Have you ever experienced that awkward moment when a singer asks the crowd to sing and only gets some lukewarm mumbling? Even in the most popular live version of Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant"— nothing short of a masterpiece—Arlo asks the audience to sing the chorus, then tells them to great comedic effect, "that was awful."
I get the impression Toots doesn't have this problem.
When Toots and the Maytals hit the Paradise Rock Club in Allston, Toots employed more audience call-and-response than an hour and a half of "My Ding a Ling." Without exaggeration, at least two thirds of the songs the Maytals played included at least a few audience "Na na na"s, or "Reggae reggae reggae"s. Again and again, Toots held the microphone out over the audience, and again and again, the audience belted back their lines at the top of their lungs. Sometimes the responses came without any prompting by Toots. The audience knew the words and recognized—and went crazy for—almost every song after the first bar or two.
It wasn't that the music was otherworldly—most of it sounded a lot like the original recordings from the ‘70s, only longer, more immediate, and without horns. In fact, the two-guitar, two-keyboard team filled in so well that the absence of horns didn't even occur to me until midway through the show. The band was solid, enjoying themselves but sticking to the back end of the stage, the sort of reggae veterans who had played enough shows over the years to just smile and keep playing when fans (including melophobe photo contributor [and reprobate] Grace Twesigye) began jumping onto stage and dancing on the last song of the night, a fifteen-minute, one-last-really-long-burst-of-energy performance of "54-46 Was My Number." A few times the band shook up an old arrangement—like when Toots brandished an acoustic guitar to open up a goosebumps-worthy revamping of "Funky Kingston"—but for the most part, it was a lot like we all remembered it.
But this wasn't about shaking up the Maytals' old soul sound. It was about the crowd, it was about reggae, and it was about celebration. The crowd moved and shouted and sang and reached their hands out over the stage in hopes that Toots or the backup singers (who were a hit) would give them some love. And Toots obliged, liberally. He went down the line and shook all of those hands in the front row—yes, ours too!—and as he looked the audience in the eye he sang, "You are a part of my life," and he put his hand to his heart. He came down the side stairs to greet surprised and eager fans (some of whom rushed down from upstairs to get a coveted handshake), singing "hello, hello!", and as he headed back onto stage he turned back towards us and said, the way one would speak in a heart-to-heart with a serious significant other, "I love you guys!" And I'm not sure if anyone around us didn't yell "We love you too, Toots!"
During the encore break, from my vantage point, not a single person left early. The same enthusiasm—ours and Toots'—that started with the first notes of "Pomp and Pride" and built and built through "Roots Rock Reggae" carried us through the encore and to the end of a magnificent show. By the end, it was clear that everybody, on and off stage, was exactly where they wanted to be. All the while, everyone was smiling, and all the way through the after-show push, as we all sweated on each other and stepped over empty bottles and moved through a packed fire-hazard hallway and out into a cold night, we were still beaming.
