BENT NIGHTS: DOUBLE FEATURE
BENT NIGHTS Eli 'Paperboy' Reed; Bob Mould
At first glance, everything about Eli "Paperboy" Reed seems unlikely. Not only is he a youthful white soul singer from Boston, Mass., the home of ingrained blue-blooded racism, but the half-smile on his face on the cover of his major-label debut ( Come and Get It on Capitol Records ) almost invites mockery. Reed stands in front of a faux grocery-store shelf stocked with bottles of bleach and generic cans of "meat sauce" ( no, there's no information which identifies the specific meat or sauce ) dressed like an early 60's crooner ( yes, he has pinky rings on each little finger ) and what could be mistaken for a conservative pompadour. But what looks like subtle shtick, retro, or "authentic" is not what this man and his band, the True Loves, are about.
Reed is gutbucket soul with a side of fatback, heavy on the passion, light on the flash and without a speck of cereal—and none of that "Neo" stuff, either. Reed—who at an early age devoured his father's Stax and Atlantic '60s collection and then trained himself on Southern stages with the likes of Terry 'Big T." Williams and Sam Carr—wound up at the University of Chicago, where, along with his undergrad studies, he connected with Mitty Collier ( who had had a hit back in 1964 with " I Had a Talk with My Man" ) and pursued his love of obscure R&B sides and quality fried chicken.
The reality, of course, is that mere obsessive love and channeling of masters like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke won't cut it in a craft like soul music. Unlike pop or rock, soul, like the blues and country, is equal parts sincerity, heart and talent. So you could be forgiven if his look suggested another helping of the Blues Brothers or Bruce Willis' Bruno character. And though Reed's unlined face may make him look suspect the man delivers the goods; Come and Get It is all muscle, sweat and drive.
I was particularly floored by "Just Like Me" which has a syncopated beat that feels like a stalker on the prowl and actually builds with a coiled suspense. And though "Come and Get It" came across as over the top as a dialogue between the sexes, it still worked on it's own terms. Better still, Reed's recent SRO show at the Bottom Lounge put the new album and his other two full lengths ( Sings Walking and Talking and Other Smash Hits and Roll With You on Q Division Records ) into a bold relief. Hitting the stage in that silk suit and careening through a ferocious and boastful "The Satisfier," it was hard to tell where the show was headed. The True Loves were a hint, though; with all of them under 30 it was a turn on to see this fresh-faced bunch get down and dirty, ragged and punchy, and play with a genuine affection that made them the genuine article.
And Reed—who bears a resemblance to a young, saucy Mel Torme with class to spare and a ragged sex appeal—was up to the task. The new album's near-ballads, "Pick Your Battles" and "Time Will Tell," nearly upended this show because they had a warm finesse and gravity and they flew in the face of the funk/soul workouts that pervaded everything else. Never mind that the show was like a mash-up of a church revival, a late-night jam session at a Harlem hoochie joint and a frat party—whatever it was, it was a hell of a blowout. The impression that I got from Reed was that performing was the one thing that he loved doing and lived for ( which was obvious since he celebrated his 27th birthday at this gig ) and the joy and commitment kept projecting off the guy like a little kid who just got locked in a room full of new toys.
Bob Mould, on the other hand, is the last guy anyone could expect to be projecting joy with an ear-to-ear grin plastered on his face. The last that we'd heard from him was on last year's Life and Times ( Anti Records ) his second full band straight-up rock album since Body of Song back in 2005. Being that Mould's classics—either with Husker Du, Sugar, or in various incarnations of his solo career—were fueled by pain, rage, and/or despair, now that he's relatively happy it's hard to know what to expect from him anymore. "Stupid Now," the opener from 2008's District Line ( Anti Records ) with it's blunt refusal to negotiate a knarled romantic entanglement ( "Please listen to me...and don't disagree..." ) , may have been the Mould song that die hard fans had been waiting for to signal a return to fury but for my money Life and Times had enough regret, intentionally forgotten mistakes and memories, pain, and emotional conflict to satisfy the gap. Maybe he's not tortured anymore but on "MM17," as he seemingly departs either a dead end town or a dead end state of mind ( " ( Say ) goodbye to innocence/farewell to all your friends..." ) you're left to wonder why this guy is always on the go. For all of it's conflict ( "The Breach" ) , evasion ( "City Lights ( Days Go By ) ,""MM17" ) , and drama ( "I'm Sorry Baby, But you Can't Stand In My Light Anymore" ) Life and Times lacks despair or frayed emotions but you can't say it's a disappointment—only a different Bob Mould.
