by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode from 2013 which KPBS was re-running,
featuring two bands which though not great were at least listening and entertaining. One was The Devastators, who
presented themselves in the introduction and their interviews as a multi-genre band influenced by Carlos Santana, Michael Jackson
and Prince, they’re really pretty much a hard-core reggae outfit who sound an
awful lot like Bob Marley. Not only does their singer, bassist Ivan Garzon,
sound a lot like Marley vocally, the songs they write are awfully Marley-esque,
as one can tell from their ritles: “Frontline,” “Industrial Execution,” “Cool
Off,” “Surrender” (their obligatory romantic ballad) and “You Possess.” They’re
quite an appealing band — they don’t do much to “put on a show,” but then after
all the pyrotechnics and gymnastics I’ve got from major artists on network
music shows that’s actually something of a relief — they just do straight-ahead
music, and I got to like them better as their set wore on even though I still
wouldn’t consider them great. Besides Garzon, the other permanent band members
are Alex Somerville (keyboards), Brian Teel (guitar, keyboards, backing
vocals), and John Allen (drums and backing vocals) — though last night they had
a trombone and a tenor sax on some songs that took them back beyond reggae to
ska.
I liked the other band on the bill, The Grass Heat, better; they’re a
simple guitar-bass-drums rock trio — like the Devastators, their bass player,
Chris Torres, is also their lead singer — he and the guitarist, Billy Joe
Clements, worked together on several projects and they explained during the
interviews for the show that in one band Chris is the leader, in one band Billy
is the leader and in others they’re both sidemen for other performers. The
Grass Heat (a name they picked simply because they thought it sounded good) is
an appealing rock band harking back to the late 1960’s when bands like Cream,
the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the early Led Zeppelin were beginning to hash
out the formula for heavy metal but before metal became so aggressively ugly
and loud. They opened with a peculiar cover of “All Shook Up” — yes, the
legendary hit Otis Blackwell wrote for Elvis Presley — but they played so “off”
Blackwell’s original melody it took me a while to realize this was indeed the
same somg. Their approach to it came off as if Elvis had decided, with his
career stuck in a rut in the early 1970’s and his record sales declining, that
he’d revitalize himself by going into heavy metal. I like the band particularly
for Clements’ surprisingly lyrical guitar soli; Torres is a serviceable singer
rather than a great one, but he’s good enough to get the point across. They
don’t write great songs, and the
ones they do write seemed to throw the usually adept Live at the Belly Up
chyron writers (one of the things I generally like about Live at the
Belly Up is that they have chyrons giving
the title of each song the band plays so I don’t have to guess frantically from
whatever bits of the vocal I can make out just what the song is called, but in
the case of the Grass Heat the producers didn’t have a title for their
instrumental, the second song they played, nor for their third, which I guessed
was called “I’m Coming Home”), but they play quite beautifully and both Torres
and Clements are boyishly handsome young men (their third member, drummer Mike
Stone, is larger, blonder and nowhere near as sexy) who are fun to look at and
even more fun to listen to.
