Classic Buzz Band (formerly Old Geezers' Garage Band) Plays "Twilight in the Park" August 13

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, August 13) I went to another of the “Twilight in the Park” concerts at the Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, featuring a group called the Classic Buzz Band, though they originally named themselves the Old Geezers’ Garage Band because their members were middle-aged to senior citizens playing the music of their 1970’s youths. I enjoyed them and particularly the guitar virtuosity of Dave Grube, who played lead on most of their songs and was especially good at duplicating the virtuosity of the late Eddie Van Halen, two of whose songs they played … sort of. As usual, how much I liked a particular song depended largely on how much I’d liked the original version “in the day.” They opened with The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” in a version that (like most of their renditions) closely copied the original. My husband Charles and I had heard a band in Martinez, California (where we had gone to visit his mother) doing a Latinized version of this song, and I said to him at the time that I liked it but would have liked it even better if they’d sung it in Spanish. This time their lead singer, Joey Molina (who’s been with the band less than a year even though the other members have been in it for a decade), powered through it decently enough and Dave Grube played killer lead guitar. Then they did “Dance the Night Away” from Van Halen’s second album, Van Halen II, and while Cream did an even better song with that title from their 1967 album Disraeli Gears, their version was at least O.K. and once again gave Grube a chance to shine.

Following that they reached back to 1969 for The Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues,” and they did a good enough job on it even though Molina’s voice hardly had the sepulchral power of Jim Morrison’s and keyboard player Rick Lake set his instrument to sound like a piano instead of an organ. After that they did The Knack’s inescapable 1979 hit “My Sharona,” and then one of the most irksome songs of their performance. They did what they announced as another Van Halen cover, but it wasn’t; it was the Kinks’ song “You Really Got Me,” which The Kinks recorded in 1964 and Van Halen covered for their first album 14 years later. Van Halen even had the chutzpah to make it their first single, which upset me no end and probably was what gave me an acute distaste for Van Halen right from the start. As soon as they finished their version of Van Halen’s version of the Kinks’ classic, I yelled out, “That’s a Kinks song! Ray Davies rules!” The next song on their program was one I didn’t recognize: Golden Earring’s “Radar Love,” which they introduced as a car-driving song. After that the Classic Buzz Band did a song that at first I hoped would be Free’s “All Right Now,” but instead it turned out to be AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” – not a song I’ve been particularly fond of over the years, even though San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez routinely plays it in his annual Labor Day rock concert at the Organ Pavilion. Then they played another 1960’s throwback, Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and asked the audience to sing along on the “Sha-la-la” choruses. (They’d asked us to sing along on “Hotel California” too, but that’s a considerably less welcoming song.)

Afterwards they made another mistake in their next announcement, but at least one more understandable (and forgivable) than the one about “You Really Got Me.” They attributed their next song, “Taking Care of Business,” to the 1960’s Canadian rock band The Guess Who, but it was really written by ex-Guess Who guitarist Randy Bachman for the band he formed after he left the Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and recorded by them in 1973. Then they announced they were going to play a Journey cover and at first I hoped it would be “Don’t Stop Believin’,” about the only Journey song I actually like, but instead it was their second best-known song, “Any Way You Want It.” For what they announced as their last song they did an inevitably extended version of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” the song that became notorious for audiences demanding it whenever they played live. I remember in the early 1980’s Verve Records released a series of albums from Norman Granz’s “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concerts, including one of Ella Fitzgerald’s live recordings from those concerts in the early 1950’s which Granz had recorded but hadn’t been able to release at the time because Ella was still under contract to Decca and so he didn’t have the rights to use her. (He signed her later and produced most of the best records of her career.) As Ella did some of the most delicate, sensitive ballad singing of her life on songs like Duke Ellington’s “I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So,” while audience members yelled out, “How High the Moon! How High the Moon!,” I joked to my then-girlfriend Cat, “Those are the parents of the kids who yelled ‘Free Bird!’ at the Lynyrd Skynyrd concerts.”

They actually did well by the song, with Dave Grube once again smokin’ on guitar and Mark Armbrister playing driving rhythms on his drums. For the obligatory encore, the Classic Buzz Band blessedly trotted out the song I’d hoped they’d be doing when they played “Highway to Hell”: Free’s “All Right Now” from 1970. Though they didn’t put a new, unique spin on the songs the way other local bands like 8 Track Highway and MOXIE had with their sets of cover songs in previous “Twilight in the Park” concerts this year, the Classic Buzz Band nè Old Geezers’ Garage Band played a fun concert that I enjoyed a lot.