June 6 & 7, 1970

June 6: Sha Na Na made a special guest appearance (they were scheduled for the next night) and Hundred Flowers reported that the 21 and over crowd was not especially impressed.

June 7: Sha Na Na did its regularly scheduled show on teen night. Fifty years later, someone in the audience said: “I remember distinctly Bowser saying, ‘Just one thing to say to all you fucking hippies: Rock and Roll is Here to Stay!’”

Hundred Flowers (Tom Utne?) said the younger crowed “showed the Depot what audiencing was all about.” As usual, HF had a beef, though:

Just to let you folks know, neither Sha-na-na nor anyone else gets anything extra for doing two shows. They just cut ten songs out of their regular set and do it twice. … Hasn’t the time come when Minneapolis is no longer considered a sucker-town by musicians and promoters?

Marshall Fine reported that the “audience alternately laughed at and cheered the group’s antics, were they hair combing or doing the twist.

Sha-Na-Na’s act is slick, possibly even greasy. The group spits, scowls and does its best to ape James Dean. It is more musically talented than it first appears, and also wildly funny. The humor in the group’s act depends on the ability of the audience to laugh at itself. For Sha-Na-Na is satirizing American youth as it was. Few in the crowd were too young not to remember the songs and styles mimicked. The humor could easily be misplaced. If any member had the slightest disdain for what he was doing, Sha-Na-Na’s hole thing would have come off ass too campy and the joke could have disappeared after the first song. Sha-Na-Na takes its role very seriously on stage, however, and it can create the mood that reigned in the days of the four-chord progression.

Adding to the atmosphere last night was the fact that the Depot’s air conditioning was not working. The sweaty, steamy temperature provided the decor that probably existed in the oven-like auditoriums of yesteryear.

This next part of Fine’s review needs clarification:

Danny’s Reasons preceded Sha-Na-Na and put the crowd in the mood for the headliners. Everyone was so fed up with the Reasons that they were all the more ready to hear a good group.

Danny says it must have been someone else: “We never did play with Sha-Na-Na. We only played on seldom occasions on Beer and Wine Night* and on the Gathering at the Depot album. We were never a supporting act for any of the national groups.” Danny has said that his group was not the kind of band that would fit in with the Depot crowd. Will Shapira submitted this rather snarky review for the Insider: “Sha-Na-Na effectively recreates the popular music that nurtured the silent majority that made up the Silent Generation.” And this: “The years of the ’50s that I devoted to jazz were all the more well-spent upon rehearing “At The Hop” and the other delights of that era.” Guess he didn’t like it. * Beer and Wine Night was a continuation of a promotion Danny had used at his previous club, Times Square. For $2.50 (men) or $1.50 (girls) (sic), you got a plastic cup at the door, and between 9 and 11 pm, you could have all the beer or Bali Hai or Reva wine you could drink. Danny noted that Beer and Wine night was especially popular with professors from the U of M.