We ventured over to La Crosse WI to see the ZZ Top show that was originally scheduled for my birthday, October 5th ... but Dusty Hill broke his hip so it was cancelled and rescheduled for the 31st.
La Crosse is a little over 50K people, 1/2 the size of Rochester -- there were about as many bars / restaurants between the car park 3 blocks from the La Crosse Center where the concert was at than there are in the city of Rochester.
We ate at Buzzard Billy's Flying Carp Cafe ... before dinner we had appetizers and a beer at the Starlight Lounge upstairs. Two excellent local Pearl Street offerings and super chicken wings for $11.50. The meal downstairs, two drinks, two soups, two entrees ... a catfish Po Boy and a Cajun platter, both excellent came in at $36! A 16oz beer at the concert was a mere $4.50 ... up at an event in the twin cities $8 is a good guess.
I have no idea if it is competition, taxes, regulations, German vs Scandinavian culture or "whatever", but those costs would have been at LEAST 30% higher here!
Billy, Dusty and Frank are all 65 years old -- Billy still seems to move like he did a decade ago, but Dusty seems a little less mobile maybe -- although he is a bass man, and they tend to not move much anyway. At the end of the show when Frank walked down front from the drums, I thought he looked like he may have aged the most. The crowd? Well, the crowd looks OLD -- what am I doing in such a crowd!!
I can't really imagine what happened -- I saw them in the early 80's on the "Eliminator" tour, then on our 20th anniversary, then 5 years ago up at Mystic Lake, and again last night -- as Billy G likes to say "40 years, same three guys, same three chords". Harley / Sturgis / ZZ Top -- those were the T-shirts, and pretty much in that order -- they seem to understand their audience pretty well at this point.
A very nice belated B-day present,
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