I was feeling a bit under the weather, but I decided to hit The Evening Muse Thursday night for a rare duo appearance by Lou Ford’s Alan Edwards and his brother Chad. Soon, I was literally under the weather, as the skies opened up with such a fury I expected to see Noah picking up pairs of stray dogs, cats and rats in NoDa. Inside the warm confines of the Muse, I settled in with. . .what seemed to be nearly every other musician in town. Yes, an audience of one’s peers (Alan and Chad’s, mind you, not mine). Which translates into. . .not much take from the door. Unfazed, the brothers took to the stage without a set list, performing songs both old and new. Problem was, they had a hard time remembering them. The audience, which included folks like David Childers and the brothers’ Lou Ford bandmates, were more than happy to help, however, yelling out song titles the brothers had penned and temporarily forgotten, or, more often than not, hadn’t written at all (I requested the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”). Temporarily, both the performers and the audience would step outside to have a cigarette, even though the sky was still spraying sheets of rain. Inevitably, the conversations would come around to the subject of the Muse “really needing a damn awning.” Mind you, none of these same people seemed to warm to the idea that, I dunno, addiction might play a part in their clothes getting soaked. Back on stage, Alan Edwards said he had a few words to say before the last song of the evening, and launched into a monologue Lenny Bruce would have loved, ending with the idea (paraphrased here) that “I used to fucking hate everybody, but now I’ve come around to the idea that everybody’s a bastard.” Somewhere, Sam Peckinpah is smiling.Having been mullet-inclined in my younger days, I jumped at the chance to go see the band Battery at Amos’ SouthEnd on Saturday. The boys are a Metallica cover band, named after the incendiary first track on Master of Puppets. The crowd was a curious mix: the usual Carson Daly-haired frat types, the usual Carson Daly-haired-but-with-a-sparse-moustache wannabe frat types, and some guys with mullets and Metallica t-shirts. The band was instantly recognizable, as they walked in wearing all black, their arms taut with the kind of starved, cigarette-addicted musculature one sees in metal bands. They were led in by a strikingly tall blond in a black mini-dress who clutched a locked briefcase. The woman wore glasses, giving her that kind of faux-intelligent bimbo look that works so well for lady managers of WWF stars. Once the band took the stage, they were Metallica: the lead singer crouched and spit like James Hetfield, the guitarist subtly bobbed his hair in cascading waves while soloing, the whole band guzzled Jagermeister, and the drummer did a knock-up job of impersonating Lars Ulrich, though I never heard him say anything about Napster. On a few occasions, however, the band was not Metallica. For one, the bass player’s sound went out for a song or so, and he had a hell of a time getting it to work again. Were this Metallica, they would have had 10 new, tuned basses by the side of the stage. At another part, Faux-James executed a lick on his guitar, only to have the strap break on him. The band’s Bond Girl (think Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough) jumped into action, grabbing a roll of duct tape from behind the drum riser and affixing the offending strap with a wad of the silver tape. Most telling was the shock that coursed through my body whenever Faux-James spoke between songs. It wasn’t quite as jarring as say, Mike Tyson, but suffice it to say that the man’s voice rose several octaves when he wasn’t channeling the Metallica singer. One could squint and see the hulking frontman out in his high school’s smoking area a few years back, reeking of Oxy and Marlboro Lights. He may have had the last laugh, however. Seeing the women crowding around the stage at the end, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the band’s impersonation of Metallica didn’t stop when the amplifiers quit ringing.
This article appears in Aug 21-27, 2002.
