Okay, I’ve put off writing this long enough. . .the Doobie Brothers were definitely a show stopper, but not for the reasons you would hope. First of all, I should write a disclaimer that I am no music critic and I am telling the truth–I never knew what a doobie was until Mike told me the other night. So, that said, I am not totally equipped to be writing any review and anything said on this blog is not necessarily the opinion of my sponsors, or something like that…I think we just got off on the wrong foot and it went a little downhill from there.

First thing I noticed was what appeared to be an AARP convention going in, then to my dismay, realized other people were thinking the same about us. Now, I’m not the brightest bulb under the lampshade, but it didn’t take long to feel something was terribly wrong. The warmup band from Austin, called “Dead Ringer” was kind of catchy, until I listened to the lyrics—not really what I wanted to be feeding this brain. Then I noticed either Dead or Ringer forgot to put on his shoes, not to mention pull up his jeans. I remembered they were from Austin and looked about 16, so I didn’t let bare feet get to me too much. And that was really nothing considering “Skylark” in Doobie Brothers forgot his shirt altogether. Just a free fashion tip here: if you have hair on your back that you could shave and spell words in, you really should consider covering up a bit. In his defense, he did wear a leather vest, and had some decent biceps for old. The next thing I noticed were all the towels they had out for the band, and all the duct tape they were putting on the floor so the band wouldn’t trip on a cord and break a hip, I suppose.

Then, they started singing, but none of those golden high notes for which this group is famous. Voices were spent and even off pitch, so they just decided to crank up the guitars a little louder. However, they had an alto sax player that was the highlight of the show. He solely redeemed the rest of band.

The final disappointment that perhaps hurt the most, (and it really is a shame mostly because I like to dance to music): Old people dancing and acting like they did at concerts thirty years ago is not pretty. I even paused to wonder if they had paramedics standing by for some of those out of shape men and women who never stopped dancing, but looked like they might need a treadmill stress test clearance. I was really afraid the woman in front of us was going to take her top off or something Woodstocky. We were definitely caught in a time warp.

So, last song before the encore, we called it a night, like respectable old people do, had our car brought around by the valet (wouldn’t have done that thirty years ago) and caught the bottom half of that nail-biter seventh inning, where the Red Sox were beating the Rockies 13-1. Didn’t take me long to jump in a hot tub and be in bed by 11:15. Guess getting older isn’t all that bad. My ears did ring a little though, and it brought back a lot of memories of concerts in days gone by.