Summer Tour Bores - Sappy Together

A sign of hot weather...is tickets on sale for events that should be staged in HELL.

This especially includes those "fun the sun" oldies events that bring together the dregs from the idiotic "summer of love" and other creepy years.

No, I don't want to watch the prune-like Remnants of the Beach Boys, featuring Mike Shove and Zombie Wilson.

Whatever combination you want of ex-Band members, ex-Credence, ex-Grateful Dead, ex-Byrds, or any bunch of initials from ELO to ELP...don't expect ME to show up. If I had to sit through coagulated "swamp rock" from Fogarty, I sure as hell wouldn't be "the fortunate...the f-f-f-fortunate...the f-f-f-fuckin' fortunate SON."

One of the most sadistic bills on the road this summer is this one:

To be fair, in their prime, those SIX groups were responsible for exactly TWO songs I could tolerate: "Along Comes Mary" and "Happy Together." Did I buy either of them? No.

IF I'M BEING HONEST, I actually did see Flo and Eddie (I don't recall if they actually billed themselves as The Turtles) play a free concert somewhere. They were ok, and the crowd happily bounced up and down (the closest they could come to dancing) when they revved up their minor-to-major sapfest finale. It's a good pop rock song, as it begins with some kind of eerie portent of doom, before blossoming into the kind of thing that would make John Sebastian wet his pants.

The main reason I wouldn't attend, if it was free, and down the block, is the kind of mindless obese cretins who'd turn up alongside of me. And some of them are so obese they'd be alongside of me in every direction. This is the kind of bill where the lead singers proudly say, "We got entire generations coming to see us, from brain-damaged hippies to their Yuppie scum children to their mindless teenagers." Oh, yeah, and there might be some drunks, a bunch of jerks singing along, and maybe one fat Dutch dimwit sobbing and overcome with the "sunshine music" that is so hard to find in his flat, gray, boring native land.

Yes, you're supposed to go out and attend idiot concerts like this. Or worse, hear cover bands with bad drummers screw up the songs on cruise ships. The truth is that most music is boring and you'd have to be an imbecile to actually look forward to seeing this kind of thing every fucking weekend all summer long. There's a very good reason only 1967 was called "the summer of love." People looked back and said, "I sort of hated it."