The Kyle Gass Band is for people who do take rock ’n’ roll seriously without taking themselves seriously if you see what I mean. Kyle Gass of Tenacious D fame is the least expected frontman, but he was acting like a happy and talented Pillsbury boy (hey he was wearing a large white shirt) jumping at the center of a group of other talented musicians, playing good-old-times rock ’n’ roll (and beyond) for one hour and half, with a kick ass attitude and lots of humor at the Bootleg bar on Saturday night.
Obviously, these guys’ first priority is to have fun with their rock-extravanganza, going all over the classic rock experience …I don’t even know exactly if they have songs of their own (I guess they do), but they totally made anything they played their own stuff. With tight southern rock guitars, Kyle Gass or guitarist Mike Bray alternating vocals and often harmonizing, they produced altogether a big arena sound, as if they were the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin,… Gass may not be Jagger but he is a natural funny man, ‘How can we follow something like this?’ he said after one of their totally epic classic rock number, ‘the truth is that we can’t, but we have to!’ he added with this facial grin he kept all night long.
It is as if the band had mined the cheesy side of classic rock and were serving large slices of it to a laughing crowd with the same debonair attitude all night long. The show was between a comedy-rock parody and serious business with nasty electric guitar riffs and huge battles between John Konesky and Mike Bray. They even touched the psychedelic side of 70s rock with songs like Sugarloaf’s ‘Green Eyed Lady, but you have to know that the KGB is a band that managed to put the flute back into rock, right in the middle of these we-can’t-possibly-rock-harder statements. Yeah, Kyle Gass was sometimes tootling on the flute in the middle of a hard rocking song, as if he wanted to demonstrate that the instrument had always been underestimated in this big rock world!
Then the set turned even crazier, drummer Nate Rothacker went frontman and had his drummer song while having a totally crazy dance number, just before they played ‘Gypsy Scroll’, a very funny, epic injected-with-flute-lines rock song, that Kyle introduced as ‘Sometimes you write a song and you realize it’s bigger than you, this is that song!’
After realizing he had his shoelace untied, Kyle Gass asked the ladies in the front to tie it, and a few of them happily jumped on the occasion, ‘Get off my shoes!’ he said to thank the girl before doing a series of covers. If Thin Lizzy’s ‘The
Boys are Back in Town’ were not really a surprise – this song has been so overplayed! – their cover of ‘Flashdance’ was certainly the highlight of their humor, with a guy looking like a cross between Jason Schwartzman and Richie Tenenbaum, suddenly jumping on stage, and giving us some on-fire acrobatic number. Let's just say that the same guy had already made a Stevie Nicks-esque apparition with black cape and tambourine during the gypsy song.
They closed the set with a sing-along of the crowd over Tenacious D’s ‘FHG’, and at this point they sounded less like an AM radio station and more like this weird band whose frontmen don’t look like rock stars at all but play like real ones.
Setlist
Raise a Little Hell
Band Back Together
The Road
Winchester (Dyin’ Day)
Man Child
Job to Rock
Brohoe
Tremendous
Questionable
Green Eyed Lady
Ram Dam
Road Chopz
Drummer
Gypsy Scroll
Boys are Back in Town
Kiss you all over/Pony
Flashdance
Alright Now
FHG