MOG

I've been away a couple of days in Northampton MA on what looks like the only real vacation I'll get this year -- no email or anything.

I did manage to get out to the Flywheel on Friday night to see K records' Jason Anderson. I knew about Anderson from his solo work, which is really nice, high quality guy-with-a-guitar work, closely observed lyrics, exuberant delivery, all that...So I was expecting that sort of thing at the club, and boy was I surprised.

Anderson had brought a five-piece band (himself on guitar, a female singer, a keyboardist, bass player and saxophone player) a fairly substantial outfit for a club that fits about 50 people packed.

The opening band, Hymns, was more or less what I was expecting from Anderson, though I have to hand it to the singer, who started out completely a capella, singing a kind of downbeat song about coming home from the war. It was a brave though not wholly successful move, and everybody felt a lot better about things when he started accompanying himself on a small keyboard for the second song. "Did you get the inside joke?" he asked, as the audience applauded just a bit harder for the second bit. "It's basically the same song." He got better as he went along, finally inviting a heavy-set man in a Motorhead shirt up to sing with him. Big surprise, the big guy sang falsetto...unsettling but good.

So then there's a break, and whoever's running the stereo is playing great stuff, old soul and reggae mostly. It turns out that's a good segue for Anderson's set, which started with a raucous the Grateful Dead's "Good Lovin'" (yes, that's right they didn't write it, but who's version do you know?) and built from there. They had a fabulous, stylized, hard-soul-into-funk-rock sound with a locked-in groove that reminded me, no kidding, of the great Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings. And also, maybe because of the saxophone, of early Bruce, the bands where he was still sweating most of the time and no one needed a chair with a mic stand. But it was totally fun, totally unexpected. So much for sensitive lo-fi.

Anderson is way more charismatic on stage than you'd expect. He's slight and skinny, dark haired with a baseball cap and a tee-shirt that says "Hungarian Horntails" but onstage, he radiates positive energy, getting a relatively easy, there-to-have-fun crowd to sing along, stick their hands in the air and shout out "Tonight" at the appropriate intervals. Every so often, Anderson will beckon with his hands and say, "I want everyone to move forward," and everyone does.

I went, again, with my kid and my husband, and my son was totally into it, standing on a chair in the back and periodically falling off it when he got too into the music. He would also get pretty mad at me when I wasn't singing along or shouting the right words or clapping my hands, and as Anderson said, "The best thing in the world is when you love someone and they love you back," and I do and he does, so I participated more than I usually would. With the result that it was more fun than usual.

So anyway, great night. We left as the Romantics' "What I Like About You" ended, one of my favorite guilty-pleasure songs to dance to, no matter how many beer commercials it ends up in.

I also bought Frank Black's new record, while in N'hampton, and the Hacienda Brothers and am looking forward to delving into both...and then not writing about them. Yippee. Vacation.