Alien lanes

The Milky Way and the Residents

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

It's official: the first person to bowl at the newly christened Milky Way Lounge & Lanes was Peter Wolf, who showed up toward the end of the club's pre-opening party last Wednesday, set up his own pins, and proceeded to roll a few frames. And that has to bode well for the Jamaica Plain hotspot (403 Centre Street), which has its official opening tonight (Thursday). Unless you count the Brendan Behan (the informal pub/music spot just across the street), this is the first time JP has had a full-time music club since the closing of Green Street Station -- the place where Nirvana opened for the Cheater Slicks in 1991. And it's the first time Boston's ever had a spot where one can bowl, have a beer, and catch a band at the same time. True, you'd have to do a lot of running back and forth, since a state law prohibits booze and bowling in the same room. But with a rock stage visible from three candlepin lanes, and the whole place done up in like a space-age vision from an old Jetsons episode, the Milky Way looks like an amusement park for grown-ups.

"I see this place as a destination -- a place where you can eat, have some physical activity, drink, and see a band," notes Lilli Dennison, the local-scene legend who's booking the new club. Although her background goes deep into local rock -- she booked Charlie's Tap in Somerville for seven years and worked a long spell at the Rat before that -- she and owner Kathie Mainzer (who also runs the upstairs restaurant, Bella Luna) are looking for this to be more of an all-purpose community center.

"JP is such a vibrant community, with so many artists and musicians living here, but we're always having to trek into Cambridge," Mainzer notes. The starving-artist circuit will likely be attracted by a pizza buffet the Milky Way has planned for Sundays (all you can eat for five bucks). And Dennison is aiming to book a diverse roster of bands, including some world and Latin music to alternate with the rock. There will also be a series of Milky Way theme nights -- gay night, fashion shows, women's night, musicians' bowling league -- to help reflect the diversity of the Jamaica Plain community.

Meanwhile, Dennison is calling in her Charlie's Tap connections to get things rolling. Headlining tonight's opening will be country funsters the Wheelers & Dealers -- Dennison's good-luck band because they played the opening of the Monday-night music series at Charlie's Tap and have done all of its annual anniversaries. Coming up are more familiar faces from the Charlie's Tap circuit, including the Upper Crust (who played their first gig at Charlie's) on April 9, the pop-rockin' Sterlings on the 20th, and local country dude Tom Leach on the 22nd. And two prominent bands are already set for CD-release parties: Fuzzy on April 30, and the Ray Corvair Trio on May 14. Local fixture Brother Cleve will be spinning his collection of vintage lounge and exotica discs on Sunday night. Dennison's hand (as well as her handwriting) is evident even in the club's jukebox, which features a mix of old-school Boston singles (the Turbines, Mission of Burma), '60s pop and soul, and '70s punk, as well as Tom Jones's immortal "Love Me Tonight," which has seemingly been in every jukebox she's ever programmed.

"So far I'm just calling up all my friends to play," she says. "But I'll also be getting a younger assistant to book shows, since I'm not completely up on my young bands."

To look at the Milky Way's décor, you'd think it had been lying there untouched since the late '50s. But it didn't look this interesting before the recent renovation, and Mainzer has the photos to prove it. The current bar is built over three of the original bowling lanes, and the bar itself was sculpted out of old ball returns. Flanking the pool table are a couple of couches and easychairs that could have come from Ozzie & Harriet's living room. There's even a working flying saucer, one of those amusement-park rides; it vibrates you back and forth near the bowling lanes -- which will probably make for fun watching once the hard-drinking crowd gets hold of it.

"We're not sure how old it is, but it's a flying saucer, and that's what's important to us," Dennison says. "Since Bella Luna's upstairs, we wanted to continue the celestial theme down here," adds Mainzer. "But we didn't want it to be cold-spacy. We wanted fun-spacy."

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The Residents, who begin a national tour this week with a three-night stand at the new Copley Theatre (April 1 through 3), have told some twisted stories in their time, but the material on their new album Wormwood (ESD) marks a new extreme: there are songs here about a woman dancing with a severed head, a man eating bread baked out of dung, and a mother slicing open her son's penis. The West Coast avant-gardists took it all from literary sources, and perhaps it's a good thing that the author of these sordid tales wrote only one book before disappearing. The name of that book? The Bible.

