What rock ‘n’ roll
offers, above all else, is its shared experience – shared in a way that
includes those who may not have been in on the initial shared event. Take
Woodstock, for example. If we are to believe all of the post-boomers who say
they were there, the attendance would had to have been in the millions, as
opposed to the 400,000 who actually were there.
It was June 1986, and my
hair was perfect. I was a 20-year-old rock ‘n’ roller working on my hustle
outside the club Rumours (what is now known as Lux)
on South Avenue. You see, I was of legal drinking age when it was 19, but they had
changed it to 21. And even though I had played in this joint with my band,
there was a chance I wasn’t going to get in to see what is still my favorite
band, The Blasters.
Long story short: I got
in. And apparently so did everybody else, as the place was sardined to the
extreme. There was nowhere to go but up. People were dancing on the bar,
perched precariously on bar stools, and flinging arms and legs carelessly about
the place.
It was just a matter of
time before the crowd spilled out onto the street while The Blasters’ vintage
American music blasted out of the door and to the attention of John Law, who
shut the show down because of noise and the size of the crowd. Frontman Phil Alvin suggested they play acoustically, but
to no avail.
What we did see of the
show was magical and memorable. I’ve gone on to see The Blasters countless
times all over the US, but nothing has come close to that night on South Avenue
and the people who were there and – those purportedly there.
The Blasters come from
Downey, California, and still manage to blow through town every year or so. I
never miss it. Over the years, in the bizz-buzz of
excited pre-show chit-chat, I started hearing about the show so many years back
from a lot of people – alot. It was their shared rock ‘n’ roll
moment.
I won’t begrudge them
their self-inclusion, whether it’s true or not. But it’s kind of like that
Woodstock math I mentioned earlier. If all those who said they were there, were
there, the club that held roughly 100 souls would have topped out at around
10,000.
So The Blasters played
Abilene last Tuesday to a capacity crowd. Some people tapped their feet. Others
danced like incurables in the steam heat as the band, all black leather and
denim, played all the hits and performed like a band half its age. While I
stepped out for some air, I heard fragments of conversation discussing the
long-ago South Avenue show, but I pulled the fly-on-the-wall-act instead before
walking over to The Blasters’ bassist John Bazz to
pull on his coat about that show. Hell. I know he was there all those years
ago.
“That’s one of my
favorite shows,” he said.
It was June 1986 and my
hair was perfect…
This article appears in Aug 22-28, 2018.
