Music

Wailin' Jenny

Sandwiched between jam bands, Jenny Carr and the Waiting List were peanut-buttery good.

By Jason Harper 

Swagger: You got it or you don't. Billy Joel? No swagger there. Mick Jagger? Rhymes with it, dawg.

The best swagger I've seen locally emanates from the hips of one Jenny Carr, whose band, the Waiting List, I saw for the first time last week at Davey's. Wearing a blue dress shirt, a necktie and pinstriped slacks, Carr slung her black Epiphone Dot Studio low (displaying a middle finger to illustrate the guitar's F-holes), sang loud and high, flailed and thrashed and shimmied, mugged for audience cameras and said some really funny shit between songs.

She likes dark beer. I watched her chug half a pint of it onstage.

At one point, she dismissed the band (in part because the drummer, Matt Heinrich, had to pee) and tore through a cover of "Folsom Prison Blues," urging the audience to sing along and doing a punk Pete Townshend take on Luther Perkins' chirpy solo.

No, I'm not in love with her. OK, maybe I am. You would be, too.

Actually, Carr's the type of rock star you wanna befriend instantly and hang out with drunk for a week straight on a road trip to Mexico. She's the kind you call after your significant other dumps you, your cat dies from eating a plastic bag, and you lock yourself out of your apartment and get stuck in a tree trying to reach the window. Because she understands that kind of crap. That's not so much in her swagger as in her songwriting.

After the show, a woman named Andrea approached Carr, falling all over herself as she praised her new hero. "Every single song — it was like you were singing pages from my life!" she said. And she wasn't drunk, either.

Don't misunderstand — this isn't teenage-girl-diary rock. At least, not live. The music on the Waiting List's MySpace page is all quiet and acoustic, as are the tracks on Carr's own solo-artist page. Onstage with her band (rounded out by bouncy bassist Nicole Murray) at Davey's, Carr would look out over the sizable crowd — impressive for a relatively early Thursday show — with her unblinking blue eyes punctuating an intensity that would triple each time she leaned her head back and shouted at the top of her lungs, swaying 3 feet away from the microphone and back. That swagger comes with a side order of balls. The only problem was the inordinate amount of time the aptly named List took between songs. When a string breaks, that's understandable, but, dude — less talk, more rock! She's funny, yeah, but tightening up the act and doing whatever it takes to avoid having to tune up between every song would only do the band good, especially when it plays before a less accepting audience. (It was obvious the band had a lot of friends in the room.)

I'd wait in line to see the Waiting List again, though.

I can't say the same for the other bands on the bill, unfortunately. Opening act Valency, though nimble and well-rehearsed, had a sound best described as jam emo (with occasional spoken word), which, to a snob like me, is like bad milk and clam juice with a cocktail onion in it. To illustrate, both the guitarist and bassist were wookies (hippyish dudes with bushy beards and long hair they'd nerdified into ponytails), but the singer was a shorn-headed guy who sounded like Jeff Wood from the Sound and the Fury, minus the catchy vocal melodies. The women in the crowd liked it, though, and as many as six twirling chicks hit the floor when Valency broke into a Middle Eastern groove that sounded like a lost track that Tool recorded for Narada.

The Waiting List played next, followed by the Boon, a new and popular gypsylike jam act fronted by scene veteran Mikal Shapiro, a powerful-voiced gal with the most expressive eyebrows since fellow Kansas Citian Joan Crawford. Again, I wasn't blown away, even though the band was energetic and had great chops, especially mad violinist Rachel Gaither and fretless bass player Devin McCollum.

The trouble with jam music is that it strives for the groove and sacrifices the soul and, of course, the swagger.

For that, you need someone like Jenny Carr.