The Elvis Spectacular

Tonight at the Middletown Arts Center: Brian Ostering Brings Elvis’s Early Years to the Jersey Shore in a Show Built on Family and Memory

There is a specific quality that separates a tribute performance from a genuinely meaningful one, and it has nothing to do with how closely the performer resembles the artist they are honoring. It has to do with why they are doing it — the personal stakes behind the decision to step onto a stage and invest themselves completely in music that belongs, in some essential way, to someone else. For Brian Ostering, the front man and bassist of the Bayshore-area band The Wag and the driving force behind tonight’s Elvis Spectacular at the Middletown Arts Center, the stakes are unambiguous. This show is a tribute to his father.

The Elvis Spectacular — officially subtitled “The Early Years” — takes place tonight, Saturday June 27th, at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street in Middletown, with doors opening at 6:00 p.m. and the performance beginning at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door and online through The Wag’s website. It is the first time Ostering has mounted an Elvis-themed show, and the decision to do so came not from a desire to expand his performance portfolio but from a desire to honor a specific inheritance — the love of a particular artist’s music, passed from a father to a son over decades of listening and playing together.

The Story Behind the Show

Ostering’s father was a musician. He was also, by every account Ostering has given in the weeks leading up to this show, a devoted Elvis Presley fan who performed Elvis’s music in his own bands — a working musician who carried that repertoire not as a novelty or an occasional tribute but as a central part of his own musical identity. What parents pass to their children through music is rarely just a catalog of songs. It is a set of aesthetic values, a way of hearing the world, a sense of what popular music can mean when it is at its best. Ostering absorbed all of that from his father, and the Elvis Spectacular is his way of publicly acknowledging it.

The personal weight of the show deepened significantly in May of 2003, when Ostering took his father on a trip to Graceland — the Memphis estate that Elvis Presley made his home and that has been maintained as a museum and pilgrimage site since Presley’s death in 1977. His father’s health was beginning to decline, and Ostering made the decision to take the trip before circumstances made it impossible. The two days they spent in Memphis became one of those experiences that only reveal their full significance in retrospect. They visited Sun Records, the studio on Union Avenue where Elvis Presley recorded his first sessions and where the sonic vocabulary of American popular music was fundamentally altered in a handful of sessions in 1954. They went to Graceland multiple times. They heard a gospel group perform. His father ate the famous peanut butter and banana sandwich — a culinary detail that has followed Elvis’s legend from the beginning and that Ostering’s father apparently found legitimately satisfying. Ostering has described the trip as something he is deeply grateful to have undertaken when he did.

The Elvis Spectacular is built from that trip, from the music that connected two musicians across a generation, and from the particular form of grief and celebration that a son undertakes when he performs music his father loved in front of an audience that shares some portion of that love. It is not a nostalgia act in any shallow sense. It is a live act of remembrance.

Brian Ostering and The Wag: Twenty-Five Years of Jersey Shore Music

Anyone who has attended live music events on the Jersey Shore over the past quarter century knows The Wag, even if they know the band primarily by the experience of seeing them rather than by name. The four-piece unit, which Ostering fronts alongside three other vocalists who rotate lead duties throughout any given show, has built its reputation on a specific and difficult-to-manufacture quality: the ability to play pop rock music with an enthusiasm and technical sophistication that makes the audience feel good in a way that takes genuine musicianship to produce. The band has been described as “the happiest band in New Jersey” — a characterization that sounds like marketing but that anyone who has seen them understands as straightforward description.

The Wag has made the Middletown Arts Center something close to its home venue over the years, producing annual Spectaculars there that have established a loyal audience across Monmouth County. The Beatles Spectacular and the Christmas Spectacular are the flagship productions in that catalog — shows that Ostering produces and performs with the care and attention to detail of someone who treats a regional venue concert as seriously as a national touring act would treat a theater engagement. Tonight’s Elvis Spectacular follows in that tradition of self-produced themed concerts built around specific artists and eras, but it is the first time the Spectacular format has been applied to Elvis, and the first time Ostering has stepped into this particular musical territory.

