Diary 7|4|2014: Fourth Of July. Grass Roots. Jefferson Starship. Not Much Seafood.

[title type="h5"]Friday, July 4, 2014. Seafood Festival. Grass Roots. Jefferson Starship. [/title] "I know you won't be interested in this," Mary Ann declares in midday, "but I think I'll go myself anyway. The Grass Roots are playing tonight at the Mandeville Seafood Festival." "What!?" I asked. "The Grass Roots came along right down the middle of my teenage pop music era! They have two songs on my Prom Night playlist! Of course I'll go!" The Mandeville Seafood Festival is a misnomer. In its early years, perhaps, there was indeed a lot of seafood out there on the lakefront. But that was the late 1970s, before the food festival craze that keeps us busy every weekend now even existed. The emphasis is primarily on the music part of the program, not the edibles. This year, it almost looked as if the festival wouldn't happen at all. But the music producer for the program stepped in, cut back the run from three days to one, and the event goes on. Predictably, the food aspect is hardly worth talking about. Nothing looks interesting enough to order. The attendance is not what you could call enormous, either. When we arrive at around seven, people milled around in front of the stage, but never densely enough that we are prevented from getting right up there to look at the musicians in the eye. [caption id="attachment_42989" align="alignnone" width="480"] Mandeville Seafood Festival, with the Grass Roots. [/caption] The Grass Roots is well beyond its fourth generation of personnel. None of the original members have been part of it for a long time. On the other hand, the band always had a studio-musician quality. In their case, that probably was a good thing for the music, which I always liked. The composer P.F. Sloan was the main force behind the group. Their biggest hits were Midnight Confessions and I'd Wait A Million Years, but I will always remember Let's Live For Today, on the radio Prom Night itself. They look old--about my age. They even joke about that. "After the concert, there will be a meeting of AARP over there," lead singer Mark Dawson said, pointing to a tent and implying that all the bend members would be there too. But the important thing is that they sound good. It's only bell-canto singers like Sinatra that grow audibly old. Not these guys. Rock singing is mostly yelling, anyway. Mary Ann has a ball. We even dance with one another, for the first time since we took a ballroom dance course on the Queen Mary a few years ago. Quite a few of our friends turn up and joined us--notably Jimmy Buras, who attended three of the five 1-through-12 schools that I did, in the same classrooms. And Ceil Lanaux, whose two sons are best buds with our son Jude, since they were in first grade and the Scouts. The Grass Roots ended their excellent, lengthy show. The sun went down. It got dark. A first-class fireworks show went off. It's the Fourth of July, after all. The crowd grows. The big name band on the program would follow. Unlike The Grass Roots, Jefferson Starship has a member--Paul Kantner, a Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Famer, no less--who goes back all the way to the mid-1960s, Jefferson Airplane origins of the band. Its Summer of Love hit Someone To Love launched the psychodelic pop era. Another song on my Prom Night playlist. The white-haired Kantner looks almost ghostly (he's seventy-three), but puts a lot of power into his singing and guitar. [caption id="attachment_42992" align="alignnone" width="480"] Jefferson Starship. Original member Paul Kantner is in the center.[/caption] The Grace Slick role is played by a relatively young (forty-five) singer, Cathy Richardson. She has the moves, the look, the sound and the range to make the band's music credible. They start with the early Airplane stuff, then moved to the Starship repertoire. The latter is what Mary Ann wanted to hear. But her teen-years music sweet spot is four years behind mine. Starship is late getting on. And even though tomorrow is Saturday, we are tuckered out, and left at quarter to eleven. We were hardly out of the parking lot of Fontainebleau State Park before we couldn't hear the music anymore. On the way home, I think about writing my first rock review in decades. Here it is.