[cognito20]

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a buddy of mine dragged me out to see Johnny Dowd - you wouldn't think a grey hair 50 something furniture mover from Ithaca would be worth seeing, but it was like the salvation of Rock and Roll on that stage that night.

Bar was nearly empty too - he's big in Europe, but in the states if you don't got fake [censored] you got no chance -

rb

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I agree. As an Ithaca resident, I can tell you that he's not one of the ten most popular musical acts IN ITHACA. This is much more of a sad comment on the musical tastes in the supposedly "enlightened" musical town of Ithaca, the place that thinks it's the center of the alternative universe, than about Johnny, who I've seen 3 or 4 times and been blown away every time. Nice down-to-earth guy too. Of course, Ithaca is notorious for producing crappy hippie wannabe and horrible white-reggae acts (the only one of them that's any good is John Brown's Body), but we do have people like Hank Roberts (the world's best jazz cellist) and Johnny here, who mostly get ignored in favor of the crap like the Sim Redmond Band (every song from whom sounds like a badly recorded outtake from Paul Simon's "Graceland" album) and Sunny Weather (don't even ask, they're as bad as they sound). Basically, if they haven't been in Ithaca their entire life sucking up to the trust-fund hippies and the Donna the Buffalo (the most overrated jam band in the USA, and that's saying a lot because they have a lot of competition) crowd, they don't count to Ithacans.

Case in point and my contribution to the thread topic: Crowded House played the State Theatre in Ithaca in 1989 on the Temple of Low Men tour, and that show is where I became a big fan of them, and Neil Finn. In a theatre holding about 1,200 people, with a band playing that had already had 2 big US hits (the only 2 big hits they'd have here, unfortunately, although they were huge in the UK and Australia/NZ), on a Thursday night when there was nothing else going on in town, the theatre was -TWO-THIRDS EMPTY-. The tickets were only something like $10, too, so it's not like the price was keeping people away. Just their insularity and closed-mindedness.

Anyway, to sum up, Johnny Dowd's great. I'm surprised he hasn't just up and moved to Europe altogether, where he's a second-level star. Maybe I'll ask him why next time I talk to him.

--Scott