GRILLING AT THE ROADSIDE WITH NRBQ

GRILLING AT THE ROADSIDE WITH NRBQ

by Mitchell Cohen

Think of NRBQ as a diner somewhere off the main highway, serving up Tex-Mex chili, Kansas City barbeque, Philadelphia cheese steaks, New England clam chowder, Chicago deep-dish pizza, Anchor Steam beer on draft. The gamut of American gastronomy. And every time you drop in, the clientele is whooping it up, clearly delighted with each course. So delighted, in fact, that they're concerned lest this place become too popular.

So when the announcer at this club in downtown Manhattan introduces NRBQ as "America's Best-Kept Secret" (as they come bounding out to the strains of Sinatra's recording of "New York, New York," with its "if I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere" moxie), it's part complaint, part boast. To the people inside, NRBQ is no secret, but there is this air of exclusivity, of being privy to something that the world at large hasn't discovered yet. You get the feeling that if the exclusivity is never threatened, that'd be just fine with the regulars. Puts the band in a bind, you might conclude.

And doesn't exactly fill founding band members Terry Adams and Joey Spampinato with glee. "That's been said," Spampinato admits. " 'We'd like to keep these guys ours.' " Adams adds, "And, you know, 'We hope you guys never have a hit arid become big.' I do hear it, and I don't appreciate that comment at all."

"What are they gonna not buy the record so that we don't get more successful?," Spampinato asks. "It's not like they can do anything. They can just wish that we didn't, for their sake."

NRBQ want you to know that they are tired of questions the thrust of which is "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Tired of people wondering out loud why the band is still together. They bristle at suggestions that perhaps NRBQ hasn't gone as far as they'd wish. "Some places can't keep the record in stock," Adams says. "You might not see our name on the charts in Billboard, but the records are sellin'. I'm makin' money.

"The fact is that things are always getting better all the time. There's never been a down. There's nothing ever gone wrong. It's always been ahead," he says in his softspoken, emphatic drawl.

The thing is, the important thing is, the quasi-ironic thing is, that from the very first song on their very first album (Eddie Cochran's "C'mon Everybody"), they have announced their open-door policy. This ain't no members-only party, and never was. They are a band of expansive good cheer, as is evident from the performance This Reporter caught on a rainy night in June. The only difference in circumstance between this set and any other set they may have played in this neighborhood over the past few years is that now they have a New Album (Grooves In Orbit), and its inevitable offspring, a New Single ("Rain At The DriveIn"), on a small upstate N.Y. label distributed by a much bigger downstate N.Y. communications conglomerate. In effect, they have printed up tens of thousands of | copies of a portion of their menu and are s£ circulating them around the country. "I don't _g' believe in being a living ad for the new J record," Adams says, "but I would like for >the people to buy the new record because o they like the band."

It's hard not to like a band that flings itself into its music with such ebullient abandon, who can swing from doo-wop to be-bop within the space of a single song, who can tear off a polka version of "Daddy-'0' " that makes you imagine them sharing cabbage rolls and jamming with the Schmenge brothers on SCTV, who have a pianist (Adams) who never does the expected, always toys with context, and a burly guitarist-growler (A1 Anderson) who can get an entire club chiming in on a song about a pregnancy scare. Their albums are woozy missiles, and most appealing for being same, but their live shows, each one designed on the spot, dictated only by whim, are where they go for the kill (in a water-balloony kind of way, of course). How can a band be devil-may-care and persistent at the same time, build a career on an apparent disinterest in Building A Career?

To backtrack a bit—longevity is part of the reason this 2500 word essay/interview is about NRBQ and not Cat Mother and The All-Night Newsboys, Bunky & Jake, or Rhinocerous—this band brought its farflung approach to Columbia Records (call this chapter Ad Hoc At Black Rock) at the end of the '60s, and immediately were tossed to the wolves. "They knew we were different, and they knew we had something, but they just didn't know how to say what it was." But don't drop the word "hype" into the conversation.

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"That's not true," Adams says. "There was never any hype on us. You remember a reviewer saying that he liked one of our songs as much as he liked somebody else's song, and that's the extent that his hype went. It didn't say anything else. He hadn't been as excited by a song this much since this one. Nobody said we were the next anything. There was no money put into this band by Columbia Records. You'd have seen big cardboard cut-outs of us if they'd have been pushing us."

