence of the Lambs. He sang and danced to the music with a silly swagger, which in contrast to the emotionless mask, was downright scary.

The instrumentation was a jumble of Devo and Misfits snippets, cut and pasted to create new, vaguely recognizable songs even to die-hard fans of either band. The lyrics and melodies, best I could tell, were approached the same way. The end result was a handful of offbeat dance-punk pop songs that were interesting and unique.

There were a few videos of his kid reading a semi-familiar Devo script that he was obviously too young to understand. It was hilarious. But most of the footage that played during Crow’s songs was a combination of weird archival film and new videos of Crow dancing and playing different instruments along to the music. The degree of effort Crow took to prepare this performance crossed the line from eccentric to uncomfortable.

Mid-way through the set, Crow moved out of the way of the screen so the audience could watch a nearly five-minute long interlude video of Crow sitting down in a chair with his face covered in bandages. A nurse slowly removed them, one bandage at a time, over a bed of foreboding music, which revealed Crow wearing a brand new, sci-fi mask—black nylon stretched over his head with fake eyes and a large silver collar covering the back of his head. Moments later, Crow emerged with the same motif on stage.

Devfits played a relatively short set of 30 minutes, which seemed like nothing compared to hour-long set from openers Sleeping People. Nonetheless, my hat is off to Crow. It’s not easy to create a live show this far off the beaten path.