Break It Up (Rocket from the Crypt, Hard Rock Times Square)

There are right ways and wrong ways to quit a job.

You can take-it-and-shove-it, tell off your boss, enjoy a momentary, self-righteous huff of indignation... but that’s just a fart in the wind, a me-me-me stomp you’ll be dancing all by your lonesome.  Or:  You can throw a party.  Give notice.  Say a proper goodbye to everyone and share the elation that comes from the shedding of a skin.

This quitting thing, John Reis is getting pretty good at it.  The former-Pitchfork (band, not mag), former-Drive Like Jehu singer/guitarist helped retire his Hot Snakes earlier this year, and he returned to New York Friday night to put Rocket From the Crypt through its penultimate set.  The sixteen-year-old punk outfit plays its last show Halloween night in its home town of San Diego.

While everyone’s clearly wondering what the ex-ex-ex-ex-band member might do in the future, this show was about enjoying the moment.  August’s Hot Snakes finale was full-to-bursting with energy, but Reis’ partner Rick Froberg kept the band buried in its music; here, our host (he’s known as “Speedo,” in this band, though he introduced himself as “Skippy”) was magnanimous, talkative, involved.  And full of sage advice:  “Remember,” he told the packed house, “You’re just as capable of being full of shit as anyone else.”

His bandmates – the Notorious N.D. (guitar), Petey X (bass), Apollo Nine (sax/percussion/vocals), JC 2000 (trumpet/percussion/vocals) and Ruby Mars (drums) – came out done up as undead jungle natives and oom-pa-pa’d the intro to “I Put a Spell on You;”  Speedo entered, dressed as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and adopted the persona of a rubber snake-handling borscht-belt evangelist.  Calling for some of “the devil’s music,” he asked everyone to press their flesh together – their hands, that is – for the band that “invented rock and roll in 1991.”

“Give it up for the band, ladies and gentlemen.  They’re pretty good.”

They are, or were, and one wonders what the band’s legacy might be.  The SoCal punks’ rise in the early nineties coincided with both the then-poo-pooh’d pop-punk of NoCal Green Day and an unfortunate embrace of ska (Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Buck-O-Nine).  Critics can argue who fused what with what first, who made the most musically “important” contributions in what was essentially a revival; but what makes – sorry, made – RFTC a great band was the gusto with which it embraced its contradictions.  Lyrics about early graves and broken hearts bounced along gleefully, but not viciously.  Riffs were dark but fun, raw but tight.  The horns filled out and punctuated the sound without ever brightening it.  What made them great was just how much fun they managed to be without ever feeling frivolous.

While the announcement set off some steam, it can’t be too surprising the band is shutting down; it was a bigger shock that the still-improving, angular Snakes called it quits.  RFTC hasn’t released an album in three years, hasn’t properly toured since early 2003 (though they set down in NYC a little over a year ago for a one-off).

They came back this one last time to remind us how much we’d miss them:  Bounding through their show, veering away off their printed set list to squeeze out “On a Rope” (simply one of the best pogo songs ever, sing it:  “Onarope, onarope, got me hanging on a rope”).  Costumes were slowly discarded, and ditties like “Don’t Darlene” eventually gave way to the epic “Glazed.”  During that song, Speedo delivered an off-the-cuff, tongue-in-cheek sermon about the positive effects of steroids – they’re performance enhancers, and music is a performance enhancer, and this band is a performance enhancer, and... – before retreating to the back of the stage, falling to his knees, dumping a bottle of beer over his head and smashing it.  As he crawled away, a roadie did the old James Brown bit with the cloak, reviving him in time for the song’s Walrusian “Smokepotsmokepot everybody smoke pot” chant.

After the encore, Reis stayed out on stage, shaking hands and chatting with fans.  Hopefully he was taking suggestions for band names; he should be starting five or six new ones, soon enough.  But for now:  Give it up for the band, ladies and gentlemen.  They were pretty good. 

R.I.P., R.F.T.C.  Another of the good, dead ones.

(more photos at my Flickr account)

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Something I particularly loved about the band:  If you had the band’s name tattooed on your body, you were given free admission to every RFTC show.  That’s real appreciation for your dedicated fans...

...though what must’ve once seemed a guaranteed lifetime ticket is now just a nice tat.

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Why does every event put on by Little Steven have to be so damned fatiguing?  I like the guy, like his radio show – I’ll never forget the moment when, during an “All Things Monkee and Monkey” night, he played the song I’d been praying to hear (Rufus Thomas’ “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog?”) – but his live shows always seem to confuse exhaustive with exhausting.

His “Halloween a Go-Go” was the first official public concert to be held at the new Hard Rock Café in Times Square (Gang of Four played CMJ, there, an invitation-only gig) and it was a bit of a mess.  All Little Steven events are.  It’s like you have to head into these things with a compass and a week’s worth of hardtack:  Doors were listed as 8pm; three bands “and special guests” were on the bill.  Show ended at 3am.

The math ain’t pretty.

