Lansing — Steve Lambert and Hood Booking bid farewell to Lansing this weekend, but not before throwing one heck of a going away party.
Spread across two nights, two venues and eight bands, the final Lansing-based Hood shows were a testament to the diverse swath of artists Lambert brought to town and to the fact that people will show up for a concert in Lansing, given the right prompting.
Night One: Calliope, The Hard Lessons, NOMO, Tight Phantomz and Vega at Mac's Bar
Thursday night's bill at Mac's Bar, 2700 E. Michigan Ave., was five bands long, but the best performances — from NOMO and The Hard Lessons — were smack dab in the middle.
In the future, when the city of Detroit is launched into orbit as part of a worldwide metropolitan purge, the spacey Afro-beat- influenced jazz of NOMO will play over the loudspeakers in the bars of what will be known as Spacestation D-Town. It wouldn't be much of a surprise if the members of NOMO have already visited that time period, as their sound implies all sorts of musical time-traveling — jazzed-up horns rubbing against Latin percussion set to a jittery Motown groove.
While the band's collective spirit drove most of its set, there was plenty of free jazz soloing, none of which sounded superfluous. Really, who can argue with a well-paced baritone saxophone breakdown?
At the set's climax, the band spilled into the crowd, creating a group sing-along with only horns and percussion for backing. It followed in the spirit of the rest of the performance — no one member of NOMO was more important than the other members or audience.
Opening with a fiery rendition of "Wicked Man," The Hard Lessons plowed through its set like a band with something to prove — which was great, but if there's one band that doesn't have to prove its worth to a crowd at Mac's, it's The Hard Lessons.
The band doesn't make it to Mac's as often as it once did, but The Anvil, Augie and KoKo Louise helped close the end of the Hood era in style — even in its revised form, "Carey Says (Alright)" will go down in history as the best song written from the bar's stage.
Their stage presence has transformed from rabble rousers dressed like high school English teachers to stone-cold, cool rock stars — check the popped collars on The Anvil and KoKo — but the set list still made room for highlights from the shirt-and-tie days. "Love Gone Cold" and "Share Your Vanity" have lost a bit of their flavor, but still elicit their fair share of swooning and hip shaking.
Wringing their last beads of sweat out of Neil Young's "Hey Hey My My," the band made the case for the rock 'n' roll life everlasting. So long as The Hard Lessons are around, rock has a home and a family to come back to in Lansing.
Night Two: Ted Leo and The Pharmacists, The Jai-Alai Savant and Thunderbirds Are Now! at The Temple Club
The Temple Club, 500 E. Grand River Ave., never feels as cozy as Mac's, but an all-ages show and a national headliner on Friday night packed the crowd into the club's Grand Room.
Things got off to a spazzy start with Thunderbirds Are Now! Unfortunately, keyboardist/vocalist/auxiliary percussionist Scott Allen's tambourine-tossing antics outshined any of his band's songs. There might be something to enjoy beneath all that energy, but it's hard to find when a band member is prancing around the stage draped in an extension cord.
The Jai-Alai Savant was good enough — making reggae and dub anything but boring by firing it through the barrel of At-The-Drive-In-esque urgency — but the night belonged to Ted Leo as much as it did to Steve Lambert.
It has always struck me as odd that Leo is from New Jersey, probably because contemporary American punk usually isn't so passionate, philosophical or articulate while not being exclusively about girl problems. Leo possessed passion and philosophy in spades, postulating on mankind's relationship to fecal matter in between songs sung with closed eyes, his head swiveling like a bobble-head doll on top of a washing machine.
Leo and The Pharmacists (bassist Dave Lerner and drummer Chris Wilson) attacked their classic rock- infused punk at inconceivable tempos — the opening bars of "The High Party" would have worn out a lesser band. "Flying without a set list," they fielded requests from the sizable crowd, turning down some while giddily launching into others.
The only request Leo had to flat-out refuse was for an encore, as the set was already pushing the Grand Room's curfew. He did emerge for one extra song, a touching a cappella version of The Pogues' "Dirty Old Town." Dedicating the song to Lansing, it was a fitting curtain call to the venture that tried to bring some rocking and rolling life to this dirty old town.
