After the New Year's Eve scene in Billy Wilder's comedy film The Apartment ( 1960 ) , that particular holiday stopped being synonymous with joy and new beginnings, and it's all right there on Jack Lemmon's sour face. There he was all alone at a bar, knowing full well that his lecherous, philandering boss ( Fred MacMurray ) was having his way with his latest conquest ( Shirley MacLaine ) —Lemmon's true love—while everyone around him blew horns and ushered in the new year.
Wilder's comedy hurts so much because it's so real, especially in the gay community where NYE becomes an entirely different night of expectations at the bars. Whether it's meeting the love of your life, a spectacular lay or just a good time, the expectation tilts dramatically with the weight of that date. Maybe Lemmon's predicament is uncommon but the idea of being miserable within all that mirth has made New Year's some sort of fixed date for masochists, sour pusses and lonely hearts. Granted, the good ship Poseidon also had a "tilted" New Year's with far different results ( go ask Dick O'Day ) and being that I'm hardly a masochist, sour, or lonely my attitude was to focus on the festivities and chuck the baggage.
This year I started early by checking out a rare appearance by James Chance, a musician who breathed soul and jazz—none of that pussified, adult contemporary, smooth shit but hard bop, bruising funk and rude jazz—while fronting his killer band, The Contortions ( later James Black and the Whites ) . Though his repertoire seemed trendy ( the '80s infatuation with ska, lounge funk and reggae ) and he was a yank, he fit into the mindset of the British New Wave that extolled blunt aggressive hooks, clever lyrics, and dare devil musical performances that literally re-invented pop, rock and roll, and the three minute radio single.
Things got off to a promising start with DJ Ryan Weinstein spinning vintage '60s hard soul. ( Motown didn't pop up until a full two hours after I got there. And instead of that "OOOOO-Baby-Baby" stuff we got the early Miracles' "Mickey's Monkey" with Smokey Robinson sounding positively ragged. ) The soul climaxed with Little Richard's "The Girl Can't Help It" and Wilson Pickett's "Who's Making Love." ( If those two records don't get your putter up then you're probably dead. ) Against my better judgment I suddenly developed expectations for the night and The Beauty Bar's weirdness ( rows of retro hair dryers that resembled brain-cooking contraptions used by the Daleks on Doctor Who and a wall full of portraits of '50s beauties who had presumably been done up at the shop with cheesy bleached smiles and complicated bouffants that indicated that they were either Coneheads or Stepford Wives ) and the crowd ( a jolly nerd-hipster mix of spiffy geeks, fetching club kids, and barely legal gay grunge boys ) keyed me up for Chance's big entrance.
When he did appear—resplendent in a white dinner jacket, raven black coif, and a starched black bow tie—wailing with abrasive attitude on his alto sax, stabbing his keyboard and singing/growling/shrieking/who-knows-what while backed by Weinstein's turntable, it dawned on me that this was probably one of the oddest gigs that I had seen yet. Granted, some members of the audience were disappointed because the "show" amounted to glorified karaoke, with Chance wandering around the bar like a funked-up pied piper skronking his heart out on that sax. But the truth was, between Chance's soul man growls, his fancy footwork and the dancing crowd everyone did seem to have a good time.
As I mentioned in last week's column, the pairing of Mucca Pazza and SSION made no sense to me, especially after the latter's front man, Cody Critchloe, hit the stage thoroughly hammered. That SSION was off the rails, delirious and far better for it made it harder for Pazza to follow or top ... but they did anyway. Marching right through the audience onto the stage just before midnight they got goofy but quick, all thirty of them. As a "punk-circus-marching brass band" Mucca Pazza is something of an event that tweaks convention ( the stiff regimented idea of brass bands ) and motive ( to inspire and encourage audiences ) and turns all that on it's ear. Who cared what they played—this was performance art, high comedy, spontaneous clowning and choreographed lunacy done right. Yes, there were human pyramids, brass-band marches, European-flavored violin solos, cheers from a glee squad and happy smirks all around. What Pazza seems to be about is wordless comedy, with the jokes all in the mugging, music, and blocking and yes, when it was all over it made perfect sense to me.
