After doing heavy promotion on the road for his latest record Cocky, the Kid Rock tour is taking a month-and-a-half-break.

        His last order of business before the vacation was Saturday night's show at Riverbend. “This is gonna be a little bit like the last day of school,” the rocker-rapper told the crowd.

        The two-hour show started tightly enough, with versions of rap-fueled songs “Trucker Anthem,” “Forever,” “Where U At Rock,” and “Welcome 2 the Party,” coming one after the other with no breaks.

        After the beginning things loosened up quite a bit, and the last-day-of-school feel took hold of the rest of the set.

        Rap is his greatest medium, as the powerhouse opening sequence showed. Augmented by flashpots and fireworks, dancing bikini-clad women and red, white and blue confetti, nothing that followed matched up.

        The next song he and his Brown Trucker Band did was Led Zeppelin's “Rock and Roll,” which wasn't bad, but it opened the floodgates for several snippets of covers, as well as his classic-rock and Southern-rock originals.

        It's Hank Williams, Jr.'s muse that directs Kid Rock's live show, and not just in the sense of the Hank Jr. T-shirt hanging from a clothesline amid the trailer-trash set design, or the lap steel Bocephus gave his protege — “from the '40s!” Kid Rock said as he showed the guitar to the audience.

        There were moments of the show either directly lifted from Hank's act, like when Kid Rock played the guitar riff from ZZ Top's “La Grange” coupled with Aerosmith's “Walk This Way.” But moreover Kid Rock took Hank's sensibilities and applied them for his own use. He cleared the stage and did “If I Were President” alone with his electric guitar. A bluesy tune written with ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, the song is full of populist one-liners, each one crafted to spur cheers out of the crowd. It didn't get any more Hank than that little ditty.

        Of course, Hank puts on a pretty entertaining show, at least the first two or three times you see him. The problem is he puts on the same show every time. We saw many of the same Hank-isms out of Kid Rock when he played Cincinnati last year. Hopefully he some new inspiration during his time off.

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