The Cars defined an era, but it’s now three decades in the rear-view mirror. Not that it mattered Wednesday at the sold-out Riviera.
Four of the five original members (founding bassist Ben Orr died in 2000) took their old, new-wave sound out for its first test drive in 24 years, but they saw no reason for updates, makeovers or hip-hop remixes.
There was always something sleekly mechanical about the Boston band, its three-minute pop songs a crisp, gleaming staple of commercial radio from 1978 to 1987; 13 cracked the top-40. Whereas some artists see their songs as living entities that can change over time, the Cars created them as immutable art objects not to be messed with. Their influence can be heard in countless contemporary bands, from Weezer to the Strokes.
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On the way to making Death Cab for Cutie’s forthcoming album, “Codes and Keys” (Atlantic), singer Ben Gibbard quit drinking, got married and ended up relocating to Los Angeles, a city he once despised.
The dramatic changes were foreshadowed by Death Cab’s bleak 2008 release, “Narrow Stairs.”
“That record is kind of a fulcrum in my life,” Gibbard says. “So much of the negativity in my life got funneled into it. I realized after the fact that I didn’t want to go any darker. I wanted it to be the bottom for this band and my own emotional spectrum in terms of writing. I had no grandiose plans to turn my life around. But there was this eerie moment ...”
It’s a good thing Gibbard has a video of the moment because no one would’ve believed him. He prefaces the story he’s about to tell by asserting, “I am not making this up”:
"Around spring of ‘08, I went with my mom to a (Seattle) Mariners game, and I had this very real thought as we were sitting there that my life was about to change. Then a foul ball came flying off the bat and I caught it in my hat. I have the video to prove it – the ball, the hat. It was out of a movie, but it was indicative of something. A couple months later I reconnected with the person who would become my wife.”
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Paul Simon has played stadiums and festivals. He’s done Central Park. So it was a treat Monday to see one of the most venerated songwriters of the last half-century turn the relatively intimate, sold-out Vic Theatre into his living room.
The 69-year-old singer-songwriter dressed for the occasion in loose-fitting jeans and black T-shirt underneath an unbuttoned shirt. His eight-piece multi-culti band framed him, with Simon at times resembling a crossing guard at a three-way intersection as he directed musical traffic. His foot tapped, his arms waved, he crouched and jutted a guitar toward his musicians, he even played an air washboard solo.
In one sense, the two-hour, 24-song performance played like a mini-history of rhythm, spiraling out from the doo-wop of Simon’s native New York to West Africa down the coast to Capetown and then out to the Caribbean, into Brazil, Memphis and New Orleans. His band of multi-instrumentalists was versatile enough to keep pace with Simon’s game of continental hop-scotch, the singer demonstrating how he synthesized his rhythm journeys into durable pop songs.
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