No time like the right time
Hoodoo Gurus' terrific show at Thalia Hall in Chicago testified to a dynamic career
DOWN AT THE ROCK AND ROLL CLUB—Midway through Hoodoo Gurus’ show at Thalia Hall in Chicago, Dave Faulkner announced that this might be the last time his band swings through the United States. The Australian group formed in 1981, took a five year hiatus at the turn of the century, and have been going at it steady since 2003. The current jaunt is their second “big bus” tour of the States in recent years, and Faulkner wonders if maybe they’ve had enough. He was quick to wave off the possibility, instead urging the crowd to enjoy the present moment.
The Gurus first toured the U.S. in 1984, and I caught an electrifying, very loud show at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. either that year or the next. If this is indeed the last time the Gurus endure a day-long flight from Australia to rock the U.S., I’m grateful that I got to see them again—in a pleasingly appropriate way, as they played plenty of tracks from their debut album Stoneage Romeos when I caught them the first time around, when everyone’s hair was longer, and they’re playing that album in its entirety on this current “Back to the Stone Age” tour. (Earlier this year the band released a 40th anniversary version packaged with an ‘84 live show and other goodies.) Form A Circle, as the Gurus once sang.
At Thalia, Hoodoo Gurus were as tight, fun, and entertaining as when I saw them a year ago in New York City. The band—Faulkner on guitar and lead vocals, longtime mates Brad Shepherd on lead guitar/vocals and Rick Grossman on bass/vocals, and, since 2015, drummer Nik Rieth—remains in trim, fighting shape, stylish in their skinny black jeans and floral (Shepherd and Rieth), Western (Grossman), and metallic blue (Faulkner) dress shirts. Pointy black boots all around. Shepherd’s playing was characteristically both controlled and feral: he alternates among searing leads, chugging rhythms, and delicate melodic passages that wink atop Faulkner’s witty and poignant turns-of-phrase. Shepherd appeared to be battling some road burn—he’s taken to adopting a professorial mien onstage in recent years, and at Thalia he looked a bit preoccupied. Faulkner was energetic as always, chatting up the crowd, taking requests, knocking out his songs in great voice. As I’ve written before, over the decades Faulkner’s tunes have scored significant times in my life, both good and bad, and it’s always a profound pleasure to see and hear the band play, to bring those songs alive again under lights.
(An aside: the show at Thalia Hall was a seated affair, a fact that I’d forgotten about, having ordered tickets many months ago. My spirits sank when I walked in and saw the polite, orderly rows of foldable chairs. I took a seat in the fifth row as songs played over the PA, feeling as if I were waiting for the curtain to lift on a three-act play. A bit later my pal Dave was kind enough to stop by for a chat—we were two guys hanging out on a stoop. Happily, most of the crowd stood during the show, and, with a couple dozen others, I eventually left my seat for the open area in front of the stage for a proper rock and roll experience. Alas, after six or so songs I and and anyone else who hadn’t ponied up for a seat in the first three rows—the “Gold Circle”—were politely asked to return to our seats. My quarrel is not with security, which was simply doing its job, but with General Admission seated shows at venues with the option to go either way. I willingly bought the tickets, sure, yet it’s not my scene, man. I like to work my way up to the stage, where over the course of a show nearby strangers become mates and then strangers again. I like to be jostled about. I’d rather be doused with beer from flying cups a foot from the stage then endure the steady drip of condensation from Thalia’s ancient ceiling as I sat like a good boy in my seat. Caveat emptor.)
The first order of business for the Gurus was to blast their way through Stoneage Romeos, forty years old this year and as dynamic and fresh sounding as ever. “I loathe the Play the Album concert concept,” Greil Marcus wrote recently at Ask Greil. “I want to see something happen. If I want to hear a script read I’ll go to a reading.” Fair enough, but the songs on Stoneage Romeos are so lively, nervy, and uniquely fun that they can’t sit still.
Faulkner’s wry and affectionate commentary on many of the tunes held them aloft, too. “Dig It Up” was dedicated to the Cramps who, like the Ramones and the Fleshtones, were pivotal early influences on Faulkner; he remarked before the exotic “Zanzibar” that earlier in the day he’d visited the “007 Science” James Bond exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, by way of explaining the song’s affection for Cold War-era subterfuge and dissembling. (The exhibit? “It was…meh,” Faulkner confessed.) Near the end of the set he sympathized with anyone familiar with the American version of the album who might be confused by the set’s song sequencing, acknowledging that the U.S. label (A&M) shuffled the order of songs and also demanded a different cover from the Australian version, which they’d deemed was in bad taste. “As anyone knows, that’s the opposite of what we like in Hoodoo Gurus world,” Faulkner cracked, adding, “We hate good taste.” He offered in evidence “In the Echo Chamber,” a song about an innocent man trapped in a mad scientist’s experimental reverb room: It was like a Phil Spector nightmare.
A dozen years ago I had the good fortune of being able to write about Hoodoo Gurus once a day over a week at the One Week//One Band site. I remarked there that in a way I’d always been waiting for them. Tutored by mid-70s AM radio, the “Red” and “Blue” albums, the Monkees, KISS, and New Wave power pop, I was primed for a band that could synthesize it all. Stoneage Romeos arrived in 1984 like a missile, funny, quirky, and in its pop sprawl, nervy confidence, and stew of colorful influences, somewhat extraordinary—the cultural touchstones were mostly American, many of the B-movie, TV sitcom, trashy sort. I intuitively dug the Gurus as pop formalists in love with tradition, but they were as interested in what might happen in a song when sources come crashing together as what happens when those sources are seamlessly integrated. Hoodoo Gurus’ love of Day-Glo pop history—trashy monster movies and novelty songs, a mash-up of TV Guide, Top 40, and Vox and Paisley—was so passionate that the histories collide. There was just so much to dig.