The show he has built for tonight focuses on the early years — the period from approximately 1954 through the early 1960s that produced the recordings that changed American popular music: the Sun Sessions, the RCA recordings, the string of singles that introduced rock and roll to a national mass audience and made Elvis Presley one of the defining cultural figures of the twentieth century. “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “That’s All Right,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Heartbreak Hotel” — these are not simply songs. They are the artifacts of a specific moment in American cultural history when the energy and vernacular of rhythm and blues crossed into mainstream popular music and nothing was quite the same afterward. Ostering’s decision to focus on this period rather than the Las Vegas-era material reflects both a personal aesthetic judgment and a recognition that the early recordings, stripped of the sequined jumpsuit mythology, are simply the best work Elvis Presley ever produced.

The Band Behind the Show

Ostering assembled a specific group of musicians for the Elvis Spectacular rather than his regular Wag bandmates, though there is significant overlap in the personal relationships that connect them.

Joe Lisa, who handles guitar duties for the show, has been a consistent presence at Wag productions for years, serving as the show’s violinist for the Beatles and Christmas Spectaculars. For the Elvis Spectacular, Lisa moves from violin to both electric and acoustic guitar — an instrument better suited to the twang and the driving rhythm of early rock and roll. The transition speaks to Lisa’s versatility as a musician and his willingness to adapt his contribution to the specific demands of the repertoire.

Behind the drum kit is Vincent Livolsi, described by those who know his work as an award-winning drummer. Livolsi’s history with Ostering predates The Wag by a substantial period — the two were bandmates in Ostering’s first original band, alongside Ostering’s cousin Mike. The decision to bring Livolsi in for this particular show has a certain biographical logic: the musician who was present at the beginning of Ostering’s performing career is also present for a show about beginnings — the beginning of rock and roll, the beginning of the musical relationship Ostering shared with his father.

Backing vocals will come from two people whose presence gives the show an additional dimension of intimacy. Alicia Van Sant, a fellow Wag bandmate, brings the harmonic sophistication that Wag productions consistently feature and the vocal experience that a show with demanding backing vocal parts requires. Alongside her will be Tiffany Ostering-Dibble — Brian’s sister, who is making her stage debut at tonight’s performance. A sister stepping onto a stage for the first time at a show dedicated to a father’s memory carries a weight that no amount of production design can manufacture. It is the kind of detail that makes a tribute concert something more than a tribute concert.

Elvis Presley and the Meaning of the Early Years

The decision to title tonight’s show “The Early Years” is worth dwelling on for a moment, because it reflects something specific about what Brian Ostering is honoring and why that material in particular holds the place it does in the history of popular music.

Elvis Presley recorded his first commercial session at Sun Studio in Memphis on July 5, 1954 — the session that produced “That’s All Right,” a cover of an Arthur Crudup blues song that WHBQ disc jockey Dewey Phillips played fourteen times in a single evening after adding it to his rotation. The response generated phone calls from across Memphis asking who the singer was, and Elvis Presley became, overnight, a regional celebrity. Within two years he had signed with RCA, recorded “Heartbreak Hotel,” appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and established himself as the most controversial and commercially successful entertainer in the country.

What made those early recordings so important — and so permanent — was not primarily the vocal talent, though the talent was extraordinary. It was the synthesis: the combination of country music structure with rhythm and blues feel, the mix of emotional directness with physical energy, the sense that a specific performer had found a way to say something that resonated so broadly it effectively created a new category of popular music. “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Blue Suede Shoes” — these songs still work, more than seventy years after their release, because the fundamental energy in them is not a product of their era. It is simply good rock and roll, performed by someone who understood instinctively what rock and roll was supposed to feel like.

Brian Ostering’s father heard that in the music when it was new. He played it in his own bands. He passed that hearing on to his son. Tonight in Middletown, that son is going to perform it in front of a room full of people who, in one way or another, have their own relationship to those songs — and who may not know, watching Ostering on stage at the Middletown Arts Center, that what they are witnessing is a conversation between a musician and his father carried on through the medium of music that outlasted them both.

Attending Tonight’s Show

The Elvis Spectacular takes place tonight at the Middletown Arts Center, 36 Church Street, Middletown, New Jersey 07748. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. and the performance begins at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available at the door beginning at 6:00 p.m. or online through The Wag’s official website. The Middletown Arts Center is located adjacent to the Middletown train station, with parking accessible near the venue. This is a single performance with no announced plans for a return engagement in the immediate future — Ostering has indicated that the show may come back if scheduling aligns, but tonight’s performance is not the first stop on a recurring tour. It is a specific occasion, tied to a specific date, built around a specific set of memories that belong to a specific family. The audience that shows up tonight will be part of that occasion in a way that a second or third performance could not replicate.