21 March 2011

Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On

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I’ve finally found my niche in the Bangkok nightlife, amongst somewhat ageing Rockers – with a lot of white hair and beards in the crowd – who are diehard fans of the old-time Rock and Roll of Peter Driscoll and the Cruisers. They played last week at the Wine Bibber Sangria in Bangkok, and they really rocked the joint. I have written before about how I’m a big fan of Peter’s performances. I try my best get into town when I know he’s playing a gig. I am one of the only regular Americans at these gigs, for all the accents I hear are English, Scots, Irish, or Australian.
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Peter is a walking historian of early Rock. As a lad growing up in England in the 1950s, he got into all the music coming in from the States. As a teenager there he recorded “Paralyzed,” a song from Elvis’s second album. One thing that continually amazes me is Peter’s brief historical prefaces to most of the songs he covers, little bits of info about who wrote it and various performers of it. He is up to date on those people of early Rock, often mentioning that such-and-such a person involved with the song “died just last Friday,” for example.
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His band, The Cruisers, has a partially new line-up, and they are getting really tight as a group. The crowd was not as thick this time as it was for their performance last month, but it was because of a heavy rain that day that thinned out the crowds everywhere in the city – even the evening Skytrain was un-crowded.
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Peter and the Cruisers did songs by Elvis, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins (“I’m a lone poor boy, and I’m a long way from home”), the Everly Brothers, Rick Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley and His Comets, Dion and the Belmonts (“I’m a wanderer, yeah, the wanderer/ I roam around, around, around”), Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, etc.
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At the stroke of midnight they started up a new set with a powerful version of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny Be Good,” and we all rocked on until late.
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-Zenwind.
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