POP MUSIC REVIEW : NRBQ Is Serious About Having Fun

The English language gives most musicians credit for something they don’t really do: No matter what happens on a stage or in a studio, the operative verb for music-making is “play.”

NRBQ truly played Thursday night at the Coach House. The venerable bar-rockers from the Northeast played the way kids play--with delighted absorption in the sheer fun of fooling around.

This is a band that has its priorities straight when it comes to play. In Webster’s New World Dictionary, the typical musical definitions of play rank only sixth and seventh on the list of the word’s possible meanings. NRBQ paid heed to meanings 1 and 2: “To move lightly, rapidly, or erratically; flutter” and “to amuse oneself, as by taking part in a game or sport.”

While most bands are satisfied with playing a given style of music, NRBQ got its kicks by playing with styles, the way kids play with Legos or Lincoln Logs. A kid at play might figure, why just build your basic log cabin? Why not put a skyscraper tower on it, or maybe a dome? Now wouldn’t that be neat? In the same way, NRBQ threw out pop music’s zoning laws and architectural codes, just for the fun of building something neat.

Terry Adams, NRBQ’s keyboards player, would fashion your basic, time-honored barrelhouse piano run and start dabbling around with the blueprints. How about wiring that solid old edifice of standard boogie with some far-out, chromatic free-jazz space music? Bet nobody’s ever tried that before, huh? Bet nobody else would even dare. One thing is certain: With his hyperactively weird stage comportment and his ever-shifting looks of mischievous wonderment and spaced-out befuddlement, Adams was the strangest, most watchable rock ‘n’ roll piano player this side of Jerry Lee Lewis.

A similarly playful attitude inspired guitarist Al Anderson to repeatedly take his beloved rockabilly runs on wide detours. Notes were bent and twisted and skittered together in ways that Carl Perkins never imagined. After one country guitar solo that he executed in the traditional, old-fashioned and sensible way, full of bassy twang, Anderson came right back with a solo in which he took bassy twang to sublimely ridiculous extremes. He fooled around with his Telecaster’s tuning keys until the notes got so low and growly that they sounded like a grizzly bear waking up grumpy (come to think of it, with his considerable height and girth and his comical squint and scowl, that’s what Big Al kind of resembles).

NRBQ used these toying techniques to play music ranging from the fine, catchy pop of its fetching recent album, “Wild Weekend,” to country howlers like George Jones’ “White Lightning.” Several winsome ballads and a sweetly odd, description-defying version of “Whistle While You Work” were thrown in for good measure.

NRBQ resembles the Band in its ability to take roots-rock styles and sound both authentic and fresh, rather than simply imitative. Like the Band, NRBQ’s lineup has been together so long, played so many roadhouses and developed such strong skills that it has gone beyond tightness--the grail of most groups--to an utter ease and looseness.

Actually, with Adams and Anderson veering hither and thither around the solid center provided by drummer Tom Ardolino and bassist Joey Spampinato, NRBQ was loose to the point of sloppiness. A murky sound mix added to the extremely off-the-cuff feel of the performance. If NRBQ were to release a recording of this show, they would have to call the album “The Sub-Basement Tapes.”

But this basement was a funhouse from wall to wall, full of surprising attractions. In a world that is far too tight, long may NRBQ unwind.