“Damn, damn, damn, damn damn.” That’s True Groove Records owner Tomas Doncker at Bowery Electric Thursday bight. “Damn damn damn damn.” Maybe five minutes earlier we’d entered Bowery Electric to an audience in a state of immense and intense pleasure, watching the Del Lords jamming with an intense intertwining of bass and guitars, it was the purest of rock and roll. It was like why some of us were so once willing to give everything to the music form. “Damn damn damn damn damn.”
“If they had just been only OK I would be so much happier,” Doncker said as we left the concert with a glazed look on our faces. “But that’s what you have to do. You have to be able to give that sort of an energy, that sort of concentration every time you go on stage.”
Here was the plan: Tomas and I would catch Buddy Guy at BB King’s. An act as big as Buddy Guy? I couldn’t imagine an opening act, so figure Buddy would be off the stage by 10pm, then we’d dash to the Lower East Side. There were three bands at Bowery Electric so obviously the headliners would be last which would make the third band on at 1030ish? Right ? Right???? Buddy had an opening act and the Del Lords went on at 9pm and we missed everything but “Southern Pacific”
To add insult to injury, Buddy Guy was… Well, I will leave Tomas to review Buddy when he gets round to it, all I’ll say is I am very happy not to be writing it up.
I wasn’t surprised the Del Lords were killing it, their first album in 19 years, Elvis Club, is one of the best of the year. It is like garage rock grown up; a really great sounding basic rock and roll band album hitting their groove, and including an awesome Neil Young cover and two or three of their best originals and “Chicks, Man” an awesome once ina life time song. If I had realized the band were gonna be on at 9pm I would have asked Tomas if he wanted to skip Buddy Guy. Yeah, I knew it was gonna be big. Just not this big.
Here is what Scott Kempner wrote on his Facebook Wall after the show: “Thank you to everyone who came to the show tonight. I have been worrying and fretting and fretting and worrying about this show for the last several weeks. The first real Del-Lords show in NYC is, after all, a BIG DEAL. This HAD to go well. Like most such nervous concerns this one, too, in the end, proved to be baseless. Definitely a contender for my favorite NYC, Del-Lords show ever. A great audience, with some dear old friends in the mix, and i gotta say i can go to sleep tonight knowing we left nothing in the locker room and then, nothing on the field. All good, and good night.”
This one hurts. What did the man say? Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.
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