Flowing Like a River, Alan Parsons in the Birthday Spotlight at 75

Producer-artist-project leader Alan Parsons has been an important piece of the 805 musical celebrity population for many years now. And he is not one to shy away from the public forum in his adopted community, rallying to many causes and, sometimes with his long standing band the Alan Parsons Project, taking part in benefit endeavors, including the worthy, starry One805 philanthropic organization, benefiting local first responders in the wake of the Thomas Fire and Montecito Debris Flow tragedies.

It made perfect sense, then, that Parsons himself was the center of a sold-out toast of an evening on the occasion of his 75th birthday at the Lobero Theatre on December 20. The birthday arrives roughly a half century after Parsons’s career-launching heyday of the 1970s as part of the team behind Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon album, working with the Beatles and other studio-centric accolades, becoming a top-drawer pop producer, and joining the hit parade as the driving, divining force behind his malleable Project band.

Aspects of that venerable history trickled through the Lobero show/party, as artists he produced — Al Stewart, dressed down like a bank manager, and the Hollies’ Terry Sylvester (“The Air That I Breathe”) — joined on stage, ably backed by Parsons’s band. Blues scorcher guitarist-singer Joe Bonamassa, who appeared on Parsons’s 2022 album From the New World, seized the stage and upped the energy level with his dynamic riff-slinging prowess. (Originally scheduled David Pack of Ambrosia was unable to make the gig.)

[Click to enlarge] Terry Sylvester of The Hollies (left) and Joe Bonamassa | Credit: Courtesy One805

Members of the elite 805 music celebs were also in-house, with songs from Michael McDonald (“I Keep Forgetting,” “Taking it to the Streets”) and a brief howdy-do from Peter Noone. Another, deeper 805 presence arrived with the Santa Barbara grown saxist Justin Claveria, who has been working with Kenny Loggins among other well-connected artists, making a guest cameo on Stewart’s sax-featuring hit “Year of the Cat,” and other tunes.

Yes, the evening hosted ample deposits of fine vintage music and warm anecdotes about the birthday subject, but to paraphrase the joke of another Santa Barbaran, Steve Martin, did it have balloon animals? Yes, it did, amongst other sleight-of-hand trickery and sleight-of-tongue comedy from Chicagoan Bill Cook, the evening’s wise-cracking emcee. The magic connection was not random: Parsons himself is also a magician, with links to Magic Castle.

As the evening’s climactic act, Parsons assumed his perch above his sharp-machined band for a few tunes, including the vintage hits “I Can Read Your Mind,” and “Where Do We Go from Here.” But those groove-lined pop-rockers framed what may well be the Project’s masterpiece, the slow-brew and existential-yet-emotive ballad “Time” (written by the late Eric Woolfson, co-founder of the band).

Time herself seemed to melt around the edges at the Lobero, as vocalist PJ Olsson flexed his powerful and focused instrument and put a memorable stamp on the song’s text: “time, flowing like a river/to the sea,” building to the crescendo and fall of the line, “until it’s gone forever, gone forever.” Somehow, the sentiment is less sobering than awakening, in one of pop music’s deftest emotional magic tricks.

A moment of unscripted comic relief popped up at the show’s end. After all parties, on stage and off, stumbled into a ragtag version of “Happy Birthday,” Parsons politely offered a call to order, saying, “The basic rule is that we all have to start at the same time. Try again.” The legendary producer then counted off a much cleaner, ready for prime-time version of the song.

When Alan Parsons speaks, or makes music, people listen.