Uh-oh, Robert Pollard and GbV are back!
continued from previous page
"God's Comic," "Every Day I Write the Book," "I
Want You," ''That Other Girl," ''The Angels Want
to Wear My Red Shoes" and "God Give Me
Strength." Then he picked up the acoustic and
played "Pump It Up." He closed the show with an
old pub song (?) for which he put down the guitar
and had all the amplification equipment turned off,
accompanied only by Steve Nieve's piano. It was
a bit hard to hear even from the fifth row, but it
was a brilliant moment all the same.
The inclusion of songs like "God's Comic"
and "I Want You" was enough to squelch my long­felt
disappointment for missing the singer's previ­ous
appearance in Louisville, when he and the
Attractions played at Memorial Auditorium in 1978
on the tour for "This Year's
Model ," the same tou r
which included his legend­ary
appearance on "Satur­day
Night Live," which was
reran on NBC-3 a few
weeks ago as part of their
over-night programming.
check it out: old SNLs run
at 3:00 a.m. on Sunday
mornings. You'll probably
want to set yc:>"ur VCR. No
need to end your night on
the town early just to tape a
tv show.
After the show a hand­ful
of us went to the Mag Bar
and got ripped to the gills
and shot sloppy pool for
hours. These are the good
old days, I said to myself,
or I _might have if I was in­clined
to take such an in­sightful
life inventory while
Modern Love Gets Weird
up at least once every couple of years, most of­ten
playing at the Phoenix Hill Tavern. Recently,
he's been playing with only a drummer in tow. The
pair made a unique appearance in the Farrelly
brothers' movie "There's Something About Mary,
and on Saturday, October 23rd, the team returned
to Louisville for a show at Headliners.
The show was supposed to start early, with
the local band Without Further Ado opening. A late
start truncated the Ado band's set, but few of
Richman's fans were disappointed to see them
leave the stage. They started off with technical
problems which were solved with a clever bit of
on-the-spot repatching of cords which created new
problems in the motitor mix, and the set didn't re­ally
start to come together until they kicked into
Jonathan Richman
has always put on a good
show. His local appear­ances
are rather legendary.
The first time he came here,
he played solo at
Tewligan's. There was a
concern that he might not
make the show as he hadn't
arrived by the time the
Uh-oh, Wink's back.
opener took the stage. He wasn't even there by
the time they finished their set, but twenty min­utes
later, as if on cue, he came charging through
the crowd with his guitar case in one hand and
his little practice amp in the other. The capacity
crowd (around 300 people) was treated to a
memorable performance.
Since then, the former Modern Lover's stops
in Louisville have become fairly regular, showing
8 • Burt's X-tra Gravy for Cats • December, ~ 999.
their last piece. At the same time, they had cho­sen
to challenge the audience by presenting their
most abrasive qualities. Joel was talking trash (as
always), but their rants came off a bit nastier than
usual. The last ten minutes of their thirty-some
allotment were sharp and tight and won them a
couple new fans among the folks I spoke to after­ward.
Jonathan's set was a strange complement
to the opener. Right off the bat, when he advised
the seated crowd to move down and stand near
the stage, he drew fire from some lame ass who
(in a horribly twisted and inappropriate effort to
tip the singer off that he was a fan) yelled out that
he didn't let his neighbors rule his life. This was,
Uh-oh, Dave Johnson's back
of course a reference to one of Richman's songs,
but there's an obvious difference between the spirit
of the song, and the singer's invitation to engage
a more intimate concert experience. The heckler
should have been smacked. Likewise, those mem­bers
of the audience that sat on their asses
through the entire set should be ashamed.
Those of us who approached the stage (for
at least part of the show) may have given Jonathan
a little bit of what he wanted, but his performance
seemed a bit tainted by what he must have taken
as an insult to his sensibilities. What I heard was
a set of meandering melodies; songs were merely
excerpted and grafted onto one another in snip­pets.
Some were played in their entirety. There
were several new songs and many old favorites
("Pablo Picasso," "Let Her Go Into the Darkness,"
"Velvet Underground"}, but the real treat of the
night was in watching and listening as Jonathan
had his way with the neck of his guitar. It was like
watching an elaborate balancing act; he would let
the melodies stray to the point where it seemed
that everything would fall apart only to catch an­other
groove. It was a strange but astonishing per­formance.
