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When I come in, Corin Ashley of The Pills and Dave Aronoff of The Details are playing acoustic guitars and singing. I'm meeting friends here, and they're sitting at the bar, so I can't really pay much attention from here. From what I can tell, these guys should stick to the full band thing; Corin's got such a fabulous rock energy when he kicks it out, I can't see why he would ever want to do this instead. Someone else--I think he's also a Pill--joins them for the last couple of songs, but I'm not paying attention when he's introduced.
We move up and get a prime spot for Robyn Hitchcock. I can't help noticing that a lot of very cool Boston rockers are in the audience. If you're unfamiliar with Robyn's magnificent history with The Soft Boys, The Egyptians, and several solo albums, the first thing you need to know is that he's professionally weird. His lyrics have a wonderful quality of not actually making any obvious sense much of the time, yet dancing close enough to the edge of making sense that one is compelled to keep trying to parse them. It's a very haunting effect. The wonderful thing about his live show is that there's more. He can do that same surreal conceptual poetry thing extemporaneously as stage patter. It's deeply involving and, incidentally, hilarious. Robyn's in fine form tonight: there's a great discussion of shelves, since his fans tend to be "shelf people;" in fact, he hazards a guess that everyone here in this room has shelves! And the old format ten pound notes are described as having been "large enough to wrap a chinchilla." The way he says it, you can just tell that he knows this because he once wrapped a chinchilla in a ten pound note, but we're not going to get into that right now.
Musically, I'm pleased because the set list leans rather heavily on Globe of Frogs, my favorite of his many albums. I'm particularly glad to get "Sleeping With Your Devil Mask," which is not only fabulous but also rather seasonal. And he does "Uncorrected Personality Traits" off I Often Dream of Trains which, if it suffers a bit from the absence of the brilliant harmonies it has on the album, is still funny and beautiful. It should be noted that his voice is going. It's never exactly been a rich, beautiful instrument, but the tone is getting pretty bad and he's losing the high end. But that's never been the point. Even in his vocal prime, he was an okay singer and guitarist, and a phenomenal songwriter and stage personality. He remains a phenomenal songwriter and stage personality and you should never pass up a chance to see him live.
