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Out
Sketchy: Roger Miller’s art; Robby’s Good Times
BY WILL SPITZ

It wouldn’t seem possible at this stage of the game that Roger Miller, the celebrated singer/guitarist for Mission of Burma, is an underrated talent. But last Thursday at the Paradise Lounge, at a reception for his visual-art exhibit "From the Epicenter," which also includes work by his friend and collaborator Joanne Kaliontzis, Miller again proved wrong the old saw about aging dogs and new tricks. "This place is pretty full," his friend Bill T. Miller (no relation) said, surveying the room. "But people should be lining up out the door."

The lucky folks who showed got to see another of Roger’s bands — Binary System, a duo with drummer Larry Dersch in which Miller plays keyboard and occasionally sings. They performed a set of avant-garde rock-and-jazz-influenced tunes that ranged from rhythmically aggressive — with Miller pounding out eighth-note clinks and clanks along with Dersch’s tom-tom rolls — to airy, piano-driven pieces. Highlights included hip-shaking covers of Missy Elliott’s "Scream a/k/a Itchin’," with Miller singing the verses in a language that he made up, and the Stooges’ "1969," with a modified verse: "Last year I was 51/I didn't have a lot of fun/And now I'm gonna be 52/I say oh my and a boo hoo."

"Iggy’s about four years older than me, and he could probably kick my ass," Miller remarked about his fellow Michigan native. But can Iggy draw? "From the Epicenter" includes Miller’s charcoal rubbings, or "frottage" (as the subject of the Burma song "Max Ernst" called it), works traced from surfaces encountered at Burma gigs, hotel rooms, and other random locales. Miller is also exhibiting photos he took using a cheap digital camera given to him by Slate for a week-long electronic journal he wrote for the on-line magazine. Such haphazard methodology is also a part of his work with Binary System: after his set, he explained that most of the sounds he uses on his keyboard are homemade samples of objects lying around the house — his car, a pencil sharpener, a prepared ( à la John Cage) piano. "It’s like the art," he said of his work with Binary System. "You do what you can with what you have."

On Friday night at the Good Time Emporium, the cheap-date "sports and amusement complex" at the Assembly Square Mall, Robby Road Steamer took off his mullet wig after a hard night’s rocking. "I tried never to come back here," he said, "but we wanted to play the Freedom Rally. It’s a good cause." After a pause, he added, "And there’s Good Time laser tag!" For a man who looks and sounds as if he’d stepped out of a commercial for Freedom Rock, there may be no better cause — the show was a benefit for the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition (MassCANN) — and, his reluctance aside, no more appropriate setting. The seedy, 83,000-square-foot facility offers an astounding jumble of suburban comforts without losing the grimy beer-hall ambiance of a townie dive bar: arcade games, batting cages, go-karts, dartboards, pool tables, bowling lanes, and, yes, laser tag, with a décor that includes gray, blue, and pink sponge-painted walls, fluorescent abstract graphics projected onto three gigantic screens (they probably looked really cool in 1991), and a lighting scheme reminiscent of a middle-school dance. Such a place, populated as it was with little kids, teenagers, and drunk adults, seemed the perfect fit for a mustachio’d man singing such would-be hits as "Finger Blastin’ " and "You’re the Only Girl I Wanna Plow!" "This place is sketchy as hell," remarked a beaming fan shortly after "I’m Sorry Your Cat Has Ass Cancer" brought the Road Steamer’s set to an end. "It’s the best seven bucks I ever spent."

Will Spitz can be reached at wspitz[a]phx.com.


Issue Date: February 4 - 10, 2005
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