Last night was a trip down memory lane – back to the times when we spent hours standing in smoke filled rooms getting our ear drums assaulted. The only differences last night were the complete absence of cigarette smoke (or any type of smoke for that matter) and the difficulty in standing for two hours without both knees locking up.
Yes, the child bride, the son-in-law (who kindly provided the tickets), one of his mates and I attended a Led Zeppelin tribute concert at the local Hamilton pub. The Hammo has an upstairs room with a laughable VIP section right at the back, a very long and well attended (both sides) bar, very few tables and chairs and a stage just big enough for a four piece band and all of their gear. Actually, that’s not quite true – two of the speaker stacks were on the floor in front of the stage. So they were just a little bit closer to us. We were about six or seven metres from the stage.
Of course a Led Zep tribute band doesn’t work unless the singer sounds like Robert Plant. This guy pulled it off with aplomb although the little thermos he occasionally sipped from, I’m sure was filled with honey and Lemsip, rather than vodka. Getting through Stairway to Heaven which starts slow and low and finishes fast and high would challenge the most muscular vocal chords let alone two hours of high pitched wailing.
Listening to the real Led Zep taught me the value of a tight rhythm section. Forget Plant and Page. It was Jones and Bonham who held it together. The two P’s were always keen to demonstrate their virtuoso capabilities with musical and vocal flights of fancy but it was the other two who kept herding them back onto the straight and narrow. Without them, the more complex songs would have become a self-indulgent cacophonic mess. And so it was with “Song Remains” which I believe was the name of the band in question. No, not a cacophonic mess, a rhythm driven performance.
Every time the base player hit a note it felt like I’d been punched in the lungs and the base drum is still pounding my skull 12 hours later. However I could have done without the 10 minute drum solo. I thought drum solos had gone out with Iron Butterfly and Cream. Still it gave the other guys an opportunity to indulge the rock god/groupie paradigm with some of the “girls” from the audience. Or maybe they just had a rest.
I’m assuming now that these guys haven’t been too successful to date although that would be a shame because they are very talented. What drew me to this conclusion was the fact that the guitarist only appeared to have one guitar. In a four piece band where one of the four doesn’t play an instrument and two of them are keeping the beat, the fourth has to fill a considerable musical void. So the distortion level is turned up to broaden the sound but not to the extent that it disguises those famous riffs. That’s all very well on Rock and Roll and The Immigrant Song and Black Dog but doesn’t work at all on Stairway to Heaven where a much cleaner sound is required. A pedal would have done the trick but he must have left it at home. Knit-picking I know because he did manage to sear a trench between my ear-drums as those famous riffs were being meticulously reproduced.
We’ve been to see a lot of the bands of our youth in recent years – Rolling Stones, Status Quo, Eagles, John Fogarty, Mellencamp and others – and as the CB says, it’s as interesting to observe the crowd as it is the band. And so it was last night. When we arrived there was a group of skinny seventy somethings who looked like how you would imagine Spinal Tap would look today. Where these people hide during the day is beyond me. We thought they may have been the band. They weren’t but they did park themselves right next to the aforementioned floor mounted speaker stacks from start to finish. They may have been the road crew but didn’t seem capable of lifting their heads such was the mass of hair, let alone a massive speaker.
And of course there’s the obligatory wanker who wants to work his moves and doesn’t care about bumping those near-by or jumping in front of others while the missus feigns indifference. No doubt he had ambitions of indulging the rock god/groupie thing when they got home. I hope she had a headache for the ages.
And have you noticed how in a crowd, if you leave a space, someone will come and stand in it. It’s like waiting for your luggage to appear on the carousel at the airport. Unless you are hard against the carousel, someone will come and stand in front of you. So we had a reasonable area around us which respected our and others’ personal space and then the Andrews Sisters came and occupied it. Their jiggy little coordinated dance move where they hopped from one foot to the other would not have been out of place at a Barry Manilow concert. It was absolutely unacceptable at a rock and roll concert.
As the CB is fond of saying, I’m getting grumpy in my oldish age. That may be true but I prefer to characterise it as reducing tolerance for idiots whose indulgences reduce my enjoyment of an event. And if you believe life’s too short, that’s non-negotiable. Notwithstanding crowd induced minor irritants, it was a great night.
As an epilogue, we got home in time to see Djokovic beat Nadal 10-8 in the fifth at Wimbledon after Anderson beat Isner 26-24 in the fifth in the other men’s semi final. The equally remunerated women’s final was a 6-3 6-3, 65 minute romp. If you believe in the gender pay gap, there’s a perfect example of one. But that’s another story for another day.