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THE ROCHES AND THE CHOCOLATE WATCHBAND
Parallel universes
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Not often does one get to witness the reunion of a seminal ’60s garage band and a beloved folk trio on the same night. Following a long hiatus by Terre Roche, the Roches’ first local trio appearance in nearly a decade drew about a half house to the Somerville Theatre a week ago last Wednesday. But their personalities — serene Maggie, quietly intense Terre, outgoing Suzzy — mesh as charmingly as ever (brother David added bass and some vocals), and the vocal blend hasn’t dulled, as the intricate harmonies in "Hammond Song" and "Quitting Time" bore out. The show was also a chance to hear some of the Christmas material they once played every year in New York: the set-opening "We Three Kings" found the haunting beauty most singers miss, and the closing sing-along of "Silver Bells" avoided the familiar sticky sentiment to become more of what the songwriters intended: a love note to and from NYC. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe at Great Scott, the Chocolate Watchband were asking one of the most resonant questions of the late ’60s: "Are You Gonna Be There (At the Love-In?)" A cult-classic band who never had a proper hit single, the Watchband showed what happened when the tough garage guys crashed the psychedelic party: the above-mentioned song isn’t about spreading love vibes — it’s about getting laid. Ditto their other underground hit, "Let’s Talk About Girls," which professes love for the entire gender but singles out one type: "Girls who beg for more!" The current line-up includes only singer Dave Aguilar (lately a Harvard employee) and drummer Gary Andrijasevich from the ’60s. No matter, because the sound at Great Scott was fully vintage, with Eastern-droning guitar lines, warped blues riffing, and Aguilar doing as good a Jagger swagger as the real one does nowadays. The peaks came when the now clean-cut Aguilar rediscovered his teenage demons: on the Watchband’s first single, "Sweet Young Thing," he sang about catching his girl with another guy, and he sneered out the killer line "Hey, who’s that creep there touching your hair?" as if he weren’t yet over it.
BY BRETT MILANO
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