"The Residents actually like the Bible," explains Homer Flynn, part of the Cryptic Corporation, who manage, produce, and speak for the anonymous group. "They all grew up in a heavy Bible Belt environment, so this was like going back and facing stuff from their childhood and adolescence. The Residents like strange and dark stories, and this time they had no shortage. The question for them is, why have we kept this book around for 2000 years, and what does that say about our culture? It's not meant to be anti-religion, or even anti-right-wing, but in our culture, the right wing has been holding the Bible hostage. Then you read it and it's really pretty cool."

The Residents' Wormwood show, built around the album and new supplemental material, is getting its world premiere at the Copley Theatre. Whereas previous Residents tours relied on sequencing and programming, this will be the group's first drums-and-all live-band tour. Six disguised people will be on stage, so it will be impossible to tell who the "real" Residents are. And though the bandmembers keep their identities secret, it's widely assumed that Flynn and his Cryptic partner Hardy Fox are the group. What's fairly certain is that the Residents, originally a quartet, have been a duo with outside help since 1982's Mole Show tour, when the other two members of the Cryptic Corporation (Jay Clem and John Kennedy) jumped ship. To scotch a longstanding rumor, I'll say that the departed members were not Penn & Teller, though both have collaborated with the band. So have other people who weren't identified (Todd Rundgren sang three songs on 1996's Gingerbread Man album, though his voice was sufficiently bent out of shape).

When pressed for details, Flynn answers, "Basically, the Residents' response is to just deny everything and move forward. It's ultimately the same as asking about Santa Claus, or what a magician's trick is." As for whether the group has the same membership as it did pre-1982, he says, "People ask me that, and I can only say that the creative core of the Residents is exactly the same."

In any case, Flynn comes across like the very last thing you'd expect a Resident to be: a laid-back, middle-aged dude from Louisiana speaking with a comfortable Southern drawl. Asked about the 1977 album Third Reich'n'Roll -- a nasty mutation of '60s rock tunes wrapped in a cover showing Dick Clark as Hitler -- he becomes downright fatherly. "The Residents have always had a love/hate relationship with popular culture. Some of that satire was vicious, but it was affectionate, too."

Projects like Wormwood and Third Reich aren't about to endear the Residents to a mainstream audience -- even after 25 years they never followed fellow cultural terrorists Frank Zappa and Devo into widespread acceptance. So it was a surprise to see them turn up recently in a promotion for Apple Computers, with Hardy Fox being interviewed as part of the "Think Different" campaign. "The Residents have no problem with that," says Flynn. "From their point of view, it's more a risk for Apple. The Residents have used their computers for 10 or 12 years now. But they don't get a lot of interest in endorsements, because they're not safe enough."

LOTHARS ON eBAY

The local three-theremin band the Lothars had a laugh recently when they checked into the on-line auction site eBay and found their own album Meet the Lothars up for sale. A fanzine editor from Hollywood had decided to auction off her promo copy of the CD, not quite accurately describing it as "experimental, psychedelic sounds with a Velvet Underground feel." Bidding started at three bucks, but someone finally snagged it for $20.50 -- about twice what he'd have paid if he'd ordered it from the band.

COMING UP

Celtic chanteuse Mary Jane Lamond is at Johnny D's tonight (Thursday), Barrence Whitfield and his new Savages are at T.T. the Bear's Place, the Tarbox Ramblers are at the House of Blues, the Grits are at the Plough & Stars, and Dennis Brennan's side band the White Owls are at Toad with Skeggie Kendall's Tuffskins . . . Avant-pop heroes Olivia Tremor Control are at the Middle East tomorrow (Friday). Speedball Baby are at T.T.'s, Stand Up Eight are at Bill's Bar, and Kid Bangham plays the House of Blues . . . The Shods and the Pills share a bill at T.T.'s Saturday, Sam Prekop headlines the Middle East, Rick Berlin, Johnny Black, and the Finch Family are all at the Linwood, Love & Rockets return to Avalon, and Memphis jazzmen Hank Crawford & Jimmy McGriff are at the House of Blues . . . Vanilla Ice hits the Middle East Sunday night; Imperial Teen and Boy Wonder are at T.T.'s . . . Cockeyed Ghost and Jumprope are at Charlie's Tap Monday . . . Slide's accordionist Suzi Lee is the guest at Skeeter Johnson's revue Tuesday at the Lizard Lounge . . . Hot Tuna guy Jorma Kaukonen brings an electric trio to the House of Blues Wednesday; New Orleans funk-jammers Galactic are at the Paradise, and songwriter John Wesley Harding plays T.T.'s, with strong support from Chris Colbourn and Buttercup.