I am mostly past the age and stage of running out to see local rock ‘n roll bands. For a good part of my listening career, it was jazz or hardcore blues that I would go looking for, certainly not the flavor-of-the-moment homegrown dudes who wanted to be called, like the neophyte guitarist in the iPod commercial, a “rock god.” Suri might be programmed to play along with that crap, but not me. It takes more than one gig in a garage for that to happen in the real world, and more than 3 chords.
I saw Stevie Ray Vaughn a handful of times, and it wasn’t enough. I loved that Texas slinger like a brother, and wanted to cry when he died. There was no one EVER who gave me chills just by playing guitar, LIVE, in front of me, like him. I saw John Lee Hooker in his late ’70’s/early 80’s prime, at a long-forgotten club on Central Avenue in Albany called J.B. Scott’s, and no one EVER made me respect his blues lyrics, his INFLECTIONS, and his sheer soul, more than that man. The way he got up and bobbed his head while he slowly boogied around his chair that night while his band kept the groove going for him, said more to me than most of the 3-hour rock concerts I have seen in my life. I saw James Blood Ulmer at the old Tin Shop in 1983, and thought he would become the combination of Hendrix and Hooker and take the world by storm, but no, didn’t happen. Sometimes I’m wrong, but mostly I’m right.
I am telling you this so you know I don’t give high praise to lightweights. If you read my piece on the Jazz Festival you get the idea that I have high standards there, too– I don’t get fooled or wooed by schmaltz, or diluted imitations.
But now I’m crazy about a cover band out of Albany, with a lead singer who has a Masters in Electrical Engineering, and has kept his day job…so far. Go figure. My wife has learned to play along with me on this– if Four Down The Band show up in Saratoga anywhere, or even over in Sacandaga– I’ll tell you where before I’m done– we’re there.
The reasons are at least three-fold: they kill every tune they attack, they never repeat the same set-list, and they show me something new every time. On their business card it says “The Northeast’s Most Diverse Party Band,” and that is no exaggeration. The range of music they excel at is rather staggering, given their youth, and speaks to their ambition as well as broad taste.
But let me digress.
It was last Saturday night, the last day of June, the end of the first half of 2012. I had circled this on my calendar, and had worked hard for 13 days in a row (since a somnolent Father’s Day), to get to this point. My dear Melinda, who had belittled me a bit in recent years, saying that “we never go downtown anymore!” was not complaining on this night. She had seen this band with me 3 times before, and knew that dancing might be imminent, which she loves. When the mood rarely strikes, I do too.
We park 5 blocks from the club where we’re going– Bailey’s Cafe, down on the back corner of Putnam & Phila. The back patio, covered but open-air is our destination, an Adirondack-y feel with superb Belgian drafts, my beloved Stella. The music is a bonus on top of it all. On the way there the mini-urban feel is in the air– skateboarders coming at us full speed on the broad sidewalks of Broadway, and a blues busker sitting in front of a closed store, strumming an acoustic version of a Hendrix tune while he wails– “Hey Joe, heard you shot your old lady down…” and glares at me like I’m some middle-class dolt. I taught your grandaddy that tune, dude, I grin back at him, to lessen the tension of his proletarian angst.
I’m usually in a subdued mood to start, so we dodge the animated ambiance of Caroline Street at 10 pm, and slide down the alley next to Uncommon Grounds, down past The Putnam Den, another fine place to hear music, but not on this night. Then we hear something good coming out of The Ice House, another open patio bar on the opposite side of the Library Parking lot from Bailey’s back enclosure. It’s a band called Giacomo,
come to find out, which would’ve been a good choice too, but I had already made up my mind. I’m gonna go see FOUR DOWN THE BAND, though it’s only gonna be THREE of them tonight.
From their newsletter I’d read that the bass player, Johnny, had abruptly departed the band. I had noted him first at Bailey’s, a year ago now, when I first caught the band. He was playing the snot outa some ska tune like he was Les Claypool or Jaco Pastorius, Jr, but with the long-shorts-and-boots-look of an early 90’s Seattle grunger. His facial expressions were somewhere between enlightened and electrocuted…which I liked in a bass player. Very animated. Yet a normal dude when he walked off, no pretension. OK.
