Narrated by Matt Davies Voiceover
I found myself at John Dam Plaza the other night, just in time to hear an Eagles tribute band play their last song: “Hotel California” — the grand finale.
I’d missed all the other songs; I hadn’t wanted to hear them. I’d missed the classic car parade and show for the same reason. I was only here because it was across from my hotel, and I was looking for a beer garden.
“You may have heard of this song,” the band said, with sly understatement, a coy downplaying of the enormity to follow. “Come on up, Richland, and let’s party,” the band said.
A few people did. The rest seemed weary. It had been a long day of sitting in the sun as old cars drove down George Washington Way, then standing in the sun looking at old cars in a parking lot. About twenty people neared the stage. Half were old couples, the other half were parents and young children. A gray-haired couple at the far right swayed as they held up their cell phones with the flashlights on — the modern version of Bic lighters, which were used for the real Eagles. Of course, by inescapable logic, this meant the couple wasn’t a ‘real’ audience anymore. They'd been transformed into a tribute audience, reenacting the past. They didn’t seem to mind. They probably enjoyed the escape, the transporting thrill, as dull reality yielded to the power of “Hotel California… such a lovely place, such a lovely place.”
They wouldn’t let me in the beer garden, both because it was closed and because I didn’t have a wristband, according to a guard wearing mirrored sunglasses and looking like his life goal was to own a nightstick.
I bought a six-dollar bag of kettle corn, shoveling it in my mouth as I walked through the park, leaving a trail of popcorn droppings for the morning birds.
A car went by blasting “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting”, a 1970s Elton John song from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. It’s a song we listened to when I was fourteen, cruising Fourth Street. The driver, Jim, was seventeen, maybe eighteen at the time — light years ahead of us. He played that 8-track all the time.
A couple of the sounds that I really like
Are the sounds of a switchblade and a motorbike.
As naive as we were, we knew that Elton — with his cartoon eyeglasses and vinyl boots and dowager-on-acid fur coats — didn’t relish knife fights with bikers. That other song, the one about Marilyn Monroe, was more his style. His switchblade stuff was too clearly fake, or — to put it nicely — a tribute to the bygone songs of bikers and stabbings, a homage to simpler times. But we all need to pay the bills, so, Elton, whatever.
Still, I didn’t like hearing it again. First, it was Friday, not Saturday. That alone seemed like it should have been an issue for somebody somewhere. Time was already getting wobbly here, with old cars that looked new and old music that refused to go away. The decades were blurring, but they could at least pin down the day of the week.
The larger problem was that my Fourth Street days were far in the past, along with that weird fourteen-year-old in Jim’s Thunderbird. I didn’t want to pay tribute to the Eagles or Elton. I wanted another beer — icy cold in my hand, real and immediate, not reconstructed and spurious.
“Get about as oiled as a diesel train,” Elton advised, his voice fading as the car drove off.
Doin’ my best, bro.
I brushed bits of kettle corn off my chest, glancing down at my Deep Purple band tee. So, yeah. I was a tribute, too. And I swayed a little, swayed in the dusk with my small light.
