THOMAS DOLBY: Live at last

At least for me.
It’s incredible that someone who has influenced my life so strongly was just 10 feet in front of me last Saturday night in Royal Oak Michigan.
Thomas Dolby was my musical hero in college. Period. I spent an insane amount of time tracking his music down, and then figuring out ways to make myself emulate his geek chic mad scientist look in my own life. I mean, it was eerie to see him in front of me, because as much as I USED to look like him, now we REALLY look alike, enough so to kind of freak out my sister Nancy, who swears she saw Dolby making eye contact with me specifically in the crowd at the concert, no doubt thinking “Cripes, that bloke’s got my look down to a scary level…”
Wow, what a great musical evening, more of a get together than an overboard concert. Seeing Dolby put his music together right before us on stage, loving the creation of it as much as the playing, made it a really shared experience. He’s always been about the tinkering being exposed and spotlighted for it’s sheer fun and exploration, and him letting us into his creative process was great!
And for sheer unapolagetic geek, how much cooler is it to find out that Dolby took sunspot radiation reading numbers from a satellite’s website, dumped them into his sequencers to see if they produced music, and found that not only did some sequences produce chords, but they also were the same chords as his song “Windpower”? And then from that, he determined that the key of the sun is A Flat! I almost had a full scale geek-gasm!
Yes, he eventually played “She Blinded Me With Science”, but for me, it wasn’t the only highlight of the concert. The entire concert was a high point, with a great selection of his songs, all with nice little tidbits of information about them and their origins in between. Like I said, this was a talented friend I’d never met showing me his box of very cool toys, and it was just amazing. The fact that he seemed genuinely flattered that so many people were showing up for this tour just underscores the fact that he’s an incredibly cool person.
And that I still want to be like him when I grow up…