BY TOM CHESEK
Correspondent
Pat Guadagno (center) and band members (l-r) Rich Oddo and Red River Rizzo of Tired Horses will perform in this year’s Bob Fest, marking the 66th birthday of folk icon Bob Dylan May 23 at the Two River Theater in Red Bank. ‘I think Dylan’s still very vital,” explains Pat Guadagno over a late breakfast at Amy’s Omelette House. The conversation, which for the past 10 minutes or so has touched upon the recorded highs and lows of Bob Dylan’s career, pauses as a familiar scratchy harmonica emerges from the background buzz of the busy Long Branch restaurant, an instantly recognizable element of our national soundscape, as American as the clatter of silverware on dinner plates.
Monmouth County has long boasted its own iconic music figures, but as Dylan’s 66th birthday draws near, local fans once again have something special to feel proprietary about when the musical birthday party bash known as “Bob Fest” returns for another edition.
The brainchild and hard-work “hobby” of Monmouth Beach resident Guadagno, Bob Fest follows up a sold-out 2006 event with an encore visit to the main stage of Red Bank’s Two River Theater on the evening of Wednesday, May 23.
If you’ve frequented the bars and bistros of the Jersey Shore, you’ve probably seen Pat Guadagno at work in his weekend element. Since quitting his full-time job in 1987, Pat has spent a couple of intense decades “working real, real hard at what I do … and loving it.”
Gigging consistently in both solo settings and as a member of The Candle Brothers, with whom he’s played up and down the East Coast, the self-described “saloon singer” has shared the stage with B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Richard Thompson, Gary U.S. Bonds and Tanya Tucker, to name but a few.
Pat’s well-traveled road has taken him regularly from Nashville to various northern exposures in Vermont and New Hampshire, although he continues to call Monmouth County home field.
Around Long Branch, Pat has been a long-running attraction at the West End watering hole Celtic Cottage, and starting this summer he’ll inaugurate a regular Wednesday engagement for McLoone’s Pier House at Pier Village.
Despite his assertion that he’s “not a worshipper,” the founder and star of the annual Bob Fest has perhaps inadvertently become known as one of the most dedicated keepers of the Dylan flame, although he stresses that “we don’t do cover versions; we don’t even have a harmonica player.”
Pat in person is scarcely a “Legends in Concert” sort of celebrity impersonator. The versatile vocalist and multi-tasking musician makes no attempt to ape the singer-songwriter whose unique conversational tone, raggedy arrangements and pointedly poetic wordsmithing changed the popular music landscape in ways that will arguably never occur again.
“The lyrics will be the star here,” observes Pat when discussing his more melodic approach to Dylan’s own stripped-down settings. “Whatever we do, we don’t stomp on his lyrics.”
Of course, even Dylan has famously refused to be boxed in by his own legacy, seldom performing a song the same way twice, and leaving his sometimes skeletal tunes open for definitive interpretation by such masterful harmony singers as Peter, Paul and Mary, The Turtles and The Byrds.
For the 2007 edition of Bob Fest, Pat and company will perform the music of Dylan in the prim and proper living room of a respectable circa-1910 German family – an oddball setting, until you consider that it’s the set design for the Two River Theater Company’s current mainstage offering.
The host venues were not always so sumptuous as Two River’s state-of-the-art auditorium. The event that would come to be known as Bob Fest began very informally about 10 years ago when Guadagno, performing one of his frequent sets at the now-shuttered Downtown Cafe in Red Bank, served up a couple of Dylan songs to the five or six patrons in attendance.
Although Pat wasn’t aware of it at the time, “The bartender said that it was Dylan’s birthday that night,” a fact that gave the germ of an idea to the singer, who returned to the same venue a year later with the first of his formally announced events.
Bob Fest was for a long time a very casual affair split between the Downtown and Celtic Cottage, one that attracted a number of guest performers, including Don “Buck Dharma” Roeser of hard rock favorites Blue Oyster Cult.
Nowadays, the annual concert is “very structured … much more like a show” than the loose jams of yesteryear. Recent shows have been attracting new audiences from hundreds of miles away and at least indirectly attracted the notice of Dylan himself (the singer’s official Web site posted news of the 2006 event).
Appearing under the playful brand “Tired Horse,” Pat’s band includes guitarist Steve Delopoulos of New York-based A&M recording artists Burlap to Cashmere, as well as Candle brethren Rich Oddo and Red River. Area musicians Andy McDonough, Mary McCrink, Rene Wooley and Yuri Turchin round out the lineup, with Pat’s 17-year-old daughter Aura now part of the show as a vocalist.
Attendees at the May 23 bash (Bob’s actual birthday is May 24) will enter into a raffle for tickets to Dylan’s June 30 concert at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts near Woodstock, N.Y.
Portions of the ticket proceeds will be dedicated to the Rock and Roll Music Fund Anthony X. Guadagno Memorial Scholarship, an endowment awarded to local students enrolled at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and established in memory of Pat’s late brother (and Berklee alumnus), Tony.
In the days leading up to the show, Pat has been busy paring down a list of some 65 potential numbers into a viable set for the concert. While he promises that lovers of the classics won’t be disappointed (Pat’s rendition of “Like a Rolling Stone” has served as a showstopper in past events), the set is also likely to include a few items from the still-rolling Dylan’s recent releases, as well as some “deep album cuts” that the old master has rarely if ever played live onstage.
“The show really rocks,” maintains Pat in noting the renewed interest from college-age audience members, “but we’ve got lots of stuff for the old folkies.”
Pat has also begun to consider the idea of “sharing it with more people” by assembling a touring version of the show. While that’s just a thought for now, Bob Fest fans are urged to check in regularly at Pat’s Web site, www.magombo.com.
Tickets for the 7:30 p.m. Bob Fest concert are priced at $30 per person and can be reserved by calling the Two River box office at (732) 345-1400.