It's Alive

Coco Montoya / Tinsley Ellis
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Toad Tavern, Littleton, Colorado

I was initially going to do an old-fashioned review of this show that brought two top-notch blues guitarists together.  Pen and paper.  The set list.  The venue.  The audience.  And maybe an interview for spice.  Exchanging e-mails with the booking agent for the Toad, I had requested, with a bare hope, for an interview with either musician.  The PR men from Coco/Tinsley needed to know what publication or entity I was representing.  My reply - just little 'ol me.  Shot down.  Ok, I then requested some set lists.  Not much help there, either.  I then imagined that a full-blown review was tenuous, at best.  Could I really capture the moment when Tinsley played his Les Paul with his teeth (he didn't) or when Coco set his Strat on fire (he didn't)?  This left me feeling a little uninspired to write.  So, I decided that this night I wouldn't be a music journalist.  Just a music lover.  So, the pressure of  'getting it right'  was lifted.

This little bar (capacity around 150) was packed.  My wife and myself were lucky to get close enough to the stage as to see all the crinkles in the faces, all the road rash, all the hard miles.  We voluntarily moved a few rows back.  I was shocked at the sound system.  It was well- suited for the HOH (hard of hearing) group but not mind warping.  It was actually nice not to be blown away by the VW-sized speakers.  The clean and crisp sound was perfect.  Only my bad ear is experiencing chimes ringing after the show.  Bonus.

I had previously seen Tinsley's trio in Charlotte, N.C. about nine months ago in support of their 2009 release "Speak No Evil", a bluesy, rock, fret-pounding, slide-soloing, riff-solid effort.  Tinsley, that night and this night, was locked into a world of his own searing, guitar bravado.  His vocals reminded us of Robin Trower's singer, James Dewar and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, thick and rich.  Displaying a warmer, textured, stripped-down, guitar-slinging, Coco Montoya nimbly picked and tricked throughout his set.  With a blistering keyboard player that almost, not quite, but at times, stole the show, Coco sounded loco.  However, after seeing Stevie Ray Vaughn several times, this brand of electric blues seemed anticlimactic.  Oh oh.  My 'music journalist snobbery' was forcing its ill-will on me.  I fought back this urge and enjoyed both 90-minute sets of power blues.

At times, we couldn't help but notice the older (older than who?) crowd breathing heavily around us.  We guesstimated an average age of 57.  How did we come up with this?  A not-so-secret formula :  count how many guys with grey, thinning ponytails; add the girth of their midsections; multiply the number of times 'awesome' was shouted; subtracting the amount of beers spilled equals average age.  Give or take a few.  Try this the next time you see Eric Clapton.  We also witnessed a Richard Gere-wannabe, countless Girthers, male and female faces that only a mama would pinch, martini-slurping (then martini-puking) women and the inevitable Coiffs.  Men with perfectly coiffured hair covering up bald spots, meticulously groomed with a dash of fake (or real) salt-n-pepper and glistening with, I suspect, the backwash of The Gulf of Mexico.  Ah yes, the over-50 crowd is here.

Going to a concert these days still gets my engine revved.  It feels like only yesterday, if a yesterday was 40 odd years, that I was driven by Dad to the Virginia (Minnesota) Armory to see Crow ('Slow Down', 'Evil Woman') and opener The Litter, two 'awesome' Minneapolis bands at the time.  Follow that innocent experience with a bus trip (our annual Concert Choir shindig) to the Duluth (Minn.) Auditorium in '71 to see Guess Who with opener, and on their first tour, REO Speedwagon.  This was my first arena show and it made a monumental impression. REO guitarist Gary Richrath had a 10 hour guitar solo (come on, it seemed that long) under one large spotlight with a darkened stage.  Blisters on me fingers.  I was 'blown away' (I know, another redundant redundancy of cliched cliches).  The sheer force of this music live was, and still is, epic and ingrained into my DNA.

As a music fan, just relaxing with family and friends, drinking a few cold beverages, without pen and paper, without the need to dissect the show, is still as invigorating as it was those decades before.  At least to this pony-tailed, non-coiffed, non-girthed, small-town boy.  The engine sputters a little more often, missing some noise along the way and the revving process takes longer, but when the gears mesh, you will inevitably hear me scream something we've all heard for a long time: Awwwsssome !