Against Me! at the Riv, Deerhoof at Metro, Zappa Plays Zappa at the Morse Theatre
Wes Giglio |
Against Me! at the Riviera Theater
Despite the relative intimacy of the Riviera and the hard-rocking, communal nature of Against Me!, the crowd Friday night was initially pretty unenthused. It's always a thankless task being an opening band, but little-known Irish punks Future Of The Left and Ted Leo & The Pharmacists played for a sparse audience and couldn't really get the crowd moving.
Despite the relative intimacy of the Riviera and the hard-rocking, communal nature of Against Me!, the crowd Friday night was initially pretty unenthused. It's always a thankless task being an opening band, but little-known Irish punks Future Of The Left and Ted Leo & The Pharmacists played for a sparse audience and couldn't really get the crowd moving.
Future Of The Left did what they could, calling for street fights and engaging in passive-aggressive name-calling: “Turn the lights on the balcony, cunts!” Ted Leo & The Pharmacists played a high-energy set, ripping through choice cuts back-to-back and debuting a new song, losing his voice in the process.
No, this was clearly an Against Me! crowd. So when the band took the stage a few minutes before 9 p.m. and nearly blew the speakers with “Cliché Guevara,” a blistering fan favorite from 2003's As The Eternal Cowboy, it was an early indicator that the show would hew closer to Against Me!'s folk-punk past than to last year's slick, Butch Vig-produced New Wave. The next few songs paid lip service to the latest release, including “White People For Peace,” a cut that highlights the brighter side of Against Me!'s evolving sensibilities. Unfortunately, it was followed by the too-catchy, simplistic “Stop,” arguably the only bad song in the band's catalog.
New Wave quickly receded as the band performed four songs from 2001's stellar Reinventing Axl Rose. Muscled-up classics “Pints Of Guinness Make You Strong,” “Those Anarcho Punks Are Mysterious,” “Walking Is Still Honest,” and the statement-of-principles title track brought the crowd to full voice, singing/screaming along with every strangled word. Raging dispatches from 2005's Searching For A Former Clarity underlined the potential reinvention unfolding on the nation's political stage, with merciless put-downs of Condoleezza Rice in “From Her Lips To God's Ears” and an apocalyptic vision of America in “Miami.”
The rest of the show, 19 songs in a hard-charging hour, emphasized Reinventing. For an encore, lead singer-songwriter Tom Gabel performed a solo rendition of a new song, possibly from his upcoming solo release Heart Burns, and the band returned for way-backers “The Disco Before The Breakdown,” “Sink, Florida, Sink!,” and “We Laugh At Danger And Break All The Rules.” While New Wave has been the victim of mostly unfair criticism, the emphasis on past recordings was more than welcome—excellence easily outweighs transcendence every time. The crowd left communion raw throated, sated, and a little taller.
Deerhoof at Metro
Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzakie knows how to seduce an audience, and the answer is simple: potato chips. She passed them around as her bandmates completed their sound check, and things just got better from there.
Deerhoof singer Satomi Matsuzakie knows how to seduce an audience, and the answer is simple: potato chips. She passed them around as her bandmates completed their sound check, and things just got better from there.
The band’s live performance gave their upbeat, oddly harmonious tracks new energy. Playing generously from the last month’s cohesive Offend Maggie, Deerhoof opened with “Snoopy Waves,” a rougher version of the song that primed the audience for a more forceful set. Matsuzakie’s voice oscillated between a crooner and robot, but her hooks blended effortlessly with the band. A few of the album’s more rollicking tracks, such as “Tears And Music Of Love,” felt sloppier than their recorded versions, but were perhaps more suited for a rock show.
If Saunier’s assessment of Metro as a “place Chicagoans should not take for granted” holds any truth, it wasn’t lost on Deerhoof’s audience, who bobbed heads and danced approvingly. Deerhoof’s four members also danced throughout—even drummer Greg Saunier, who moved his torso with the same urgency as his hands. They ended the show “Fresh Born,” which has spawned countless covers since the band posted the sheet music online and encouraged fans to perform their own version of it.
Here's the original:
Zappa Plays Zappa at the Morse Theatre
Frank Zappa fans are simultaneously the most and least demanding audiences in the world. They pride themselves on having ears too refined and finicky to tolerate any imperfection, and yet they're really very simple creatures, satisfied to see musicians play Zappa's impossibly demanding music at all. It is for these fans that Dweezil Zappa, eldest and most fleet-fingered son of Frank, hatched the Zappa Plays Zappa band, which brings a healthy combination of sick chops and inexhaustible energy to one of the most intimidating catalogues in all of rock music.
Dweezil's band has garnered virtually no attention, catering instead to the existing die-hards. And yet the players' considerable skill transforms it from what is—essentially a cover band—into something worthy of new Zappa fans as well. This is music first, and nostalgia a distant second.
Zappa Plays Zappa began its fall tour with a three-night run at the Morse Theatre, which is back from the dead after a nasty fire early this summer. The shiny new house was packed, though not nearly so packed as the stage; the eight-piece band—which included venerable soul singer and Zappa veteran Ray White—had little wiggle room. Keyboard player Aaron Arntz spent most of the show tucked behind a barricade of amplifiers and other musical paraphernalia. Rarely has anyone rocked so hard while moving so little.
Friday night's set progressed in chunks, book-ended with the beautiful melodies and unpredictable rhythms of “Camarillo Brillo” and “Peaches En Regalia,” then taking time to linger in selected eras of Zappa's lengthy career, from 1979's Joe's Garage and Sheik Yerbouti to 1972's Just Another Band From L.A. Whereas most bands would be content to evoke some cheap applause by shouting out the name of the town they're playing, Zappa Plays Zappa did one better by performing “The Illinois Enema Bandit.” Ray White, who sounded slightly unsure of himself on a few other tunes, was indistinguishable from his electric 1977 self on this one.
But the evening found its two featured pieces in “Billy The Mountain”—a mostly nonsensical, half-hour “movie for your ears” that had not been performed since the early '70s—and “King Kong,” which gave Dweezil the opportunity to conduct the band in an improvisational bacchanal worthy of his father's best. Both numbers garnered extended standing ovations (because these crowds are the sort that sit down), as well as a whole lot of mid-song applause and drunken cries of “Oh my God!”
It was hard to tell whether these fans—many bald or sporting salt-and-pepper beards—were cheering for the remarkable performance that they'd just seen, or because they'd just heard “Black Napkins” and “Inca Roads.” Either way, Zappa Plays Zappa has treated Chicago to three nights of challenging and beautiful music—so they can be forgiven for being a cover band, right?
Here's a bootleg video from YouTube taken their second night at the Morse Theatre:
