The sweat was dripping off the walls, the humidity was suffocating, one paying customer passed out in the mosh pit and another lost a pair of glasses in the mass of bodies. The band onstage, L7, waved in security to revive the overheated fan, but drew the line there. "I don't know if we can stop the rock for a pair of glasses," cracked guitarist Donita Sparks. "It's part of the pitfalls of the pit."
Ahh, the stench of rock 'n' roll was in the air again, and life was good. After a summer spent outdoors, watching remote self-important performers on big stages, here at last was a band that just kept bringing it on with no quarter asked and none given.
Looking like they had applied their mascara with paint brushes Saturday at the Fireside Bowl, Sparks and guitarist Suzi Gardner were the antidote to a month's worth of cosmetics ads. It was not a good night for feminine stereotypes and Cosmo girls in general, as L7 celebrated the teens who skipped the prom to see the Motorhead concert. Their songs capture the moment of clarity when pain and heartache melt away and harden into anger, action and self-knowledge.
But beyond that, the music moves like a bulldozer. It's a deceptively simple sound, founded on a few basic chords and dynamics borrowed from the harder end of the rock spectrum: Stooges, MC5, Ramones. Gardner and Sparks favor low-end guitar chug, a sound that suggests the idling engine of a Harley-Davidson more than the high-end squeal of most lead guitarists. They intersect with bassist Janis Tanaka to create a thick, sludgy bottom that rumbles the floorboards and shoots right through the sternums of innocent passersby.
The band's secret weapon remains drummer Dee Plakas. On record, she's a hard-hitting disciple of the less-is-more, Marky Ramone school of rock percussion. On stage, Plakas kept lifting songs to a higher plateau--her intro to "War With You" sounded like Godzilla strolling through Tokyo; "Fuel My Fire" burst under her relentless tommy-gun fills; and she cracked open "Crackpot Baby" with a wash of ride cymbals and a wicked snare roll.
Rock doesn't get more fundamental than "On My Rockin' Machine," a song so dumb it's great--Plakas' rippling toms underpinning "Hey! Hey!" interjections--while Gardner's wigged-out solos splattered mud across the windshield of "Non-Existent Patricia." Early classics such as "Shove" and "Fast and Frightening" were reminders that L7 were grunge before it was a marketing term. A decade later, not just the sound but their enthusiasm for it remain undiminished.
Loraxx, a promising Chicago trio who opened the show, takes a more artsy but no less nasty approach. Arista Strungys' dark, cutup-style poetry and unearthly howl recall the raw Sub Pop-era Nirvana, driven by Santosh Isaac's power-tool bass and the walloping drumming of Elliott Talarico. Strungys was most effective when she backed off just a touch; she sounded creepier when she was whispering "Help me sleep better" than when she was screaming it.
Honky brought the Texas-style biker rock, closing with a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man," but ending their set abruptly after several audience members rushed the stage over what they considered a homophobic lyric. It was that kind of night--and the rock was hot, sticky and nasty on both sides of the stage.