Benefit 2 Celebrate Life at First Avenue

Go to any concert and the band will gratuitously thank the crowd, possibly even tell them they are the best audience they’ve ever played for. But rarely will the performer walk to the front of the stage and tell a room of 1,500 people, “You saved my life.”

But Bobby Z, the drummer of early-’80s disco rock band The Revolution, who suffered a heart attack a year prior, did just that on Sunday night. Billed as a “Benefit 2 Celebrate Life,” Bobby Z teamed up with the American Heart Association to celebrate his own unlikely recovery, raise awareness about cardiac arrest, and reunite the iconic Minneapolis band once headed by Prince (without Prince that is).

After The Revolution’s closer—a broken-out, spectacular version of “Uptown” (two people literally passed out during the song’s climax)— Questlove, the drummer from the iconic hip-hop group The Roots and a renaissance soul man in his own right, played a perfect DJ set of funk, soul, disco, and old-school hip-hop. Questlove, who called himself “the second biggest Revolution fan,” teased the crowd to lose their inhibitions. Or, in other words: dance, and celebrate their own lives.

- text by Will  Wlizlo, photos by Patrick Dunn