Richman's shows are always worth at­tending.
Guided by Old Farts
When the news came through that Guided
by Voices would be appearing at Headliners on
Wednesday, November 24th, the night before
Thanksgiving, we knew it would be a big show.
force behind the legendary pop band.
He used to guzzle beers one after another.
He used to jump and kick and move. Here, he
was relying almost exclusively on the microphone
swinging move he stole from Roger Daltrey. His
stage banter was characterized by a question to
the audience as to whether we had purchased a
copy of one of his more obscure solo aibums. I
think I was the only one in the room who was ac­tually
disappointed, however, as most of the
band's fans were grooving by the stage. Anum­ber
of detractors were standing further back swap­ping
slurs on the crowd and the band; the fans,
they said, were a bunch of masturbators who'd
never lost their virginity.
The band's songs are generally so simple
its hard to deny their hooks, but some of them,
like "Teenage FBI" (from their recent album, "Do
The Collapse"), have plenty of reasons to war­rant
admiration, clever changes, accessible lyr­ics.
Still, a number of the songs they played were
not nearly so fine, and I was left wondering why
they had been included in the set list.
The crowd alternately responded to the band
by pumping fists and jumping or by merely stand­ing
attentive (when they didn't recognize the
songs?}, but there wasn't any real excitement
moving through the crowd. Jon Cook and I played
with the idea of "going bowling," an activity where
we lock arms and throw ourselves into a crowd of
people in hopes of knocking a lot of people off
their feet, but we missed the chance. Later in the
set, my boredom got the best of me and I started
running through the crowd roughing things up. It
got kind of interesting, and I shot a lot of pictures
as I fell down, ran around and jumped up. Some
of the pictures may have come out as recogniz­able
images, but it wasn't really about the pictures,
I was just trying to get things stirred
up. I think it worked; I woke up with a
huge bruise on my back.
We make the news
A couple months ago, faced
with a fairly desperate need to pull
some money together in order to keep
this stupid fucking newspaper on its
legs, I had the brilliant idea to stage a
benefit. I had kissed ass on enough
bands, I thought, that I could probably
get some of them to play for free and
get you people to put some dollars in
my pocket to help pay for this paper
which, as you may have noticed, is
free to you otherwise (and still you
complain, you lame asses).
Uh-oh, Without Further Ado is back.
Headliners was the place,
and the bands were, in reverse order,
the Pennies, Glasspack, Without Fur­ther
Ado, the Stiffs, Lumen, all of which
were preceded by a set of experimen­tal
guitar exploration by Keenan
Lawler. I shouldn't have to explain fur­ther,
but it was an excellent show, one
of the finest I had attended all year,
especially for the Glasspack set
(Golly!) and the pleasant surprise of
Lumen (a band currently in search of
a new name-any ideas?). The Pen­nies
and the Without Further Ado
bands presented their material with
characteristic flair, and the Stiffs were
All our old friends would be visiting from out of
town, and all the goofy GbV fans would turn out
en masse. The fact thatThose Bastard Souls were
also on the bill probably didn't affect attendance
one way or the other, but that was the reason it
became a not-to-be-missed event for those of us
who had been clued in to their heartbreakingly
beautiful album, "Debt & Departure."
Still, we expected GbV t~put on a righteous
fireball of a performance. When they took the
stage, I was engrossed in a conversation in the
back side bar. I heard a number of familiar melo­dies
streaming through the bar and knew that I
would have to pay closer attention to part of the
show, but when I found my way to the stage area,
I was surprised by what came off as an unusually
an~mic performance by Bob Pollard, the main
a bit of a hoot, but the gist of the event was a cool
balance of many sounds, excellent performances
throughout.
Unfortunately, fewer than a hundred people
paid to see the show (I didn't crack a whip on the
band's guests lists), and most of the money went
to the bar. You want to know why this issue is
late? I was depressed.
Hell Freezes Over
Several years ago (before the Cherokee
closed!}, Wink O'Bannon swore that he would
never play with Bodeco ever again. He made a
bet on the matter to the tune of $50,000. We were
sure that he meant it. We actually believed that
he would never go back. Three years passed.
Bodeco went through three or four other guitar-