My Life As A (One-Night) Rock Star, Part 2
By Bryan Gruley
One Saturday evening last fall, this band you’ve never heard of — The Ritz — took the stage at a rock-and-roll joint in suburban Detroit. It was our first gig in forty-seven years. “It’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled,” I sang in the Led Zeppelin classic that opened our show. Twenty tunes later, we finished with Rod Stewart’s “Stay With Me.” I told the two hundred people packed into the Token Lounge, “We’ll see you again in 2069.”
Turns out I lied.
When we showed up that October night, my four bandmates and I really weren’t sure what to expect — from the audience or even from ourselves. We’d prepared the best we could with two of us living hundreds of miles from Detroit. We knew the chords and changes and licks and lyrics of the songs we’d first performed together in 1975. And, man, I had my cowbell parts down. But what would happen when we actually got up in front of a roomful of people?
I’ll tell you what: We had a fucking blast.
I almost didn’t make it. A few days before the show, my wife and I evacuated our home on Florida’s Gulf Coast as Hurricane Ian barreled toward us. We’d just made the Atlantic shore when Ian swerved south, sparing our area. Now I had to get my butt to Detroit, half a country away with no flights out of…