Standing in front of a sold-out crowd for a solo acoustic set at the The Old Town School of Folk Music while supporting a new live limited-edition cd and dvd ( Bob Mould Band Live at ATP2008 and Circle of Friends, both on Anti Records ) Mould got to clear the air and let his adoring public know what was really going on with him. Now happily living in San Francisco and finishing up an autobiography with scribe Micheal Azerrad, Mould seemed relaxed and positively benign. Never mind his gentle humor and laid-back conversational tone; none of that prevented him from ripping through classics like "Hardly Getting Over It," "Paralyzed," "Hoover Dam" or "See A Little Light." But if "Loud Bomb" as he used to be called seemed mellower he mentioned that writing an autobiography will do that to you. Now being forced to recount events from the past, Mould pointed out that hindsight forces one to see things objectively and one has to face up to one's own shitty behavior. His running joke was that he hoped everyone would come back and see him again even after they'd read about the naughtiness in his book. He needn't have feared public abandonment though; starting out his set on an acoustic guitar and chewing through the second half strapped into a stratocaster he kept rummaging through his 30-year discography which pointed up the reality that nobody in there right mind would expect a pleasant skip down memory lane with Mould at the top of the bill. The show's opener, "The Act We Act," made it clear that Mould hadn't exactly morphed into a cuddly play thing but with no Grant Hart to snip with, no aching abyss of agony and unfullfillment in the center of his heart, and a comfortable process of taking ownership of his past mistakes Mould seems to be moving into a phase as a wizened elder statesman. It's somewhat funny and actually ironic that a gay punker like Mould would evolve into the kind of happy-with-himself, fun, relaxed, engaged, creative individual that gay punkers used to rail against. But ain't life grand?
Comments? Drop a line at McBryde299@hotmail.com .
BENT NIGHTS
The Gay Blades;
The Tubes
Celebrated film critic Pauline Kael once said, "The movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we might as well stop going." The same could certainly be said about rock-and-roll trash, and now that we're barely into a new decade we're already up to our necks in the stuff. There are so many varieties to choose from that one could get lost in the thought of it; glam trash ( Semi-Precious Weapons ) , country trash ( Gretchen Wilson ) , trash rap ( Lil' Kim ) , top-40 pop trash ( Britney Spears ) , retro '70s disco-funk trash ( Foxy Shazam ) and, now, plain old juicy thrash trash in New York's The Gay Blades. This duo, guitarist Clark Westfield ( a.k.a. James Dean Wells ) and drummer Quinn English ( a.k.a. Puppy Mills ) , isn't even gay, having taken the group's name from a Lou Reed song, and that's a damn shame, too. There sophomore CD, Savages ( Triple Crown Records ) —for all of its rough edges, sloppiness and sonic punch—seems to be channeling a crack-addled drag queen who still has her wits about her.
Opening with a guitar blast reminiscent of Frank Zappa, Wells shrieked, "I'm gettin' while the gettin's good!!!" with such desperate abandon that it's impossible to doubt him. But if Wells' vocals are the aesthetic of pure trash ( sheer abandon coupled with a "throw-it-on-the-floor-f*ck-me-honey-then-get-on-out" attitude ) , then the music is a perfect shotgun wedding as a match-up. Stranger still is that Well's voice is a perfect contradiction in itself; he has a quavering arc in his tone that makes him sound genuinely sincere, hungry and needy all at the same time ( you could imagine him singing '60s love songs in some coffeehouse in Greenwich Village ) , which makes the oddball lyrics even more preposterous when they come out of his mouth. As if that weren't enough, Savages' songs seem to be about surviving the dog days of this millennium from the view of a third hand La-Z-Boy plopped out in the front lawn of a trailer park. On "Puppy Mills Presents," Wells runs down a list of options for making it to the next day in one piece ( "I could sell your body and you could sell mine/If only we could find somebody to buy..." ) while "Why Winter in Detroit" has a couplet that's chanted, "Because it's kill, kill, kill, or be killed/and it's drink drink drink drink 'til you've agreed to sell your car..." "Try to Understand" seems to put the Gay Blades and Savages in the correct perspective, though—the universe of the sitcom My Name Is Earl where an admitted f*ck-up tries to do the decent thing.
Of course, Wells and Mills, or rather Westfield and English, are too smart and witty for that. With all the bamma-lamma and gobs of slop thrown around on Savages the songs are immaculately constructed with all kinds of goofy asides left hanging out ( the Supremes-like "OOOOh-La-La"'s at the close of "Puppy Mills Presents" and that seemingly random voice at the close of the opener "Rock and Roll" burbling "...show some self-respect" ) .
