REGARDS FROM BROADWAY: Patti LuPone is perhaps the definitive Broadway star — having made her name in the original production of Evita as well as originating the role of Norma Desmond in the world premiere of Sunset Boulevard. She’s also played Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class and has won a whole bookshelf full of awards. That includes the distinction of having been the first American actress to receive England’s Laurence Olivier Award, for work in the world-premiere Royal Shakespeare Production of Les MisŽrables. (Those of us who are Law & Order addicts remember a nifty guest-star turn by LuPone as a sharp-tongued attorney defending a murdering female Navy pilot.) Next Saturday, November 10 at Symphony Hall, LuPone will get into character for the pop and Broadway hits from her new CD, Matters of the Heart (Varese), which includes Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim, and Lennon & McCartney. That’s at 301 Mass Ave in Boston at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30 to $60. Call (888) 266-1200.

BENEFIT: The large and loyal extended family of Boston-based Irish and Scottish musicians are rallying round one of their own in a time of need. Greenock-born Tony Cuffe is widely regarded as among Scotland’s finest musicians: best-known as the singer/guitarist in the traditional group Ossian, he’s been a regular from Augusta to the Catskills — and once played the White House on St. Paddy’s Day — since moving to Boston in 1988. He’s currently battling cancer, and to help pay for his medical expenses, a benefit concert featuring the cream of the crop is being held next Saturday, November 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Boston College’s Gasson Hall. Performing will be Seamus Connolly, John McGann, Deirdre Goulding, Aoife Clancy, Abby Newton, and more than a dozen others. Tickets are $25 and are available at the Burren in Somerville, or by calling (617) 552-0490.

NEXT WEEKEND:

Oxbow

Perhaps the least interesting thing one could say about the writer, actor, fighter, and musician Eugene Robinson is that for the past decade or so he’s fronted a thermonuclear art-punk band called Oxbow, whose five eviscerating albums range from the screaming white-hot animal noise of the Birthday Party and the Jesus Lizard to the fried-membrane scum cabaret of the Honeymoon Killers, the Scientists, and Suicide. (Their sixth album, An Evil Heat, will be released early next year on Neurosis’ Neurot Recordings label; the band make their Boston debut next Sunday at the Middle East.) This is a guy who, in his "Damage, Ink" column in CFW publications’ Grappling magazine, writes about going mano a mano with the stars of ultimate fighting. "Yeah," he sighs. "I do an article a month about getting my ass kicked by a professional."

If Oxbow’s music often explores dark themes — the transformative power of violence is a recurring one — Robinson knows of what he speaks. As a black kid coming of age in New York City in the late ’70s, he fell under the spell of the city’s dark spirits — Richard Kern, James Chance, Johnny Thunders — even though, as he puts it, "there weren’t many muscley, body-building black guys singing in bands." His influential ’80s zine The Birth of Tragedy (he calls it "my version of the Whitney Reader") featured long-form interviews with Anton LaVey and Charles Manson alongside conversations with Nick Cave, Henry Rollins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom appeared on the Robinson-produced 1989 album Fear Power God, a seminal document of the spoken-word genre.

Robinson began his freelance-writing career penning stories for Hustler in the mid ’80s about, as his friend Richard Kern once put it, "beating up people for money." "I’ve written articles on drug smuggling, being a bouncer and a collections thug," he acknowledges. "Strangely enough, given that I’m a sex fanatic, I’ve never really been all that interested in writing about sex, but I’ve always had a love affair with tough-guy writing."

Robinson’s fascination with dark matter finds constructive outlets these days, but a decade ago, it almost didn’t. "Oxbow started because I was planning an elaborate suicide, of which the first Oxbow record [entitled Fuckface] was gonna be the centerpiece. In a typical juvenile fashion I’d had my life upended, and so I was gonna leave this last aural will and testament. I lived in a garage at this point, and [Oxbow guitarist] Niko [Wenner] came out there and I told him all about it, though I left out the suicide part at that point. We put out the first record, and I guess the reason I didn’t kill myself was that the person I was in a tizzy over — well, I had the most dangerous thing in the world, a brief moment of hope. I thought maybe we could get back together, and of course it didn’t work out, but people were really excited about the record. And I thought it would be much more dramatic to say ‘Fuck you’ and go off on tour than to say ‘Fuck you’ and put the shotgun in my mouth."

Fuckface was followed by a series of albums with collaborators including Kern, Lydia Lunch, Steve Albini, Marianne Faithfull, and Kathy Acker; in the meantime, Robinson had bit parts in Bill Cosby’s atrocious Leonard Part 6 and in a Gus Van Sant–directed beer commercial. More recently, he edited the award-winning glossy urban men’s magazine Code, for which he rubbed elbows with the likes of Halle Berry, Lawrence Fishburne, and Bill Clinton; and his crime-noir novel, A Long Slow Screw, was picked up by Random House before his editor departed.

On the other hand, he says, "the dot-com heyday, the late ’90s, were tough on Oxbow. Nobody wants to listen to that crap when money is flowing and expense accounts are fat; and I tell you truthfully, Oxbow didn’t feel like making Oxbow. We were out abusing whatever rights having lots of money gave you." Then came an economic downturn, and Oxbow headed back to work. "While we were making this album, I worked real hard to get my hands on as many pharmaceuticals as possible. Somebody wandered through and described it as like stumbling in on a sex crime. I don’t think of our records as musical experiences so much as theatrical ones. The music underscores certain dramatic tensions and is useful for the people who like music. Otherwise the lyrics would be less interesting."

Oxbow play the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave in Central Square, next Sunday, November 11. Call (617) 864-EAST.

Issue Date: November 1 - 8, 2001