Let's fill in some of the blanks. The reviewer was Mike Jahn of The New York Times (the newspaper of record, but in those days without much savvy when it came to records); the song that "Stomp" by NRBQ excited him as much as was "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by the Beatles. He also called it "one of those eternal rock songs like 'Satisfaction.' " Not only did CBS make a fuss over those notions, but Jahn's opinions ("NRBQ is the first group to play magic music since the Beatles grew up") also comprised one-third of the album's liner notes. Another third (that's right: three essays on the back of the jacket) was by Terry's brother Donn, trombonist in The Whole Wheat Horns, NRBQ's horn section. "NRBQ is life," Donn claimed, one of the few times a rock group was explicitly compared to photosynthesis. Anyway, there was some backlash. Not a terrific start, but their instincts were right: how many albums in 1969 piggybacked Cochran and Sun Ra, pointed a finger at Richard M. Nixon (on Adams' Chuck Willis-inspired "Mama Get Down Those Rock And Roll Shoes"), or even tried to capture a rockabilly spirit?

Adams relates, "We requested the 'Sun echo.' Nobody in the studio knew what I was talking about, 'cause first off they didn't know what 'Sun' was. Then I tried to describe it technically, that it was a singledelay echo, and they couldn't get it. I think if we'd have had a thousand dollars we could have bought Sun."

This Reporter points out that it was around that time when Sam Phillips sold off the whole catalog to Shelby Singleton. "We were ready to buy it, too," Adams says. "We were thinkin' about it. If we'd have had a hit record we'd have probably owned all that stuff. 'Cause nobody cared about it. They were thinking about Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that." Considering that early inclination, and the fact that NRBQ's second and final LP for CBS was with Carl Perkins ("We told him we didn't want to do 'Blue Suede Shoes' and he said OK"), it would be easy to assume that they could have followed the rockabilly trail. Not bloody likely, according to Adams.

"Everybody's so used to everybody wanting to be something. They say, well, we're gonna do rockabilly now, so they go out and get their haircuts, and they get the right clothes, and they study the Johnny Burnette Trio until it's coming out their ears, and then they decide that's what they are. We're not trying to copy anything. It's all there, but we just don't want to be it. I don't want to be Johnny Burnette. I don't want to be Jerry Lee Lewis. I didn't decide to be one of those guys."

It was on to Kama Sutra at the top of the '70s, a label that probably thought it had another Lovin' Spoonful on its hands. You know, slightly wacky-eclectic, eastern on wry. Scraps and Workshop weren't bad ("Boys In The City" mentions Ferlinghetti and Durwood Kirby, and the band does a fair job on "Ac-cen-tu-ate The Positive" and "Hearts Of Stone"), and are especially notable because one song on each ("Howard Johnson's Got His Ho-Jo Working" and "R.C. Cola and a Moon Pie") has a reference to grilled cheese, a subject to which this article will ultimately return.

NRBQ started to hit their stride on their initial indy release, All Hopped Up: "Ridin' In My Car," Spampinato's "Still In School," some sloshed Louis Prima moves on "Cecilia," and a Spike Jones-ish version of the Bonanza theme. That would've been cooler if they'd done the lyrics. As a Red Sox fan, This Reporter doesn't want to be reminded of anything that involves Yankee Stadium and/or 1978, but it's generally acknowledged that NRBQ At Yankee Stadium is their vinyl high point, and one can hardly disagree.

But if YS is quintessential recorded 'Q, then the following semester's Kick Me Hard is the one that comes closest to capturing the out-of-the-magic-box spontaneity of the band's looniest performances. A very weird collection of tracks. Adams says, "I think we figured out that out of the, I don't know if there's 13 or 14 songs on it, 11 of them we had never played before the moment they were on the tape. Like 'It Was An Accident' was the very first time we ever played it. All those songs. 'Tenderly,' we didn't even know the chords. 'This Old House,' that was recorded at home at a party. We were just goofin' around, someone else took it seriously and made a lot of money off of it." (This last remark concerns one Shakin' Stevens, whose marginally tidier arrangement earned him a worldwide hit.) The album also features the "Whoo! Whooo!"s of "Electric Train," "Hot Biscuits and Sweet Marie" (a guy has to choose between mom's home cooking and the favors bestowed by his bride-to-be), and "Things We Like To Do," adapted from the Chipmunks' original to reflect the band's personal proclivities: short dresses (on girls, they specify), CHiPs, pizza, riding in limos.