At the recent show at the Beat Kitchen Wells, in tight nut-crunching black jeans and boots, was all about slinging his guitar, wiggling his ass and thundering through the set as if his probation officer was right outside the door. Fresh-faced Mike Abiuso, along on this tour on keys, was just as possessed with his hair flying every which way and his board violently tilting back and forth precariously. Mills was even funnier; with all this mayhem around him his playing was anchored and brutal but his face looked as if he had seen it all before. Onstage Savages got loopier which I could expect since the album sounds like it was made to be played in front of a live audience. And hearing "Why Can't I Grow A Beard?," the big ballad "Dog Day Afternoon," and "Robots Can F*ck Your Shit Up" from the debut Ghosts ( Triple Crown Records ) was the extra icing on the cake.
So are the Gay Blades serious? God I hope so.
For the Tubes—the '70s-era satirical/theatrical/rock band—to drop in for a Halloween bash sounds so appropriate that one could expect it. Never mind that the band hasn't recorded anything new since 1986 or that they are now basically an oldies act. Like Alice Cooper ( who admits it ) and KISS ( who won't ) , lead vocalist Fee Waldo Waybill knows it's all shtick, even though it was rich-and-creamy-cutting-edge-high-quality-satirical shtick for it's time. Where Cooper danced with a boa constrictor, fondled mannequins, raped, murdered and got beheaded for his crimes onstage, Waybill and the Tubes made fun out of lust ( "Don't Touch Me There," "Sushi Girl" ) , consumerism ( "I Want It All Now," "What Do You Want From Life?" ) , kink ( "Mondo Bondage" ) , the battle between the sexes ( "Attack of the 50 ft. Woman" ) , mating rituals ( "She's A Beauty," "La Vie en Fume" ) and whatever else they could point their attention at which was far from the punch line. Cooper did things on stage that no sane man would ever consider while the Tubes frolicked in things that everyone did whether they admitted it or not. And whether you saw yourself in the songs wasn't the point, either—the point was to laugh yourself silly.
Maybe at this stage it's not fair to say that this Halloween show had few surprises but that's really my own fault. Going to see the Tubes these days and expecting something different is like buying a box of Cracker Jacks and expecting to find a vintage Coupe de Ville as the surprise at the bottom of the box. Hitting the stage with the Tubes' traditional vintage tv theme song ( this time it was "I Love Lucy" ) the set pieces came fast and with as much jolliness and humor as Waybill could muster. "Tip Of My Tongue" benefitted from a playful sample of James Brown's "Sex Machine" but it still seemed to go on forever. Waybill performed "TV Is King" with a television monitor on his head, again. He also came out in a straw hat as the leering huckster from the video for "She's A Beauty," again. And for the finale he came out in the four-foot platform boots, fright wig, 12-inch dildo and assless mylar-silver outfit as drugged -up/pooned-out rocker Quay Lewd for "Boy Crazy" and "White Punks On Dope." Yet again.
When Waybill came out as a punk rocker with a fake mohawk for "I Was A Punk before You Were A Punk" the "GLAM SUCKS" scrawl on his Misfits muscle tee hinted that now that glam is stylish again that the Tubes were up to their old satirical tricks. Fat chance, but really the clowning was beside the point. Waybill is still a unique front man, equal parts entertainer, vocal technician and ripe ham. I doubt if anyone could curl the hook line of "She's A Beauty"—"...Now why would I lie?"—with his smirking tone and sound like the devil tricking a 6-year-old into selling his soul for a bag of marbles. What always killed, of course, was Roger Steen's incendiary guitar work, burning through "Don't Want to Wait Anymore"'s solo while turning what should have been a generic '80s power ballad into raging operatic art. Prairie Prince, one of the all-time great bashers in rock and roll, stole the show though. While sitting nonchalantly behind his drum kit in a pair of aviator glasses and a fedora with a deadpan expression chiseled on his face, his pounding rumbles kept upstaging Waybill's goofiness. Maybe the Tubes will never go down as the social satirists that they once were, but what they always will be is a killer rock-and-roll band.
Heads Up: For those "who just can't get enough," Samba Bamba will be playing a special 'holiday office'-flavored show at Martyr's Tuesday, Dec. 21. And for those who like there heavy metal with a tinge of lavender, Rob Halford will be playing the House of Blues Thursday, Dec. 9, presumably without Judas Priest.
Comments? Drop a line at McBryde299@hotmail.com or Andrew@WindyCityMediaGroup.com .
