Northbound

So, it was the Sunday after the bar exam, and we had tickets for the Pat Green concert in Asbury Park.

I had warned my beautiful, wonderful fiancee about what would happen. “It’s going to be two hundred drunk expatriate Texans who know every word to every song, and aren’t afraid to sing along. Loudly.” And, yet, she still came.

First thing is the locale. It was at The Stone Pony in Asbury Park, which is supposedly a name to conjure with. I don’t get it, myself. Of course, I just barely get New Jersey. I had been on The Turnpike, and on The Parkway, but I had never been on The Shore before, other than one quick trip to Wildwood for business. The point of the Stone Pony is that it is in Asbury Park. “Which is where Bruce Springsteen claims to be from,” my fiancee explained. Anyway, Asbury Park plays a big role in the Springsteen mythology, and it’s not hard to see why. It is (from what I can see out of the windshield of my Taurus) in ruins but not grand ones. The shore area directly around the Pony is redolent with decay and falling-down buildings, spaced out on the original Thunder Road.

The Pony is part of that scene, and that isn’t good. It is, not to be fancy about it, a dive. The fact that it is a famous dive — made so solely by its longtime association with Springsteen — doesn’t make it any less a dive. It is a large, square, dark, un-air-conditioned room on Ocean Avenue with a bar, and an outside pavillion attached. It has bouncers and Miller Lite and an attached cafe. That’s pretty much it. If the fancy electric guitars weren’t up on the wall, you wouldn’t stop there to use the payphone or take a whiz.

But that is where Pat Green was that night, so we were going — we weren’t going to Texas, so Texas was coming to us. I hadn’t seen Pat in concert before and was eagerly looking forward to it. So we drove down the Parkway, had a nice seafood dinner in a waterfront place, and drove up Ocean Avenue and found a decent parking space, and found a seat at the outside bar and waited for things to get interesting.

The opening act was a guy named Patrick Davis, who appears to be from Nashville, which is a bit of a problem for him, because he doesn’t sound Nashville. He sounds more Austin than anything else, which is a good thing, and he’s writing songs for Cory Morrow, which is another good thing. Check him out.

It wasn’t too terribly late when Pat made his appearance, all hot and bothered in a black silk shirt. And God bless him, but he put on a durn good show. Of course, the very first thing he did was pay his respects, and came out of the box with a rocking cover of “Atlantic City”, off the Boss’s Nebraska album. (There was also a kick-ass version of “Glory Days”, which was maybe the best thing that he did all night, and a brief homage to Bon Jovi in the encore; Green was seriously playing up to his audience.)

The concert itself was a pretty good mix of old and new — only a couple songs off the new album, “Baby Doll” and “Don’t Break My Heart Again”. Only a couple of songs off the previous album, for that matter — “Wave on Wave”, and “All The Good Things Fade Away”, and “Wrapped”. (The latter Green introduced by saying that he didn’t know what it was about.)

I am not really a music critic, still less a concert critic. All I know was that I had a cold beer in my hand, and I knew every word, and I sang along like the sentimental expatriate Texan that I am. Good, rousing, rocking stuff, and I was glad that Green had interrupted the big concert tour, with arenas everywhere, to detour down to The Shore and down a little whiskey and sing. Anyway, I couldn’t think of a better way to get over the trauma of the bar exam.