John Kritzman Photo
Bleachers.
Milling around the floor-level seating area at the Westville Music Bowl on Friday night, I had no particular idea what I was in for. I had come to review a show by Bleachers, the six-piece band conceived, fronted, conducted, and in every way emceed by Jack Antonoff, the producer and songwriter responsible for approximately 63.4 percent of the songs inflicted on me by Top 40 radio, including large chunks of the catalogues of Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Kendrick Lamar, and Carly Rae Jepsen. He is also an alumnus of the band Fun. (period intended), for whom he co-wrote the unbelievably catchy 2012 song “Some Nights.”
But as far as I knew, I had heard only about three songs by Bleachers, and I had never seen them live — or even seen them. I had not seen any of Bleachers’ music videos, nor had I caught them performing on television. I was a blank slate. I was optimistic, to be sure, but when it came to Bleachers, I was uninitiated. Inexperienced. Virginal. Not sure what to think, expect, or even think about, I killed time waiting for the band to come on stage by trying to find the best beard in the crowd. This guy won:
Mark Oppenheimer Photo
Eventually, the band came on, and what can I say? The next two hours were two of the best concert-going hours of my life. From the first three songs — “I Am Right on Time,” “Modern Girl,” and “Jesus Is Dead,” which happen to be the first three songs off Bleachers’ latest album, Bleachers — to the last, an epic “Stop Making Me Hurt,” my attention was not at all on the beards surrounding me. Rather, it was on this unabashedly retro band and the years I had wasted not listening to them. When I took a break from kicking myself, I had other scattered thoughts, including:
Bleachers sounds like Arcade Fire.
No, wait, they sound like Bruce Springsteen.
No, wait, they are the spiritual heirs of Darryl Hall and John Oates.
No, wait, they sound like a band whose sole raison d’être is to conjure the joyous spirit of “You’re a Friend of Mine,” the unimpeachably great 1985 duet between Clarence Clemons and Jackson Browne, a combo so improbable that the song should have won a Grammy just for existing. If you don’t remember that song, I have a treat for you.
If none of this is doing it for you, let me try coming at Bleachers from another angle: There is one central truth of rock ‘n’ roll, which is that every band is either a saxophone band or a fiddle band. No rock band — Dave Matthews Band notwithstanding — can possibly have both those instruments. Fiddle bands take their historical cues from folk, country, and Americana. The Decemberists and the Avett Brothers are fiddle bands, and there are scores more. If you are a band trying to get played on AAA radio, or book a gig at a City Winery location, or draw tired parents grateful for a 7:00 p.m. start time for a show, it helps to have a fiddle in the lineup.
Sax bands nod to an earlier era of rock. The sax, of course, was an original rock instrument, going back to Bill Haley and the Comets; it was important to the sound of the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and on and on. But the sax lost its cool along the way, possibly because of its overuse in solo breaks in the 1980s, by acts like Phil Collins (cf. “One More Night”), George Michael (“Careless Whisper”), and Spandau Ballet (“True”). We now recognize that these acts were all profoundly cool, their songs indisputable classics. But every rock-musical action, no matter how brilliant, breeds an opposite reaction. In this case, that meant the sax got banished from 1990 to 2010, give or take. Grunge and seven waves of dance genres killed the sax. Blame Kurt Cobain and Skrillex. In the classic 30 Rock eulogy for “people whose professions are no longer a thing,” “dynamite saxophone solos in rock ’n’ roll songs” were listed along with travel agents and American auto workers.
As a result, there aren’t many true sax bands today. Aspiring rockers got bullied out of sax. In a rumble with the fiddle bands, the very few sax bands would get creamed (although maybe I’m wrong; it’s hard to imagine anyone in the crispy-stoner fiddle-band world throwing a punch — they might just run scared, retire to a home studio, blaze up a doobie, and argue about steel-guitar technique). Among bands that really draw a crowd, practically the only sax band working today is the Revivalists.
John Kritzman Photo
But I’d throw Lake Street Dive into the mix. And some other pretty great bands, like The National, Arcade Fire, and the War on Drugs, use sax on a healthy share of their songs. Perhaps the sax band’s fortunes are turning around. If so — if the sax band has more than a prayer, has two or three of them — it will be because of Bleachers, who feature not one but two saxophone players in their touring lineup: Zem Audu and Evan Smith.
What’s more, at various points in the concert, each of these saxophone players did that back-to-back thing perfected by the greatest saxophone band of all time, the E Street Band. You remember Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons doing that back shimmy? Where they crouch low, knees bent, butt to butt, and shred on their respective instruments?
Well, so did Jack Antonoff, with Zem Audu and Evan Smith.
That’s the kind of move you can only pull off, or only try to, if you are fully committed to a revival of the earnest enthusiasm that defined arena rock in the 1980s, when U2, Bruce Springsteen, and Michael Jackson all filled stadiums. Antonoff clearly sees Bleachers as being in that spirit. He communicates his 1980s affinities not just with saxophones, but with his and his band’s outfits. He spent much of Friday night tinkering with his uncooperative braided belt. His stage prowling and jumping from platforms is part Springsteen and part Van Halen. He also deploys a nice kick in the air to punctuate power chords — a very MTV move, circa 1984. I’m thinking Steven Tyler of Aerosmith.
He also spent much of the night reminding us that he is a proud Jersey boy, who played many of his early gigs at Connecticut venues, in Hartford and Danbury. I didn’t need any convincing. By the time Antonoff and Bleachers tootled offstage after a rousing “Stop Making This Hurt,” I had no doubt that he was an earnest disciple of the Boss. It’s there in the wistful nostalgia of songs like “I Miss Those Days,” which sits nicely on the shelf next to Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” It’s there in the collective bandsmanship of Bleachers, who are like a locker room full of bros, but nice, musical bros. It’s there in the sax.