Those rainclouds in the distance got darker and moved closer toward the end of the day, looming overhead as Michael McDonald took to the stage in a ring adjacent to the stadium where the Grand Prix had taken place. The impending bad weather didn’t seem to dampen the crowd’s enthusiasm, as several thousand fans found a comfortable spot for the festival-style seating within the ring and on the surrounding berms.
McDonald opened with “You Belong to Me,” a song he co-wrote with Carly Simon in 1977. It’s usually more associated with Simon, as she had the bigger hit with it, but McDonald’s rendition of it is more appealing to this female sensibility. His voice is still strong, husky and emotive as he moved easily into a trio of big hits he had with the Doobie Brothers and solo; “It Keeps You Runnin’,” “Sweet Freedom,” and “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).”
Knowing that McDonald has been touring lately with Boz Scaggs and Donald Fagen as a group effort, “The Dukes of September Rhythm Revue,” and knowing as well that Fagen lives near Saugerties, it was tempting to entertain the idea before the concert that maybe Fagen might show up. When he did, the crowd reacted enthusiastically, most of them teenagers or twenty-somethings when Steely Dan was at its height in the mid-to-late seventies.
Fagen and McDonald launched into “Peg,” from the 1977 Steely Dan album “Aja,” where McDonald sings multi-tracked background vocals on the song behind Fagen and Walter Becker. The crowd loved it. Since Steely Dan didn’t perform live during its heyday, only recording studio albums with obsessive attention to detail, it was great to hear Fagen’s distinctive vocals live on this particular song and watch his quirky body language as he sang.
When Fagen left the stage after the one song, Michael McDonald quipped, “He would have stayed longer, but that’s rock n’ roll for you. He had to go pick up his grandson.”
The energy level was upped a notch, though, and stayed up for the rest of the show. There was nothing grandfatherly about the music or the tight backup band behind McDonald, which featured the considerable talents of Drew Zingg on guitar, Shannon Forest on drums, Richard Patterson on bass, Mike Logan on keyboards, Eric Crystal on saxophone, and “Ms. Monét” and Drea Rhenee’ Merritt as backup singers, two very talented women with engaging personalities who brought the stage presence to the show, adding a bit of theatricality to the modest and unassuming band members, including McDonald, who sits throughout the show at his keyboard and makes minimal onstage movements.
McDonald slowed things down for a few songs with some impassioned ballads, including “Ain’t No Love,” then switched up to “Yah Mo B There” and, a highlight of the evening, from McDonald’s days with the Doobie Brothers, 1978’s “Minute by Minute.” Whenever he played one of his biggest hits during the show, McDonald teased the audience first by playing some unrelated riffs, noodling around on the keyboard, riffing so that it wasn’t obvious what was going to come next until you heard a slightly familiar sequence for just a moment, and then, okay, there it was.
A few Motown songs came next, from the cover albums McDonald did in ‘03-’04, “Ain’t Nothin’ Like the Real Thing” and “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” The latter was a spirited version of that song that, thanks to the assist from the band’s solid musicianship and the vocals of Ms. Monét and Drea Rhenee’ Merritt, would have raised the roof if it had not been an outdoor concert with no roof to raise. Instead, it brought the heavens down, and drenching rain accompanied the end of that song as well as the last song, “What a Fool Believes,” and the encore, “Takin’ it to the Streets.”
The downpour did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of the audience, who’d been on their feet dancing for a while anyway, and despite the ground below turning rapidly into mud, the crowd responded to the energy level of the band which, during those final numbers, literally approached the fever pitch of gospel music, with some pretty great call-and-response type vocals from Ms. Monét and Drea Rheneé Merritt. The show ended on that high note, and it wasn’t even sundown.
And if you looked up into the sky as you drove away, out of the muddy parking lot at HITS and onto the streets of the village of Saugerties once again, there were, not one but two rainbows in the sky, side by side. That’s gotta mean something.
