It's only rock and roll

I was looking around today to see if I could spot a good concert to attend this summer. I’ve already seen Springsteen this year, and he was in top form, so it’s kind of greedy of me to want to see more. But I’m like that.

I know the Allman Brothers are playing in October at Chastain Park Ampitheatre. I doubt I'll go, because they’re really not the Allmans to me without crazy old Dickey Betts, and Chastain can sometimes suck as a concert venue because they have to keep the noise level down, being as it’s in a fancy neighborhood. In other words, none of the homes there have wheels.

The real problem at Chastain, as you know if you’ve ever been, is the crowd, which is frequently of the wine-and-cheese “we’re only here to be seen” variety. They buy their season tickets because they don’t want to miss the Kenny G show, but then they go to see real artists play, and annoy the rest of us.

A couple of years ago I went to see Mark Knopfler, and these two Buckhead princesses on the next row were loudly discussing their upcoming dinner party. They were talking over the long guitar solo at the end of “Telegraph Road,” which is only the second best guitar solo ever recorded, behind Duane Allman’s blistering 5 minutes or so at the end of “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” from the live At Fillmore East album. Don’t argue with me about this.

Finally somebody told the two ninnies to shut up, and they looked mortally offended, but the rest of us applauded, so Buffy and Bambi spent the rest of the show glumly stuffing their faces with brie and chardonnay.

I went to Chastain a few years ago to see Neil Young. This was the tour when he had just done his “Greendale” concept album, and he only played songs from that record, so the normally fickle Chastain crowd grew even more restless as people realized they didn’t recognize a single song. During a quieter, acoustic number, Neil quit the song in mid-strum, stood up, chastised the crowd for chatterint, strapped his tattered electric guitar back on and blasted us with another half-hour of songs about this imaginary town. Part of me admired his stubbornness, but part of me wouldn’t have minded hearing “Down By The River,” or “After The Gold Rush.”

(By the way, since this is a blog, and the rules of grammar can be nebulous here, I’m arbitrarily using italics and quotes for song and album titles. It’s fun. And because I’m old, I still say album. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.)

My first experience at Chastain was when I went to see Chuck Berry and the forgettable Bo Diddley, who somehow manages to work the words “Bo Diddley” into about three-fourths of his songs. Bo opened, then after a while Chuck came out and announced to the crowd that he wanted to perform for us, but the promoter would not allow it. Then he walked off stage, and the crowd booed and grew restless. A few minutes later he came back, announced that the promoter had seen the light, and kicked into his set. I found out the next day that he was demanding more money before he would come out on stage, and finally the promoter had to give in. Nice move.

Anyway, there are a lot of good shows coming up all over Atlanta – Knopfler, Tom Petty, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt, Old 97s. And probably a rockin’ Kenny G show somewhere.