Bill Murray Launches Dad-Rock Concert Tour
It took a minute for audiences to catch on to Bill Murray when he replaced Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live. But after a few months, Murray finally broke through thanks to his old Second City characters like Nick the Lounge Singer.
Nick’s trashy covers of popular songs like “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “That’s the Way (Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh) I Like It” sent up Vegas’ worst, a parody of the cheesiest kind of entertainer. “Billy’s performance was so over-the-top,” remembered Paul Shaffer in SNL oral history Live From New York. “I never knew what his criteria were (for choosing songs), but whatever he wanted to do was just right.”
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Fast-forward nearly 50 years, and parody has become reality. Bill Murray and His Blood Brothers, a dad-rock cover band, just launched a U.S. mini-tour, according to Consequence. The tour kicked off in Chicago last week, with Billy and the boys wailing through their versions of Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting” and Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour.” It’s a set that sounds like the karaoke lineup when the over-50 softball league shows up after the game.
The vanity project is probably closer to Murray’s Lost in Translation cover of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” than Nick the Lounge Singer’s version of “Star Wars Theme,” but how different are they really? The comic actor still relies far more on his charm than his raspy vocal chops, backed by the kind of kick-ass band afforded people who’ve earned $1.5 billion at the box office. “Bill’s got this incredible charisma, he gets up there and he hams it up and people just respond to him. It’s quite an amazing thing to see,” blues great (and Blood Brother) Albert Castiglia told the Chicago Sun-Times. According to Castiglia, Murray is also a “very capable percussionist.”
The main difference between Murray’s band and the one the neighborhood dads put together last summer? Catching Bill Murray and His Blood Brothers on their current tour is going to cost you a little more than the two-beer minimum at the local dive bar. Checking out his show in San Francisco at the end of the month will set you back $227 per ticket, and that’s before StubHub piles on the convenience fees. That’s a hefty price for capable percussion and hammy vocals.
But if this is how Murray wants to spend his golden years, why not? If it’s this or watching Chase do Q&A after another showing of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, I’ll take the Neil Young covers every time.
