And now, a list:
Joe Strummer
Warren Zevon
Johnny Cash
Robert Palmer
If you see a pattern, good for you. Or bad, actually, because if you do see a pattern, chances are you're old enough to remember listening to them the first go-round. And if you are, then you've probably got more than a few of their albums. And if you do, that means that you've joined that club of poor sods whose hi-fi library is now significantly populated by dead people.
Welcome.
And if you're really lucky and live in the right city, you've probably also experienced the phenomenon of the Overbooked Bar. To explain, the Overbooked Bar operates on the same principle as an overbooked airline flight. In some cities, the musician-to-bar ratio can reach such an imbalance that the bar owners will, to ensure bookings, schedule local singers for any old timeslot they can shoehorn them in. The upshot of this is that you run the risk of wandering into your local watering hole around, say, 5:30 in the afternoon and being subjected to grievous musicological assault from some doughy 24-year-old with a guitar and three-day stubble proving to everyone at Happy Hour that he's just two steps away from becoming the next David Gray.1
And it's not as though loosing your inner Bluto Blutarsky on the evening's troubadour will have any appreciable effect. They've got other acts, piled up in the back room next to the 50-pound bags of Sam's Club pretzels, ready to step in and continue the assault on your musical sensibilities. They may not think they're the next David Gray (at that point, thinking you're the next Dorian Gray would be a bridge too far), but they're perfectly content to settle for being the next John Mayer, or Edwin McCain, or that adenoidal teabag from Coldplay, or any of the endless plague of deluded dorm-crooners stretching out in your mind's eye like some particularly twisted branch of the Banquo clan.
Terrifying as that prospect is, it only gets worse when you realize that they all sound exactly the same: the halting down-tempo major-7 chords, the woe-is-me subject matter, the unmistakable pubescent break of the voice when they're trying to hit something approaching falsetto. It wasn't like this back in the day – and "the day" wasn't all that long ago. Time was when you knew a singer or a band by what they sounded like. The Beatles don't sound like the Rolling Stones, who don't sound like The Who, who don't sound like Pink Floyd, who don't sound like The Clash, who don't sound like Dire Straits, who don't sound like Blue Öyster Cult.
And those bands don't sound like Styx, or REO Speedwagon, or Journey. All three of which passed through town not so long ago.
And, of course, which I had to see.
To justify the expense, I invited a friend, whom we'll call Spalding. He's a card-carrying member of the Younger Generation (that demographic to whom '80s stations are considered "oldies"), but more than willing to try something new. So when this triumvirate of rock hit Washington, DC, you can bet your entire AC/DC back catalog that we were gonna be there to witness it.
The venue for this episode of auditory burlesque was the MCI Center, one of those newly built, debt-heavy, bond-funded sportspalasts designed to provide improved sightlines to the sorts of sports teams you really didn't care to see in the first place. And since the Wizards and Capitals don't exactly pack 'em in, it doubles as a major concert venue in the DC area, that is, if you call the American Idol tour a major concert. We did not. A triple bill of Styx, REO Speedwagon, and Journey, on the other hand...
Let's just say that 13,000 of our closest friends were of the same mind. Not a full house, but hardly the Idaho State Fair (which, for all we knew, the headliners had just flown in from).
You could make the usual assumption about the sort of crowd that elects to hand that month's mortgage payment over to the soul-sucking weasels at Ticketmaster to attend such a show, and you'd be mostly right. They skew a bit older for concertgoers, mostly people in their 30s and early 40s, but there were more than a few teenagers to be found wandering mortified around the concourse levels. Whether they were there because they (a) saw the relevant Behind the Music specials, (b) got dragged there by the folks as punishment for something or other, or (c) possessed serious knowledge of the REO Speedwagon oeuvre beyond the Hi Infidelity album, was unclear. But they were there, soaking up the surreality of hundreds of denizens of the nation's capital region determined to bang heads and flick Bics to the inimitable vocal stylings of whichever lead singer's replacing Steve Perry that month.
