You’re almost positive you’re being taken for a ride. Andrew W.K., in the same faded jeans and T-shirt he wears in the video for his breakthrough single, "Party Hard," is curled over his microphone in a hunched-shoulder stance that only the most committed grindcore screamers adopt, and his shriek sounds like what you ordinarily hear coming out of Anal Cunt frontman Seth Putnam’s piehole. To his left, a guitarist with frizzy hair and a manicured beard — at first glance, a dead ringer for Weird Al Yankovic — wears a Hawaiian shirt, blue shorts, black socks, and white sneakers. Farther left, a second guitarist sports black jeans tucked into new black boots. To the right, there’s a bald bassist with huge sideburns barking into a microphone, and a third guitarist who looks like a young Dave Mustaine. Below the drummer there’s a keyboard but no keyboardist: with the exception of a few wild solos by Andrew, the instrument plays itself, as keyboards are perfectly capable of doing these days.
By conventional standards, Andrew W.K.’s Friday-night show at the Paradise was terrible. The guitarists sang a lot and managed (barely) to cover for their frontman; a good bit of the trickier instrumentation from the meticulously arranged I Get Wet (Island/DefJam) was programmed into the keyboard; and almost every hard-rock cliché was invoked at least twice. Yet the effect was to render conventional standards null and void: after seeing Andrew W.K., I think I have an inkling of what audiences must have felt upon witnessing the Stooges in 1969. You had the distinct impression you were being put on, but the frontman’s awkward sincerity pushed past the ridiculous into the sublime.
Andrew looked less like a metal god than like a metal fan caught freaking out in his bedroom. Faced with an enigma as clumsily serious as Andrew, the band clowned it up, with the Weird Al one spewing self-consciously trite stage patter and the bassist dancing a pie-eyed running-in-place routine that was old when vaudeville guys did it. The audience came prepared for the possibility of farce but were hoping for something genuinely absurd — one young fan came with a hand-scrawled cardboard sign that read, "No, Seriously: Party!" And eventually they got what they wanted: a gnashing Casio-thrash "Get Ready To Die" and the hyperventilating dance tune "Party til You Puke" set stage divers flying. "We Want Fun" opened with Andrew’s delirious piano solo; the mammoth tune sounded like Slayer covering a medley of the Phil Spector Christmas album. By the end of it, Andrew was spent and nearly hoarse, but he knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it: the bassist humped the drumkit, Weird Al splayed on the floor turning circles on his back, and Andrew, beside himself, shouted "Fun! FUN! FUN! FUN!", as if he could will joy back into the universe just by uttering its name.
