{"id":770,"date":"2005-12-14T03:14:13","date_gmt":"2005-12-14T11:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/?p=770"},"modified":"2006-10-20T08:16:56","modified_gmt":"2006-10-20T12:16:56","slug":"leon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/2005\/12\/14\/leon\/","title":{"rendered":"Leon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Diane enjoyed Saturday night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Leon Russell concert; I say, put the poor wretch out to pasture. <\/p>\n

The Bull Run in Shirley is a dinner theater. The dining room\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a perfect rectangle seating three hundred people. The so-called stage is not elevated, and this night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opening act, a banjo and steel-guitar-playing rockabilly soloist, disappeared below the heads of those diners in front of us. His music disappeared too. He touched on those famous locomotive cord sounds, but the train never arrived. <\/p>\n

During intermission, Leon\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s drummer and two guitarists set-up largely unnoticed. Then Leon, with his ghost-like flowing white beard and hair, and wearing a jacket, white fedora and dark sunglasses, limped to his keyboard from a nearby stairwell. There were no introductions, nor much time for applause. Leon laid his thick fingers on the keyboard and from that moment on, he pounded out unremitting wake-the-dead material.
\nI turned to Diane, pulled her head close, and screamed, “This is what the first act lacked,” but she couldn’t hear me. I gave up, pivoted back and waited for the quiet break between songs – except there were no breaks, because there were no intros, no repartee with the audience, and no intelligible words. With his lips pressed against the microphone, and the volume and treble maxed out, Leon rasped his way through the entire set like a hack saw screeching through a rusty Studebaker fender.
\nTwo hours later and a single song before the end, his band stumbled away to recover while Leon played on. Stiff back, seemingly frozen at the mike, Leon shattered ear drums until his mates returned. Together they banged out a final number, after which Leon stood up, said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Thank you,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and walked away.
\n\"leon_sm.jpg\"
\nView larger image<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Diane enjoyed Saturday night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Leon Russell concert; I say, put the poor wretch out to pasture. The Bull Run in Shirley is a dinner theater. The dining room\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a perfect rectangle seating three hundred people. The so-called stage is not … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mainecourse.com\/mt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}