President Peter Salovey is the leader of our university, the man we look to when things go wrong, the person we expect to hear from on a weekly basis (even if it is in the form of “Notes from Woodbridge Hall” that we don’t read anyway), and, in a weird way, Peter Salovey is also Yale’s kooky uncle. He’s that uncle who used to have a really cool mustache. He’s that uncle who is probably psychoanalyzing your social interactions at Thanksgiving dinner. And he’s that uncle in a bluegrass band.

This past Sunday, Uncle Salovey and his band played at Toad’s for the 40th anniversary of our favorite New Haven concert venue/nightclub/place where you got pink eye at a foam party. The aptly named “Professors of Bluegrass” (the band features several actual professors playing bluegrass music) took the stage amid applause. Uncle Sal stood tall in the back center gussied up in a suit jacket and slacks, twanging on his giant bass.

If you haven’t been to a Sunday night Toad’s concert featuring a bluegrass band that itself features the president of our university, you probably aren’t imagining the same Toad’s that I visited last weekend. On Sun., Jan. 25, 2014, for probably the first time since a church held its weekly service at the club (this actually happened), the hallowed institution exchanged the aromas of the Wednesday and Saturday-night dance floors with its ubiquitous DFMOs for hundreds of fold-up plastic chairs, arranged in a small horseshoe around the stage. The chairs, I imagine, are standard procedure for any event that attracts a crowd who flash their AARP cards at the door.

When I arrived at the concert, Salovey and the gang were already in the middle of a song. Unlike every other act that has played at Toad’s ever, the Professors start class on time. The show began sometime between 8:00 and 8:10 p.m. In a tune called “I Ain’t Broke But I’m Badly Bent” the Professors crooned, “I’m going to the back country, I can’t pay the rent.” As the woman in front of me enthusiastically waved her Bud Light Lime in the air, I couldn’t help but wonder if this had anything to do with the Professor Salovey’s really nice place up on Hillhouse.

Between songs, President Salovey channeled his professor side and gave short lectures to the crowd. Lecture topics included: honorary degrees, the inability to receive honorary degrees posthumously, dedications to “middle middle class parents,” and Bill Monroe (who is the father of bluegrass). And then the music would start up again, and Sal would thump that bass, standing between a steel guitar, a fiddle, a guitar, a banjo, and who knows how many Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorates.