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Concert Review: Mudvayne up to old games at EP tour opener

There are advantages and disadvantages to opening a tour in a border town like El Paso. There's not much media scrutiny to worry about, the cost of renting out the venue for rehearsals is relatively low and God knows there isn't any better Mexican food.

The disadvantages? "Don't ever, ever get up on stage in a red f------- monkey suit in El Paso, because it's hot," Mudvayne shrieker Chad Gray observed during Tuesday's "The New Game" tour opener at the County Coliseum.

It's not the first time the Peoria metal band's lead singer has taken the stage in a headless guerrilla costume. Despite his last name, Gray's one of the more colorful frontmen in modern metal, his unusual choice of wardrobe falling somewhere between Tool/A Perfect Circle/Puscifer vocalist Maynard James Keenan's sardonic dramatic flair and Slipknot and Mushroomhead's insane asylum escapee getups.

He chose the fuschia ensemble (complete with like-colored mohawk) for the El Paso kickoff, the opening salvo of the nearly two-month first leg of "The New Game" tour in support of Mudvayne's new, more streamlined-sounding CD due Nov. 18. With three weeks to go before its 11 songs officially are made public, it's not surprising that the band played so little of the new album Tuesday, but it was disappointing.

It's been three years since they released new material, and, thanks to the fact the band wrote and recorded the successor to "The New Game" over the summer at the Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, there's plenty of new material to go around.

When a band like Mudvayne, which has managed to sell about 3 million albums flying largely under the radar, targets hardcore fans by playing mostly theaters (the Coliseum stage was nearly halfway out on the floor), said hardcore fan doesn't need to wait for a new album to want to hear it. That's assuming they don't have a bootleg copy already.

Of course, the band went to great lengths to cut down on leaks. Its confusing "The Album Is the Ticket" campaign was designed to give those aficionados first crack at the new CD, tickets and bennies like meet-and-greets and a fan club membership for about half what they would cost otherwise.

For a couple of weeks, that was the only way to get tickets to Tuesday's show, until cooler heads prevailed and the $29.50 ducats went on sale through the usual outlets in late September. It's not like fans flocked to the Coliseum; promoters said about half the 1,500 people who attended the concert bought their tickets in advance.

While the band — staccato guitar king Gregg Tribbett, thundering bassist Ryan Martinie, pounder Matt McDonough and Gray — did work new, heavy-rock radio friendly single "Do What You Do" and its likely followup, the whacked out title track, into the intense 90-minute set, it was obvious that the band isn't even close to pushing those songs' boundaries just yet. Double disappointment.

What they did do was return to their old games, conjuring up an often powerful, if occasionally monotonous 11-song set (no encore) drawn mostly from their last three studio albums. Dramatic, episodic songs like "Not Falling" and "Happy?" were already buffed and shined on previous tours, so they required only spit polishing Tuesday.

Gray was in fine, vocal cord-shredding form, his monkey-turned-sweatsuit notwithstanding. His soul-purging screams are ear-piercing blasts of catharsis for him and his fans, but Gray shows on the new record and on songs like the oddly timed "Nothing to Gein" that he's got a singing voice that can convey more emotion than most of those blood-curdling vocal blasts. The song, from their 2000 album "L.D. 50," takes on an almost jazz-like sophistication in its 2008 incarnation, a sign that the newer, more accessible songs on "The New Game" could blossom in time.

The set was a stripped-down affair, framed by large red curtains bearing the new album logo, illustrated with an inventive light show that eschewed spots for four light towers and several computerized lights situated behind the band members.

The four-hour concert started promptly at 7 with a serviceable 20-minute set from local speed metalists Garden of Thorns, who made up in intensity what they lacked in variety or originality. Short-lived '90s punk-metal band Snot has reinvented itself with hyper Tommy Vext, late of Divine Heresy, in the late Lynn Strait's place. Their energy overcame a lack of standout material.

Frequent visitors 10 Years, who toured with Mudvayne a few years ago, was the most accessible and most balanced of the four bands on the bill. With radio hits like 2005 fixture "Wasteland," to which the audience sang along, and the kiss-off "Beautiful," the Knoxville quintet and its affable frontman Jesse Hasek managed to straddle that tricky line between fashionably hardcore metal and melodic radio-friendly rock.

Frankly, Mudvayne could use a little more melody and variety in its music. They have a fair amount of that on their new album, despite its occasionally political overtones. Too bad they didn't play much of it Tuesday.

Doug Pullen may be reached at dpullen@elpasotimes.com; 546-6397.

Concert Review: The Who renewed

AUBURN HILLS, MICH.-- The Who don't tour because they need to anymore. They do it because they want to. And they wanted to open a 10-city North American trek Tuesday (Oct. 21) night in Detroit, a city that needs all the help it can get.

The Motor City's always been there for the fabled British rockers and with this show what's left of the graying, groundbreaking group -- muscle-voiced singer Roger Daltrey and guitar maestro Pete Townshend -- returned the favor, donating proceeds from the concert to two local charities, and giving the kind of fiery performance for which the '70s rock legends were once known.

The locale evoked more than the usual memories from the former quartet, who lost drummer Keith Moon 30 years ago and bassist John Entwistle, who kicked the bucket hours before their 2002 tour kicked off. Townshend, who was in fine form all night, noted it was a Detroit radio station that helped give them their first Stateside hit and recalled their first gigs in nearby Ann Arbor and a high school in suburban Southfield. "Then we went to the Monterey Pop Festival and it was all downhill from there," Townshend quipped.

Of course, the opposite was true. Townshend turned his teen rage and gnawing adult sense of disillusionment into a succession of brilliant, trailblazing albums that explored everything rampant commercialism ("The Who Sell Out"), celebrities as false gods ("Tommy") and the notion of the individual vs. the group dynamic set in the early '60s of his youth ("Quadrophenia"), timeless themes that remain timely today.

By 1982, Townshend felt a Moonless Who was spent and was unwilling or unable to try to live up to the legacy he helped shape. His solo albums had eclipsed the bands. The Who bid farewell that year with a listless, ill-advised tour, then regrouped in 1989 for a tour that seemed almost as pointless, other than the big paycheck at the end, with a performance of their rock opera "Tommy" as the centerpiece, but backup musicians doing all the work. It wasn't until after Townshend found new life with a musical theater interpretation of the story of a deaf, dumb and blind messiah that he found a portal back into the Who's creative vision. He re-envisioned "Quadrophenia" for the concert stage and it was obvious that the spark, and his trademark windmill, had returned.

The result is a band that rediscovered the joy of reinvigorating its considerable body of work, songs like "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Riley," which found new audiences through new means, including the "CSI" TV series, TV commercials and the popular "Rock Band" video game.

Even after bassist Entwistle died from a cocaine-induced heart attack and the handwringing that followed, Townshend agreed to continue with the always ready Daltrey, backed by essentially the same musicians who punched new life into the "Quadrophenia" songs. It includes stoic journeyman bassist Pino Palladeno, hastily recruited to fill Entwistle's spot eight years ago, longtime keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick, Townshend's younger brother Simon on guitar and backing vocals and the explosive drummer Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr's Moon-trained son.

The half Who's 2006 album "Endless Wire" was their first in a quarter century and it aimed high even if it fell a little short. As solid as their Detroit performance was that year, it in no way matched the intensity and sheer sense of celebration that marked Tuesday's 22-song, 2-hour show. Daltrey was in particularly fine voice for a guy whose voice sometimes is the worse for wear (the inevitable hoarseness crept in near the end). A slim Townshend played like a caged animal from the opening strains of "I Can't Expllain," and later admitted to the 10,000-member crowd that he'd been up since 7 a.m. "waiting for this."

They treated longtime fans with concert rarities such as "Tattoo," the 1967 ode to innocence that has a new resonance in a day when body art and piercings are the norm not the exception, "Who's Next" gem "Getting In Tune" and the dated "Who Are You" social commentary "Sister Disco." The real thrills came when the band went into full, rumbling throttle on warhorses "5:15," with Townshend leading a spirited instrumental jam, and a newly expanded "My Generation," their 44-year-old signature song, its newly constructed peaks and valleys giving Townshend and Starkey ample room to weave the former's sinewy guitar bluster with the latter's drum pyrotechnics.

The encore included a playful, exploratory "Magic Bus," complete with Daltrey and Townshend's negotiators' repartee (Pete changed the "100 English pounds" line to dollars, noting it was "the only currency anybody ever gives me"), and a "Tommy" medley (Townshend restarted "Pinball Wizard" when he realized he was using a wrongly tuned guitar) that played like a payoff for fans after the sustained dynamism of the show's second half. It ended appropriately and symbolically with "Tea & Theatre," the touching "Endless Wire" ballad that serves as the theme song for the Who two's closing chapters, a fitting answer to "The Seeker," played early (and well) in the show, and its famous observation that "I won't get to get what I'm after 'til the day I die."

That's probably what it's going to take to put an end to one of rock's most enduring forces. They may still sing in "My Generation" that they hope they die before they get old, but Tuesday's tour opening performance showed that the surviving half of the Who can be every bit as musically and thematically vital as they want to be.

Set list
1. I Can't Explain
2. The Seeker
3. Getting In Tune
4. Fragments
5. Who Are You
6. Behind Blue Eyes
7. Tattoo
8. Baba O'Riley
9. Relay
10. Sister Disco
11. Mike Post Theme
12. Eminence Front
13. 5:15
14. Love Reign O'er Me
15. My Generation
16. Won't Get Fooled Again
(encore)
17. Magic Bus
18. Pinball Wizard
19. Amazing Journey/Sparks
20. See Me Feel Me
21. Listening to You
22. Tea & Theatre

Music fans get 'Addicted' to Saving Abel

It’s amazing how quickly life can change for an unknown band with a major hit on its hands.

“It definitely made a drastic turn. Once we got a tour bus, (our manager’s) thinking, ‘You guys can get rest,’ and they doubled our work,” says Jared Weeks, 26-year-old lead singer for Mississippi rockers Saving Abel, whose song “Addicted” has become habit forming for rock and pop fans.

The group, which performs Oct. 30 at Club 101, was just another bunch of rock star wannabes traversing the country in a van before “Addicted” cracked the rock charts, then crossed over to pop radio (it’s No. 38 this week on the Billboard Top 40 chart). Now they barely have time to think — not that Weeks is complaining.

“I have to look at my schedule one day at a time instead of a week at a time. It’s overwhelming just being on the road, sleeping on the floor of the van, well, the bus now,” the singer, who’s diabetic, says by phone from “somewhere between Lexington, Tenn., and Nashville on the Music Highway.”

“We get a little more rest, but it’s hard to balance and focus everything out, especially with phone interviews, radio performances, headlning shows, meet-and-greets. We’re new to this,” he adds. “I had a rough time adjusting to it, but now we’ve got our tour bus and we can sit down every day, work on new stuff, write new songs. Just the fact that we’re getting rest makes the job a little better.”

“Addicted” is the first single off the band’s self-titled debut album for Virgin Records, ironic considering the song’s an explicit ode to a lover. It had to be cleaned up for radio, which makes for some awkward moments. “I’ve seen the YouTube videos where parents have recorded their little kids singing the song,” Weeks says. “Me, being from the Bible belt, my mom wouldn’t let me do stuff like that.”

Weeks used to draw blood at Magnolia Regional Health Center in his native Corinth, Miss., when the song’s infectious melody first rolled around in his head. He used to sing to patients there, and says he wrote the lyrics on a prescription pad.

It was just what the doctor ordered for the band, which includes guitarist Scott Bartlett, drummer Blake Dixon, bassist Eric Taylor and guitarist Jason Null, with whom weeks started the band in 2004. “Addicted” caught the attention of an A&R man, which led to the Virgin deal. Weeks said they knew they had something special.

“I remember us in the studio after we recorded it. We were looking at each other with jaws dropped, ‘Oh my God, this is something good.’ We liked it. The fact that the fans of America are actually enjoying it themselves, well I had no clue it would get us to where we are,” he says. “We always dreamed about it.”

The Club 101 show is a one-off headlining gig, a break from a fall/winter tour with Buckcherry, Avenged Sevenfold and Shinedown. It comes a week after the group’s appearance with Kanye West and others on the Oct. 24 “MTV Concert for the Brave” for young war veterans (which will be taped Oct. 23 in New York).

The video for “18 Days,” which will be released Oct. 27, is the band’s tribute to the troops, inspired by a war-related fan video posted on Saving Abel’s MySpace page, myspace.com/savingabel.

“It’s hard not to watch the video, seeing all the emotions and pictures, and not get a lump in your throat,” Weeks says.

In concert, the singer dedicates the song to the military, many of whom are “coming up after shows, sometimes crying. I think, cool, I’ve touched them,” he says. “They’ve started giving me their dog tags ... and I started wearing them proudly. I wear them every show we play.”

Saving Abel and Redline perform at 6 p.m. Oct. 30 at Club 101, 3233 N. Mesa. Tickets are $12 at the club and ticketbully.com.

Doug Pullen may be reached at dpullen@elpasotimes.com; 546-6397.

Review experiment

The Times is experimenting with running concert and show reviews online only, except in certain cases, such as multiple-show runs like the recent "Disney's High School Musical: The Ice Tour" at the Coliseum.

Most of our reviews are posted on the Did You Hear? blog and I've been double-posting shows that I review in this space as well.

Since I started here in April, the print reviews usually run two days after an event, but are posted online that night — in the Did You Hear? blog, my blog (when applicable) and with the online versions of our print stories.

It's called reverse publication, meaning you get it online first, then in print.

This is a change from what we did before, if, that is, we even reviewed something. Before, the reviewer was expected to write the review before an event ended to meet the deadline for the following day's paper. I suggested we do away with that for various reasons, the main one being out of respect for the reader, those in attendance and the artist the reviewer should critique the whole show, not just part of it (kind of liking covering the first half of a football game).

With this experiment, we're just trying to find out if people miss, or even care about, reviews in the paper.

Lemme know what you think.

Call me at 915.546.6397 or email me at dpullen@elpasotimes.com.

Last-minute Skatalites gig canceled at the last minute

Just a few hours ago I posted a blog about a last-minute "surprise show" tonight (Oct. 13) by the Skatalites at Take II.

Well, I just got word that the show was canceled. "Sorry, I guess all the arrangements were not made. What a loss," reads an email from Radio La Chusma, the El Paso band that was going to open the show.

The show was listed on the Skatalites Web site, but not Take II's Myspace site, so it sounds like someone got their wires crossed.

Don't look for the blog I posted earlier. I deleted it.

Something New, Guest Review: Tito & Tarantula

I'm trying something new. The guest blog.

After missing Beck at The Percolator and Mars Volta at Club 101, I had to come up with some way of getting some coverage on the Web site of shows I am not able to attend.

Case in point: Tito & Tarantula. The plan was to check out former El Pasoan Tito Larriva's band at The Hidrant after reviewing the Ron White show at the Chavez.

But I found out the day before that the tee time for an annual golf outing involving a bunch of guys with whom I graduated from Eastwood in 1975 (some of whom fly in for this) was at 8 a.m. and I needed to get to my ride's house by 6:30. 6:30!

So I had to call an audible. And that call at nearly 11 p.m., when I got home, was to write the White review (show was so-so) and go to bed.

Luckily, John G. Townsend went. John's another EHS '75 grad who I interviewed for a story on "The Dark Knight," the latest Batman movie.

Here's John's account of Friday's show:

It started an hour late, but that didn't seem to bother the crowd at all. When he finally took the 'stage' it didn't take long to get into his more recognized music, "Strange Face of Love," from "Desperado," was his second song and that got everyone on their feet.

He played some of his stuff from his Cruzados days, including a great version of "La Bamba."

He talked about Selma Hayek during "Back to the House" and invited girls to join him onstage since Selma wasn't there.

He talked more about his music this show than during his previous (one here in 1999). "After Dark" is about a vampire, his daughter helped him write "Wasted" and, of course, "Angry Cockroaches" is about pot. Larriva played a great version of that song.

He also spent a lot of time talking to the crowd or to his 'familia' as he called everyone.

High points: A version of "Secret Agent Man" and a Spanish version of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK," which closed the encore. About an hour-and-a-half show and well worth it.

I did get to meet him and the band backstage before the show. Went with Hector Montes and George Reynoso. Very cool and nice group.

Man, wish I'd gone. I kick myself every time I miss something like this!

Happy birthday, dad

Today's Oct. 13. That's Columbus Day to you. But to me, it will always be my dad's birthday.

Lt. Col. Sydney Pullen would have been 88 today.

My dad died Aug. 31, 2006. He was 85. He lived a long and good life. Born in Royal Oak, Mich. Joined the Canadian air force during WWII, transferred to the Army Air Force. Navigated B-17s on bombing missions over Germany. He helped lead the Berlin airlift, joined the Strategic Air Command and flew B-52s after the war.

Married my mom, Louisa, after he met her in London during the war. Five kids — Mike (a Vietnam vet who died on Sept. 11, 2002), Mark, Matt, me and Lesley.

Dad taught elementary school after retiring from the Air Force in 1965. After he retired from teaching in the public schools, he taught for nearly 20 years at El Paso Community College. In fact, he had taught a class on a Saturday, then fell and broke his hip at home later that day.

He was supposed to recover and go into physical rehab, but that old body gave out and he died five days later.

He's buried in the national cemetery at Ft. Bliss. So's my brother Mike.

Miss you dad.

MGMT EP show in EW

Beck plays El Paso and Vanity Fair writes about it on their Web site.

MGMT opens the show and Entertainment Weekly takes pictures.

See what happens when we get shows that go beyond the norm?

Well, I can't promise it'll happen every time, but I'm sure the city's cheerleaders won't mind the two-page, five-picture spread in the Oct. 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine, its annual "Photo Issue" (with pretty boy Zac Efron on the cover).

The headline reads: "On the Road With MGMT," with "9.25.08 EL PASO" in smaller type below.

The blurb reads: "They met as freshmen at Wesleyan University, and formed a band built on trippy, epic songcraft. Today, Ben Goldwasser ... and Andrew VanWyngarden ... have transcended the indie-rock genre with a hit record — the aptly titled 'Oracular Spectacular' — and are currently traveling the U.S. on a 12-city tour with elder statesman Beck."

Goldwasser is featured in one photo behind his keyboard rig onstage (presumably during soundcheck), with another photo a closeup of one of his keyboards.

Baby-faced singer-guitarist VanWyngarden, who looks like Gram Parsons, is shown rehearsing guitar chords as he's reflected in a mirror, the largest photo of the spread. There's also a shot of him talking to Beck, and another on their tour bus showing off his undies.

One cutline reads: "The New Kids. 'We're really grateful Beck has taken us on the road with him,' says Goldwasser. 'We consider it a fluke that we play music that people like — people who don't even necessarily listen to indie rock.'"

The other: "Behind the Scenes: The band has a TV on their bus, but Goldwasser says, 'We mostly watch VH1 Classic, or maybe a football game. Getting (our songs) placed on shows like 'Gossip Girl' — we're flattered, but I don't think we've gotten the full maning of it (because we haven't really seen it). Still, a lot of people have told us about it.'"

It was reported by Leah Greenblatt and shot by Alex Tehrani, the San Francisco-based photographer whose images of Barrack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Fidel Castro, Jay-Z, Joel Osteen and many more have appeared in pubs such as Outside, Details, Time and Interview, as well as ESPN and Nike.

Exit 116 ramps up CD release party

El Paso alt rockers Exit 116 will headline a release party for their new CD "Life of Alibis" at 9:30 p.m. Friday (Oct. 17) at Maverick's Bar & Grill, 6999 Montana.

Fatter Than Nancy will open the show.

Details: 779-7368; myspace.com/exit116.

