Earlier this week, I wrote about my family’s sojourn to the final Taylor Swift Eras concert in a city redubbed Swift-couver for the weekend.
Seeing as I didn’t actually go to that concert, I didn’t think it would be proper to include it in my year-end review of concerts.
This time, I’ll go over the concerts I actually did attend, even if we might quibble over whether or not one of them actually counts as a concert. Since we all know the real pop star of the Happy Days set was Ralph Malph.
Don’t believe me? Look up Don Post on YouTube. He might even be more talented than Jason Mraz.
Dammit. Getting ahead of myself.
Jason Mraz
The only musical concert I actually attended this year was Jason Mraz.
Wife and I started dating in the late aughts, so “I’m Yours” was one of “our songs.” It only seemed natural that we go see him perform it live.
Our other song was by Michael Franti. Maybe we should’ve seen him instead.
Sorry, don’t want to spoil my review of the concert.
Starting out with his opening act, which I thought was an odd choice.
It was a jam band. I’m all for jam bands. Except I like the jamming to happen at key moments throughout the show. Not be the ENTIRE show.
Like, seriously, I don’t think there was a single lyric in the entirety of their show. But the lead… um, not singer… lead player?… kept introducing different songs and claiming they were written about a thing that happened, a person she met, an emotion or whatever. But when they started playing, it still just sounded like the same old jammin’.
The… um, the person whose name was on the band… also had a tendency to mouth along the guitar riffs as she played them. Like scat singing, but with no sound coming out. Or maybe there was sound coming out but since there were no lyrics, her voice wasn’t being mic’ed.
Again, I’m all for scat singing. If Louis Armstrong starts touring, I’ll be first in line. While there, I’m might also parlay the 1969 Mets and Jets.
It turns out the opening band were actually just three if Jason Mraz’s backup musicians. I guess it saves on the expenses when the additional help is already on the payroll. Andrew Carnegie called that vertical integration.
Then again, if Jason Mraz was looking to control costs, he might’ve thought about keeping that backup band to, i don’t know, maybe a bakers dozen?
Seriously, his band was fucking huge. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty musicians. I lost track because there were rarely more than four or five on the stage at one time. There are fewer line changes at a hockey game.
He started out the concert with an all female band. I thought maybe it was a virtue signal. Like “look how un-misogynistic I am. I’m making a point that women can be musicians, too.” As if anybody would disagree with that? After all, we were seeing Jason Mraz in a glorified Indian casino. Taylor Swift is playing slightly larger venues.
It made it even worse when I was finally able to track all fifteen or so musicians and realized only six or seven were women, so the likelihood of all five starting musicians being female without it being intentional is statistically improbable. He also let the women play one more song by themselves, second from the last song, and he made a point of how phenomenal these women musicians were, before bringing the men back out for the big show ender.
Kinda feels like the main misogynist in the room was Jason.
And yeah, the women were great. Both the men and the women. It was an amazingly talented band. Most of them switched instruments without missing a beat.
One woman played not only keyboards and percussion and bass, but she also busted out a motherfucking sitar for a couple songs! She stole the show as far as I was concerned. Unlike those wimpy Beatles, who stopped touring when they took up sitar.
Largely because of the talent behind him, this concert was pretty solid from a music standpoint. When they did “The Remedy,” they turned it into a slower, funkier version great for calling attention to a song we’ve heard so often, and so fast, that the lyrics go by without thought.
Meanwhile, the guy whose name was on the marquee occasionally busted out a rhythm guitar from time to time. If had to rank the musical ability of the various people on the stage, Jason Mraz would’ve been in the bottom twenty percent.
Which isn’t a slight, necessarily. Going back to the Beatles, they weren’t the most talented musicians. George and Paul might’ve grown as their careers progressed, but there’s a reason they brought Eric Claption in for “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
What made the Beatles great was their songwriting and ability to push the envelope on musical techniques. Jason Mraz has the former. Not sure if he has the latter or not.
At least I thought had the songwriting thing down. Until he told a heartwarming story that the line “I won’t worry my life away” came from a friend of his who was dying of cancer. Jason visited him and was totally bummed out, but his friend said that line and it lifted Jason’s spirits. I mean, if a guy who is dying isn’t going to worry his life away, then… maybe I can steal that line and become super popular with it.
Tough shit, Cancer Dude.
There was another lyric in another song, I forget which one, that he also admitted to totally stealing from someone. This dude is like a walking trademark infringement.
He’s clearly pretty enamored with this propensity of his, too. After one song, he said, “Wow, that’s such a great lyric.” To which I thought, “Oh yeah? Who’d you steal it from?’
Normally I wouldn’t be so snarky when reacting to a little in-between-songs banter at a concert I’d been looking forward to attending. But, my God, this guy had shit to say after every single song. A number of his diatribes were longer than the songs themselves.
He’s clearly going for a particular schtick, which is “Aw shucks, ain’t life great?” I suppose life sure is great for a dude that gets millions of dollars to steal lyrics and hide behind more talented musicians.
Not that I’m opposed to either of those things, but come on, dude, we’re paying to hear songs, not a celebrity basking in the trappings of privilege. If I wanted to hear from a life guru, I wouldn’t have needed to pay an extra Ticketmaster fee.
Plus, I’d already seen a celebrity do a similar schtick earlier this year.
And Fonzie did it better.
Henry Winkler
I wasn’t sure if I should include this. It certainly isn’t a concert by any stretch of the imagination. However, it was listed as a “Tour.” He played the Bay Area on a Thursday night and was doing the same “playlist” (really more of a PowerPoint) the following Sunday in Sacramento.
All to promote his newest album… I mean, book.
I’ve always been fascinated by Henry Winkler. First and foremost, I’m fifty years old, meaning Fonzie was everywhere during my upbringing. And unlike Jack Tripper, the other late-1970s epitome of cool, Happy Days was considered family friendly. Despite the fact that the family killed off their eldest son and then went all “Say Nothing” on it for ten more seasons. Sit on it, Motherfucker!
But then, as I grew up, I saw Fonzie taking on some very un-Fonzie-like rolls. I mean, I could maybe see an aging Fonzie coaching a college football team like he did in Waterboy. But he showed up in a random MacGyver episode as a probate lawyer. If Fonzie decided to use his charisma and charm to go the lawyer route, you know he would’ve been an ambulance chaser a la My Cousin Vinny, not a lawyer dealing with dead people’s estates.
But a mortician in Night Shift? No way Fonzie’s working with dead people unless he can hit the jukebox and bring them back to life.
It turns out that Henry Winkler is actually an actor.
Of course, I’m being facetious. But not entirely.
Given his first role, one might be forgiven for being skeptical of his acting. After all, Steven Segal and Vin Diesel might play one specific type of character really well, but I don’t see them turning a morgue into a whorehouse. I’m still convinced that the reason the first Matrix movie was better than the other two is that Keanu Reeves is best when his character is confused.
Henry Winkler, however, is a damn fine actor.
Such that his most iconic role, Arthur Fonzarelli, is about as far from the real Henry Winkler as you can get.
Fonzie is all about cool, while Henry Winkler seems to be a bundle of neuroses. Fonzie is aloof, Henry is personable and empathetic. Fonzie could take it or leave it, Henry is amazed with life.
Like seriously, how can a guy that was on every third-grader’s lunchbox in America be this humble? How can a guy who was one time at the top of the celebrity hill be so empathetic and enthusiastic about the lives of others?
(Although, Henry claims he was never top of the A List. Fonzie was. When he showed up to parties without using the Fonzie voice, they were usually disappointed.)
I took my mom to see him speak after having given his autobiography to her for Christmas. I didn’t read the autobiography, but figured it would be a generally positive look at life. My mom said it was mainly him complaining about his parents, which, yeah, is a big part of his schtick, but usually he’s very humble and introspective about it. My mom didn’t get that on first reading, probably because she imagined it coming from an arrogant Fonzie, not an effusive Henry.
By the time his show ended, she saw the book in an entirely different light.
There isn’t a heck of a lot to the show. I wasn’t kidding when I said it was basically a PowerPoint of his life story. Hoo-Wee, that sounds exciting!
But he wasn’t just reading off the slides like my students do. They were mainly just some pictures to ground him in case he got off on a tangent. And trust me, he went off on a number of tangents.
In fact, there were a number of times he forgot it was even there and then would have to jump forward multiple slides to get caught up.
My favorite example of this was his long diatribe about his father’s wood-cutting business. His parents wanted him to follow his father into this family endeavor. “Why else do you think we came to America than to give you this chance?” To which Henry responded, “Gee, I thought maybe escaping the Nazis had something to do with it.”
He continued on with this and various other stories about his family fighting his decision to do theater in college.
Maybe five minutes later, he realized he was still on a slide of him as a child, so he quickly forwarded a few slides. For the most part, it was easy to see which pictures corresponded with which parts of his story. Except for the picture of the Hollywood sign, because his story hadn’t progressed to California yet.
