Rant #2,095: Draggin' the Line

After a very long week for myself and my family--as I said, I have been giving you bits and pieces of what we have been going through, but I simply don't feel that it is appropriate to be going into the specific details here--we settled down to a nice concert on Saturday night.

I know they don't call it Westbury Music Fair anymore--it is now the NYCB Theater at Westbury, or something to that effect--this venue will always be my personal favorite concert setting. Everything is right on top of you, you are really close to the performers even if you sit in the last seat in the last row, and well, you can't beat the drive, as it is only maybe 20 minutes away from where I live.

And this Saturday, we saw Tommy James and the current Shondells one more time, and we will see them many more times in the future.

More on that later.

Opening for James this time around was John Sebastian of Lovin' Spoonful fame. With all the heavy artillery musical instruments on stage, he came on with just his electric guitar and later, a harmonica, to do an acoustic rendition of his hits and other songs.

The problem with his performance was that I think most people were expecting him to come out with a band, because even at his own admission, the success of his music was due to his bandmates in the Spoonful, a fact that he repeated a few times during his performance.

He decided to take us on a trip through his musical history-- a lot of it verbal--and a lot of people in the audience were kind of turned off my it.

For the first time that I can ever remember at this venue, there were hecklers in the audience, one in particular who was sitting way up front and was getting on Sebastian's goat a good part of the time he was on stage.

One time, the heckler screamed, "Are you done yet," Sebastian shot back, "I will be the judge of that!," but you can see that he was clearly perturbed.

There was no encore, so no "Summer in the City," which he has alluded to "coming" earlier in the concert.

I interviewed Sebastian a number of years ago, and I found him to be a smart, very verbal, intellectual type of person who was very sensitive to the way things are handled.

He hasn't changed at all, so his portion of the concert was a bit of a letdown, as his most popular music would have carried more weight with a band behind him. The way he did it was interesting, but it came off as a bit pompous, although not enough to be heckled like he was.

James came on with a band, and as usual, he played just about every hit he had, which was many over the course of his band and solo career.

James is as busy as he has ever been today, more than 30 years after his last big hit. He has a show on satellite radio, his book about his years at Roulette Records--a front for the mob--continues to be looked at as a movie property, and he has a new album coming out.

But fans came to hear his hits, and he did not disappoint, playing just about all of them, from "Draggin' the Line" to "Hanky Panky" to "Crimson and Clover," my wife's personal favorite.

Yes, he physically looks a bit bulkier than he had been in the past, but his voice still sounds the same. He is also very personable on stage, and he seems like he is having as much fun as the audience is when he is playing, which I think is a secret to any performer's success--not going through the motions to earn a paycheck.

The crowd--Westbury was just about two-thirds full for this concert, which really is a shame, populated by 50-something and over, making my son far and away the youngest person that I saw there--was very appreciative of James, and let him know it.

Me, I enjoyed the entire concert--James AND Sebastian--but we had two loudmouths sitting directly behind us, a man and a woman who were talking during the entire concert--even on their cell phone--yelping and screaming in my ear-kicking me the entire time from the back, and were totally out of control.

It was so bad that my hearing was impacted not from the decibels produced by James and his band, but by this fellow literally screaming in my ear like a teenybopper for upwards of two hours.

My son also said to me that the guy was annoying him too.

After experiencing this for about two hours, in between two of James' songs later in the concert, I told my wife if the guy, in particular, screamed in my ear one more time, I was going to turn around and "punch him in the mouth."

Of course, I wasn't going to do that, but I was fed up.

It seemed that he and his companion must have heard me, because they settled down for the last 15 minutes or so of the concert--and they were such big fans of James that they left before he was over, by the way.

I guess to beat the Westbury traffic, which can be a bit much at times.

Anyway, in spite of this, my family and I had a good time at the show.

Hearing music that you know and love soothes the soul, and heaven knows we need our soul soothed right now.

The bottom line is that I think Sebastian undersold his musical legacy while James honored his fully.

Now, it's just another memory from more than 50 years of me seeing concerts at the venue, from Robert Goulet in "Camelot" when the place was just a tent through today.

It has been an interesting journey, one that I hope to continue for years to come.