Live Music in MoCo? Oldie, but Goodie

While passing out campaign leaflets yesterday, I ran into the brother of an old schoolmate of mine, and we got to talking about our school days and chums who might still be in the neighborhood. This person pointed out that the bar in the corner of the shopping center, "Dad's Neighborhood Pub" was a sort of a hangout for people who had attended Peary, my alma mater.

I graduated in the Class of 1976, and Robert E Peary HS was a school that totally exemplified the saying "if you remember the Seventies, you weren't there". It was "like, totally a party school, dude". The neighborhood was "like, totally a party" too. We had our own lingo which generally made no sense to a lot of folks, by design. For example: "so, dude, how was it last night?" referring to a party attended by one person but not another. "Lups, lurrs, it was kick, it was cash, I did crews, and I died". It's a testament to the resilience of the human psyche and physique that any of us still walk and talk. Some have even successfully raised offspring and have even seen their grandkids, and with no visible evidence of chromosome damage!

As time went on, Peary wound up closing down due to declining enrollment. It is now the Melvin J Berman Hebrew Academy, and the Berman people took charge of a campus that had been abandoned for the better part of a decade, and brought it up to a condition surpassing that of the original campus. But I digress.

In the long years since graduation, I mostly fell out of touch with Peary people, as I moved around the country several times. Much of the time I've lived in the region, I have lived downtown in the District. I've been to a few Class Reunion events, and help a little bit with the school website, but I'm not much of a party-with-the-homeboys kind of person. Among other things, I am single, and almost everyone else went the route of raising families. But sometimes it's good to drift back onto the scene.

The former classmate's brother, when asked "so how is Dad's", told me it was pretty cool, lots of "Huskies" (Peary's mascot was the Husky dog) hung out there, they even had live music.

This set off alarms. I have been complaining for years about the dearth of places in Montgomery where you can have a drink and see a band. I thanked the man and went to look the place over. I decided I would be back when I saw the band starting to unload, and one of the musicians informed me that their band played Seventies music.

I got in there about 9:00PM. The Sam Adams in a bottle set me back for six dollars including a tip. A bit later I sat down for the wings, which were pretty much wings, definitely not bad, cooked just right for me. They set me back around eight dollars or so.

The first band, which someone told me was called "Warlocks", did a very passable revue of about half of the songs ever done by Black Sabbath. The covers were very tight, the musicians more than competent, and the singer sounded almost exactly like Ozzy Osbourne, not an easy task.

The second band came on maybe around 10:30 or 11:00. They were called Platform Soul and they put on a very credible set.

I have a confession to make here. Back in the 1970s, while most people were sitting around their basements blasting Led Zeppelin or Johnny Winter, I was driving around with my friends listening to WKYS, the "soul" station. As much as I liked Jimmy Page playing guitar, I also liked the Ohio Players. So when Platform Soul launched into "Brick House", my feet began to move. This has been known to happen when I have been drinking. But suddenly, from memory erupted a lesson given to me back in the closing days of the springtime of 1976, when this really very hot Filipino exchange student taught me to do the new dance craze, "the Hustle". As it turned out, you could dance the Hustle to almost anything except for hardcore Rock Music, which nobody could really dance to, and as it turned out, I could Hustle pretty well, still. I drank one for you, wherever you are, Rose Filarama. I even did the "Soul Train" to "Hollywood Swingers".

The crowd in there was about what you might expect: a lot of folks in their 40s and 50s, a few younger folks as well including some of the type of youngsters who wear their baseball caps backwards and say "whassup, yo" a lot, and of course the staff. Behind the bar was one large individual and a fairly small bartender gal, who was insanely busy all night. Let's just say that the County got a lot of bar tax receipts. Also insanely busy, a variety of lovely waitresses who were probably counting everyone's drinks and weren't entirely sure why I had not yet fallen over. Here's the trick, ladies. Dance yer butt off and burn those calories and you can sweat out your beers almost as fast as you can drink them, as long as you have water as well.

Platform Soul is not limited to Funk and Soul, I should add. They covered Steely Dan, with some old fellow they claimed to have never seen before sitting in with a saxophone. They did a fine cover of Chicago's" "Twenty five or Six to Four", with the synth player covering the horns section credibly, and with the guitar player smokin' the leads.

While the band took a break, so did I. They have a rather good pool table there, and people who played better than me, I lost. Then the band came back on.

All in all, this is what I call a good time being had by all. The prices were about the same as I would have encountered downtown, but this was within walking distance and that's a good thing. I think the County needs more of this kind of establishment, not less. Let's put the rock back in Rockville and keep it that way! For too long, repressive County ordinances have made it almost impossible to run a restaurant where you can drink and hear a band or two, and in my humble opinion, that's got to change.

And that's another reason people should vote for me, so they can "party on, dude!"