No names will be mentioned, nor place of performance. No band name, no bar name, no set list. This...group...is real. It exists. It must never see this review.

Because I don't want to hurt their feelings. Nor do I want to die. One of 'em looked like Charles Manson.

Anonymous they must remain. Or I am a dead man.

It isn't just a bad review. It's a sad review. Old goat classic rock zombies--Facebook is loaded with them--and not very good, it's doubtful these guys could ever play. And at this late stage of the game nor ever will they.

But playing bad isn't the greatest sin in the world, no sir. Playing bad and thinking you're playing good isn't the greatest sin either.

No. The worst sin in the world is playing really bad, thinking you're really good--and also thinking you are really, really bad-ass while playing like crap thinking you're great. At a really old age.

I guess what am trying to say is you may as well pose like you have a ravenous armadillo in your pants 'cuz you suck so badly anyway.

Hey, I didn't walk into the joint with subjective negativity. I was in a damned good mood. I didn't even know there was gonna be a band of sad-sacks ruining entire decades of some of my favorite songs.

Earlier in the evening a friend and I successfully installed a new porcelain bathroom throne in my house from Home Depot, replacing an Ancient Mariner of a commode that'd flushed its last flush.

Two hours of muscular labor and we were throwing the old pot out the second floor bathroom window like Keith Moon tossing a TV set out a eighth floor Holiday Inn. It shattered hilariously on the concrete patio. Immature, I know.

Our work done, I thought it only right to reward buddy boy with libation and song. A sports bar we entered and upon our palettes we poured rare blends from near and far. Eventually we noticed there was distinctly odorific music aggressively wafting our way.

A stage in the corner behind us held large, misshapen white men with the standard tools of rock 'n' roll, going through the motions. They each wore a lifetime of grunting on their faces. Then I realized they were just trying to look like wanted posters. Weird.

How exactly does a band screw up Honky Tonk Women after all these years while looking like Richard Petty's mummified pit crew? Easily, apparently. If you can't play, you can't play.

These old boys of too many summers to be any good played the Seventies mostly before roaming like tired buffalo through the '80s and '90s. I did not enjoy a single song they played. It was one of the worst hour-plus of music in many, many years.

My warm new toilet glow was gone. My booze buzz busted. I felt like throwing a punch in the general direction of the stage. 

Everything sounded like Bachman-Turner Overdrive, though. Everything. Even Nirvana's Teen Spirit. What the hell?

Sawing, sawing, sawing away. If these guys were from Bulgaria or North Vietnam I'd understand. Chillicothe birthed them, if I heard correctly. Just back and forth, back and forth they monotonously rhythmatized. No fire, no heart, just...sawdust.

It's just that they really did, in their own stupid pathetic redneck ways, look like road warriors – grizzled, worn-out, willing to get back onstage after being shivved out back during break. They just couldn't play for shit. Could they ever? They were so old, though.

Maybe a little top-shelf bourbon would help, I thought. Nein. They took Lou Reed's Sweet Jane, eliminated the beautiful guitar parts, fed it into their woodchipper of a rhythm section and reduced it to stinky mulch.

And yet those bad-asses grimaced the whole bleedin' time. None of 'em were Cochise but they all played him onstage. What were they thinking? Constipation has no place in rock'n'roll.

Rock star fantasies acted out with zero irony by dudes old enough and stiff enough to play cigar store Indians is funny on the face of it. But if they are goaty and can't play then it is tragically pathetic. Even Shakespeare would've puked.

Strange, I thought, as we drove home. I hated the band but I loved my new toilet.