Bands: The Deccas with the Hushdrops
Location: Liar's Club
Cost: $5
Drinks: $1 PBR
Things I missed to be there: 16 Bitch Pileup and Magic is Kuntmaster at Enemy; Flosstradamus as Subterranean; Women's Worth, Binges, and Fake Lake at the Boris Kar-Loft
Reason for Going: A girl group! A damn hell ass girl group!
The time is right for r&b and soul music to shed some of the trappings of hip hop and come back into its own right. I'm really happy with the way artists like Gnarls Barkley and Amy Winehouse, and even- ashamedly- Christina Aguilera have been adapting the old shit, from Sly and the Family Stone to the Shangri-La's, to the new era, one of stolen, digital music, energy crises, and orange alert terror warnings. The only thing is that all those big name artists had their start doing something else. Amy Winehouse got people to care about her overseas with some slightly boozey, kinda racy adult contemporary shit, trip hop and Norah Jones-style jazz; Cee-Lo Green was already doing some neo-soul crooner work when he started Gnarls Barkley, but even he got his start doin Dirty South hiphop with Goodie Mob; it probably doesn't need to be said, but Xtina built her name using one of the best voices on the radio to make some of the worst music of the last decade.
The question, for me, is whether you can build this kinda thing from the ground up, especially when it comes to girl groups. Even though a lot of the recordings seem pretty lo-fi today, the production was often considered more important than the talent, and pretty very high-end. Most of the girl groups that we think of when we think of girl groups (the white ones that is, not the Motown ones who, up until the Supremes stayed pretty steeped in a doo-wop sound) were put together by the legendary producer/psychopath Phil Spector. Bob B. Sox and the blue Jeans, Darlene Love, The Crystals and the Ronettes all had the benefit of Spector's Wall of Sound and they set the tone for a scene that would include a lot of imitators.
Twenty years later though, after he would work with Tina Turner and the Beatles, Phil Spector would meet the Ramones, and produce their 1980 album End of the Century. This was the Ramones' fifth album, and their throwback 1950s sound had long since been established, but I think something happened in that meeting of the Ramones and Phil Spector, that would make it impossible for a band to just style themselves after the old girl groups and actually sound like them.
I was excited when I heard that my old friend Emilie, a girl I went to ska shows with in high school, who has since become enmeshed in Chicago's mod scene, had formed a girl group, and would be playing a show at the Liar's Club. I like the Liar's Club a whole shit ton. The drinks are in the affordable range, the owner is nice, the bartender is nice, they've got a good mix of b-movie, horror and porn on the tv screens and a good amount of punk rock most days of the week but I can tell you this, the Liar's Club is a terrible place to see a show, especially a band's first show. The sound was atrocious, fuzzed and metallic, and the joint was too thin for most people to really catch a glimpse of the band.
The Deccas had their look down. They weren't totally matching but their outfits, the singers' outfits at least fit thematically with one another, a variation on big hair and tiny, shimmery cocktail dresses. Their sound wasn't crisp though. Some of it could be attributed toi the room, or the sounguy, or whoever was fucking up, but I think part of it could be attributed to Phil Spector meeting the Ramones. They sounded punk, at least a little, the way Japan's 5,6,7,8's sound punk even when they're rocking a Tina Turner song. I'm not completely sure, on account of the fuzz, but I'm pretty sure I had heard The Decca's play Turner's "I'm Blue (the Gong Gong Song), which the 5,6,7,8's perform in Kill Bill.
Not that it wouldn't be awesome in different surroundings. The 5,6,7,8's are ten different kinds of awesome and the Deccas could be too with a little more time. I just wish the band had a little more money thrown at them to get it all together, or that we had our own little Phil Spector here in town, because one thing's for sure: Ain't no Chuck Uchida's or Steve Albini's around that can make these girl's sound like Diana Ross.
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