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[Live & On Record]

THE BLAKE BABIES:
WHEN PIGS FLY

Over the past decade, it’s been pretty easy to forget about the Blake Babies. Even here in their home town. The band have been out of commission since 1991, when then bassist Juliana Hatfield embarked on a solo career that quickly overshadowed most of the Blake Babies’ accomplishments. And unlike a number of their contemporaries from the Boston post-punk underground, the trio of Hatfield, guitarist John Strohm, and Freda Love Smith (formerly Freda Love Boner) became a footnote in a story starring groups like the Pixies, Throwing Muses, and Evan Dando’s Lemonheads as alternative rock and grunge took center stage in the ’90s.

The current Blake Babies reunion tour, which kicked off at the Paradise last Friday on the heels of the March 6 release of the band’s outstanding new God Bless the Blake Babies (Zoe/Rounder), may not change the history books. But it certainly should raise some doubts in the mind of anyone who wrote the trio off as anything less than a major creative force in the scene that helped put Boston on the indie-rock map. Indeed, in retrospect, the Babies’ edgy brand of folkish, jangle-and-strum pop, coupled with their shy, innocent, and generally unassuming demeanor, provided a detailed blueprint for the softer, sensitive sound much of the indie world would embrace in reaction to the loud and angry grunge, punk, and metal of modern rock.

Sporting a four-piece line-up, with Hatfield sticking to the guitar she favors as a solo artist and new recruit Daniel Johnston (“Not the crazy guy from Texas,” Strohm pointed out by way of introduction, referring to the cult singer/songwriter of the same name) filling in on bass, the band offered a varied selection of songs old, new, borrowed, and blue. Highlights included a gorgeous reading of “Walk a Thin Line” from the Fleetwood Mac album Tusk, a rousing set-ending rendition of “Rain” from the Blake Babies’ 1989 Mammoth album Earwig, and a moving version of the gentle “Baby Gets High,” an old Madder Rose song included on God Bless the Blake Babies.

The relatively low-key, though not necessarily low-energy, backing of the Babies was always a good fit for Hatfield’s sweetly girlish voice, and it continues to inspire some of her most affecting vocal performances. She appeared more at ease and more radiant in her own demurely detached way than she has on stage in some time, and she seemed to enjoy playing a supporting role on the two occasions she ceded the spotlight to Strohm (for his new rocker “Picture Perfect” and his old countryish “Girl in a Box”). Love Smith, as always, beamed from behind her kit, especially after Strohm pointed out that the first “single” from God Bless, “Nothing Ever Happens,” was written by her. When he then asked the audience to urge a particular radio station to play the song, Hatfield sardonically quipped, “Yeah, that’ll happen when pigs fly . . . out of my ass.” True enough. But it wasn’t too long ago people were saying the same thing about a Blake Babies reunion.

BY MATT ASHARE

Issue Date: March 15 - March 21, 2001