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BONAPARTE PAIS
ON THE RECORD
EMAND! D R A L U POP BACK BY
Ready for This Jelly THE VASELINES’ SEX WITH AN X.
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body knows us,” Kelly says. “It was a oneoff, but we got more offers to go places. Coming to America made us realize that we’ve got to keep doing this because there’s people out there who want to
All the songs, sass and swing of the 1940s starring eight terrific singers and dancers, Weekends, through November 21. Friday & Saturday Evenings Sunday Brunch Matinee
Dinner Seating 6:00pm – 6:30pm Showtime 8:00pm Dinner & Show: $60 SHOW ONLY: $30
Brunch Seating 11:00am – 11:30pm Showtime 1:00pm Brunch & Show: $55 Balcony Brunch & Show: $50
NÉSDEASY TIN MA WED E
RY LIVE EVE
Take a nostalgic journey with our charming vocal trio and their spirited renditions of 1940s musical classics. Plus a delightful lunch by Chef John Besh and the American Sector restaurant! Every Wednesday through November 24 Buffet Lunch: 12 Noon; Performance: 1:00pm $34 per person, including tax and gratuity
ReseRvations on-line at www.stagedoorcanteen.org or call 504.528.1943 The Vaselines have found a following in the U.S. despite releasing few albums and not touring here often.
Sponsored in part by LA Office of Entertainment Development and IMLS Magazine Street at Poeyfarre H 504-528-1943 H www.stagedoorcanteen.org
PHOTO BY WATTIE CHEUNG
see us. So we’re going to try and play for them.” Cobain’s company of fellow admirers has grown over the years, as have the bands adopting the Vaselines’ accidental genius of sweetly harmonized guy/girl melodies with amateurish guitars and beat-skipping rhythms. Many were in diapers during the first, abbreviated goaround, such as the Dum Dum Girls, who will join the Vaselines later on its current jaunt. Does Kelly hear himself in the current crop of garage bands? “I think we’re all just coming from the same direction,” he says. “We’ve all got the same influences, ’60s garage pop/rock.” A “joke that people didn’t really get,” according to McKee, the Vaselines’ seemingly overt sexual content was a source of great amusement within the band. It still is, Kelly says: “(‘Rory Rides Me Raw’) was about a bicycle that Frances used to own,” he laughs. “She loved that bicycle. ‘Monsterpussy’ was about a cat that went under the floorboards and stayed there for a few weeks. It was just our idea of what we were going to do with it, to get it back out. A lot of the songs were based on things that were going on in our lives, what we’re thinking about.”
OCT
THE VASELINES WITH JEFFREY LEWIS 10 P.M. WEDNESDAY
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ONE EYED JACKS, 615 TOULOUSE ST., 569-8361; WWW.ONEEYEDJACKS.NET
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Gambit > bestofneworleans.com > OCTOBER 12 > 2010
ost bands, if they’re lucky, have middling experiences with labels. The Vaselines are not most bands. “Last time, there was no money there, just one bloke working out of an office in Edinburgh,” Eugene Kelly says in a rich Scottish lilt. He’s recounting the week in 1989 when his first imprint, 53rd and 3rd, went belly-up. Kelly remembers it well. It was the same week Dum-Dum, the Glaswegian band’s first — and until last month, only — LP, was scheduled for release. “It’s nice being on a proper label. Sub Pop is the real deal.” On Sept. 14, the Vaselines ended two decades of recording silence with Sex With an X, a collection of 12 new songs that sound remarkably like its 19 slumbering treasures. The album is actually the band’s third Sub Pop catalog number, following two compilations, 1992’s The Way of the Vaselines and the expanded 2009 reissue Enter the Vaselines — and giving the Vaselines the rare and dubious honor of having its second retrospective arrive before its second album. “I think the time is right,” Kelly says of the reunion. “There wasn’t much of an audience for us back in the ’80s. We were kind of ramshackle then as well. We weren’t really presenting ourselves as best as we could. There’s an audience for us now. They get our humor. They get what we’re trying to do.” Included in the small crowd the Vaselines’ sloppy, randy pop attracted was one huge outlier: Kurt Cobain, who championed the band like a super fan, wearing its T-shirt on magazine covers and covering its songs in concert and on records. A brief reunion in 1990, to open for Nirvana in Scotland, didn’t stick; too many hard feelings between Kelly and co-singer/songwriter Frances McKee, he says, both professional and romantic. But the pair remained friends, and a chance performance in Glasgow together in 2006 — a promotion of their respective solo projects — spawned a series of gigs in the summer of 2008, as well as their first trip to the U.S. “We came over and didn’t know what to expect, not thinking really that any-
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