In Bad Company, making some kind of sense

By Thomas Dimopoulos

SARATOGA SPRINGS – In the darkness, everybody has their eyes fixed on the vacant stage, waiting in silence.
Suddenly, there is a blaze of lights and a giant roar goes up that hangs in the air for a moment before being hit by the rolling tidal wave of buzzsawing power chords that goes bursting across the stage.

Suddenly, last Saturday, it all made sense.

Thousands of people attended last weekend's Bad Company/Foreigner concert at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. I was one of them.

I have seen both bands individually – Bad Company shortly after they released their debut album and toured third on a bill behind the Edgar Winter Group and Foghat; And Foreigner when they opened for The Rolling Stones on the “Some Girls” tour - but aside from hearing the odd hit on classic rock radio, the last time I even had a thought for any of these guys was more than 25 years ago.

I don’t think any of the thousands of fans who showed up to see the double bill at SPAC Saturday night cared less. Suddenly, it was the 1970s all over again.

From the moment Paul Rodgers opens his mouth and unleashed his blues-gravely voice, Bad Co. (as some of crowd’s t-shirts hailed them) burned through a set of tunes basted in such a familiarity over so many years that it required every effort to remind yourself that you are in a new millennium.

There were, sing-along choruses to ''Shooting Star,'' time-honored guitar riffs of ''Ready for Love'' and, with ''Run with the Pack,'' a high-clanging volley of keyboard-wrung notes so eerily familiar that it seems that it's being played somewhere deep in your subconscious.

As a memory inducer, classic rock does for the ears what reminiscing about the smell of a backyard barbecue does for your nose, or turning the pages of a long-lost photo album for your head.

Consider that since Bad Company first hit the airwaves, there have been seven different U.S. presidents and we have witnessed the fall of Communism, the rise of MTV, and the advent of compact discs, computer games, video cassette recorders and the Internet. Hell, even the New York Rangers won a Stanley Cup in the interim.

It occurred to me that all the grooving, hand-waving, fist-raising and mouth-moving going on Saturday night at SPAC, was not simply people remembering music of a different time. It was more like the adult stepped outside its aging body to see if it could catch a glimpse of the child long buried within.

Saturday night, they were dancing to the heartbeat of their own lives. They were shadowboxing with ghosts.

published in The Saratogian, June 16, 2002