Community Voices

Enjoying Toast

My wife, my sister Jane, and I recently got toasted.

It had nothing to do with overconsumption of alcohol or being feted at a festive gathering. This toast had to do with bread. Sort of.

The music group Bread flooded the AM airwaves with hit tunes during the 1970s. Bread essentially created the genre known as soft rock. "Soft rock" seems like an oxymoron; in my vast experience with fieldstones, all rocks are hard.

The inspiration for band's handle arose during a drive on a LA freeway. The newly formed group of troubadours were casting about for a name when they happened to pass a bread truck. Which means that their name could have just as easily been U-Haul.

Bread might seem like a strange moniker. But during that era, rock bands had such names as Grand Funk Railroad, Led Zeppelin, and Badfinger.

Many of Bread's tunes are soulful love ballads, songs of longing for love, and melodies about love gone wrong. The topic of romantic love was of great interest to a certain zit-faced teenaged boy living on a small dairy farm in South Dakota.

As an adolescent, I would gaze out the window of our farmhouse at the lonesome prairie and wonder if romantic love was real or just something the music industry had concocted to sell records. My lovelorn status caused me to lean heavily toward the latter.

Some months ago, I happened across a video of a band called Toast. Jeff Clark, Toast's lead singer, was blessed with a voice that's remarkably similar to that of Bread's frontman, David Gates.

Jane, my wife, and I decided to attend a Toast concert at a local performing arts center. As we entered the venue, I harbored lingering doubts regarding what might lie in store. At the end of the evening, maybe we'd be saying, "That was awful! They should add the word 'Burnt' to their name!"

We had excellent seats. The front row of Balcony Right afforded us a commanding view of the stage and the audience below. There were a good number of cotton heads in attendance -- people who had reached the age where they've given up on coloring the gray -- along with a smattering of younger folks. And by "younger folks" I mean "I have socks older than they are."

Any doubts about the quality of the music evaporated with the opening licks of Toast's performance. Toast isn't exactly Bread, but their music is so close to the real thing that from the distance of several decades it was nearly indistinguishable from the original.

Clark was backed by a pair of guitarists, a keyboard guy, and a drummer, all of whom were expert at producing the same notes and beats that I recall from Bread's tunes. They must have listened to Bread's records a thousand times to achieve that level of proficiency. And by now, they've probably played those tunes about a thousand times.

Midway through the concert, Clark began to croon the song "If." As though by a hidden signal (the drummer, who had nothing to do during the song, actually started it), many audience members turned on their cell phone's lights and waved them rhythmically. This is much safer than back in the day, when cigarette lighters were used for this purpose, creating the very real danger that smokable materials could begin to combust.

When Toast launched into a rollicking version of "Let Your Love Go," my ears were treated to a powerful stereo effect. This wasn't just due to the massive sound system, but also because Jane and my wife, who were seated on either side of me, were singing along and doing some theater seat boogieing. I've never been able to decipher females' signals but would go out on a limb here and state that it appeared that the girls were enjoying themselves.

At one point, the lead guitarist hurled himself into an extended freeform solo. I turned to my wife and said, "Wow! Toast and jam!"

She's going to hurt herself if she keeps on rolling her eyes like that.

One of the final tunes in the Toast concert was "It Don't Matter to Me," a ballad about a guy who is OK with his lady taking time to find herself. The entire audience sang along with every syllable. This seemed to indicate that many of the attendees didn't care about a lot of things.

Basking in the post-concert afterglow during our drive home, my wife and I decided that we've reached the age where the phrase "It don't matter to me" should be adopted as our new motto.

And her beaming smile told me that romantic love is indeed real.

-- Jerry's book, "Dear County Agent Guy," can be found at www.workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.