Wind Me Up and Put Me on the Grill

Go-Go at the National Capital Barbeque Battle, 6/27/09

The National Capital Barbeque Battle certainly qualifies at the very least as a miniature music festival, charging a mere $10 on each of its two days for two stages full of performers in a congenial environment in the shadow of the Capitol, yet somehow the going-out-ocracy typically pitches it as primarily a barbeque event. Well, titles can be deceiving, and on Saturday, June 27, I went to the battle not to watch gladiators of the smoker duke it out but to see go-go performers having a good old time in the hot city. (Though I did also eat a lot of barbeque beforehand.)

Perhaps because the Chuck Brown sets in years past have been so fabulously entertaining, there were three go-go performers this year, including the legendary Experience Unlimited. E.U. had to go first for some reason, although this did not prevent them from putting up a hell of an hour-long set, featuring no fewer than four Michael Jackson covers offered as tribute: "Heartbreak Hotel," "I Want You Back" (a classic E.U. cover), "ABC," and "The Lady in My Life." The last of these is one of my faves, and Junie gave it a smooth falsetto touch over a hushed beat, with just a little pocket-beat bump and a few snatches of singalong from the crowd to remind you that we were at a go-go concert. A few phrases in this seemed to stop time.

Time exuberantly started again with "Da Butt," of course, in which the crowd enthusiastically sang a few rounds of "Yay-ee yay-ee" before the band was persuaded to drop the beat. Maiesha took the stage, giving E.U. its original lineup for what Junie said was the first time in ten years, and did a delicate "People Make The World Go Round," affecting even though her voice is past its prime. The band closed with a roiling "Dog Star" and a thunderous, super-precise "E.U. Freeze," its decending three-note unison motif rooting one to the ground and arresting, however temporarily, all of the attendant bodies in motion.

I skipped off to meet friends during the first part of Be'la Dona's performance, in part because I was not aware that Be'la Dona was a go-go group. They appear to be not only that but also almost all female. I made it back for their final three songs, all covers, none very imaginative. But most of the reason I had come back was to get a good spot to watch Chuck Brown.

By now, Chuck's shows stick to a proven formula, including his special guest lineup — it would be a shock now to go to a Chuck Brown show that didn't feature Little Benny at some point — yet Chuck and his bandmates always manage to throw in enough surprises so that you're never bored. A key change here was the addition of a second trumpet, boosting the brass to four (five when Little Benny whipped out his own horn) and thus enriching the sound, crucial since so much of the thrill of Chuck's music is those lavish horn hits over the hard pocket beat. (In an artistically pleasing and economizing touch, veterans Juju and Mighty Mo expertly pounded the drums and congas, respectively, for all three bands.) The extra brass amplitude paid dividends during the set's opener, "Harlem Nocturne," which sounded silkier and suaver than usual. Soon after, when Chuck came to "Hoochie Coochie Man," where the brass chart over the keyboard using its harpsichord patch has always sounded eerily reminiscent of Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto to me, the over-the-top pileup of brass hits had many folks waving their hands in the air to conduct (not just me this time!).

Chuck's daughter KK delivered the biggest changeup with a bouncy cover of MIA's "Paper Planes," nasty brass hits (again) subbing for the gunshots in the original hook. A surprising number of people in the crowd knew all the words to this song, which I had thought was popular primarily with hipsters and not hip-hop fans as such. Hearing MIA's third-world taunts ("If you catch me at the border I got visas and money") stripped of their swirling psychedelic beat and rendered instead as party-time dozens made one appreciate afresh the canny strucure of the song by casting it in a new and flattering light — surely the achievement of the best covers.

The crowd, too, really elevated this concert. This year more fans than ever showed up, shouting the call-and-response in perfect time, waving their hands just as Little Benny said to wave them, singing along with "Moody's Mood For Love" in the "Go-Go Swing" medley, and generally having themselves a good old time. And there certainly is a multiplier effect with a happy crowd that's completely tuned in to the stimuli being provided; when Chuck asked us how we were feeling this evening, y'all, the unanimity on "Feel like moving my boooo-dy!" was thrilling. And indeed we did move our bodies, and if they had let us, we would have done it all night, barbeque be damned.

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