The Ukulele Alphabet: Rebecca by Pat McGee Band

August 8, 2025

Letter P, Week 1
“Rebecca” by Pat McGee Band

This song might not be as familiar to you as some of my other choices for the Ukulele Alphabet — unless you went to college somewhere on the East Coast in the late ‘90s, in which case, the lyrics to this one might be like breathing.

Pat McGee Band was a FIXTURE at Bucknell during my four years there, playing House Party weekends to mob scene crowds in the backyard of the Phi Psi house every single spring and feeling as big as DMB to us. (I mean… not totally… we never had to camp out for tickets on a frigid January night for Pat like we did when Dave played a show at our performing arts center.)

I don’t know if we invented this nickname or if it was just in the ether, but we referred to the band as “Fratty McGee” because of their tendency to do this.

Our love for Pat McGee Band was so deep that my group of closest friends decided to spend Y2K with them at a New Year’s Eve show in Richmond, Virginia. Hey, if the world’s gonna end, why not be at a Pat McGee show, right?

One of my husband’s favorite stories of mine comes from this night, when I was so sloshed on cheap J. Roget sparkling wine by the end of the show that I went up to the hotel room alone and ate microwave mac and cheese with my hands rather than return to the lobby for a utensil.

My favorite story from the night is when I jumped up on stage and kissed the guitarist Al Walsh —on the cheek! nothing salacious! — after we safely made it into the new millennium.

If you ever were a fan of Pat McGee, you know that “Rebecca” is THE signature song. It’s the “Born to Run,” the “Hotel California,” the “All Too Well” of the band’s oeuvre. I once heard it on the radio in spring 2001 when I was tooling around the Chicago suburbs for some grad school journalism assignment and pretty much lost my shit.

And if this takes you back and you want a vintage Pat McGee live experience, I found the recordings of the exact concerts I saw at The Crowbar in State College during the spring of my senior year on February 15 and April 11, 2000. The internet archive is crazy good sometimes.