‘Sober Musicians’ Headline MAP Benefit

The featured performers at Friday’s benefit concert at Billboard Live for the Musicians’ Assistance Program (MAP) offered heartfelt sets that underscored the organization’s purpose: to provide peer support and treatment funding for musicians addicted to drugs and alcohol. But the 3 1/2-hour show was hindered by an inept emcee and an ill-timed closing presentation.

Billed as an acoustic evening, the program featured brief sets by a diverse lineup of “sober musicians”: singer Kathleen Hanna of punk/feminist band Bikini Kill, Everclear front man Art Alexakis, X co-founder John Doe, singer-songwriter Peter Case and country rocker Steve Earle.

Each gave the audience something different: Alexakis performed a tune from Everclear’s forthcoming album, as well as the band’s hit “Santa Monica,” and Case delivered an energetic, tight collection of mostly new material in a Dylan-esque folk-blues vein. A laconic Doe let his material do the talking on the subject of addiction.

Hanna, accompanied by bandmate Kathi Wilcox on guitar and bass, belted out a mournful country tune and an appropriately deadpan rendition of Devo’s ironic ballad “Beautiful World.” She spent much of her 20-minute set delivering screeds against capitalism and consumer culture to the largely indifferent crowd, and ended by reading an article from her fanzine lambasting the Powers That Be (a.k.a. “Them”) for wanting to enslave musicians and everyone else with materialism and addictive substances.

Though Hanna had some compelling points, her frequent demands that the audience shut up and listen sounded childish and proved ineffectual. Earle’s 45-minute set conveyed a similar idea far more potently, with a tune invoking such legendary agitators as Woody Guthrie, Emma Goldman and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He made his own point about oppression, and the people who suffer it without bearing down on the audience. Earle clearly shared Hanna’s desire to communicate the lessons he’d learned from his excesses, but rather than lecturing, he demonstrated the ravages of addiction through a well-chosen selection of folk-blues and country songs.

He ended with the quietly devastating “Ellis Unit One,” his chilling song from the “Dead Man Walking” soundtrack, as the packed house remained markedly subdued. That should have been the final note, but the organizers instead closed with a videotaped segment about MAP from ABC’s news magazine “PrimeTime Live,” which would have better served as the show’s introduction. The power of Earle’s tune lingered, while the tape seemed almost an afterthought.

This error in judgment was minor compared to the choice of emcee, however. Although MAP’s 70-year-old founder, saxophonist and recovering addict Buddy Arnold, would have been the perfect host, he appeared only at the beginning of the evening to describe the organization’s purpose. Sitcom actress Jenica Bergere (from “Ink”) then took over, intermittently bombing the proceedings with non sequiturs and sight gags so inept they would have embarrassed Ellen DeGeneres. If there’s a support group for recovering comedians, send that woman a brochure.