But it was more the guitarist Justin Metz, and the lead singer Eric Schwerdt, who had won me over, quickly, during that first sighting. Metz had the ability to replicate convincingly, then improve upon, almost every riff of every song of every genre they played, effortlessly. His licks in 2 or 3 extended solos per night so far have elevated him close to the upper echelons of guitarists I’ve ever seen around these parts, as they say. I will give some examples as we proceed.
Schwerdt has the uncanny verbal versatility of similarly covering a full spectrum of the past 50 years of vocalists– from Robert Plant to Nelly, from Stevie Wonder to freakin’ Lady GaGa, I’m not kidding you. He seemed to specialize in 90’s stuff at first, then I realized how far beyond that decade he was taking things. Here is a short, muscular white kid skillfully skidding from ska/Sublime to James Brown and Marley with full conviction and gusto. He performed the howling falsettoes of “The Immigrant Song” as well as Robert Plant in his prime– skyward notes the elder master of Led Zep’s stage show would not attempt any longer, as the guitarist Justin pointed out to me later.
That’s the kind of classic ’70’s song that could easily end up as a Spinal Tap parody in a hurry, in the hands of misfit amateurs, or if the lead Voice was too weak to live up to the original. I’ve seen this band blow the doors off that tune twice now. The drummer, Mike Caputo, actually has the cajones and the chops to attack the John Bonham parts with full smash aforethought. And Justin Metz plays the Jimmie Page groove like it’s in his DNA– don’t know where that comes from but it’s amazing. And in Saturday night’s version, vocalist Schwerdt was carrying the rumbling bass line as well, very impressive, done as a power trio.
But let me go back to when we got there, so you think of this progression. We missed their early set and got there at 10, before the second set started. The first tune they started out with was so drowsy as to be a stark contrast to what came later– “Breathe” from Pink Floyd’s 1973 classic Dark Side of the Moon album, a stoner’s anthem, not exactly dance music. Then there was one of their signature ska tunes which picked up the pace from there– I was busy getting beers and was just randomly liking it without latching on yet.
Then they began to “crank up the party” a notch with a version of “Let’s Get It Started!” by The Black-Eyed Peas. Then it was The Killers: “Take Me Out”– a thumping, redundant groove, appropriate accompaniment to beer drinking, I felt. Heads bouncing now, they took us Rasta-side with a nasty version of Marley’s “Jammin'”– another song
which can be deadly in the wrong white band hands. Justin Metz, I scribbled in the notes of the moment, has a vision for how this great musical vehicle works… there is room for so much more than just the original reggae once he starts to shred it up…
That was incredible, and then the next tune was better. As a former d.j. I like to think I’ve kept track of the best tunes over the past few decades, so it always drives me a bit mad when this band picks one I can’t identify. I knew it was recent vintage but it had the feel and lyrics of an old blues, just couldn’t place it, and meanwhile Metz was carving it up and shootin’ it out. I just scribbled “killer solo, again” on the back of my spare business cards, which I find more durable than cocktail napkins for such notes.
I had to ask him later what the song was: “Sun’s Gonna Shine…” by Citizen Cope was the answer. Learned something new tonight, I told him. That’s why it’s worth payin’ Five bucks for a beer sometimes, I rationalized. Stella Artois was feeling like good, worthy, medicine by about then.
There was a tune I missed while I went can-ward, and I thought my wife mentioned something by Boston, or maybe Aerosmith, but that was more her era than mine, so I didn’t mind. Then it was another ska thing with the recurrent verse “Itz just the WRONG THING” and I couldn’t recall if that was Sublime, Blind Lemon, Everlast, or Sugar Ray– I get all those dudes confused, to tell you the truth– our kids were young in those days and I missed some musical details. But I like it all–that surf/punk/ska period– in retrospect, like it was from an un-mined era for me. Somewhere in this set came “The Immigrant Song” I think, which took the light bouncy stuff in a dark and throbbing direction, with my full approval.
Then came a tune this band just tears up– and particularly the drummer, when I think about how it sounds in my memory afterwards, the nasty crackly snap of the snares, and the throbbing foot pedals on “That Girl is POISON!” which I think is a Bobby Brown dance classic, when he wuz on top of his game. My only regret about this past Saturday night is that I didn’t get up to dance to that tune, which would’ve been a helluva good workout, really, but I wasn’t quite there yet.
Now look back on what I wrote, and what they played– tell me how many bands you know
can go from Pink Floyd to Bobby Brown within an hour, and hit Citizen Cope, The Killers,
and Led Zepp on the way. If my bar scrawls were right they ended up with Lady Gaga, doing “Poker Face.” Unbelievable, and good, in fact better than I thought it could be..
The last set, no problem with dance reluctance, overcome. To prove they were current with the times, in addition to GaGa, there was Maroon 5, “Harder To Breathe” (?), then back to the hip weirdness of The Violent Femmes, with “Blister in the Sun”; into Sublime’s phenomenal singalong, “What I Got” (we’re all dancing now), and a ridiculously superb version of a tune I used to HATE with a passion when Rick Springfield first came out with it– “Jessie’s Girl!”– which once again Justin Metz tore up with an eerily great solo.
After that we sat down a bit and a got to speak to my sister-in-law’s new beau, a dude who had not heard this band or anything like them in a while. I asked him if this was as interesting to him as his more customary country– and he just grinned and shrugged.
Then this band starts– as if on cue– to play “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”– the old Charlie Daniels Band version!– and Justin Metz takes the guitar and fiddle parts both, and blows my new buddy Brad away.
They could’ve taken a break at that point but I believe they pushed a 90 minute-plus set
right to 1 a.m. I stopped recording my scattered rampage of thoughts and song titles somewhere in there, but recall dancing to my favorite semi-drunken fast step tune–
“Do You Wanna BE My Girl?” by Jet, and then hearing the supersonic Prince tune from his heyday “Letz Go Crazy”; and then gettin” down and greasy with one I’d not heard this band play before– Nelly’s “Gettin’ Hot In Here”– a sweet tune to sweat to! That brought me back to early 2000’s — gleefully recalling (while dancing) Miles’s heyday in hoop, a white kid competing in a black kid’s game, with rap and hiphop flourishing all around us… Next thing I know we’re back in 2011, laughing and dancing our asses off as we dance to Ce-lo’s “FORGET YOU!” The gears then change seamlessly to The Beastie Boyz powerfouse tune: “NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN”– another rowdy singalong. Then toward the end it was Rage Against The Machine, “Killing, In The Name of…” and we were sweaty and sated and time was running out on the 1 a.m. noise ordinance…so that was about it…
This band named Four Down The Band had hit all the bases, from my teen years (long before they were born) to collegiate indulgences to my bohemian 20’s to romantic 30’s and family 40’s and those early 2000’s when my son himself was becoming a teen, to the present tense, right up to today, all in a three hour time warp, and I have to thank this Band for that– it’s better than any wedding d.j. could ever do, because it was LIVE, it was real, and these performers were as cool and proficient as you could get.
And let me add this– unlike bad wedding bands, their taste in the music they choose to
play is consistently exquisite and unique– there are no cheesy renditions of “SHOUT”, no version of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock N’ Roll”, no Meatloaf, no Billy Joel, no bad disco, no dumbass version of “Brickhouse”, nor Brittany Spears. The repertoire is fresh and original, even in playing covers. With their talent level, I expect at some point they may break out some originals, and that would be a cool twist.
They can be seen July 4th at 9pm at The I-Go-Inn at Sacandaga Lake in Edinburgh, for another high-energy party, perhaps with their new bassist, but even if not, the best damn band in the area, in my book. They will also be appearing at Bailey’s 2 or 3 more times this summer, at Dango’s Sports Bar at the end of August, at The Prime Ultra Lounge at Saratoga National Golf Course on July 20th (hope to see that!), and at the always mobbed SIRO’s near the racetrack on August 5th. There are also gigs in Glens Falls, Amsterdam (!), and Albany listed on their own website, so try to experience them yourself. And by the way, I am not a paid publicist for this bunch, nor am I related to any of the band members! Someone came up to us at their I-Go-Inn performance in June, and asked my wife and I– “Are you their parents???” We cracked up at that… “No, but we’d be pretty proud of them if we were…we just like the music.” Ciao, over and out…
In musical peace,
Wayne