Desert storm

Oasis need to give Liam Gallagher his pink slip

by Charles Taylor

Every once in a while you see a band on their way up who connect so directly with their audience, who communicate so clearly, whose lead singer is so charismatic and riveting, that the evening reminds you of why rock and roll ever mattered to you in the first place. I'm talking about the Sleater-Kinney show at the Middle East Café two Tuesdays back. But for those of you who couldn't get tickets to Sleater-Kinney, there was still Oasis last Friday night at the Centrum.

Although Oasis are, arguably, the biggest band in the world right now, the Centrum wasn't sold out. Scalpers outside were selling tickets at half-price, and last-minute ticket sales were probably not encouraged by lead singer Liam Gallagher's last-minute pre-US tour antics. (Gallagher, as you probably know, refused to board the plane to come to America, alternately citing a sore throat and the need to go house-hunting with his fiancée, actress Patsy Kensit.) That news must have created a sense of déjà vu among Boston fans who, last November, saw Gallagher exit the stage of the Orpheum mid set in a huff, leaving his brother, guitarist/songwriter Noel, to finish the show.

The strange thing about Liam's departure last fall was that the Orpheum show got much better after he left. Liam showed up at the Centrum on Friday and was even considerate enough to finish the set, but not a half-hour into it I was envying those folks in Chicago, the first stop on the tour, who got to see a Liam-less Oasis. By the time he left the stage for Noel's three-song acoustic set, I would have been happy to see him handed his walking papers.

Short of the titanic figures who come along and dominate our pop cultural life (Elvis, the Beatles, and, for fleeting moments, Michael Jackson and Madonna), it's hard to ask more of a mainstream pop band than that they produce listenable, well-crafted songs that have legs. There hasn't been a time in the last year when I haven't been happy to hear an Oasis song come over the radio. Going to see a band like that provides the thrill of entering into a shared pop moment, of joining the kind of community rock promises.

Live, Oasis are less exciting than their videos. Watching those beautifully shot and edited little widescreen films awash in color and mod trappings -- vertically striped shirts and round sunglasses -- is, for those of us who missed Swinging London the first time around, like waking up in the thrift shop of our dreams. On stage, the band (apart from the Brothers Gallagher, no member has a distinct personality) stand stock still, acknowledging neither one another nor the audience. Liam, the perfect mod fashion accessory, cranes his torso forward and sings upward into the mike, hands clasped behind his back. When not singing, he blandly checks out the girls in front, spits, wanders the stage aimlessly, or retires to the drum riser to drink beer. Between songs he occasionally sprouts impenetrable Mancunian gibberish into the mike. ("It's like reading Trainspotting," a friend said; at least that has a glossary.)

It wasn't that Oasis didn't sound terrific. They did. But bands who don't aim to smash the barriers between themselves and the audience by constant communication (as the Beatles did) need to make up for the reinforced distance with showmanship, and Oasis have none to fall back on. Which makes what happened during Noel's acoustic set all the more remarkable. I don't think it's too much to say that he held the audience rapt, and that takes some doing when you're just a guy sitting with an acoustic guitar in a hockey barn. And though I think a lot of Oasis fans might not want to admit this, they were responding because suddenly there was someone on stage with color and presence and warmth (and a much more expressive voice than Liam's sneering rock-star whine).

That feeling held throughout an electric, Liam-less "Don't Look Back in Anger." Liam rejoined for "Live Forever" (touching because it details the band's ambitions) and the closer, a stunning "I Am the Walrus." His vocals were a stone ripoff of Lennon's. The band's treatment, however, transformed what's as pure a studio creation as the Beatles ever did into a soaring piece of hard rock.

The most memorable moment, though, remained the acoustic "Wonderwall," especially when Noel sang, "There are many things that I would like to say to you/But I don't know how." I felt as if, for the first time, I were hearing the man who wrote (on "Live Forever"), "Maybe you're the same as me/We see things they never see" -- hearing someone trying to talk honestly to his audience, dreaming rather than boasting, hoping to navigate pop stardom with his music intact. Over the next few years, one of the best dramas pop may offer could be watching Noel Gallagher try to find and maintain the voice to say what he'd like to say to us.