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Robin Lane and Willie Alexander
Music that needs playing


King Crimson leader Robert Fripp once summed up his band’s on/off existence this way: "When the music needs playing, we come together and play it." The same thing could be said for Robin Lane and Willie Alexander, long-time local heroes who packed the Middle East on Saturday — Lane with a near-original Chartbusters line-up, Alexander with the original Boom Boom Band. Although both were major local figures in the late ’70s (and had made their recording debuts a good decade earlier), their sets on Saturday looked to the future as well as the past.

For Lane, it was simply a matter of staying true to her songwriting Muse. Since dissolving the Chartbusters two decades ago, she’s recorded with different bands and performed live without one. But she’s never found an outfit that fits her as well as this. Co-founder Asa Brebner and new member Pat Wallace do a two-guitar sound that combines lyrical phrases with underlying bite; it’s the perfect match for the tough love in Lane’s lyrics. The songs she wrote in her 20s have enough emotional complexity to be worth revisiting. For one, the chorus of her hit "When Things Go Wrong" registers love and exasperation, and her voice gets both across.

Although her set was heavy on ’70s material, Lane slipped in a few new numbers — notably "Longest Thinnest Thread," a ballad with Dylanesque word streams in the verses and a gorgeous falsetto hook in the chorus. And one of the ’70s songs, "In My World" (it was newly recorded for their Windjam album Piece of Mind), sounds more timely now. In its original incarnation it was a protest song without a specific target; on Saturday it was dedicated to George W. Bush.

By now it’s no shocker to see a middle-aged band who can still rock hard, but the impossibly youthful Willie Alexander is one of the few guys pushing 60 who can still get away with wearing make-up. Since his set opened with "At the Rat," you’d have expected the proceedings to be pure throwback, but that wasn’t the case. It turned out that Jim Harold, who owned that Kenmore Square landmark, was in the house, and the song was played in his honor. And unlike Willie’s reunion with the Boom Booms last June, this lengthy set (nearly 90 minutes) featured a large chunk of newer material, some of it reworked from his two ’90s albums with the jazzier Persistence of Memory Orchestra. The funk noir "Who Killed Diane" and "Oceans Condo" bore out the exploring Alexander has done over the past two decades; on Saturday his old band, especially monster guitarist Billy Loosigian, proved ready and willing to explore with him.

BY BRETT MILANO

Issue Date: February 20 - 27, 2003
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