A rare performance New Year's Day with Chicago's Hot Machines offered an appetizer of things to come in an unexpected way. Hot Machines could be tagged a local "supergroup," with Ms. Alex White ( of White Mystery on rhythm guitar and vocals ) , Jered Gummere ( of The Ponys on lead guitar and vocals ) and Matt Williams ( of Lover! on drums ) but the term smacks of calculation. Hot Machines is anything but and the vibe I got from this show was of a trio of great friends doing what they love together for the sheer joy of it. The word is that they've been in Gummere's studio working on a proper debut for the summer and that's a great thing.
What we got at the Empty Bottle was a melding of familiar sounds, mixed, diced and served up like a slightly familiar but altogether exotic pate. Williams' drumming was all soggy thudding thunder but with White's spiraling guitar drones overlaid and Gummere's enveloping bark of a growl shot through with feedback they came on like a tsunami of shrieking sweet noise. "Microphone" and "Copping A Feel," though parts of which sounded like snippets of White, Gummere, and Williams from other places, had the freshness and drive of an unheard new group rather than pros who have been around for ages. Summer of 2011 looks better and better already...
For the life of me I can't fathom why a reasonably attractive young man would put on a soiled tatty rabbit mask and flounce around onstage in his undies. But that's exactly what Justin Champlin, or rather his alter ego No Bunny, did at his SRO show on New Year's Day. His just released sophomore cd, First Blood ( Goner Records ) didn't explain any of that either.
As I mentioned in a previous column on New York's The Gay Blades, trash rock is definitely in, and No Bunny seems to represent the West Coast school which is by far nuttier, sloppier, and much more vulgar by degrees ( If the home made rough painting on the cover doesn't convince you the cd jackets inner sleeve certainly will; No Bunny, dolled up in shirt and slacks, on all fours, and about to wipe up a puddle of blood. The word 'subtlty' is obviously not in this guy's vocabulary... ) . Regardless of the soiled undies, oddball psychology ( like, 'dude, what's with the mask?' ) and gutter-slut trashiness for the raging hell of it, First Blood is a delirious charmer crammed with irresistible pop smarts ( think of the early '70s Brit-glam-pop band The Sweet ) , throw-it-on-the-floor attitude ( vintage Mott the Hoople from the same era and locale ) and satirical intelligence ( with the label on the CD an almost exact replica of Columbia Records album-label design from long ago and far away ) . Champlin may insist that he be taken at face value but there's a lot more going on here than he'll admit to letting on.
"Ain't It A Shame" is the kind of devil-may-care opener that sets the tone for the album and you have to laugh at No Bunny's head-first attack. ( He produced and played mostly everything on it. ) A straight-up raver about a lover who flat out won't be good to his girl, stay home and behave, tell her he loves her, or act like he's sorry for the grief he's causing which is flippant and tossed off like a dirty joke makes it hard to take him seriously on any level. "Live It Up" and "Motorhead With Me" are the classics here; as rambunctious as any rock and roll that's come out of Detroit with ragged chunky guitar riffs reminiscent of The Crystals' "And Then He Kissed Me," of all sources.
The show, on the other hand, was insane before he set foot onstage. ( No, there was no striptease; Mr. Bunny was barefoot and pants-less by the second song. ) He grabbed his privates, rolled on the floor, bounced like a Super Ball shot out of a high-pressure hose and leered-mugged as if the fate of the Western Hemisphere depended on it. It surprised me to find out that this and his opening slot for Big Freedia the night before were the only gigs on this mini-tour but it really shouldn't have; the show had the same sloppy glee that the album has and if it was "rehearsed,"'tightened up,""choreographed," or "more restrained" it wouldn't be No Bunny. It made perfect sense that his encore was a cover of Big Freedia's "Azz Everywhere" since ... oh never mind.
Corrections and omissions from last week's column: SSION is pronounced "shun" as in "obsession," not "sheen." The band Out of Our Minds' correct name is Outer Minds. And in my 2010 wrap-up I somehow excluded Teddy Pendergrass ( soul legend/sex stud and wheelchair-bound gospel singer ) from the RIP section. Sorry, Teddy...
