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MERE MORTALS
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It was never supposed to come to this. Anti-American Shiite uprisings in Iraq, huge federal budget deficits, women undergoing plastic surgery for sport on TV, and Urge Overkill playing a Tuesday night at the Hard Rock Café for 25 paying customers. You kids might not remember this — hell, I probably wouldn’t remember myself if Courtney Love and the Darkness hadn’t both copped the riff from "Saturation" on their respective new albums — but back before hanging chads in Florida and the latest wave of Spanish bombs, a little punk band from Chicago reinvented themselves as rock-and-roll superheroes and set out to save the world from the black plague of whiny angst-ridden grunge. They dressed the part, with swank matching suits, long golden ’70s rock locks, and brassy UO medallions hanging from their skinny necks. And they wrote an album brimming with all the old arena-rock cheap tricks: big, bold, brawny rock guitars with hooks, solos, and all that other good stuff; sing-along choruses that didn’t mean much but sounded great; and tongue-in-cheek, we-don’t-give-a-shit attitude that thumbed its nose at dressed-down, smarter-than-thou indie rock. But somewhere along the way, Nash "National" Kato, "Eddie" King Roeser, and Blackie Onassis lost it, and the plot of their supersonic storybook took a turn for the bleak. They followed up 1993’s Saturation (Geffen), an album sporting an unimpeachably anthemic single in "Sister Havana," with 1995’s Exit the Dragon (Geffen), a downer that dropped all kinds of ominous hints about the band’s well-being. By no means a bad album, it told serious Stonesy tales of drug addiction ("I’m asleep when I’m awake/Can’t get a break," from "The Break"), desolation ("This is nowhere to be," from "This Is No Place"), and desperation ("I’m choking on the silence and I want to scream out," from "I Need Some Air"). Perhaps they started believing their own hype. Or perhaps they just fell in with the wrong crowd. I mean, check out this lyric from the morose "The Mistake": "Traveling ’cross the USA/It’s hard sometimes to keep it together/Nothing but the songs that you play/And a couple kids believe in your sound." Those are not the sentiments of men who can outrace speeding bullets or leap tall buildings in a single bound. Cut to 2004. Plagued by rumors of coke-snorting junkiedom, the merely mortal Kato and Roeser re-form UO without Blackie and embark on a tour of Hard Rock Cafés. "Are you here for the show or for dinner?" a bouncer asks a guy at the door before openers Bloom’s set in Boston. "I’m just here for some souvenirs." Florida’s Bloom, it seems, are charged with clearing the room of its diners for Urge. They succeed good-naturedly, the bassist/singer joking with the families seated in front that "this" is why you shouldn’t let your kids play in bands. "Have you tried the Pete Townshend?" he quips. "It’s on the kids’ menu." When Urge finally arrive — with an anonymous bassist and a dreadlocked drummer — they’re met with cries of "Where’s Blackie?" No answer. Instead, they plow through a selection of some old faves, including a passable "Bottle of Fur" and a fairly emotional "The Break." Blackie’s busy beats are sorely missed — his hapless replacement has trouble finding the groove. But by the set’s end, Kato and Roeser have 15 of the 25 who paid on their feet. With a little urging from former SSD frontman Spinga, sufficient applause is generated to justify an encore. Kato takes his shirt off as they offer to play some hits — "Crack Baby," Neil Diamond’s "Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon," "Sister Havana." For a moment, the old magic is back. But as the last chorus of "Sister Havana" fades into the sound of 30 hands clapping in a room built for 300, it’s hard to shake the sad sense that Urge Overkill were built for something better.
BY MATT ASHARE
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