Rockabilly-Online

Elvis Birthday Party

Posted by Miriam On January - 28 - 20115,268 views

On the 8th of January you can always find a nice Elvis-movie or Elvis-concert on television. Why on January 8, you’ll wonder. Well, that’s the birthday of Elvis Presley and that is still be celebrated after such a long time. So does the Belgian fan club “Elvis Matters”. Each year they organize a party around that date and also this year there was a reason for a party.

I travelled to Belgium to experience this. This year was the original band of Elvis invited, The TCB Band, to spice up this party.

This all took place in a brand new accommodation, the C-Mine in Genk (Belgium Europe). Apparently the location was so unusual, because the address couldn’t be found on the GPS. Of course I should have thought by the name C-Mine, but we found out later. After a lot of searching and driving we just arrived in time, 5 minutes before the show should start. It seems that the concert hall was build in an old colliery. Rather special!
The whole concert was guided by the former musical director of Elvis, Mr. Joe Guercio. He did this in a very nice way and it seems that he has a good sense of humor.

I had seen the TCB Band already in action a couple of times. The last time was about 1½ years ago and now you can definitely start to notice that the men are getting old. Not everything goes smoothly anymore and with the rhythm and the keys they’re once in a while are pretty wrong. Also the inspiration seems to be declining. This is not surprising when you consider that they still playing the songs they used to play, already about 35 years ago. The singer during this concert was the Austrian Dennis Jale, kind of a mix between Brian Setzer and Eddie Cochran. He’s certainly no stranger to the Elvis world. Naturally, the concert opened with the Space Odyssey theme, what is so recognizable to the opening of the Elvis concerts in the seventies.

Dennis Jale with the TCB Band

I thought that Dennis had no real power to bring the songs. His voice was flat and had certainly not the range that Elvis had at the time. So Dennis sticked to the “safe” songs.

Obviously to a party belongs a birthday cake and after singing “Happy Birthday Elvis” (this is a bit over the top for me, 33 years after his death!!), everyone was provided with a piece of birthday cake.
After the concert there was an opportunity for a dance and if you had the patience to stand in line, there was a meet and greet with the TCB Band.
A nice experience in Belgium, but we can’t go back in time: “Elvis still has left the building”.