Limos? NRBQ? Doesn't that raise the very question that we've been trying to skirt, that of degrees of success obtainable by A Working Band In The U.S.A. that resists typecasting? "It's relative, I guess," Spampinato says about sales and stuff like that. Yeah. It's relative. They aren't mentioned in official histories or encyclopedias of rock, or even in The Catalog Of Cool. McCartney never invited Adams down to Montserrat to lay down some tasty licks (his loss). The guys don't escort TV starlets to The People's Choice Awards. Wozniak doesn't offer them six figures to play in his '80s dustbowl. Who cares? C'mon everybody.

"We've been making the most commercial, accessible music in the country for a long time now. We're not trying to do anything abstract. We're not trying to scare people. This music was made for people, and they'll love it." If you've ever seen NRBQ in a crowded* club, you can see the devotion they inspire, another two edged thing they have to handle, just because it's difficult to imagine them being as much fun in any venue where you're ritualistically patted down for cans and bottles and taping equipment before you enter. Are they the ultimate bar band; as many have tapped them?

"We take the phrase 'bar band' as an insult," Adams says.

"Why would you?" This Reporter asks, genuinely startled.

"Why wouldn't we? We're the best musicians in the country, we can out-play any band on the planet, and they're calling us a bar band. I could go out there without the band, I could sit down at the piano and play a concert at Carnegie Hall right now."

Spampinato adds, "When people talk about bar band instead of concert band, what they're talking about is something that has nothing to do with music. What they're talking about is spectacle on a grand scale."

"It just sounds like some kind of category that I don't feel that we belong in," Adams continues. "I know good bar bands, and most of the bands know how to play the blues, and they know how to play the latest hits, and they swing every night and people love 'em, and that's great. That's not what we are. I don't think of a bar band as one that can write songs like 'How Can I Make You Love Me' or 'My Girlfriend's Pretty' and pull them off in a bar."

Their diversity is their charm, not only in their own music—so what if no one in the band knows the lyrics to "Alone Again (Naturally)"? That doesn't stop them from giving it a game try, or from releasing that try on an EP—but in their adjunct projects and passions. Everything gets blended, pulled into their orbit. This is, after all, a band that, when on the road, asks the folks back home to videotape professional wrestling matches and a Sun Ra interview on PBS. Terry Adams can compile and annotate a Thelonious Monk album (Always Know) and also sponsor the indescribable Shaggs. NRBQ are as comfortable with jazz composer Carla Bley as with country warbler Skeeter Davis. The paradox is that there's no paradox.

"All music is folk music," Adams states, "Because we're all folks. I mean, I'm sure Sun Ra likes cornbread as much as Skeeter Davis, and we all might enjoy watching Deputy Dawg together again."

After the release of Tiddlywinks in 1980, there was a recording hiatus broken up only by a single, "Captain Lou" (lyrics about, and lead vocals by, their intimidating manager/wrestler Captain Lou Albano), and that EP mentioned earlier. Then they signed with Bearsville and issued Grooves In Orbit. In the interim, they got some impressive endorsements from colleagues, Elvis Costello for one, Bonnie Raitt for another (she cut their existential car song "Me And The Boys" and "Green Lights"). On DE 7th, Dave Edmunds put "Boys" smack up against a new Springsteen song, and followed that by putting Adams' "I Want You Bad" on Information.

"Future's no problem, well we don't care/'Cause wherever we're going we'll soon get there," goes their most famous song, and it's emblematic of NRBQ's philosophy of aimless forward-motion (another non-paradox). From their first LP ("We never thought, 'Ah, well let's do this thing again slower,' or 'Wait a minute, let's tune up,' or anything like that") though Orbit (" 'Daddy-"0" ' was recorded with two microphones in a bar, and it wasn't even a professional recording; we just found it, on a cassette or something"), they've valued freshness over polish, the wide view over the narrow focus. And the "N" in their names means that they won't allow themselves to get locked into a revivalist frame of mind.

"A lot of groups try to perfect the sound of Chicago in 1955, and they'll do real good at it," says Adams. "And if they want to do that, that's fine. But that's not what we're doing. Music has to be right now. In fact, so right now that every night has to be for right then."

Spampinato says, "You have to play like it's the last time you're ever gonna play, and that this particular moment is the moment we've all been waitin' for. We haven't been running this thing to a pre-planned-out program."

"You can't place us in the mainstream," Adams says. "I think that something that's this good should be mainstream. Let's all get the best. If you know the restaurant that's got the best grilled cheese, go to it."