A line stretched up through the corporate entertainmo-plex and out onto 43rd street; video cameras ran up and down the line, exploiting our pain and suffering, perhaps for some DVD intro.  Doors finally opened at around nine, and the first band took the stage soon afterwards.

Though Little Steven had billed this as the Boss Martians’ “first appearance on planet Earth” (leading to conjecture that this might be a new Reis band), the Seattle four-piece has been around since 1995 and played last year’s Van Zandt-curated fest on Randall’s Island.  At first they seemed the right sort of opener for this sort of thing,  bringing agreeable, energetic, anonymous garage stuff (listen at their myspace page); somewhere during the middle of the set, though, things got thin and Get-Up-Kidsy.

One thing about the Martians made an impression:  Their lead singer, Evan Foster, has a classically ugly rock n’ roll face.  It’s fantastic, like one of those Bill Plympton cartoons in which, after someone gets punched in the nose, all their features get sucked into the center of their face and stick there.  It’s a mug that screams, “I couldn’t get laid, so I started a band.”  He should be the poster-boy for Garage Rock.

(Here, a la my collage of Jemina Pearl Abegg:)

Up next, after a long break, were our “special guests:”  It was Halloween, and ‘60s afterthoughts Richard and the Young Lions came dressed as a band that mattered, once.

The costume was unconvincing.

It didn’t help that the night’s host, “Handsome” Dick Manitoba, intro’d them by citing the building’s history:  Long ago, what is now a Hard Rock Café was the Paramount.  Sinatra played here, as did the Beatles.  Elvis premiered his first movie in this very room.  Yadda, yadda.  (Reis brilliantly upended this, later, citing the building’s most recent history... as a WWF theme restaurant.)  All that, and now... this?

There was little lionish about this band, they weren’t young, there wasn’t even a Richard (lead singer Howard “Richard” Tepp passed away last year).  We got treated to what was left.  One of those archaic my-dad’s-in-a-band bands best relegated to the back of a very noisy bar, they blandly filled out a looooong set with very little.

The only highlight was when they became a backing outfit for THE original Bobby “Boris” Pickett, who performed his 1962 hit (“Elvis Presley called it the ‘dumbest song ever written’”) for us.  That’s right:  He did the Mash.  He did the “Monster Mash.”  Fucking awesome... though he couldn’t get off stage fast enough.  Probably had a check to cash.

The penultimate act was Norwegian garage-punk-metal band Gluecifer (the Voice write-up, this week, wrongly mistook them for Georgian deaf-con duo Jucifer).  Announced as the last-ever show for these, er, “Kings of Røck,” it never felt less than awkward.  Yes, the band had its share of fans, there – someone with whom I spoke flew in from Texas just for them – and the guys on stage seemed to be having fun.  But the songs were largely unmemorable, and there’s just something odd about a band giving its final performance so far away from its fan base.  And as an opening act.  Without an encore.  Doughy lead singer Biff Malibu wasn’t even sure if their last couple records had been released in this country.

Malibu also apologized for not getting into the Halloween spirit; there is no such thing in Norway, he explained, the only holiday being “that darkest of days... December 21st.”  Whatever the hell that meant.

The band has a guitarist – “Captain Poon” – who looks a little like a leather-clad Jimmy Fallon.  So, this one’s for the ladies:

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...and for the guys?  Between acts, a loop of horror film clips were projected on a drop-down screen, Halloween-themed music filled the room (well, any song that even casually mentioned “blood” or “coffin” or such... even Tegan & Sara’s “Walking with a Ghost” got a spin), and a half-dozen dancers added their a-go-go on stage.

Those poor women spent more time up there than any of the bands.

As the night stretched on, so did the time between performers.  There was no explanation given to the crowd.  We watched the dancers go through their same six or seven moves sixty or seventy thousand times, and wondered if they were being punished for something.  Even the video clips seemed tired; Psycho and Night of the Living Dead passed on in favor of The Blob and It Conquered the World, which gave way to Barbarella and Batman:  The Movie (because... they’re wearing costumes, maybe?).  The audience got drunker and more impatient; some nimrod threw a cup at one of the dancers (and was rightly ejected).

It’s a further tribute to RFTC that when they took the stage – at 1:20 in the morning – they were able to summon any energy from the crowd.

Little Steven came out at the end of the show and promised more like it at this same venue.  He had better promise better line-ups, better organization, and a way to purchase tickets without extravagant Ticketbastard fees.

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The venue, for those who are wondering, is a bit odd.  The floor section is nice, about as wide as the Bowery, but about 1/3rd as deep.  Behind that, though, it’s a mess of short, narrow stairwells and tiered bits of standing room with odd sightlines.  The soundboard is squat in the middle of the place and takes up valuable real estate.  A real struggle to get from front to back.

No coat-check!  $4 bottled waters, $5.50 for a plastic cup of Bud.  Frighteningly clean bathroom, with attendant; that, in itself, sucks the rock out of the place.

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There's another write-up at Death of a Party, and more photos at DoaP's Flckr site.

tags: boss martians  richard and the young lions  monster mash  bobby boris pickett  little steven  gluecifer  rocket from the crypt  

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