DPO, Jeans ’N Classics to do 20 top songs, but setlist is secret
There’s no doubt there will be plenty of classic material featured in a concert billed “Top Twenty Rock Hits of All Time.” However, the actual song selection is a tightly held secret for the special Rockin’ Orchestra Series concert with the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and Jeans ’N Classics at the Schuster Center in Dayton on Saturday, March 30.
Jeans ’N Classics founder Peter Brennan recently shared what he could about the first-time concert.
A formidable task: “This is a very special show for Dayton. We’re covering probably 60 years and we had to narrow it down to 20 songs. Talk about a tall order because no matter what you do it’s like one grain of sand compared to the whole desert. Unfortu- nately, somebody will, of course, be going home and saying, ‘Oh, I wish they’d board to go from and then played, blah, blah, blah.’ we arm wrestled, argued Well, sure, but this is the and used other people as tiniest little snapshot of rock sounding boards to get the ’n’ roll history, if you will, whole thing together.” even if the history can be Setting parameters: “We quite recent.” tried to go with the top 20
Musically simpatico: “I rock pieces of all time and, was talking with (Dayton of course, that includes its Performing Arts Associa- roots,R&B and Motown varition’s president and CEO) ations, pop-rock and what Paul Helfrich and he told you might call album rock. me the idea of the show. Then you have to consider, We started off with Paul ‘Do we have it?’ ‘Can we making a list and me mak- do it?’ ‘Will it work with an ing a list and we emailed orchestra?’ It really is that them to each other. Inter- thing where every single perestingly, out of the gate, we son you ask to write down must have had 10 songs the their top 20 would all give same. We know each other you something different. And but we also share some of the same musical likes. That gave us a really good spring- then, of course, everybody changes their mind 5,000 times, but Ithink we landed on some pretty good common ground.”
Keeping it fresh: “While getting it down to the 20 songs was a difficult thing, it has been an awful lotof fun. It’s exciting because we’re doing a few songs we’ve never done before, there are others we’ve never done before in Dayton and there are also some we haven’t done for a long time.”