Spalding, at this point (ten minutes before curtain), was regarding the teeming throng with a bemused, almost clinical air, as if he were Margaret Mead among one of the more unsettling Micronesian tribes. He (and I) were vastly amused to see people in the luxury boxes at the MCI, clad in vintage Escape T-shirts, being served canapis from the in-house catering staff. Truly. (Truth be told, Spalding was amused. I was trying to figure out a way to get in there. Think about it. A Styx concert viewed from the comfort of your own luxury box. Brilliant.)
The concert started bang on time, too. Hell, the concert was adamant, if not smug about starting on time, because, well, we all had work in the morning. Not a huge point, but it's something you never see happen with these new bands, if the concert starts at all. Even money usually has the audience waiting around for 45 minutes because somebody botched Coldplay's contract rider and that simping wanker's locked himself in his dressing room because the walls are the wrong tint of beige. Time was, if the lead singer didn't like the color of the walls he'd just up and ignite them, and usually spend that evening locked in a holding cell by the local constabulary. Now it's all about feng shui and macrobiotics and other eco-weenie obsessions. Disgraceful.
Styx were first out of the gate, at 7:07 PM, identified by the large carrot (from their new album, and no, don't bother rushing over to HMV for it) hurtling into view on the DiamondVision monitor behind the stage. They started with "Too Much Time On My Hands," moved on to "Show Me the Way" and "Fooling Yourself" and "Blue Collar Man" and "Lady" (with that goddam high note, if you know what I mean and I suspect you do), segued into "Grand Illusion" and "Miss America" and "Babe" and "Come Sail Away" and never lost a step throughout. The encore was "Renegade." They played only three songs from their new album, were cognizant enough to space them waaaaay the hell away from one another, and James "J.Y." Young himself assured us that after the third song the band would return to, as he so eloquently put it, "the soundtrack of your misspent youth."
And they did. Because, let's face it, you don't go to this sort of concert for the new stuff. You're there because you need a damn Styx fyx, and there's only so much the CD player can do for you. You need to thrash and yell and scream and pound the armrests and embarrass your guest with your antics, and you can't do that with the new stuff.
Spalding enjoyed the Styx set, to be sure, but he was already pretty up on the band's playlist (compliments of Behind the Music again). REO Speedwagon, on the other hand, presented a challenge. After a trip to the beer stand, I returned to the following question:
"So what is an REO Speedwagon, anyway?"
"You'll see," I said.
I wanted to grab him by the lapels and shake him silly. I wanted to tell him that REO Speedwagon isn't a thing, man, it's a state of mind, it's about being young and livin' life and reachin' for the stars and rockin' out and not taking any guff from anyone, you Philistine!2
Which was in ample evidence the minute they showed up. No new album. Same old REO. (And I do mean old, as Kevin Cronin's definitely got that leatherette quality about him these days.) But again, the set was damn near perfect, starting with "Riding the Storm Out" and jumping off into "Keep On Loving You" and "Can't Fight This Feeling", gracefully sliding into ""Don't Let Him Go" and "In My Dreams" and "That Ain't Love" and "Time For Me To Fly" (and dammit, bands knew how to write song titles back then, didn't they? None of this "Jeremy" crap), and "Take It On The Run" and finishing big with what everyone in the house was waiting for, "Roll With The Changes."
We left three songs into Journey's act. Not by choice, mind you, but as I said, some of us gotta work in the morning. And the Steve Perry look-alike had no, repeat no, sense of stage presence. Oh, they started with "Separate Ways" and "Don't Stop Believin'" and "Wheel In The Sky", and if you closed your eyes you could almost see them jumping around MTV back when it still played videos, but ultimately it didn't measure up to the first two acts. Still two out of three ain't bad, to quote another musician who knows how to do a concert the right way.
All in all, a great way to kill a Wednesday evening. And one heck of a conversation starter at work the next day, as everyone nodded approvingly and said things like "Styx? Yeah, I used to listen to them. They were great."
Friend, there's no "used to" about it. They still are great.
And yes, they still loathe Dennis DeYoung. Some things are, after all, eternal.
