Among Everlast’s least-heralded qualities is his empathy for people who are paid to describe what he does. On Thursday at the House of Blues, the guitar-strumming rapper was feeling my pain. Naturally, I was taking notes.
“I’m glad there are some people here with pens and notebooks,” he said midway through his encore. “Because I’d like to see somebody put this [concert] into a category.”
Not that Everlast was helping to clarify things. During his encore, he became a verbal gymnast in a lumberjack vest, performing a trash-talking, Eminem-bashing hip-hop track while his deejay scratched out a beat on the turntables. Then he threw an acoustic guitar over his shoulders and strummed his quintessential Hollywood Hills soul ballad, “Put Your Lights On” (the highlight of Santana’s “Supernatural” album), before closing with a heavy-metal screed backed by a band that sounded like 2001 version of Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies.
Those three closing songs pretty much summarized Everlast’s dizzying ambitions, which by the end of the nearly two-hour performance were fully realized. The rapper emerged in the early ’90s, a time of tremendous promise in both rock and hip-hop, and his career ever since can be seen as an increasingly refined attempt to merge the best of both worlds. Unlike many of his peers in the lucrative rap-rock genre, however, Everlast has refused to become a cartoon, a crotch-grabbing, baseball-cap-wearing advertisement for the thug life.
Instead, his recent albums have forged a soulful mix of streetwise folk, introspective rap, atmospheric rock and dance-hungry groove, topped by a bevy of bodacious rhymes. His performance was as much a plea to return to the strengths of that golden age — when alternative-rock wasn’t just a marketing term and rappers were obsessed with consciousness-raising — as it was a defiant rejection of current idols such as Fred Durst, Eminem and Kid Rock, who came under verbal attack during and after songs. Fortunately, Everlast wasn’t just all talk. He embodied the promise of what rap-rock could have been, a cross-cultural blend of styles underpinned by solid songs.
Most of the music began in the same place — Everlast, with his deep, Tom Waits-like growl of a voice, sing-speaking over the chiming chords of his acoustic guitar — before his five-piece band began coloring in the spaces. Guitarist John Bingham was a marvel of understated flash, filling in ably for Santana on “Put Your Lights On” and turning “Babylon Feeling” into a rock epic as his sinuous fills curled into a hurricane. Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man” was transformed into an even gruffer inner-city ballad by Everlast’s gutsy diction and Keefus Ciancia’s pipe-organ keyboards and Gang Starr’s 1990 hip-hop classic “Just to get a Rep” clawed to a new level behind Bingham’s insistent riff.
For Everlast, the ends don’t justify the means. His version of rap-rock aims high, but doesn’t condescend. When he reached back for “Jump Around,” a 1992 hit by his former group House of Pain, he extolled the timeless virtues of being young, talking tough and feeling invincible. During “Black Jesus,” Everlast flipped from biblical allusions to quoting the ’60s garage-rock classic “Surfin’ Bird.”
“The bird, bird, bird, bird is the word,” the audience shouted back. In the midst of a song about race, religion and identity, it was a tension-exploding moment that made everyone in the room — including the beaming Everlast — sound like they were glad to be alive.
