By CHRIS PACKHAM
Nikka Costa performed last night at the Record Bar, and we've run out of rock cliches to describe how great she was. I wish my gastroenterologist was as good at gastroenterology as Nikka Costa is at rock and roll. AND SO DOES MY DUODENUM! After the jump, a review of that amazing, sweaty concert.
Click on photo for concert slide show.
Back in 1972, my son and I considered our options for surviving in the rough and unforgiving urban jungle of the Watts neighborhood in southern Los Angeles, and went into business as junk men. It was a smelly, hardscrabble life, but after my wife Elizabeth died, we had nothing but each other, my ugly sister-in-law Esther and this fat kid who was always out in the junk yard trying to play music on some kind of homemade radiator/accordion with his thick, clumsy hands. Hey, man, he had a fucked-up childhood.
One day, we figured out he was trying to squeeze funk music out of that old radiator. So we'd put on some Sly and the Family Stone records and he'd laugh and clap and then look around for more food to smear across his blubbery face while attempting to cram it through his alimentary tract. Goddamn, that kid was fat, the summers were hot, a dollar was hard to come by, and electric guitars made a wakka-chicka-wakka-chicka noise you don't hear too much anymore. The soundtrack of our lives had a hard, driving rhythmic funk groove.
Now I'm old and my bones ache. I live life from one Social Security check to the next, drinking my afternoon can of High Gravity malt liquor from a paper bag outside the hotel where I've spent my retirement, the telomeres at the ends of my DNA strands winding out the last months of my life, base pair by base pair. But last night's astonishingly energetic Nikka Costa performance at the Record Bar blasted me back to the 1970s with an explosion of drum-and-bass-heavy old-style funk and, swear to God, the best set of pipes not owned by Urethra Franklin. That's a little urology humor, big props to my internist, Dr.Coen, for keeping me in the Flomax and out of the Depends. Got you on my MySpace, doc.
Tiny little Nikka Costa can be raw and earthy or as light and bright as an angel. Annoyingly, while watching her perform, a thousand rock journalism cliches floated through my head. I'm just an old junk man with a bad back, a hernia and an estranged son who now makes his living on religious television, and I never went to Rock and Roll J-school. But I know that referring to Costa as a "tiny dynamo," with "in-your-face energy and passion" would totally not pass muster on the written portion of the School of Rock Journalism final exam. In fact, I just stole both of those phrases from this review of an Avril Lavigne concert in Seattle. I'll try to avoid suggesting that Costa "belts out" her funk-soul songs or "commands the stage like a veteran" although it would be true.
Chanteuse-lady Costa loves her job: Engaging members of her audience, even introducing strangers in the front row to one another, Costa insisted on audience participation and even seemed surprised at how enthusiastically the crowd responded. She's totally a charmer; if her concert had been a job interview, they'd have been giving her a tour of the office and letting her pick out her desk and presenting her with a thick binder describing her benefits package.
The night's set included her breakout hit "Everybody Got Their Something," although the band didn't whip out "Till I Get to You." Or maybe they did and I forgot, man, this old brain sure is getting clogged up with the amyloid plaque, it's only a matter of time. And meanwhile, Tim Finn of The Kansas City Star punched in for work last night for his second Tina Turner shift in a single week. Look, I love "The Burner" Tina Turner as much as the next late J.J. Jackson, but SRSLY, Tim Finn, do you realize that as the Music Editor, you're allowed to delegate repetitive tasks? That's like one of those managerial perks. You know where you were at? At the wrong show.
Costa's band was also a fine tribute to the resourcefulness and perspicacity of her Human Resources department, boy howdy, they hired just the right guys and also trombone-playing girl for the job, including just about the most charmingly spastic drummer I've seen in a long time. Does funk get into your bones? Because I think they got the bone-funk, and also funk spurting out of their pores. It's a further tribute to Costa's own impressive versatility that she sat down and drummed enthusiastically during "Happy in the Morning." It was so great I started getting chest pains and lurching around the dancing crowd, calling out to my dead wife Elizabeth and having a "big one," and then Esther called me a "fish-eyed heathen" and I told her, "You so ugly I could smash yo' face across some dough and make gorilla cookies," and she said, "Well I never!" and I said "With that Godzilla face, you never will."
Nikka Costa, I'm 75, but I look like 65, I'll settle for 55 and you make me feel 25.
Click here for a photo slide show by Nicole Reinertson.
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The girl can SANG
she can Perform
she is the real REAL DEAL
LIVE no one compares
no one
amazing
The girl can SANG
she can Perform
she is the real REAL DEAL
LIVE no one compares
no one
amazing
Holy crap, I've just added the Sandford & Son theme song to my work folder. Thank you for making me laugh so hard that my boss wants to know what I'm working on. Did you get there via The Wiz? Because I have to admit, the video above reminds me of the Poppy Girls.
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