{"id":66180,"date":"2018-03-06T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2018-03-06T17:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=66180"},"modified":"2018-03-05T23:40:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T05:40:15","slug":"i-dont-want-to-go-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=66180","title":{"rendered":"I Don’t Want To Go Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at the Dakota last night<\/p>\n

First things first – the Dakota is a great place for an evening out.\u00a0 They make a mean old fashioned.<\/p>\n

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A Dakota Old-Fashioned. I drink them so you don’t have to. Although you might want to anyway,<\/p><\/div>\n

And just to make sure quality of the first one wasn’t a fluke, I had two more.\u00a0 \u00a0All of ’em checked out.<\/p>\n

The food is pretty righteous, too – although oddly enough, the french fries that came with the\u00a0\u00a0outstanding\u00a0<\/em>House Burger were cold and not very tasty.<\/p>\n

Can’t win ’em all, I guess.<\/p>\n

Anyway – if you’ve been reading this space for a while, you’ve familiar with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes.\u00a0 They hit their commercial peak in 1978 with the album\u00a0Hearts of Stone –\u00a0<\/em>sometimes called “the best album Springsteen never recorded”, which is a bit of an overstatement; Springsteen wrote half of it (and a great half it was; I reviewed the album ten years ago in this space<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The Jukes have\u00a0 been together since the early seventies – although “together” is kind of relative, since over a hundred musicians have been members of the Jukes at one point or another, including Miami Steve Van Zandt, who produced their first two albums and only left to join the E Street Band in 1975.<\/p>\n

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The Jukes raving it up during the opening song, “Until the Good is Gone”.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even in their heyday, of course, the Jukes were something of a retro anachronism – a band specializing in horn-driven Stax\/Volt soul during the height, respectively, of the singer-songwriter era, Disco, punk, New Wave, synth pop, heartland rock, hair metal, new-jack hip-hop (which dominated the charts when the Jukes had their solitary Top-40 single in 1991, thirteen years after their commercial heyday, with “It’s Been a Long Time”, a musical favor called in with “Southside” Johnny Lyon’s pals, Springsteen, Van Zandt and Jon Bon Jovi) and on\u00a0 and on; by the time they grazed the top forty, they were a borderline nostalgia act.\u00a0 \u00a0Not only is Lyon the only member left from their seventies glory days, he’s the only member left from twenty years ago.<\/p>\n

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“Make yourself at home”. Keyboard player\u00a0 Jeff Kazee and a very comfortable fan in the Dakota’s, er, intimate setting.<\/p><\/div>\n

But don’t let that fool you.\u00a0 They do a fantastic show.\u00a0 \u00a0Lyon, 69, has always been one of rock and roll’s better lead singers, and while his voice has an extra dollop of gravel after fifty years of leading bands, he hasn’t lost a note (of power, anyway; he joked about his range “I’m a little like Tom Waits these days”.<\/p>\n

The setlist was thick with old favorites, with a generous helping of R&B museum pieces delivered with a galloping, sloppy affection, and a few of the band’s newer songs thrown in for good measure.<\/p>\n