Oh how cruel is fate to tease us thusly! Imagine that you haven't tasted really good food for a good long while. You get a bunch of your friends together because you hear that there's a great restaurant having some kind of event: the chef has prepared a special menu. There was a particularly good catch of striped bass that day, and the farmer's market had KILLER heirloom tomatoes. You go to the restaurant with your friends, and it's just amazing. Multiple, serial food orgasms, taste explosions: you've rarely had a dinner this fine, the flavors so complicated, so exquisite. Then the chef comes out and tells you that he's quitting the game, that there's been a tomato blight, and that stripers have gone extinct.
Overstatement? It's what we do here. But how brutish to see The Undisputed Heavyweights' final show, having never seen them before. How nasty, how poor(e). Luckily, with four of Family Records' finest artists on the bill for the night, Tuesday night's concert at the Bowery Ballroom was certainly not short.
Now, technically, The Undisputed Heavyweights were co-headlining the show with Mike Grubbs's really, really, really, really well-liked Wakey!Wakey! However, as Casey Shea noted, The Heavyweights played last. QED, motherfuckers (I paraphrase Casey).
It was truly an honor to catch the final Undisputed Heavyweights show. Their weirdly awesome mix of lounge and funk and James-Brown-y stylings are going to be sorely, sorely missed. Casey Shea's energy and freneticism provide a totally pleasing visual and aural assault, particularly when compared to the complete cool of Wes (guitar) and Jeff (um, also guitar) and the rest of the crew. They deserved every single pair of cutie-pie panties thrown on the stage, and even some of the more frightening grannie-type undies as well.
I'm nowhere near qualified to eulogize the group, so we're including more pictures than we normally post in tribute. Again, something special came to a close on Tuesday night, and I'm grateful that melophobe could catch the blazing glimmer of the end of that comet's tail.
As ever, Mike Grubbs brought an excellent performance with Wakey!Wakey!, happily filled-out once again with at least eleven different musicians playing over the course of the set. It's been a few months since we saw Wakey! with more than just Mike at the keys, so it was a real treat to hear that developing, rich, thick sound that showcases Mike as such a special song-writer. It continues to be a joy to cover his shows, and, Boston, if you're reading, please take note for next time Mike comes to town.
Opening the show were two of Family Records' newer groups. First up was Matt Singer, blessed with a solid voice and a calming demeanor. Backed up by Wakey!'s bassist Anne (and others), Matt was a welcome kick-in-the-pants to get the evening going, with his boss songwriting and sly grin.
Pearl and the Beard also rocked as openers. Made up of a guitarist, a melodica/glockenspiel player/singer, a cellist that never sits down, and an upright bassist (chewing charmingly on a wad of gum), Pearl and the Beard played up-beat, rollicking fun. The cellist (Emily Hope Price) extended her instrument's end pin allllllll the way out so she could strum, pluck, and generally abuse her cello from a standing position. With Emily in the lead, Pearl and the Beard's energy was hard to resist, getting an already pumped, jacked-up Bowery Ballroom into a near frenzy. We're definitely going to keep our eyes and ears open for them, and we're excited to see exactly what Wes and the Family Records crew cooks up next.
