Live at The Redstone Room | May 27, 2006
By Sean Moeller

The dirty language of the pool hall, tavern or racetrack is rarely taken home for Sunday brunch with the family. If you have a fifth grade-aged son or daughter, they likely leave their Sopranos mouth back at the schoolyard, slipping into the cleaner version of themselves for the benefit of mom and dad, grandma and grandpa. People learn to play their audience. Catting around as a foul-mouthed Samuel L. Jackson type during your night hours isn’t going to transfer well into calculating annuities and approving loans during office hours. And if you’re a rock and roll band looking out over a room and seeing it packed with Baby Boomers seated at tiny, round tables with a candle lit at every one, it’s not the time to cook the air and pack a wallop. You don’t pretend to know what they’re going to want. They aren’t old folks home material yet, but it’s for damn sure that they aren’t going to laugh at your jokes (they’ve never seen Chappelle’s Show!!?) and they’re unmoved by creativity (routine and the rote are preferable to surprises; don’t scare them, no sudden moves or they’ll silence/indifference clap you to death!).

Oakley Hall lead singer Pat Sullivan, a fun, consummate entertainer could have belly-flopped into a pool right in front of the crowd on this night and they wouldn’t have batted an eye. When he commented after “Lazy Susan,” a stellar track off of the Brooklyn, N.Y., band’s soon-to-be-released third album “Gypsum Strings,” “Those were the obligatory flames of hell in the middle there,” he had to use a paused beat and then a suffix comment of, “…and on that note…,” when the reaction was so much more lukewarm than the flames of hell. This resolute, stone-facing came after the six-piece band – one that has a devoted following in many places and is being talked up by Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst in recent print interviews – had just taken one of its best and most rousing songs for a hard boil. They took the song past the point where the cookies get burnt – an on-going simmering and scorching that no one should survive – and came out on the opposite end with the perfect brown and chewy middles. It was the signature moment in the set that should have swung the needle right into the “That Thing You Do!” so wicked territory, but it drew a mostly dazed petrified enthusiasm. It made you wonder if no crowd is better than a crowd with no pulse left in their heartbeat.

The band obviously and admittedly (afterward) pulled it back following that response, realizing they weren’t among friends, but among a pack of corpses there to see a country music duo of sisters that was by-the-numbers and couldn’t help but rip off the intro to “Here Comes The Sun” and not realize it. Hall took it down three notches and dug into its more countrified past – something the first printed review of the new record that the band had seen bemoaned wasn’t more prominent – tried giving the people more of what they wanted. But Oakley Hall couldn’t help but still be ambitious and dexterous, claiming both country twang and rock and roll manliness as identical twins. The four-part harmonies of Sullivan, guitarist/vocalist Rachel Cox, violinist Claudia Mogel and bassist Jesse Barnes were soothing and top-notch and the lap steel work of Fred Wallace was a secret ingredient. Greg Anderson’s driving and lazy day-driving beats were the duct tape that locked everything in. Cox was something special every time she stepped to the microphone for her lines, delivering them in a sublime manner that evoked beauty in sadness. Sullivan, minus his shoes and in a Boston Celtics T-shirt circa The Chief days, spent more time than he normally would behind his organ rather than behind his guitar, but that’s just how this night was dictated.

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