|
I didn't know exactly what to expect when I walked into opening night of the annual Happy Together tour at Ruth Eckerd Hall last Wednesday night. There was local art on display, records for sale, and nary a soul - mostly flower children and ex-hippies - under the age of 55.
The Happy Together tour started in the 1980s as a traveling bubblegum pop revue, hosted by The Turtles, and while there were many years that it didn't happen, the tour has been an unofficial kickoff to summer every year - minus 2020 and 2021 - since 2010. These days, the lineups feature a handful of people who actually appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show," while many on the lineup are new kids approved-by-the-OGs, and performing under whichever moniker, while reminiscing about how cool the '60s were, and bragging about how many records their band sold compared to The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Sibling trio The Cowsills opened things up at 7 p.m. on the dot, with flowery, jangly jams. Also thrown in was a story about how in 1969, the Cowsill family was on a beach in Florida with their drunk father, who refused to get out of the ocean because he wanted to swim to Cuba in order to "get that son of a bitch [Fidel] Castro once and for all."
. . .
|
