I’d never been to Indianapolis, let alone to any rock shows there, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of the venue, the performers, or the crowd. I was pleasantly surprised. Chubby’s is a small club located in the rear of the bar of the same name on Michigan and La Salle, with an emphasis on small - the place has about as much floor space as my one-bedroom Chicago student apartment. If there had been a big crowd, the club would have been nearly intolerable. With thirty to fifty, however, it became intimate, an up-close and personal encounter with the musicians. It reminded me rather of the Ark in Ann Arbor, except that Chubby’s caters to a working-class rock crowd rather than a college folk crowd. The place had two major drawbacks. First, the ventilation was almost nonexistent, and a good fraction of the crowd was smoking, which irritated the hell out of my eyes after an hour or two. The other drawback is that the PA is very loud for a space that small, where there’s nowhere to stand outside the broadcast arc of the speakers. My ears were ringing for a good portion of the next day. Tip: unless you’ve already got tinnitus or like your rock at aircraft-engine decibel levels, wear earplugs.
Direwolf, being the local band, opened the show, and was received very well by their crowd (Randy Joe Duke seemed to know just about everybody in the club). I hadn’t really heard their music before this show, except for the scratchy samples on their Web page, and was frankly expecting some kind of mediocre redneck metalhead band. Boy, was I wrong. These guys were impeccable musicians, thundering out ferocious rhythms in perfect time, and bringing more than a couple of the female members of the crowd to their feet to groove in front of the tiny stage. (I’m not sure if there’s some tradition or rule in the Indy scene that only the women dance - well, nobody protested or laughed when I got up there. Not audibly, anyway.) Since I didn’t know any of the songs, and couldn’t hear the vocals all that well, I can’t really name the tunes that they played. In retrospect (after listening to their CD a couple of times), I know that they played “Embrace the Night”, “Raven” (which was plagued by a PA problem), and “Live and Learn” during their hour-and-odd set. That latter tune was spectacular - during the percussion jam that makes up the middle section, Randy Joe and bassist Tom Daley put down their guitars, grabbed drumsticks, and joined Kevin McBride behind his kit for an awesome three-person tribal drumming jam which lasted a good five minutes or more. The whole set was peppered with breakneck-speed instrumentals, propelled by Tom’s driving slap bass grooves and ornamented with Randy Joe’s fretwork. This guy can burn! Rock, blues, country, hillbilly - it all came together in a firestorm of sound that ripped from his Strat and tore through the club. Needless to say, I was impressed. One song in particular stands out in my mind which doesn’t appear on the CD: an emotional ballad to the Goddess, celebrating her roles as mother, teacher, lover.... I hope to hear it soon on a follow-up disc, or at another show.
Velvet Hammer was scheduled to start at midnight, but problems with the stage monitors delayed their set until 12:15 or so. Since my ride showed up at a quarter to one, and I simply could not drag Emily and Rob into the club, that meant that I only heard four or five songs of their set, which I’m sure I will regret for a long time. They were spot-on, nailing two- and three-part vocal harmonies with the same precision they show on their recorded music. The beginning of their set included “Visions”, “Burning Times”, “Window”, and a song sung (and therefore presumably written) by guitarist Dana Davis. Their sound was lush and full, due in large part to the prominence of Ginger’s keyboards and the strong support of Lynda’s bass. Her vocal performance of “Burning Times” was intense - just as impassioned and powerful live as it is on the CD. I’m hoping that they’ll come through the Midwest again sometime soon - maybe a bit closer to Chicago next time.
Either of these bands would put on a great show on their own. Together, they were outstanding, and well worth the eight hours I spent on the road that day to get to the club. Many thanks to Randy Joe Duke and Lynda Millard for making me welcome and tolerating my chattering before their sets, and to Beth Manning for helping me to organize the logistics of the trip.
A year after my last attempt to see Velvet Hammer in concert, I was still smarting at the fact that I’d only managed to catch three songs of their set due to time constraints. When I found out that they were playing a show in Toledo on this year’s tour, a city considerably closer to Kalamazoo than Indianapolis, I jumped at the chance to see them.
J.J.’s Aqua Lounge is a typical rock bar on the northern edge of Toledo, with the added benefits of a fairly low cigarette smoke factor and free pizza for patrons on Saturday night. When we arrived, local band Strychnine was in the middle of a very loud set of formulaic thrash metal. They were competent enough, and certainly seemed popular with the local crowd, but I was in the mood for a different kind of music that night, and so theiir performance, and the between-shows Metallica filler, just got on my nerves. I had the opportunity to speak with VH bassist/vocalist Lynda Millard before the show; she remembered me from my emails and from last year’s show in Indy, and gave me some of the details about their recent shows at Indy and the Heartland Spirit Festival. Strychnine ended at about 11:30, and setup took another hour or so, due to the range of instruments involved in a typical Velvet Hammer show.
Velvet Hammer played a dynamic 90-minute set, featuring both classic VH tunes and new songs. They played “Window” and “Blessed Be” from last year’s Storybook CD; Lynda graciously dedicated the latter to the fans who had traveled from places as far as Kalamazoo and Cleveland to see them that night. Other concert favorites included “Kansas” and “My Aphrodite”, featured on the out-of-print live disc. With the amiable departure of guitarist Dana Davis, Lynda and Ginger have picked up the occasional guitar duties for songs that need it - Lynda for “Blessed Be” and the new “Hades”, and Ginger on another of Lynda’s compositions whose title I didn’t catch. For the most part, however, the bass and keyboard filled the sound spectrum nicely, driven by Tawney’s drum set and additional tribal percussion by Nighthawk. The new songs in the set are everything that I’ve come to expect for Velvet Hammer: complex, lyrical, and rockin’! They included the aforementioned “Hades” by Lynda, as well as Ginger’s “The Sun” and “Come Down”. The band and crew tell me that they’ll be entering the studio after this tour finishes in June, so hopefully VH fans will have copies of these new songs by the end of the year. I, for one, am going to have a hard time waiting that long!
The show was marred only by the reactions of some of the audience members, who seemed more interested in drinking and being rowdy than in the music. In fact, I think the band may have cut their set short due to the belligerency of one particular individual. The incident was, however, handled professionally by the band, the crew, and J.J.’s staff, and evening ended on a good note, with Lynda strapping on a drum for the dance-provoking “Come Down”. Thanks again to Velvet Hammer, and to their road crew (Nikki and Sam), for a great show!
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