I checked out the man behind “Steal Away” Robbie Dupree at Iridium late last year and was mightily impressed. Over the decades the man has continued to improve, going from soft rock to AOR to a jazzy Steely Dan moodiness over to the American Standards and he currently exercises all these musical muscle, and especially the harp, with wild abandonment.
If you haven’t see the man on stage do treat yourself to the fine tuned sound merchant, he is so supremely confident and such a charmer on stage it is a consistent shock he is at the Iridium and not at Carnegie Hall. The problems are obvious: Dupree never was a purveyor of cool, he was never quite hip, always on the outskirts. Indeed, his biggest hit was released in 1980 but, cmon, has there ever been a more 70s song? Maybe Bill Wither’s “Lean On me” but otherwise, this shoulda be a 1975 LA soft sell and instead it heralded the end of the decade.
Dupree could never regret the song, it gave him a life and he is not unresponsive to the wild gift of a career based on one track of platinum and a handful of gold, so that 40 odd years later Dupree is till working it, Still a pro.
two shows on February 7th, so why not to go?