Beck–the headliner at Q101’s Twisted 5 alternative-rock festival Friday at the Rosemont Horizon–was asked a few weeks ago if this was an exciting time for music.
“The best times in music,” he replied, “are when each band is upping the ante and inspiring other bands to outdo themselves. If anything, it’s been at least 15 to 20 years since there were at least 25 amazing bands out at the same time.”
Why is that?
“There’s just a lack of desire to stand out,” he said. “It’s so much easier to blend.”
Blend, bland, blah. One had to wonder what Beck would have said about the bands that preceded him onstage at the Horizon: Third Eye Blind, Garbage, the Goo Goo Dolls, Soul Coughing, Cake and Everlast. Was the ante being raised? Were people being inspired to take risks? Or is that asking too much of any band in these self-satisfied times?
The only real drama at radio festivals such as Twisted 5 goes on behind the scenes, as stations call in favors and assemble lineups of artists that have enjoyed heavy airplay that year. WMAQ-FM (101.1) is one of the most powerful “modern rock” stations in the country, its clout measured by the number of albums and concert tickets its mostly teenage audience buys, which is lots. Eager to curry favor, record companies and managers offer up their brightest stars to fly halfway across the country just to play a 25-minute mini-set.
These annual shows also become a convenient way of looking back at the year’s most commercially successful rock acts.
Q101 has in previous years pulled in some big names, from Alanis Morissette to Korn. Of course, it also has played host to–hold on to your nose rings–Tripping Daisy, Chumbawamba, Sugar Ray and Weezer. Where are they now? In the modern-rock dust bin, their careers either over or on life-support.
How history will judge this year’s lineup is impossible to predict. But Twisted 5 wasn’t about raising the ante. It was about keeping the money machine greased and the customers–who came to hear the hits and nothing but the hits–satisfied. No band better exemplifies the price of playing by those rules than the Goo Goo Dolls. They’re a richer band for it, but not a better one.
The scruff is gone
Years ago, the Buffalo, N.Y., trio was drawing comparisons to mid-’80s ragamuffins such as the Replacements and Soul Asylum, with their cheerfully scruffy anthems played at punked-up tempos. Now the only thing scruffy about the band is Johnny Rzeznik’s fashionably tousled hair.
Once, the singer-guitarist shared the microphone and the songwriting with bassist Robby Takac, but now it’s Rzeznik’s band in everything but name only. Or should that be “Name”? That’s the song that blew the band out of obscurity in 1995, and landed the trio a slot on the Twisted Christmas bill that year. “This was the song I thought was gonna end our career,” said Rzeznik as he introduced it Friday.
Instead, “Name” brought the band into the ballad-heavy world of a previous generation: Bon Jovi, Journey and Foreigner, and the land of leather pants, poodle haircuts and lovelorn lyrics.
The Goos’ latest album, “Dizzy Up the Girl,” milks the formula for what should be a couple million more sales, and on stage, Rzeznik offered up heartsick valentines by the tubful, as though it were he, and not Leonardo DiCaprio, standing on the deck of the Titanic with a blue-blooded beauty in his arms. “Could you whisper in my ear/The things you want to feel?” he sang on “Slide.” When he wailed, “Do you wanna get married or run away?” there was no shortage of volunteers raising their arms in the audience.
Third Eye Blind is a California quartet that is beginning where the Goo Goo Dolls have ended up, by piling up more than two million in sales of their wildly uneven, self-titled debut album. The band focused on its uptempo songs, particularly “Semi-Charmed Life,” which became a bombastic backdrop for singer Stephan Jenkins’ insufferable shtick: full-of-himself patter (“Sometimes ya gotta let the beast go free”), whip-wielding “Clockwork Orange” poses, even a down-with-the-‘hood quote from Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.”
Cake shambled through horn-spackled novelty numbers, such as “Rock ‘N’ Roll Lifestyle” and “Sheep Go to Heaven,” with a bemused detachment and not much passion. Former House of Pain rapper Everlast transformed himself into a credible guitar-strumming urban bluesman singing cautionary tales such as “Ends” and “What It’s Like.” Soul Coughing’s M. Doughty paced like a caged panther, a caffeinated counterpoint to his band’s shaggy grooves and shape-shifting atmospherics, but like Everlast, the band’s esoteric brand of hip-hop sounded lost in the arena’s aircraft-hanger acoustics.
Finally, a bright spot
The room lit up only when Garbage’s Shirley Manson began to roam like a pony-tailed Sugar Ray Leonard. She and her muscular band punched out a veritable greatest-hits set that suggested a darker Blondie, a faster Cars, a techno-tinged Pretenders. For all its futuristic guitar sounds and digital rhythms, Garbage is a disciple of classic pop, and its tunes rank with the best of the late ’90s.
To close the show, Beck managed to have his rock-star cake and squash it too. He made like James Brown crossed with Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, guzzling milk, crooning falsetto soul ballads and doing the boogaloo with an array of pop-and-lock moves and flying splits. With the exception of the Caribbean-flavored “Tropicalia” he ignored his latest material and focused on the 1996 album, “Odelay,” and unreleased songs.
With a soul-revue-style band featuring horns, clavinets and turntables, Beck was neck-deep in the funk and having a blast.
As Beck waltzed out to Eddy Grant’s reggae anthem “Electric Avenue,” he resembled a pied piper, blazing a trail into the darkness beneath the exit sign behind the stage. If unsure of his next destination, Beck seemed perfectly comfortable with the idea that he’d come up with something interesting during his journey.
If only the futures of many of his Twisted 5 running mates were so unpredictable.
