The New Catillacs Play Infectious Program of 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's Oldies at Twilight in the Park August 20

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I went to Balboa Park again (Wednesday, August 20) for another “Twilight in the Park” concert, this one featuring The New Catillacs. I remember seeing the original Catillacs doing a brief concert on a patio in Seaport Village in the 1980’s; back then they were a three-piece group of guitar, keyboard, and bass. Alas, they just did 1950’s and early 1960’s songs and they used a drum machine in place of a human drummer, which seemed inappropriate for material that was first written and recorded before drum machines existed. I could understand why: the tiny size of that patio would have precluded someone actually setting up a drum set. The New Catillacs still use the original group’s logo – an anthropomorphized drawing of a cat wielding an electric guitar – but they now not only have a human drummer but a quite fine one. His name is Bruce Pictor, and he has apparently played with The Association (an association, pardon the pun, that’s lasted 40 years and got him into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame) and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. Pictor also delivered a quite credible vocal on the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Bad Moon Rising.” The rest of the group is Thom Van Ourkerk on keyboards and saxophone; Andy Tirpak, lead guitar and vocals; and Sharon Shuemaker, a quite powerful bass guitar player (though she complained midway through that she’d made the mistake of wearing an off-the-shoulder top and her instrument strap was cutting into her skin, so she took the strap off and played the rest of the night sitting down) and also an impassioned singer. She did a really good job on the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women,” tweaking the lyrics so she became the honky-tonk woman, and also on James Brown’s “I Feel Good.”

The band did a nice mix of 1950’s songs (the Del-Vikings’ “Come Go with Me,” which for some reason they announced as “The Dum-Dum Song”; The Clovers’ 1959 “Love Potion Number Nine,” though they announced it as by The Seekers, who covered it in 1965; and Dion’s “Runaround Sue”); early 1960’s songs (Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” The Beach Boys’ “Little Deuce Coupe,” and their opener, Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”). But most of their material came from the later 1960’s and the 1970’s, including at least two soul songs (“I Feel Good” and Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally”); the Beatles’ “Birthday” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”; the aforementioned Stones and Creedence covers; Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” (which Andy Tirpak tweaked lyrically, making it “Blue-Eyed Girl” because his wife Sandy, who’s blue-eyed, was celebrating her birthday that night) and “Moondance.” They also did some 1970’s material like Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll” (a song my then-girlfriend Cat and I particularly loved when it came out at the height of the disco era; lines like “Don’t ever take me to a disco/You won’t even get me out on that floor” resonated with us, and when we read an interview with a disco DJ who said he’d tried to do disco sets with rock songs but he couldn’t sustain a mood because rock songs were too short and sounded too different from each other, Cat said, “They admit it! They admit all disco sounds the same!”), Eric Clapton’s “Lay Down Sally,” and their encore, Jackson Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes.” (I still think the greatest version of this song was by the Jackson 5; the young Michael Jackson tore through that song on the first and third choruses and reached an emotional pitch Jackson Browne never even approached – though when I played it for my late friend Garry Hobbs, he said he just couldn’t accept a song that sophisticated sung by someone that young.)

The New Catillacs are an entertaining cover band that delivered the goods, though maybe next year I’d like to hear them cover songs associated with Janis Joplin, since Sharon Shuemaker certainly has the voice to do Janis. I had a lot of fun even though it didn’t help that there was a (literally) crazy man in the audience yelling that he owned the stage and the band were trespassers and needed to leave immediately. I tried calling 911 on him, as did a woman in the audience who whipped out her cell phone at the same time I did, but neither of us could be heard over the music.