By Jim Bissett
For The Dominion Post
Fairmont – Are yinz ready to rock?
Then get dahn to Palatine Park on Saturday for a show by Pittsburgh’s radio-fave mavens, The Clarks.
You first heard this Americana-styled assemblage from the Steel City issuing forth from your car’s speakers in 1986.
Since then, the band has gotten crowds going in bars, music clubs and arenas from here to there.
Palatine Park, the popular outdoor music venue in Fairmont, will be the most recent stop on the band’s 40-year anniversary tour.
“Oh, yeah, we are definitely excited,” said Marion County administrator Kris Cinalli, who books the popular outdoor concert series for the expanse that bumps the banks on the Monongahela River on Fairmont’s East Side.
“If you’re a certain age, you loved The Clarks when they first hit,” he said. “Their fans have stayed with them. This is going to be a good, regional show.”
That’s because north-central West Virginia’s The New Relics are the opening act. The Morgantown-based act, which has a strong following in these rock ‘n’ roll, garage band climes, plugs in at 7 p.m. for the free show.
Headliners The Clarks hit the stage at 8:30 p.m.
“Shows like this are why we’re now a destination,” Cinalli said.
Palatine Park was largely underused – and not necessarily in the best of shape – when Johnnie Johnson performed an outdoor concert there in 2002 that’s still being talked about.
Johnson, who grew up in Fairmont, was making a triumphant tour of his own.
The boogie-woogie piano player who gave Chuck Berry his first professional gig in St. Louis in 1953 was fresh off his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – Keith Richards did the honors – when a couple of longtime friends and new ones invited him back home.
“Johnnie put this place on the map,” Cinalli said.
On Saturday, The Clarks and The New Relics will etch the borders even more, he added.
So long as Mother Nature doesn’t decide to sit in, he said, ruefully.
Sudden and torrential downpours have already forced the cancellation of a couple of shows this season.
And sweltering heat has turned into a chronic annoyance.
“In terms of weather,” he said, “this has been our worst summer.”
At least Palatine Park, and Palatine’s music-goers, weren’t subjected to last weekend’s acrid gauze from the Canadian wildfires, he said.
“Thank goodness we didn’t have anything booked,” Cinalli said. “We missed the smoke.”
Now, he wants you to enjoy the sparks on Saturday, he said, “when two great bands” fire up their amplifiers and let it rip.
“The bands we get are the bands you don’t always see around here,” he said.
“And our shows are free. It’s not gonna get any better than that.”
Read more from The Dominion Post, here
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