POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Skeletons at Rhythm: These Bones Connect

One of the best things about this rock critic job is that every time you start getting complacent and thinking you’ve heard it all, something comes along and makes you realize that even if you have heard it all, you haven’t been listening as well as you should.

There’s nothing tremendously new in what Springfield, Mo.’s Skeletons do. Like NRBQ’s, the quintet’s music is a wild pastiche of most things American, including the twang of country, a splash of surf and great heaps of rockabilly, ‘60s rock and R&B; influences. But, further like NRBQ, the Skeletons combine those elements in a way that makes one hear them afresh, catching the vitality the music had when it was first born and that still is there when the songs are played with spirit.

The Rhythm Cafe had enough Skeletons to fill any closet Thursday night as the band did triple duty, opening the show with a rousing set of its own and then backing singer/guitarists Scott Kempner and Dave Alvin in their separate sets.

The Rhythm Cafe was a dinner theater in its previous incarnation, and much of that plushy look remains. After surveying the room when the Skeletons came on stage, bassist Lou Whitney announced, “This is our first dinner club engagement, so we’d like to play something suited for the digestion of food.” Whereupon the group launched into a loving version of the breezy 1960 instrumental “The Theme From a Summer Place” with Duane Eddy-like tremolo lines from guitarist D. Clinton Thompson and airy “oooh” vocal harmonies.

Through the ensuing 11 songs the group continued to have a rousing good time, making it seem no work at all to create music that is about as good as rock gets. Whitney, Thompson, drummer Bobby Lloyd Hicks and keyboardists Joe Terry and Kelly Brown are total groove-monsters, giving a song and its mood the total due while also enriching the songs with the musicians’ own diverse musical personalities. Thompson and the keyboardists took some fanciful, and in places downright atonal, instrumental flights, but they all came to ground right smack in the songs.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the Skeleton’s “cross-dressing” version of Jimmy Bryant’s classic “Only Daddy (That’ll Walk the Line).” Instead of its typical country setting, the song was rendered in a brilliantly nasty, clacking funk form. With his trebly Telecaster, Thompson laid out a solo that sounded like something slithering out of a snake-charmer’s basket.

The Skeletons’ original country tunes aren’t quite the norm, either (though the band showed a firm mastery of the form with its playing on Jonathan Richman’s 1990 album, “Jonathan Goes Country”). Whitney’s “Thirty Days in the Workhouse” is a not uncommon tale of what happens when a good ol’ boy’s good times run afoul of the law, but he gives it a socially conscious twist in the chorus:

Thirty days in the workhouse.

Don’t you shed no tears.

If I’d been a black man,

They’d a give me 30 years.

The other near-country tune in the set was “Waiting for My Gin to Hit Me,” a song both whacked-out and ominous in its vision of the grip of alcohol and made all the more sinister by the Indian tom-tom beat driving through it. “I can’t see till I get half-blind,” they sang, as Terry and Brown took off on a duet that sounded as though their keyboards were on a spiral staircase descending through the levels of hell.

Not everything the Skeletons did was quite so skewed. They had some fine melodic tunes, such as the new “Mad Old Lady” that recalled Marshall Crenshaw’s brand of power pop. They also had a command of the sloshy frat-rock sound, as one might expect since Whitney was a member of the Swingin’ Medallions, whose “Double Shot (of My Baby’s Love)” was a ‘60s frat staple.

Though the group has a strong personality of its own, it submerged it, to varying degrees, in the sets by Kempner and Alvin.

Kempner’s eight-song offering wasn’t that different from what he used to do in the Del Lords, namely roots-based rock that doesn’t have much of an individual stamp. Though he’s an able performer and clearly sincere in his efforts, his songs just don’t have an authentic ring, seeming instead like just another commodity from the over-farmed earth of post-Springsteen “heartland” rock.

Though the Skeletons lent him able support, they seemed a mite subdued, as if worried that if they went full-tilt they might well overwhelm Kempner’s material.

It was a different case when they were backing Alvin. The ex-Blaster is such a potent performer and strong song craftsman that the Skeletons were able to let fly without fear of outstripping the man in the spotlight. Indeed, the band and front man seemed to push each other to new heights. Alvin hasn’t sounded this good since he left the Blasters in 1986.

He still isn’t exactly what you’d call a singer. Alvin and his vocalist brother Phil (see review on F1) remind a bit of the story of the seven Chinese brothers, who each had a distinct skill, and as long as they stuck together could face any challenge. In the Alvin brothers’ case, Phil has a distinctive, emotional voice that cuts through even the most driving band, yet he has no muse for writing songs. Dave, meanwhile, has written some of the most evocative and resonant songs ever to come out of L.A., yet his warm bellow of a voice can’t come close to doing them justice.

Such as it is, Dave’s voice has improved considerably over the past six years to where, combined with his assured guitar work and assertive stage presence, he put on a strong show, even if the lyrics often got lost in the mix.

He opened the show unaccompanied and then, after a false-start on “Hollywood Bed,” he and the Skeletons roared into a thunderous version of “So Long Baby Goodbye.” The show stayed at that heated pitch, with Alvin alternating easily between Blasters’ favorites, his own more recent tunes and a coupla of new songs due to be recorded next year. (There was one person in the audience who kept screaming for “Marie Marie,” prompting Alvin at one point to respond: “I wrote the damn song. I’ll play the damn song. So hold your damn horses.”) On several numbers, Alvin and Thompson traded some blazing solos.

For his encore, Alvin came out in a blindingly garish Nudie jacket loaned to him by local country luminary Chris Gaffney and, joined by Gaffney on accordion, did a slow, atmospheric ballad version of “Border Radio.” Alvin closed with a driving version of his “American Music,” first announcing, “I rarely do this song because I’m such a pessimist.” He then dedicated the song--an ode to the vitality and diversity of American creativity--to Hillary Clinton.