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Pander bears
Elvis at Harvard; Plumerai at T.T.’s; ‘mp3j’ spares the DJ
BY SIMON W. VOZICK-LEVINSON

There was an Elvis sighting in the heart of Cambridge two Saturdays ago, though not of the Presley or Costello variety. In some circles, however — Harvard Square being one of them — former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell is almost as big a deal. The flamboyant cinéaste may have ditched the Gray Lady for a lecturing gig at Harvard (after passed over for the chief film critic’s gig), but he’s the kind of academic whose panel discussions demand an afterparty. So following a Mitchell-led panel on the HBO feature film Lackawanna Blues, a group of Elvis fans made their way to Grafton Street, where the regular crowd included budding Ivy Leaguers nonchalantly sipping martinis and foreign beers and otherwise doing their best to blend in with the room’s native upscale thirtysomethings. By 11, an almost continuous stream of well-dressed revelers had made their way to the back of the room, which was starting to look more like one of those swank post-show soirees R. Kelly is always singing about than a Yardie watering hole. DJ Incognito spun Ludacris and J. Lo, and though the dancers danced and the players played, the lanky, dreadlocked guest of honor was nowhere to be seen. Finally, quelling fears He Had Left (or worse, Wasn't Coming To) The Building, Elvis arrived — he’d just been keeping his crew waiting for a fashionable half-hour or so before making an understated appearance with fellow panelist Hill Harper, star of CSI: NY as well as Lackawanna Blues.

On Tuesday night at T.T. the Bear’s Place, a small crowd arrived early to claim valuable floor space for what would be a sardine-packed rave-up by Elephant 6–ers Of Montreal. Everyone’s attention focused intermittently on openers Plumerai, a Boston foursome who took the stage for a short set of candy-coated shoegaze. Martin Newman’s guitar produced a swelling drone that Kevin Shields wouldn’t be mad at, though there was only polite applause; the band avoided eye contact with the audience — and for that matter with one another. Such, after all, are the rules of shoegazing. But Plumerai's shyness was the genuine article — this was only about their fifth show together. (Minutes after their set, bassist George Martinez struggled to remember lead singer Kerry Leva's last name, and he admitted with a sheepish grin that they’d only recently been recruited by Newman and his drumming brother James.) Later, the Nordic duo St. Thomas showed them the most direct route to a local audience's heart: old-fashioned pandering. "We have heard very good things about Cambridge and the Boston area," Norwegian acoustic guitarist Thomas Hansen said, to heartier applause, through a heavy accent. "I had a feeling that you were nice; now we are certain that you are nice." In between the patter, Hansen and his Swedish band mate, Greg Peterson, managed a few songs: the duo’s paisley-print irony was backed up by soaring folk melodies, and the audience soon took to their spaghetti-western twang, one-night-stand balladry, and yodeled scat.

The next night in Allston, Common Ground answered the age-old question: what if you held a trendy, iPod-based you-be-the-DJ night and no one came? In its third week, the bar and grill’s regular "mp3j" night had a cutting-edge concept but little else. Only a handful of forward-thinkers showed up, portable music drives in hand, to commandeer the loudspeakers with 12-to-15-minute sets culled from their laptops. If you were looking for an evening where radical democracy toppled musical authority, you’d have found that this one — inoffensive playlists that grazed from Green Day and "Hey Ya!" to "Song 2" and Spoon, with an orchestral Fleetwood Mac cover and a few online-cartoon audio samples — failed to get anyone up in arms. Organizers Andy Bunnell and Sarah Korval blamed a heated Sox-Yankees game and the damp weather for the low turnout. (Competition might also have been a factor: down the street at Great Scott that night, "Blackout Bar" was offering up an analog twist on the open-mike DJ night, drawing a crowd of amateur deck wreckers including Dropkick Murphys drummer Matt Kelly.) It was hard to frown at their enthusiasm, but maybe even Steve Jobs’s genius and all those dancing-silhouette ads aren’t enough to bring the revolution to a Wednesday night just yet.

Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.


Issue Date: April 22 - 28, 2005
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