Wow, what a rock star lineup they had on the Pabst Festival Stage at Summerfest Wednesday night! Just roll these names off your tongue and taste what you missed -- the Rolling Stones, Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad, Steppenwolf, the Young Rascals, Focus, the Edgar Winter Group.
Now that we've got your bug-eyed attention, let's amend that a little. The performers up on the stage weren't really the Stones or Steppenwolf or the others. But the music blasting from the speakers was their authentic stuff, all right, and from a hundred feet away you could swear those guys on the stage were singing and playing their hearts out.
For this was the second and final night of the Pabst/93QFM Rock Pantomime show, featuring four of the best such outfits in the area, selected from 39 groups in seven weeks of preliminary judging at The Palms nightclub.
A rock pantomime band, for those not familiar with this art form, uses fake instruments and is rated on how convincingly it mimics the moves and visual effects of real rock groups to taped performances of their music.
If that sounds a little clinical, the hour-long show Wednesday night was anything but. The crowd couldn't have been packed in more solid for a $200,000-a-night supergroup, and they were with it all the way, standing on the tables, clapping, cheering, cracking up. It was as much fun watching the audience, in a way, as the antics on stage.
The show opened with Bitchin' Heat, a Glendale group, followed by Air Strike, from Hales Corners. Both quintets had the basic rock choreography down pat -- the menacing crouch and prowl of the wing guitarists; the sudden leap and thud on the downbeat by the lead singer; the helicopter whirl of the mike wire; the flung head; the pelvic thrust; the rooster strut. All performed to roaring numbers like "American Band" by Grand Funk Railroad, "School's Out" by Alice Cooper, and "Get Off My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones.
They were followed by Arf Pink Bullet and the Lovedogs, a frenetic fivesome made up, believe it or not, of surgical team personnel from St. Joseph's Hospital. Or is it St. Elsewhere?
