(I’ll spare you the obvious “Radios Reappear” title, since I’m sure the LA Weekly will fall for it)
You never know what to expect with these sorts of things. Near-legendary, ahead-of-its-time band from the fog of misplaced history gets a quorum of members back together and lets fly. Cognitive dissonance is a funny thing: at best you know you’re ultimately going to be disappointed yet you still find yourself making the most dubious justifications. Really, how bad could it be having Evan Dando fronting the MC5?
About the best you can expect is a lot of haze and a brief clearing where everything lines up and you hear what all the fuss was about, but that’s extraordinarily rare. I can think of only one exception and not surprisingly at all, it goes by the first name of Iggy and the last name of Stooge.
The advantage to Radio Birdman is that they’re the most shadowy of cult bands. Last night at the Wiltern was their first US show ever – no expectations to live up to, no disaffected Amoeba-denizen in the back crossing his arms and harumphing about how so much better they were back in the day. And really, no time to think about any of that because they simply tore through their set at 200mph, pausing only to replace a cranky guitar amp. Rob Younger’s (himself an odd mix of Julian Cope and Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror) vocals aren’t quite up there yet, but the rest of the band packed a tremendous wallop. The star of course is Deniz Tek: bona fide Guitar Hero and Buckaroo Banzai incarnate (no joke – after Birdman broke up the first time he became a jet fighter pilot and a surgeon). I wish LA was the last show of the tour, I can only imagine what they would be like un-jet lagged.
(Blurry photo courtesy my new camera phone, there’s a significantly better set of recent Birdman photos on Karena Hoyer’s Flickr stream)