Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Tues July 22, Graceland, 9:30 pm, $13 adv.
You always hear about the local band that made it big and left all its embittered friends in the dust, whining and perpetually unsigned outfits whose only purpose is to fulfill the prophecy of Morrissey's "We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful."
The guys in Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are not that kind of band. In the Rock 'n' Roll High School yearbook, they'd be awarded "Band Least Likely to Courtney Taylor Your Ass," as they're just as nice and humble today as they were back when they were called the Elements in 1997.
Back then, my now defunct Bay Area band, Mover, used to practice two doors down from them in Oakland. One night, I remember hearing this serpentine sound slither down the hall. Piping into our room was this rough-and-tumble drone-rock that pounded seductively with sinister vocals and bionic drumming that gave me that "special feeling" right where I go "number one." After we called it a night, I heard something that sounded like a dirtier Spiritualized with bigger balls. It sounded so good you wanted to fuck to it in the back of an old car. My curiosity got the best of me, so I peeked into their practice room. I knew these guys. Back in '95 my friends and I started a little Anglophile club in San Francisco called Popscene and every now and then I'd run into bassist Peter Hayes, guitarist Robbie Turner, and drummer Nick Jago at the club. It was fun for a while. You'd have these hipster kids running around saying things like "dodgy" or "bollocks" in their Orange County accents, and everyone tried to dress like members of Elastica or Blur. Before interviewing Nick, we were reminiscing about Popscene (he met his girlfriend of five years there).
"Ah, Popscene," he laughs. "Those were some funny days. I got drunk and was kicked out of there for like two years. You probably shouldn't print that, though."
Sorry, dude.
At the risk of sounding like a Tiger Beat editor, Nick is my favorite.
Robbie is the friendliest guy--a "bro" if you will--and you rarely meet someone as passionate about music as Peter, but nobody can make me laugh like Nick. My fondest memories of Popscene include watching Nick fearlessly pissing off the knuckle-dragging asshole bouncers and getting tossed out on his ear time and again. It didn't surprise me when I read that Nick was coerced off the stage at this year's NME Awards after a seven-minute acceptance speech of silence and an unblinking thousand-yard stare. According to the article, he also proceeded to wrestle with someone on the lobby floor and one journalist accused him of being on LSD.
"All I can say is being in England again maybe brought out my eccentric side and my excitement," says Nick. "Maybe I was having a bit too much fun. But you know, no comment about anything else." (I like to think that maybe he was inadvertently living down that old Stone Roses lyric where Ian Brown admits, "I'd like to leave the country for a month of Sundays and burn the town where I was born.")
B.R.M.C.'s new album is Take Them On, On Your Own, and if you'll pardon my East Bay phrasing, the shit's hell of rad. The music still makes me want to hit it and quit it from the back seat of a '70s Charger. Songs like "Six Barrel Shotgun" seem punchier and brasher than the band's previous recordings, but the production comes off more bionic without sounding glassy and coked-up like a stupid Richard Ashcroft album.
There are already a lot of heavy expectations on this album coming from San Francisco, the hometown of the B.R.M.C. sound, but the truth is nobody here (or anywhere) can rightfully talk shit about these guys; no more joking that B.R.M.C. really stands for Band Relives Mary Chain. But while most English guys really get their knickers tied in knots about the inevitability of obvious comparisons, Nick doesn't seem too bothered by references to the brothers Reid.
"Maybe it's all [journalists] could come up with at the time, but we never really did sound like them," he says. "We still sound how we always have sounded. We said it from the start. But you know, the Jesus and Mary Chain were a very good band, so I'm not hung up on it."
