Black Lips at Turner Hall
The world’s greatest troglodyte party band behaves itself on a school night
CJ Foeckler
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There ought to be a law against having a Black Lips concert on a Sunday night. Better yet, you should be allowed to take a paid vacation the following Monday. (Not just to recover from the inevitable chemical headache, but also to prepare the numerous apology letters for people you beat up, pissed on, or propositioned.) But school nights are school nights, which might be why Black Lips were relatively well-behaved on Sunday at the Turner Hall Ballroom. Bassist Jared Swilley even took the time to announce that he was “not peeing on anybody." For a band that was recently kicked out of India and is barred from touring Canada, not publicly urinating on another person is akin to touring with The Jonas Brothers.
The audience was also reasonably tame; it emptied its beer cans before tossing them at the stage. The last time Black Lips played Turner Hall, the band’s sizeable area following “affectionately” pelted the band with half-full cans of Pabst.
Oh yeah, there was music, too. Live, Black Lips lose most of the Roky Erickson-inspired psychedelic derangement it exhibits on record, and instead kick out the jams like dyed-in-the-wool punk rockers. (Guitarist Ian Saint Pe looks a bit like Mick Jones of The Clash, but with gold-plated grills.) The stomping “Bad Kids” is Black Lips’ anthem—these guys are naughty, but in a sweet, mostly harmless way. Maybe they really are a bizarro world version of The Jonas Brothers—instead of doing bad pop songs for clean kids, they do really good pop songs for filthy potheads and booger-pickers.
The engagingly melodic “Starting Over” off the new 200 Million Thousand certainly sounds like a hit, and the crowd surged to its insistent bop like the song was an old favorite. But it was the material off the band’s 2005 benchmark Let It Bloom that drew the most enthusiastic response. Four years later, Black Lips still haven’t written songs as great as “Hippie, Hippie, Hoorah” and “Not A Problem,” but as long as the group remains the world’s greatest troglodyte party band onstage, it probably doesn’t matter.
The best thing about opener Gentlemen Jesse And His Men is its cool-looking guitars. The group also has good taste in late-’70s power pop: Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, and The Knack ring through loud and clear in their relentlessly peppy music. Unfortunately, regurgitating your record collection usually results in diminished returns, and Gentlemen Jesse’s set was essentially one long blah accented with the de rigueur “oos!” and “ahs!” The group was thoroughly outclassed by Milwaukee’s Goodnight Loving, which once again made a convincing case for being the city’s best pure rock ‘n’ roll band. Pared down to a quartet, Goodnight Loving was less cluttered and more immediate on meat-and-potatoes dance songs like “Drag,” sounding like Del Shannon jamming with Tom Petty and The Reigning Sound.
