The Saw Doctors: No Sex, No Drugs, Just Rock And Roll

Ireland's throwback '60-pop phenomenon, the Saw Doctors, have finally got themselves an American label (Paradigm); their first American release -- Sing a Powerful Song -- has just hit the stores, and they celebrated last Friday with a show at the Roxy, their third trip to America this year. True, the CD has no new material, being drawn entirely from their three Irish Shamtown releases: If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back, All the Way from Tuam, and Same Oul' Town (a new album is due out in April). And the show was scarcely different from the one they'd put on at the Roxy in April, or at McGann's in June. But the crowd that packed the Roxy didn't mind a bit. They were like a child who asks for the same bedtime story night after night.

What's the Saw Docs' secret? They conjure up a small-town innocence that post-Springsteen American bands can no longer lay claim to. The group formed in Galway City, but the songs focus on life in the market town of Tuam, just up the N17 motorway, where singers/songwriters/guitarists Davy Carton and Leo Moran grew up. "Same Oul' Town" and "Back to Tuam" encapsulate life in "a repressed, Catholic, conservative, small-town, agrarian, angst-ridden and showband-infested society." Translation: you have to get out, you have to go back.

"Presentation Boarder" and "Mercy Gates" convey the special pride of having a, uh, friend at one of the local Catholic girls' schools. "Wake Up Sleeping" shows that these guys also understand your girlfriend should be your best friend; in "I Hope You Meet Again," "Never Mind the Strangers," and "Best of Friends," best friends are more important than girlfriends. Even so, you get the sense that their narrators are fated to be alone. "Broke My Heart" describes what happened not when our hero lost his girl but when he was unmarked in the penalty area and a teammate didn't pass him the ball. "Music I Love" forsakes the discos for listening to CDs, by yourself, in your room. "N17," their biggest hit, finds them tooling down the motorway from Tuam to Galway, "travelling with just my thoughts and dreams."

All this is put across by a three-guitar front (Pearse Doherty is the bassist), with keyboards (Derek Murray also plays button accordion) and percussion (John Donnelly) backing up. Memorable tunes, memorable riffs (already the bass licks in "Wake Up Sleeping," "Exhilarating Sadness," and "To Win Just Once" are the stuff of legend), sturdy backbeat, lots of guitar. There was very little between-songs patter at the Roxy -- no need when your audience knows all your songs, even the ones that haven't yet been recorded, by heart. About half the two-hour set (with a mere five minutes of intermission) was drawn from the forthcoming album, and it showed the band still looking back, still looking around, with wry wit and glad-to-be-here feeling. "J.C.C.B." (for Joyce Country Céilí Band) details the doubtful joys of being a showband in the west of Ireland; "Tommy K" is for a favorite DJ; "Michael D" honors former Minister for the Arts Michael D. Higgins in its "We got Michael D rockin' in the Dáil [the Irish parliament] for us." (You'd never hear an American band pay tribute to the NEA.)

The crystalline clarity of the CDs got blurred a little by more impromptu jamming than I'd ever heard from this band. And the encore, "I Hope You Meet Again," their most grown-up ballad, didn't benefit from being turned into "Hey Jude." Still, you can't expect them to keep playing the same material straight.

As for Sing a Powerful Song, it's a generous selection, 17 tracks taken evenly from the Shamtown releases. There's no apparent logic or arc to the sequence, which ends with their first hit, "I Useta Lover." And it speaks for what the Saw Doctors accomplished on those Shamtown recordings that a lot of good songs didn't make the cut: the self-depreciating "That's What She Said Last Night," the local-reference-filled "Pied Piper" and "F.C.A.," even "I Hope You Meet Again," with its whiff of political reality. But what's really missing is a lyric sheet -- this is an Irish band, for crying out loud, from the country that gave us Yeats and Joyce. So Sing a Powerful Song will do, but if you can find the Irish releases, buy them. For the record, Macnas (in "Macnas Parade") are a Galway street-theater troupe (they graced Cambridge's St. Patrick's Day parade back in '95); the Gaelic refrain of "Share the Darkness" means "Darkness is descending/Come home with me, love"; and the last line of the chorus in "Hay Wrap" is "Get that wasp off my sandwich."

-- Jeffrey Gantz