Shows/1995-01-07

January 7, 1995
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Maxwells
City	Hoboken, NJ
Tour
Event
Billing	The Red Krayola

Reviews

CMJ New Music Monthly

March 1995

Douglas Walk

Though 28 years have passed since its first record (The Parable of Arable Land—recently reissued on Collectables and now available in the oldies bin of a chain-store near you), this is the Red Krayola's first American tour. The band consists of genteel Texan wildman Mayo Thompson and whomever he happens to rope in for a given project. In the past, the lineup has included all of Pere Ubu, punk Saxophonist Lora Logic and novelist Frederick Barthelme at various times. Tonight, it's Thompson with David Grubbs (Squirrel Bait, Gastr del Sol), Tom Watson (Slovenly, Overpass) and George Hurley (Minutemen, fIREHOSE). Though the group's never quite broken through to the masses, it's maintained a cult following since the beginning, especially among musicians—its songs have been covered by everyone from stately, calm Galaxie 500 to splattercore freaks the Dwarves to psychedelic droneheads Spacemen 3.

Thompson, in a heavy jacket, wraparound shades and an unruly mop of dirty-gray hair, looks like a weird uncle that the family never talks about. The years have not been kind to his voice, a nasal, quavering baritone that's too often altogether unmoored from pitch. But he's a striking stake presence, clearly basking in the adoration of his juniors in the band, and yelping his brainy lyrics like he's having the time of his life ("They say that art killed Pollock/As if that could be/In fact he missed a bend and drove his Ford into a tree"). And the band's absolutely great: Hurley has mastered the insane personal blurt-rhythms of Thompson's songs, and drums them out so forcefully that Watson and Grubbs could just be sucked along for the ride if they weren't playing their guitars with so much gusto themselves. The quartet leaps from songs to "free-form freakouts" (as Parable of Arable Land called them) and back again, often without even giving the audience a chance to applaud.

Of course, the great advantage of not having toured before is that Thompson has more than half a dozen albums' worth of great songs that he's not sick of playing and the audience isn't sick of hearing. The set tonight draws a little on the Red Krayola's new self-titled album (Drag City), notably the Bo Diddley-in-the-desert raver "People Get Ready (The Train's Not Coming)." Mostly, though, it makes use of songs from every phase of the band's lengthy, diverse career, even reaching back to '67 for the proto-punk classic "Hurricane Fighter Plane." For an encore, the group plays the heady 1980 single "Wives in Orbit," and it sounds fresh and celebratory, like they're nailing it live for the first time. At times, on record, the Red Krayola is too intellectual for its own good; tonight its pleasures of the mind are tempered but undiluted by the pleasures of the flesh.

References

The Red Krayola Shows
1966, 1967, 1968			1969	1970	1971	1972	1973	1974	1975
1976	1977	1978	1979	1980	1981	1982	1983	1984	1985
1986	1987	1988	1989	1990	1991	1992	1993	1994	1995
1996	1997	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005
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Live recordings