Heavy Metal Metamorphosis Was a Laughing Matter

Besides all the usual problems of promoting successful rock shows, Club Tangent has a cultural hurdle to overcome: How do you bring alternative rock--and alternative rock fans--into a den of heavy metal?

The Great Divide between the worlds of heavy metal and alternative rock was apparent in the quips and musical jokes coming from the stage at the Marquee on Wednesday.

Steve Jacobs, singer for the headlining Swamp Zombies, joshingly commanded the audience to flash the traditional heavy metal hand sign. “C’mon, this is the Marquee--give us the devil horns!”

And opening act Don’t Mean Maybe finished its set with “Citadel,” a howling, falsetto-voiced spoof of heavy metal’s tendency to turn itself into opera buffa.

Those two bands and a third county group, the Clints, relaunched Club Tangent in its new quarters before a sparse audience that according to promoters Kitty Bash and Octavious totaled 50 paying customers and 20 guests.

“I thought there would be a lot more people, at least 100 paid,” Octavious said, attributing the sparse crowd to Tangent’s move to a new location and stiff competition from Bogart’s, where Mary’s Danish, a strong alternative-rock attraction, played a near-sellout show Wednesday.

Club Tangent began as an every-Wednesday alternative-rock showcase in August. Its previous host club, Manhattan’s in Stanton, closed in January because of a business dispute among owners, prompting Bash and Octavious to seek a new location.

The Marquee offers obvious advantages: It can hold 452 people; Manhattan’s holds 300. But with a layout that includes separate stage and bar areas, the smaller shows Club Tangent books should maintain a sense of intimacy. The Marquee also offers a large stage and good concert lighting.

On the down side, Club Tangent will no longer draw the younger crowd it could pull into Manhattan’s, which admitted concert-goers 18 and over. To get into the Marquee, you must be 21.

And there is the heavy metal barrier. Fans and musicians in alternative-rock circles tend to look at the metal scene the way academics tend to look at sitcoms--as a formulaic, mercenary genre driven by the bottom line.

The challenge, Octavious acknowledged before the show, is to make alternative-rock fans expand their itinerary to a new spot off their usual circuit--at least for one night a week. The promoters’ goal is modest enough--a draw of 100 or more fans each Wednesday (Octavious said Tangent’s draw at Manhattan’s had built gradually to an average of 130 to 180).

To reach that goal in a hurry, Bash and Octavious are taking a risk in coming weeks by booking more expensive nationally known bands, instead of Tangent’s usual diet of local rock contenders. Caterwaul, a critically hailed I.R.S. Records act, headlines Wednesday, with locals the Pivot Foots and Naked Soul opening. Firehose, a college radio favorite, plays the Marquee on March 21, with Twisto Frumpkin and Flatbed opening. Ticket prices will be $10 for those shows; the Swamp Zombies bill cost $5.

“I wanted to have two big shows so we could establish alternative rock on Wednesday nights a lot quicker,” Octavious said. “If we did smaller bands, it would take a lot longer. This way it should go faster for us.”

Trojan Tabak, co-owner of the Marquee, said he will be happy if Club Tangent can average 100 or more fans a week. He is willing to give Bash and Octavious two months to build an audience for alternative rock.

Wednesday “has been my slowest night of the week,” with a typical draw of 30 to 40 people, Tabak said. “I’ve had classic (rock) cover bands, other promoters, DJs, wet T-shirts, every possible thing I could think of. I haven’t been able to get anything to fly.”

Actually, Wednesday’s bill offered moments that the Marquee’s usual metal crowd might have enjoyed. The Swamp Zombies, playing with their accustomed energy, irreverence and infectious sense of enjoyment, ended their set with one of their typically skewed acoustic takes on the rock classics, including Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” complete with howling feedback from Jacobs’ upright bass.

That metal transposition finished a concluding medley that also included snippets from Metallica, the Circle Jerks, the Pixies and the Brady Bunch--an omnivorous sequence that was indicative of the Swamp Zombies’ humorous, try-anything philosophy.

The set, vastly overamplified by the Marquee’s sound crew, showed that the Swamp Zombies have evolved from a rough, good-time band into a strong musical unit that can rock impressively with amplified acoustic instruments and rough but rich harmonies. “Creeps,” a catchy novelty song, was the highlight among several new numbers that will be on “Scratch and Sniff Car Crash,” the new Swamp Zombies album due out next month.

The show did not include the band’s version of Public Enemy’s rap hit, “Fight the Power,” which Jacobs said will appear on the album.

Don’t Mean Maybe’s well-played set included a surprising wrinkle: a swinging boogie version of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy.” Although Mark Andrea’s laconic singing on that oldie lacked bite, the song came as an interesting change of pace from Don’t Mean Maybe’s usual lean, angular, hard-edged take on guitar psychedelia.

Andrea was not as rambunctious as he can be on his best nights, but he, drummer Jeff Fairbanks and bassist John Hawthorne gave a tight, well-honed performance that centered on Don’t Mean Maybe’s new album, “Live Sample,” due out next week.

The Clints’ set was spirited, but not nearly sharp enough to make their driving guitar rock soar. Harmonies involving all four members (each one named Clint and decked out in a black cowboy hat, in keeping with the band’s dubious joke-Western persona) clicked at times, but more often they sputtered and squawked.

Clint Ambuter and Clint Wade, the guitarists who sang most of the leads, lacked the vocal range to do justice to the band’s strong melodies (Ambuter had a particularly rough night).

As their album, “No Place Like Home,” demonstrates, the Clints have plenty of worthwhile ideas and a good notion of how to construct a sharp pop-rock song. Several new songs showed an emerging Bob Dylan influence to go with their New Wave leanings.

But for all of it to work, the Clints need to graduate from creaky garagedom to a strong, confident level of musicianship. As far as live performance goes, these Clints are going to need a lot of target practice before they can think of making anybody’s day.