sb/sm

Indulge me for a minute as I wax poetic about the power of Rock & Roll. We, sb/sm, I am proud to say, are a tight band.  Our records are made live in the studio, mostly in one or two takes. We played Highway to Hell front-to-back and it came in at the same running time as the record. To the goddamn second.  I love that.

I also love Iggy & the Stooges. I love the feral shitstorm that is that band.  I think Metallic KO is maybe the greatest live record ever released. I can't even say "ever made," because it wasn't so much made as wrenched from the broken bottles and dried blood on the floor of the Michigan Palace.  

When we set out to learn 'Raw Power' for the second installment of our sb/sm plays... residency at the Central, I knew we could play the songs.  Hell, they're mostly one riff bludgeoned into submission for an entire song.  And the lyrics, well, Iggy never really remembered them either.  No, I wasn't worried about much of that, or the fact that we couldn't really find much time to practice.   I was worried that our tight little band just couldn't get loose enough.    

I set about listening to 'Roadkill Rising,' the warts-and-all box set of Iggy live recordings, and I immediately feared we couldn't un-learn that much.  There's a kind of liquid recklessness, and frankly a certain 'badness,' that's inherent in those recordings, and we've never been much good at that kinda thing. 

But it happened.    

It might've been luck. Or it might've been that we never really quite learned the prolonged belch of a song that is 'Death Trip.' Or that we played 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' once a couple of years ago and figured that'd be good enough to get us by.  Whatever the case, for six odd minutes last week we were just bad, in the best way.

As we skitter from the gnarled conclusion of 'Death Trip' -  Tarik wailing away indiscriminately, my attacking the mic stand with the fretboard, and Ryan and Aaron holding down the fort - into the opening chords of 'I Wanna Be Your Dog,' you can hear one guy clapping. 

Man, there's nothing like the sound of just one guy clapping.