As a fan of a wide variety of popular (and not-so-popular) music from the 1950s (and sometimes even earlier) up through the present, one of my bucket list projects for years has been to put together a list of my 100 favorite songs of all time. At some point I decided that, once I got around to figuring that out, I could put it out on a blog, for the infinitesimally small proportion of the Internet world that might be interested. So, here we are. While the Top 100 will be a major focus, I also plan to post on a variety of other musical (and occasionally non-musical) topics, in which you may or may not be interested. (If a particular posting doesn’t ring your bell, you’re only a few clicks away from a dancing cat video on YouTube.)

Monday, June 16, 2014

Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes at the Birchmere, 6/13/2014


Southside Johnny and the crew were in fine form, playing for over two hours at the sold-out (or nearly so) Alexandria music hall. I was particularly impressed with the work of Jeff Kazee, not just on keyboards but also when he shared vocals on several of the later songs in the show. The early part of the performance included mostly songs I couldn’t remember hearing before (since I’m most familiar with SSJ’s first couple of 1970s albums), but was enjoyable nonetheless. The show really caught fire midway through with the classic “Talk To Me”, and proceeded through “Broke Down Piece of Man” and other numbers requested by various members of the audience. The main set ended with “I Don’t Want to Go Home” and was followed by a first encore that included a great version of “Love on the Wrong Side of Town”. The band then came back a second time, sending everyone home happy with “The Fever”, which for me goes down as the best-ever cover version of a Springsteen song. (I’ll admit that you could make a case for Rage Against the Machine’s take on “The Ghost of Tom Joad”.)

I decided to go with the chicken quesadilla for dinner – nicely done, although probably not the best choice diet-wise. Traffic down (via Falls Road and MacArthur Blvd. rather than 270 and the Maryland section of the Beltway) was actually not too bad. On the way back, I did manage to miss the ramp from Glebe Road onto I-395, so we stayed on Glebe through Arlington and eventually did wind up on the GW Parkway – a scenic although not especially efficient detour.

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