Word: sha
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Baker, who once played with Sha drummer Jocko in a Boston surf band, The Pilgrims, puts entertaining above all else. He says that he gets jumpy and nervous before shows, from sheer eagerness to get on stage. And at the root of Sha Na Na'a success is this kind of feeling, combined with a real affection for the songs and routines that they perform...
...Since Sha Na Na became big on the concert tour one of the trademarks of the group's performances has been the large number of people in the audience who "grease up" and dress fifties. "There are several different reasons I think people do this at our concerts," Baker says. "One is that when they grease up, they become a part of the whole thing. For that time that they're there at the concert and they're greased and we're on stage, they're part of the 1950s, or what they think was the 1950s...
Audience participation plays a big part in the Sha Na Na performance. And Baker says that it is an important factor when the group is planning its shows: "You shift things around to see where they work best. If they don't work right, you lose your continuity in the show. Then you have to shift it back somewhere else. We have to have that continuity, we can't let that audience down, we've got to keep it going. Once you let an audience down you've got to get them back up again...
Baker describes the closing series of songs in the Sha concert as an example of keeping an audience up: "We go from 'Duke of Earl' to 'Rama Lama Ding Dong' to 'At the Hop'--just bam bam bam. We're out of there. Come back on for 'Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.' Come back on--our encores are all up tempo until we've got them standing on their feet. And then we just go--bam--and let them down with "Lovers Never Say Goodbye' and they know it's over. It's like a play or anything...
...Sha Na Na makes a lot of whistle stops at colleges around the country. And Baker, who had a sporadic career at Northeastern and never did get his degree, feels that the campuses are radically changing. "Colleges seem to be back into having a good time," he says. "The fraternities are back. They were really big for a long time and then became unpopular when everybody became politically aware. It's gone back to a more happy atmosphere. It's fun to go to college again. For a while there everything was so serious that it wasn...