The noisy list of dedications on the back cover of Stoneage Romeos included Larrabee, the ham-fisted secret agent from Get Smart, comic actor Larry Storch, Dallas Donnelly, an Australian professional rugby league footballer, Arnold Ziffel, the pig on Green Acres (“and his tailor”), as well as Arthur Kane, bass player for the New York Dolls. Faulkner told Fred Mills at Blurt, “In the case of the Hoodoo Gurus, in the early days, in songs there were a lot of jokey themes and titles. The ‘dumbness’ of rock—trying to bring that back.”
Not just dumbness, but the innocence and naiveté and the fun. You know, songs like “Splish Splash” or whatever. Things that were kind of corny but still, in a way, kind of above the trappings of supposedly intelligent music—stuff that had an internal intelligence, which was a bit more rarified to me. I mean, ‘a wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!’ and early rock ‘n’ roll just has this exuberance, and it didn’t have to necessarily make sense.
He added: “That music is still just as exiting and direct today, whereas a lot in between has become sort of stale. That stuff still has an energy you just can’t deny.”
The Gurus’ mélange of crazy crushes is heard best in “(Let’s All) Turn On,” the b-side of “Tojo” released in the summer of 1983, the lead track on the Australian version of Stoneage Romeos, and the charging opener at Thalia Hall. The tune’s at once a “What We Like!” litany, a call to arms, a sonic manifesto, and a bubbling brew of sources across the decades. Name-checked: the Flamin’ Groovies, Count Five, the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and the Animals, Sky Saxon, the Ramones, early Elvis, Danny and the Juniors, Gene Vincent, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Isley Brothers, the Beatles, T. Rex, Eddie Cochran, Carl Perkins, the Velvet Underground, Suzi Qautro, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Jackie DeShannon, the Kinks, Little Richard, the Archies, Music Machine, the Drifters, and the Royal Teens and the Nair TV commercial—and a cheeky nod to Le Hoodoo Gurus themselves. All in three minutes, needle time packed with hooks, jokes, and layered harmonies. I never heard a “Thank You” note you so fun.
The album title? That, the fellas nabbed from a 1955 Three Stooges short: Larry, Mo, and Shemp set out to prove to a museum curator that cavemen still exist, an urgent mission right up the Gurus’ alley.
The second set saw the Gurus work their way through fifteen more songs including a three song encore. They led off with the driving “World of Pain” from their latest record Chariots of the Gods, their strongest in years, and ended the night with a stomp through “Where Nowhere Is” from 1987’s Blow Your Cool! In between, the band played the familiar (“What’s My Scene,” “Out that Door,” “1000 Mies Away,” “Come Anytime,” “Miss Freelove ‘69,” “Bittersweet”), the rarely played (“Bring the Hoodoo Down,” a mid-80s b-side), and a request from a fan (the lovely “Shadow Me” from 1989’s Magnum Cum Louder; other requests were hollered out and Faulkner was mock-repelled by one in particular; had I not been booted from the stage area I was prepared to request the righteous caveman stomp of “Be a Woman” from the Gurus side project Persian Rugs. Alas.).
Faulkner introduced “Another World” as a song about “looking in the mirror and seeing a monster,” an interesting gloss on a number that I hadn’t read before as quite so personal. That gave the lilting melody and sweet closing harmonies more dimension—it’s nice when a thirty-five year old song can still surprise. What didn’t astonish me was how hard the Gurus can rock. “The Right Time,” “Like Wow—Wipeout,” and the hard charging encore opener “Axegrinder” were vintage Gurus in Rocking Mode: loud, riffing, at turns galloping and strutting. If I occasionally indulged myself in imagining the band as they looked in the ‘80s as they tore across the U.S., young and hungry, their hair down to their shoulders or teased up high, watching Faulkner and Shepherd on Wednesday night trading leads and barre chords, two mates still getting off on the noise they make, was heartening, and inspiring.
It’s bittersweet, to coin a phrase, to think that barring a visit to Down Under and immaculate timing, this might’ve been the last time I see Hoodoo Gurus live. A few nights ago I watched Paul Weller play a long set, the lived-in ease of his decades-long career palpable. Weller and Faulkner were born six months apart. Here’s hoping that each man keeps writing, recording, and playing songs for as long as he can, and that I get the good fortune to hear them.
All photos ©Joe Bonomo
Thanks for the great review (& photos) - I'll be seeing the Gurus here in Seattle on Monday night, and really looking forward to it! Saw them last year and it was terrific show - fortunately they're playing a venue with an open floor here, the Neptune Theatre. I feel lucky that Seattle is a stop on their fairly limited tour, and I didn't realize it was being talked about as their last one so I'm extra happy I get to see them again.
Great piece! I was also at the 1984/85 show at the 9:30 Club and was blown away. (Figures, on the Twin Tone label, was the opening act.). And I also saw Paul Weller and the Gurus the same week, but in Philadelphia. Weller was cool, but I came away from the Gurus show knowing I had seen the best rock band in the world. Probably my favorite of the seven times I have seen them over the past 40 years. So much joy in the room. Thanks for the article. Cliff in PA