David Johansen, Eat Your Heart Out

Date: 2/20/07
Band: Lord Mike's Dirty Calysonians
Location: The Note
Cost: 8 bones
Things I missed to be there: Hotlips Messiah and Saskrotch at the Mutiny; free drinks from my friend's sugardaddy in Boystown
Reason for going: Calypso and mardi Gras go hand in hand

I don't know if I would have come to this conclusion if there wasn't so much of a crowd crossover, but Lord Mike and his Dirty Calypsonians kind of do the same thing as Deals Gone Bad. They adapt old, black, Caribbean sounds for contemporary white audiences. Not that either band is putting on a minstrel show, you can tell that Lord Mike has listened to his fair share of calypso and plays the music with love, just like you can with Deals Gone Bad, but it's a little more exciting with Lord Mike because, unlike ska, there's no built-in audience for calypso, so the band has had to build their scene from the ground up.

There's no shortage of spectacle to draw you to the Dirty Calypsonians. Last night, the band employed guitar, bass, four percussionists, three saxophones, and two dancers dolled u like tattooed Carmen Mirandas. At various points in the evening, the scene onstage also included a guy in a banana suit and one of the guys from The Tossers cavorting with the dancers like he was P. Diddy and doing the mashed potato when they weren't around. Then there was Lord Mike. while his band wore matching red shirts, he commanded the stage like a big cracker Papa Moai in white shirt, pants and shoes, and black Ray-Bans.

"Don't look behind the curtain," he warned, as the band cut short a song he didn't intend to play, "It's all fucking gimmick."

The music wasn't deep calypso but it wasn't a Carnival Cruise Ship ad either. The band wasn't lacking in skill but they weren't able to instill much soul into the music, either, so they settled on being silly (that is, of course, assuming that being silly is settling and not its own thing of merit). when they weren't doing calypso classics or bawdy, double-entendre-laden songs about big sausages and pussycats, they did a set of songs people might remember from movies, including Buster Poindexter's "Hot Hot Hot", "Day-O", and -prefacing it with the warning this shit is straight retarded- "That song from Captain Ron". I was halfway expecting (and more than a little bit hoping) to hear the bureaucrat song the character Hermes sang on an episode of Futurama but it never happened.

Highlights included Zatarain's givaways in honor of the holiday, more than one conga line, the blonde dancer's titties which fought to escape from her shirt and seemed to succeed every time I turned my head to order a PBR (dang), the other dancer's belly, and the most spirited banana-themed song breakdown since Gwen Stefani spelled it out in "Hollaback Girl".


[can you believe that this douche used to sing for the New York Dolls? Life is weird]