Looking around the Berkley Church on Thursday night, Steve looked at me and said, “Jesus, mate, I feel like I’m standing in the middle of a soup kitchen.” We’d been given tickets to see an Edgar Winter concert and really didn’t know what to expect. As it turned out, the place was full of a bunch of people in their mid-50’s, people who didn’t look like they left their apartments all that often.
The men all seemed to have the same haircuts that they had back in high school, and so there was lots of defiantly long, gray hair. Many of them had beards and wore concert bomber jackets that I imagined they saw as part of their “going out” uniform. There must have been eight one of them for every woman in the crowd, each one of the women having an aggressive, boozy quality about her, as if she’d been to her fair share of interventions.
The opening band was comprised of five 20 year-olds who looked like they were dressed up as rock stars for Halloween. They were called Symphony of Nine, and they were truly awful. Honestly, they were like a parody band, encapsulating every horrible rock cliché there was without even a glimmer of self-awareness.
The drummer chose not to wear a shirt, revealing the pale flesh of somebody who had just spent a winter in Canada. As an accent to this look, he donned a top hat with a Do-Rag underneath it. The lead guitarist, who shared a haircut with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, wore a Mandarin collar jacket. He was mystical. The keyboardist was shy, focusing all of his energy on his craft. He had a New Wave vibe to him, and his black hair shone blue beneath the lights. The bassist hid behind tiny, John Lennon sunglasses, a goatee and a Do-Rag, while the lead singer threw himself out there for all to admire. He had on some Sgt. Pepper style jacket and he tried very, very hard to be seductive and charismatic, but it was no use, his reach exceeded his grasp.
I checked out their merchandise table, which was hopefully arrayed with homemade t-shirts and CD’s. One of the band’s girlfriends stood there awkwardly, hoping somebody would buy a Symphony of Nine sticker, but nothing was moving, and she, like everybody else, just stood there, waiting.
It was heartbreaking to watch.