A Ducktail with Grease

WHEN THE WORD got out that Sha Na Na was coming back to town, I rushed down to Woolworth's and got myself a 79-cent tube of Brylcreme. After all, if "a little dab will do ya" in every day life, Sha Na Na's return was certainly worth a whole tube.

Rock and roll has always been a special thing with me, and Sha Na Na is a special brand of rock and roll. Or so I'd been told. Nearly 5000 people packed the MIT Field House to see Sha Na Na and nearly every one of them was excited about the possibility of recapturing that oldies mania. The concert was, after all, a second coming. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. On Friday night, Sha Na Na was good, but nothing to break your date at the soda shop for. The group displayed a polished -- if mechanical -- mastery of that amorphous brand of Fifties songs that made the Chiffons what they are today. There were the usual highlights -- "At the Hop," "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay," "Tell Laura I Love Her" -- and they all came off with a slick dexterity. But none of the songs made you really want to throw Mary Lou over your shoulder in mid-jitterbug or snuggle up in an end-of-the-dance waltz. The old magic just wasn't there.

For all the pizzazz, Sha Na Na's return was a disappointment. Four years ago at Rindge Tech, the group gyrated through 32 nostalgia-filled numbers in a greasy tour de force of The Coasters, Danny and the Juniors, et. al. Of course, that was when the group was still reaching for the big time, when it was still groveling for a few scraps of attention. Last Friday the old vitality was gone. Sha Na Na performed about half as many numbers as four years ago, and most of those were short, flat, systemized, and impersonal. The band played for an hour and called it a night.

There was no "oomph" to Sha Na Na Friday night. And Sha Na Na without oomph is like a ducktail without grease. Maybe they were tired, or just bored with it all, or preoccupied with endorsing their paychecks. But whatever it was, Sha Na Na's concert wasn't anything to make you paste the ticket stubs in your scrapbook. It seemed like the group was just going through the motions, rather than giving a performance.

To give them credit, Sha Na Na did come back for three encores, but there was some confusion whether the crowd yelled for more because it wanted more or because it thought it was being gypped. For $2.50 you can't expect too much, but any way you look at it, Friday's Sha Na Na concert was a chintzy deal.

When Sha Na Na first appeared in 1966, they were a fresh breath in the wasteland of the teeny-bopper-gee-I'm-heavy rock of the Sixties. If Friday's performance is any indication, Sha Na Na has come a long way since then, and most of it is downhill. Sad to say, Sha Na Na seems to have made the grab for the big buck, and kissed the Magic Sound goodbye.