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Outdoor rock concerts suggest bare backs, bare feet, getting scorched by the sun, lots of beer and pop, and loud boogie and/or heavy-metal rock.
Saturday's third annual Great Northern Picnic at Parade Stadium featured all of the above except the loud music. Instead, the program was mostly danceable new-wave rock that's fashionable at clubs and bars.
The usual outdoor battle cry on concertgoers' T-shirts, "Boogie til you puke," was not apropos. The watchword might have been "Dance until your feet blister" or, as one T-shirt suggested, "Shut up and dance."
The main musical attractions were Blondie and Elvis Costello & the Attractions, both of which had made separate Twin Cities debuts at the Longhorn bar in 1978. Back then those performers made about $650 to $750; Saturday Blondie pocketed maybe $50,000 and Costello probably about half that.
That's the ticket for the new wave's most commercially successful (Blondie) and critically successful (Costello) acts. Both responded in worthy fashion. Costello was simply terrific but all too brief, giving the best of his four Twin Cities performances. Blondie, making only its second local appearance, was strong and convincing.
Toss in brief sets by St. Louis Park's Sussman Lawrence, England's Duran Duran and San Francisco's Greg Kihn and you had the most musically satisfying local outdoor concert since Fleetwood Mac and Jeff Beck shared the Parade stage during a rainstorm in 1977.
Costello emerged as the angry young man of Britain's new-wave scene in '77 but these days he's being hailed as the Cole Porter of the '80s. He's mellowed both musically and as a stage persona, yet he gave the fans glimpses of his many dimensions Saturday.
His snarl has been replaced by a sly grin when he croons such new, heavily orchestrated ballads as "Shabby Doll," "Kid About It" and the brand new "Shipbuilding," which he explained was probably not appropriate during an afternoon in the sun. Even "Alison," a ballad from his feisty debut album, was given a more controlled reading. Moreover, Costello's emotional but technically limited voice has grown more musical; in fact, it sounded better Saturday than on his latest, controversial album, Imperial Bedroom.
Costello's 70-minute set was well-paced and well-chosen, as he covered the best material from his seven albums. The beguiling "Watching the Detectives" stood out until Costello and his three-man band, the Attractions, tore into the encore; a high-speed assault of short, punchy rock 'n' roll songs that really pumped up the fans. He kept teasing the crowd that he had time for only one more song, but wily Costello cranked out "Mystery Dance," "Pump It Up," "Peace, Love and Understanding" and "Radio, Radio," his diatribe on why radio is so stale.
Blondie may have had more radio hits than Costello, but beyond its five smashes, the New York sextet, which seldom tours, is unfamiliar to the concertgoing masses.
Like Kiss and Alice Cooper, Blondie may be better known for its image than its music. However, much of the visual appeal of lead singer Debbie Harry, Blondie's pinup figurehead, was lost during the bright afternoon sun. Dressed in a safari coat over a tiger-pattern leotard and leopard-pattern miniskirt, she slunk around like a less than graceful go-go dancer. Some fans preferred ogling the singer with her subtle seductive style, but Blondie drummer Clem Burke was an equally appealing show as he bashed away at the drum kit with all the abandon of the Who's Keith Moon.
Burke is the backbone of this energetic, eclectic band, whose sound was bolstered by three horn players and an extra keyboardist. The horns nicely punctuated such hits as "Rapture," the rap-inspired tune that Blondie used to open its 80-minute set. There followed "In the Sun," a breezy throwback to the updated girl-group sound of Blondie's early days, and then the momentum slowed. Most of the sun worshipers didn't recognize the next few songs (face it, Blondie is a nighttime band anyway), but once the band tore into the ebullient new "Danceway," everyone was dancing.
Next up was "The Tide Is High," the group's bastardized calypso song that reached No. 1 last year, and the disco-flavored "Heart of Glass," Blondie's first No. 1 song. The crowd was completely won over at that point. Even an unknown new piece, "War Child," with plenty of funk-chording guitar, went over as effectively as such minor hits as "Dreaming" and "One Way or Another."
Blondie encored with the kind of boogie outdoor concerts fans love — a version of the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," the rock anthem of the summer of '81. And then the band closed the day in the sun with the propulsive dance-rock-meets-disco beat of "Call Me."
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