Best drag
After more than 25 years on the Boston scene, Rick Berlin is a throwback - to the androgynous glam of Bowie and the New York Dolls, the glammy punk of Talking Heads and Blondie, and the proto-new wave of Roxy Music. Early Berlin ensembles played up the glam - Orchestra Luna in the '70s, followed in the '80s by Berlin Airlift; Rick Berlin: The Movie; and, briefly, something called Rome Is Burning. In the '90s he went downscale solo for a while: pocket T-shirt, jeans, piano, voice - the lost cabaret act that punk wrought. For the past few years Berlin's been fronting a new band, the Shelley Winters Project. Though relatively dressed down (Berlin still likes to wear a suit jacket and suspenders), the SWP has all the Berlin hallmarks: driving rock with a cabaret sensibility and songcraft. Berlin, meanwhile, is the traveling troubadour of the Boston scene, bringing the stories of one neighborhood to another in his songs: the waitresses he works with at Doyle's, the pretty girls at the end of the bar at the Brendan Behan Pub, the Cambridge club we won't name where things got really out of hand one night. Berlin is Boston.
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