So it's Day Two of the annual cavalcade of amazing food and abhorrent music that is RibFest, and things are nowhere near as interesting as they were the night before. It took forever to find a parking spot. It's taking forever to get ribs, because there are approximately googol freakin' people here, far more than attended on Friday.
We missed Night Ranger. Former Allman Brother Dickie Betts is onstage with his band and his son Duane, and while his prowess as a guitar player is impressive, his longwinded, mellifluous jams are about as exciting as an 18-hour insurance seminar led by a guy who's a great public speaker but is still leading an 18-hour insurance seminar.
And Sal's just not getting the extra-generous sampler portions of ribs she was last night, because we keep getting in lines with women working the registers.
"Fuck those chicks, man," she'll say later, while we're walking from Vinoy Park to the Pelican Pub in the breezy cool — walking quickly, because behind us is an extremely inebriated shirtless man named Jimmy who's just taken a dip in the foul, shallow waters of the Vinoy's yacht basin, to the delight of everyone around. "I was totally going to get the love from that fat kid," she went on, "if we hadn't ended up at the wrong register."
Men, if you really want to fill up at RibFest, take a cute, curvy, petite girl with you. Sal is of about the same height and temperament as one of those perfectly balanced inflatable toys that rock back and forth but can't be knocked over — you push her a little, and she's coming right back into your face — and the guys manning the registers at the booths we visited on Friday night loved her. Loved her.
The average five-dollar taster/sampler plate at RibFest consists of three to four ribs, which is what I got, while Sal consistently walked away with her little paper boat filled to the brim with about three-quarters of a complete, meaty pig skeleton. Fortunately for me, Sal eats about as much, and about as quickly, as the average human corpse; I'd finish my bones before she'd finished nibbling her first one, and then I'd dig into her heap with her blessing.
That was Friday. Friday was special, and not only because of Sal's way with the dudes at Dave's Good Old Boys (the best ribs we had all weekend), Porky 'N' Beans, North Carolina BBQ and several other kiosks.
In my role as chief music critic for the Planet, I've taken RibFest to task nearly every year for its tendency to feature dinosaur rock acts as headlining entertainment. I feel completely justified in doing so. I don't care how old you are — if you haven't bought an album since Journey's Escape, then you're lazy and culturally retarded, an accomplice in America's continuing artistic atrophy.
You don't deserve to be catered to. You don't deserve big events featuring musical entertainment by one or two original members of some band you worship because it was your favorite back when it still seemed like you had life by the balls, before you realized working and making babies was pretty much it. You should be shamed and ostracized, not rewarded with five fucking classic-rock radio stations in every market and massive afternoon outdoor concerts in the park.
Unfortunately, there are several million of you, and as long as you're an influential consumer base, every food festival I attend will put Beatlemania or Three Dog Night or fucking Foreigner up on the stage and the JumboTron.
But this year, it seemed like RibFest was offering a little more, and I was able to rope several cronies into attending on Friday due to the promised presence of David Lee Roth, former lead singer of Van Halen and eternally energetic egomaniac.
"Diamond Dave, at RibFest? Hell yeah, I'm in, what time should we meet?"
Half of 'em didn't even like ribs, and went in search of corn dogs — and found them — while I helped myself to Sal's bounty. (Joey ate a deep-fried Twinkie, too, and without much prodding.) Along with maybe a dozen others, we watched an emo band called The Black Maria that wholly inexplicably ended up on the bill. We looked around for interesting freaks to gawk at; there really weren't many, but it was OK anyway, there was plenty of really unhealthy shit to eat.
And then we made our way up to the main stage to see David Lee Roth, hoping for the best but fearing the worst — after all, Dave just turned 51, and there's nothing sadder than an aging, formerly virile rock star trying to re-create the spectacular excesses of his youth.
It was worse than that.
Shorn of his trademark dyed-blonde locks, wearing an electric blue track suit and looking an awful lot like George Carlin's Rufus from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, David Lee Roth, hero of our pubescent vicarious fantasies, wasn't even an aging, formerly virile rock star trying to re-create the spectacular excesses of his youth — he was a caricature of an aging, formerly virile rock star trying to re-create the spectacular excesses of his youth.
In between creepily flirting with the girls in the front row, making fun of his guitar player's ethnicity, and doing occasional pathetic spin-kicks that called to mind an old man trying to remove a piece of toilet paper stuck to his ass, Diamond Dave managed to badly croak out about one-third of the lyrics to each of the famous Van Halen songs he didn't write, and one or two solo-career songs he did. The mere notion of watching this man perform "Panama" drove us from Vinoy Park before we were subjected to the sight of it.
Sometimes, in the wake of witnessing a horrifying, catastrophic event, a person's senses may be dulled by shock. The world seems less colorful, less alive in comparison, after you see something immediate and terrible.
I think that's why RibFest on Saturday isn't such great shakes. The food is still good, and there are many more people-watching opportunities than there were last night: In addition to Jimmy The Amazing Seal-Man, there's the guy in the chambray shirt sitting Indian style in the grass and freaking out to Dickey Betts, the woman who needs a bra more than Jeffrey Dahmer needed therapy, the biker wearing bull horns that are painted like an actual cow's body rather than bull horns, and more extremely drunken people than I've ever seen in public before.
But it all seems a little hollow, a little faded, a little less than real.
I'm blaming it on Diamond Dave.
This article appears in Nov 16-23, 2005.