The Ponys w/the Girls, Dios
Thurs June 24, Chop Suey, 9 pm, $8 adv.
From urban blues to acid house, industrial assault to indie experimentalism, Chicago has long been a hotbed of musical innovation. In fact, just about the only thing the Windy City hasn't thrown up in recent years is a name-brand, sweat-drenched, ear-buzzing rock 'n' roll band.
"The rock 'n' roll scene's pretty small," confirms Ponys guitarist/keyboardist Ian Adams, before the quartet's headline set at sticky-floored London dive the Metro. "It's a tight clique, lots of weird shows where they have five bands playing at a bowling alley. People in Chicago are more into emo, which I find really boring and predictable."
The Ponys are anything but predictable. Sure, their debut album, Laced with Romance, has all the febrile distortion you'd expect from a disc produced by Jim Diamond (The Dirtbombs, White Stripes, et al.) at Detroit's fabled Ghetto Recorders, and released on peerless West Coast garage label In the Red. But this raw ambience is merely one ingredient in a bubbling sonic soup composed of fuzzy psychedelia, post-punk propulsion, and monochordal organ vamps straight from the Velvet Underground cookbook. Critics have had a field day playing spot-the-influence. In particular, the combination of needling dual-guitar lines and Jered Gummere's yelping, wailing, yet intuitively melodic vocals have incited countless references to New York's legendary avatar of poetic nihilism, Richard Hell.
"It's flattering," says Gummere, "but we never tried to base our sound on just one thing."
"We've all already been in bands which have a set manifesto of five records that they want to sound like," adds Adams, who himself used to play in Happy Supply--"a pop band with me and this lesbian and a drum machine."
Gummere's previous outfit was a self-described "shitty punk rock band" called the Guilty Pleasures, while drummer Nathan Jerde served his apprenticeship in the "even shittier punk rock band" Mushuganas. They formed the Ponys in early 2001 with bassist Melissa Elias, whose recording career stretches back to childhood.
"My parents are musicians and for a while my dad wrote jingles," she reveals. "He'd use me in kids' commercials. I had a demo tape when I was seven! There was one for Rice Krispies color-changing bubblegum which ran for a long time. [Sings] 'It's lots of colors, lots of fun/It's changing color bubblegum/Goes in your mouth one color/And comes out another.'"
The nascent trio gigged around Chicago for nearly two years before Adams joined. Their big break came when Gummere and Elias, who are a couple, were planning a vacation to Los Angeles and received a surprise e-mail from In the Red boss Larry Hardy.
"He'd bought our first 7-inch and wanted to meet us in L.A.," remembers Gummere. "We arranged to see him at a Modey Lemon show, but only two people showed up and the band didn't play. So we ended up going to this karaoke bar and just getting smashed. We did tons of shots of tequila and sang songs all night... and then Larry put our record out!"
The result is Laced with Romance, a superbly played and tightly written set that flits between sardonic angst ("Let's Kill Ourselves") and hyperactive whimsy ("Little Friends," a tribute to household pets) while fashioning a layered, cohesive sound from disparate sources.
"It was pretty much recorded live," recalls Adams. "Except for the vocals and my horrible keyboard-playing. Jim Diamond has all these great old mics and instruments. That place [Ghetto Recorders] used to be a chicken-processing plant or something. He has huge stacks of '70s porn. It's weird. You pick up these dirty, dirty magazines and there's interviews with Captain Beefheart!"
While they're not retro fetishists, slavishly re-creating a bygone era, the Ponys do have an unabashed enthusiasm for the smoky warmth of early rock 'n' roll.
"We definitely listen to a lot of '50s and '60s guitar music," admits Gummere. "Link Wray, Chuck Berry, and so forth."
"I love surf music," says Adams. "There's this old Australian band called the Atlantics, who had Echoplexes and whole songs that were just drums and echoey noise. But then they'd play nursery rhymes like 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic Stomp.'"
"Actually," grins Gummere, preparing to deflate his bandmate's obscurist idyll, "thanks to our driver, what we've mainly heard on this tour is 'Toxic' by Britney Spears."
