As the 20^th anniversary of the Doheny Blues Festival comes to a close there are several thoughts that I have regarding this event besides how much Joe Walsh and Melissa Etheridge bear a striking physical resemblance to one another.

This festival, which I enjoy very much for a variety of reasons, gives me a chance to listen to music outside the blues genre. It gives me a chance to step outside my comfort zone if you will. A blues festival on the surface would seem like an odd place for me to take this quick look into pop culture. I figure while I’m enjoying my favorite music, I might as well take a peek at the carnival of commerce and see what I’m missing. As it turns out, not much...I have to be honest, I don’t much care for it. It reminds me of ice hockey, a Toby Keith concert or the Republican National Convention, too many white people. Then again, I am in south Orange County and at the beach, so what did I expect...dude.

Listening to Joe Walsh’s set was a great example of why our country is in the dire mess we find ourselves. Walsh’s set was embraced by the huge crowd. It was also just plain stupid, predictable and boring. Walsh trotted out one familiar old tune after another and played them pretty close to the vest, you know just like you have heard on the radio over and over again for the past 40 plus years.

Most people will love what they loved in high school for the rest of their lives. If they went to college, tack on another four years. So for the massive, aging baby boomers there is that four to eight year window of music to which they desperately cling.

Walsh fits right in there and fills the bill for people in and around my age. He delivers and life has been good to him, so far.

Walsh, who finally and famously dried out a few years ago, still plays the drunken buffoon character on stage much to the delight of the mostly inebriated crowd. Picture a baby boomer version of Dean Martin who can’t sing.

The “I remember what I was doing when I first heard this song” appeal doesn’t work on me so much. Maybe because I wasn’t doing anything or anybody and if I had been, I sure wasn’t doing it to a Joe Walsh tune. However, I do know what you were doing. You were being brain washed by commercial radio and being turned into very loyal, predictable and ultimately pliable consumers. How very patriotic of you.

The music that Joe Walsh presented on Saturday night reminded me of the consumer surveys of people who eat at McDonald’s. They admit that the food tastes like shit. They know that it will kill you. Yet they eat there anyway because and I quote, “I know exactly what I’m going to get.” The massive LCD (lowest common denominator) crowd is alive and well. If Donald Trump is their King then Joe Walsh is their Joker.

The weekend’s other big headliner Melissa Etheridge, who closed out the show on Sunday evening, was a little more interesting and presented a set that was also very well received.

I must admit that I have never heard her music, as her career started after I checked out of pop culture. I am familiar with much of the material that was presented as she was incorporating a Stax Records tribute into her own material.

What I did hear on this evening was that she has a powerful, if not one dimensional, voice and is a gifted guitar player. What I also heard was that she strangled the life out of several very familiar Stax classics. The best thing you can say about her vocal histrionics is that is less annoying than Michael Bolton, yet she assaults the material with the same kind of over the top bravado as that windbag.

She made very predictable choices and stuck with some of the most popular tunes from the Stax catalogue. Sam & Dave’s Hold On I’m Coming, a couple of Otis Redding numbers and a Staple singers classic. However, in my mind, it showed poor judgment and a lack of respect, to trot out a song that she knew full well Staples had sung just a few hours earlier, Respect Yourself. Oh well, what are you going to do; get a rock star to learn another song?

One of the most painful moments came with her rendition of Born Under a Bad Sign by Albert King. Not only is this song butchered on a nightly basis at every blues jam in the country, but the fact is King and the great Stax house band didn’t leave any head room in that tune. Try all you want, and Lord knows folks have been trying for decades now, you just can’t improve on the original. I suppose that could be said about any of the songs she trotted out. Unless your name is Aretha Franklin, my advice to any singer is to leave Otis Redding alone. Trust me Melissa Etheridge is no Aretha Franklin.

As far as her original material is concerned, she presented some well crafted tunes which everybody seemed to know but me. Etheridge has become an iconic American figure and a hero for the LGBT community which makes her a hero for everybody. It was just fun for me to be surrounded by people having such a good time and who were enjoying her music so much.

This is what it is all about I suppose. Just because I don’t get it, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. After all, at this point it isn’t about a blues guy like me anyway. It is about a type of music that is so pervasive, so ingrained on the collective consciousness of the world that it's beyond evaluation. I just decided some time back not to play along. I don’t regret one minute of that very conscious decision to leave the circus or my very occasional glimpse into the big tent. 

It is the mass appeal of these headliners which allows the relatively small (by comparison) number of people to enjoy music that is pure, organic and rooted in old traditions, the blues, at the Doheny Blues Festival and not music that is a bi-product of corporate marketing campaigns, focus groups or market research.

It is really something for a guy like me to observe the power that fame has on the public. It is interesting to see how unadventurous my generation has become. Most people find a band or a particular artist that they liked as children and ride that same kiddy car around the block for the rest of their lives.

People enjoy the comfort which comes from the knowledge that what they like is also embraced by the masses. It is also what went wrong with the blues world. For many they can’t live with the fact that blues music, for whatever reason, is simply not that popular. The blues world suffers from acute insecurity. The blues got organized some time back and has been trying to do something to make the music more popular and therefore more mainstream. They decided to make this happen they think it must change into something that it is not...classic-rock.

-     - David Mac

 FoFor more on the 2017 Doheny Blues Festival read my thoughts in a piece called, The Doheny Blues Festival: The Good Stuff. You are also encouraged to check out the photo essay covering this year’s Festival as well as a piece where I reflect on the 20 year anniversary of this event.  

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