The Fab Faux, Lowell Summer Music Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts, USA

Now in its 22nd year, the Lowell Summer Music Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts, offers outdoor concerts throughout the Summer on most weekends.  First come, first served folks mark their turf up front near the stage with blankets and/or low beach chairs earlier in the day for that up-close and personal viewpoint.  Tonight's performers were the Fab Faux, a group of five professional musicians reknowned for their painstaking accuracy in recreating the exact music of the Beatles. 

How did our generation go from the idealism and rebellion of the 60's to needing to perfectly line up folding chairs with cup holders, and in order of color?

As curtain time approaches, the venue fills with parents, grandparents, and some reluctant and not-so-reluctant kids in tow.

A few of the long hairs of the Beatle generation were out tonight but most folks looked like Moms and Pops in Anytown, USA.  They were way more comfortable in cushy chairs than in a rain soaked field sitting in the mud - ahh, youth, where have you gone?

I am certainly no fashion plate myself, and at the risk of sounding way too snarky, these two Beatlemaniacs have clearly exceeded the boundaries of appropriate attire.  I'll bet as rebellious youth they had long hippie hair, smoked dope, and wore bell-bottom jeans.  Be that as it may, however, it wasn't okay back then and, it is still not now - EVER appropriate in public to wear your black dress shoes and black dress socks with white spindly legs protruding out of your shorts - and shorts that end 12 or more inches above your knobby knees are also outside the limits of propriety for gentlemen in their 60 or 70's. (I'll let the loud nylon Hawaiian shirt pass without comment).

But snarky aside.........at long last, under a warm, clear, moonlit, New England Summer night, we were able to sit back and listen, and close our eyes and remember the simple days of our youth - and again hear the music that has served as the backbone of this generation. And it was performed tonight nearly perfectly by these fine musicians, the Fab Faux.