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Out
The days after
BY WILL SPITZ
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It was Wednesday, the Night After. At ZuZu in Central Square, Stephen Brodsky — whose spacecore, prog-metal band Cave In had just finished a wild tour with their good friends Converge — did his best to distract us, and himself, with his solo-acoustic "Beatles ripoffs" (his description, not mine). During one interlude, he likened the feeling behind the song he was about to play — "like the universe is coming down" — to the way he felt upon hearing the election results. But like a lot of bummed-out Bostonians at bars and clubs last week, he found the thought too painful. "Let’s not talk about that," he murmured and then played on. The mood at ZuZu the following night was even damper, thanks to a pouring rain that splashed against the restaurant’s picture windows and created a melancholy backdrop for the Bee Gentles, a Bee Gees tribute band fixated on the Brothers Gibb’s esoteric psychedelic years. Like most fans of the Bee Gees’ early work, singer/guitarist Raymond Morin and his accordion-slinging, ivory-tickling, honey-voiced bandmate/girlfriend/business partner, Minette Vaccariello, are serious about their love for the group’s first four albums, which have been overshadowed by their later disco hits. Some years ago, Morin found a copy of Horizontal at a thrift store in Kansas City and got hooked. ("I always thought that it was really interesting that these guys were so prolific," he wrote later in an e-mail, "and the songs from that era really measured up well against other favorites like the Beatles, the Zombies, and Love.") Morin has another band called Pickax; Vaccariello plays in a synth-pop band called Mane. The two also make one-of-a-kind shoulder bags that are available at www.ray-minshoulderware.com. At ZuZu, Morin paused between almost every song, alternately praising his heroes and providing historical tidbits about them. But like Brodsky the night before, he couldn’t avoid bringing up what everyone was trying not to think about. "It’s the shittiest night of the shittiest week in a long time," he lamented. Someone in the crowd attempted to lighten the mood with a "Go Sox!" "That was last week, bro’," Morin sighed. Upstairs at the Middle East on Sunday night, as a prelude to the second of Karate’s two CD-release parties, Helms’s Sean McCarthy shared with the audience a joke he’d told some weeks earlier at a show in New York. "What’s better than Christopher Reeve?" No one knew. "Christopher Walken." Worse, McCarthy related, the day after he told the joke the first time, Reeve died. Now intoxicated with the idea that he’s been blessed with the power of killer jokes, McCarthy decided to tell a couple of new ones. "What’s better than George Bush? The burning Bush." And "What’s better than Dick Cheney? Dick Pussy." The following day, alas, they lived, and four more years of dread loomed like a spoiled tune you couldn’t get out of your head. (Will Spitz can be reached at wspitz[a]phx.com)
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