Ron White — uneven in public

Remember that big hulking guy from school who didn't care what he said or who he said it to, who drank like a fish but was smart as a whip?

That's who Ron White reminds me of.

The black sheep of the Blue Collar Comedy chorale made his entrance at the Chavez Theatre Friday night like a rock star, entering to the strains of the pride of Texas, Stevie Ray Vaughan. All the lights were extinguished — the better to see the glow of his trademark cigar — save a single spotlight focused on the other part of his visual signature, a bottle of his favorite Johnnie Walker scotch perched atop a simple stool.

And he used it, pouring himself a second glass of scotch on the rocks (taken from an ice box on a second stool) near the middle of his solid but uneven 90-minute show, which filled nearly all 2,100 available seats in the theater.

Obviously, Ron White likes to make himself comfortable onstage. It makes sense. He's been doing standup for 22 years and you don't last that long without knowing your way around a stage, an audience and a tumbler.

But the Ron White who performed here Friday isn't exactly the same one who performed here two years ago, or the one who played the Pan Am Center with Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall and Larry the Cable Guy (or Larry the Cable Idiot, as White cracked) before that.

He's not the same blustery funny guy with the hilarious stories about bad judgments and misdeeds or other people's stupefying stupidities.

He still does that kind of material, only now he's not some struggling comic assailing us with funny stories about getting kicked out of a bar in New York or pulled over in Podunk for some minor indiscretion on his record. These days he's a well-to-do comedian who whitens his teeth, wears yellow-tinted designer glasses, a smart black suit (with white shirt open at the neck), jets around the country in a plane "that you guys bought me," lives with his wife in a big house "that you guys bought us" and complains about the lack of hot water at the Ritz-Carlton and the smarmy teenager in the valet parking lot.

That doesn't mean the man they call Tater Salad isn't funny. But his white-collar comedy isn't as funny as the blue because most of us can't relate to it as well, and, frankly, White doesn't seem to invest himself as much in, doesn't seem to believe in it as much as he did the stuff that made him famous after he jumped on the Blue Collar Comedy express.

He's a lot more effective when he taps into the kind of crude humor that separated him from his squeakier, cleaner Blue Collar comrades. Those middle-class roots were showing in a bit about his first encounter with heated toilet seats and a bidet in his ritzy New York hotel room. "It's amazing how accurate it is," he said, marveling at its front and back streams. "It says, 'oscillate,' and I say, 'Why not'?!?"

It's tough to be a comic who writes about his world, even when that world is separating him from the people who gave it to him in the first place. How do you make that stuff relatable to them? Maybe his signature use of mock indignation, dripping, drawling sarcasm and clever set ups just needs a little facelift.

It didn't help that the performance had as many valleys as peaks. Finding humor in a poignant visit to a maimed soldier at Walter Reed Army Medical Center allowed him to rant about the need to take care of these men and women while working in a funny bit about a friendly epithet tossed at him by a guy with no larynx for using a "man bag." But a bit about color-coded security alerts and his 73-year-old mother's inability to understand them was dated, funny only when he imitated his mother stiffly donning a protective helmet.

White was at his funniest Friday when he joked about those porcelain waterworks — and when he recounted his arrest for what he said was 7/8 of a gram of marijuana Sept. 10 in Vero Beach, Fla. The 50-year-old Atlantan by way of Houston walked the audience through the adventure, from seeing what he thought was going to be a police escort when he landed to his 90-minute stay in the pokey. "They had to drive by three meth labs and a hooker just to get to my 7/8 of a gram of marijuana," he said, raising his voice in exaggerated indignation.

White never got into the particulars of the incident or the press release he issued six days later that claimed it was "medicinal marijuana," but he could evolve the retelling of the event into a funny bit of stoned in public if his lawyers let him.

Opener Alejandro Reymundo focused most of his 30-minute set on his "Hick-Spanic" life, inspired by his marriage to a "hillbilly" from Kentucky and their two kids, one of whom likes to shout "Orale! Ya'll!" His humor relies a little too much on stereotypes, not enough on insights. White has the insights, he just needs to tell them with the kind of focus and invention that made him a rich man.