He took one look at it and said, “Oh. That was the only Wood I wanted to work with.” We laughed. Belatedly.
His life story revolved around the fact that he has dyslexia and therefore struggled in school. His parents called him “Dummhund,” which translates to dumb dog. Although he did graduate Emerson College and then attended Yale’s graduate school for drama. These two facts seem to counteract both his school struggles and his parents’ lack of support for his acting ability. Yale drama school might not be as selective as the rest of the campus, it’s still an Ivy League graduate school that probably doesn’t take a lot of students who can’t read.
Regardless, if I wanted my daughter to take after me in my wood cutting business, I wouldn’t be signing her up for acting school.
When his story did progress to California, it was the similar story to a lot of actors: Living on someone else’s couch, doing random commercials or sit-com walk-ons for a pittance to stave off starvation or, even worse, returning home with your tail between your legs to grovel before all those naysayers and their “I told you so”s.
He didn’t seem to wait any tables, though. Maybe that’s more of a post-1970 thing.
We learned that Fonzie’s famous “My hair’s too good for a comb” pose was not in the script. Garry Marshall wanted him to actually comb his hair, because greasers gonna grease. Henry thought that was too cliche and asked for it to be taken out. Marshall kept it in. So Henry did what he did, fully expecting them to yell cut and have him do it over, but instead they loved it.
It might have been that scene that changed the trajectory of the Fonzie character from local tough guy to main character.
In the end, it was Fonzie who killed Chuck Cunningham. Just (probably) not figuratively.
The end of Henry’s parents stories are great. After fighting his getting into acting for so long, they traveled all around proudly claiming they were Fonzie’s parents. He’s met people all around the world with his parents’ autographs on his own glossy.
“Not bad for a Dummhund, huh?”
He talked about discovering Marlee Matlin when she was a teenager. Her mother hoped he’d talk her out of her dreams, convince her that Hollywood is too shallow for a deaf girl to make it. Henry responded that he wished he could, but what he saw on the stage was a rare talent, a commanding presence, and it would be an absolute travesty if she didn’t follow through.
He told other stories, as well. My favorite was the time Robin Williams guest starred. He was mostly quiet during rehearsals as the part was continually rewritten. When he finally kicked into character, the rest of the cast could barely contain themselves. What Henry decided was to let Robin take over the episode, not pull a “Hey, this is MY show” and try to steal the spotlight. To just step aside and let the force of nature take over.
And to think, he did all this without stealing from a cancer patient.
It’s not surprising, then, that his whole schtick is about ignoring the naysayers and following your own path.
Not sure that I buy fully into the message. Sure, it works for Marlee Matlin and Robin Williams. And Henry Winkler. But I’ve seen a number of really bad community theater actors who probably need to invest in an accounting degree.
And, to be fair, his message was not just to follow your dreams, but to be true to yourself. But again, that implies people are able to separate their dream-self from their real-self.
He also focused a lot in on children, feeling his parents never listened to him, never really engaged with him. He gave an example of a kid wanting to say something when you’re on the way out the door. But you take the time to ask them what’s up, they say something like, “I like green,” and instead of saying nobody gives a shit, you say, “You know what? That’s very interesting, and I have to go, but I really want to talk more about this when I get home tonight.”
I mean, I get it. But tell me you haven’t had children around forever without telling me, am I right? If we let Daughter dictate when and how we are to leave the house, she’d be a half-hour late to school every day, and I don’t care if that’s her “real self.”
Then again, I think he’s talking more about how the Baby Boomers were raised and how they raised us Gen Xers. If anything, we’ve overcorrected for this. Nowadays, a dyslexic kid isn’t put in the “Dummhund” category. They’re given an IEP that specifies they never have to do anything, ever. Doubt they’re going to learn the perseverance necessary to do auditions.
Sometimes I’d love to treat Daughter like I was treated, allowed to range freely about the neighborhood without a GPS in sight.
When she was born, I swore I’d never give in on Elf on the Shelf. If my dad had sworn his child would never be given something, he wouldn’t have given a shit how much it bothered me or made me a social pariah. Want to know how many elves we have on our fucking shelf? Four!
So yeah, I get that children are impressionable and an errant comment or brush-off can have a lasting impact, but that doesn’t mean we should encourage them to interrupt and hold the world hostage to every whisp of a whim.
Otherwise we’ll get another generation of Jason Mrazes.
The Writing Wombat 