The Negro Problem at Sub Zero, 4/25/98
A Live Review by Andrew HamlinIt's very late, they're very tired, and they're third on the bill opening for some band they've never heard of. But Stew, who writes the songs for the Negro Problem, and Mark, who at least temporarily plays keyboards for them, have time for this installment of what I imagine is a multi-state (American plus head) argument of Gilgamesian proportions.
Stew: (flipping absently through the latest Stranger) "See, I figure, that once you get all the essential stuff for the last fifty or sixty years, beyond that, you got Bach, you got Haydn..."
Mark: "And Penderecki! Man--"
Stew: "No, no, wait! Bach is for melody, see and he's for creating the vocabulary. He created the vocabulary--"
Mark: "But in a hundred years, you're saying--"
Stew: "No, no huh-uh, listen! Bach is remembered because he created the vocabulary, and because the he wrote how people think! He wrote the way that people think, the structure," (running his finger emphatically down Stranger page 43, past Modest Mouse and over Gas Huffer) "And as much as I like Penderecki, he doesn't--"
Mark: "Or Varese."
Stew: "Yeah..."
Mark: "Varese was so in tune--"
Stew: "Varese's a better example, even, of what I'm trying to--"
Mark: "He had so much to say to what happens now--"
Stew: "Definitely, definitely--no, I've always felt that...I've always said that if Edgard Varese was around now, he would dig the Bomb Squad. He would be into the Bomb Squad. But he just doesn't write the way people think."
Over comes Charlie the drummer. "Hi, I'm Charlie."
"Hi Charlie, I'm Steve," says Mark. "I'd like to have sex with you."
The Negro Problem missed their 6:30 load-in and as late as 11:07 I don't think I'll see them. When I first catch sight of Stew he's conferring with a club honcho in his overcoat and what looks like an ornamented white mushroom sprouting from his head. Hats. Everyone must have one. Charlie wears a railroad engineer's cap.
Temporary keyboardist Mark wears a faux-leopardskin fez. Okay, the bassist doesn't have a hat.
"Do you do cover versions?", I ask.
"A few," Stew nods. "Sometimes we do whole sets of cover versions. I like that. Lets people know where we come from. What they're gonna get."
"Do you do anything from Forever Changes by Love?" (That's the other classic album by an L.A. rock band featuring a black leader, Arthur Lee. Buy it today.)
"We do one, actually--these people asked us to be on a Love tribute album, and we always get compared to that, so we're trying to...my point is they always talk about the psychedelic thing, and my point is, Arthur Lee could have been in NWA. And they probably won't put it on the album. We're making it as hip-hop as possible."
Which one is it?
"The Red Telephone."
After four cups Pabst on my part, I tiptoe into the Sub Zero's ballroom as the band finishes setting up the gear. (The club still has the turnstiles from its past incarnation at the Off-Ramp, but I sneak a peak at the men's bathroom, and while it has the grimed-over patina of heavy use with weekly, if that, wipedowns, but it was no longer, as it was when this club was the Off-Ramp, the Scariest Men's Room on the West Coast, a men's room to make leapfrogging out the front door into the alley to your left a plausible option).
The Negro Problem don't understand what they're doing on a bill with three "heavy metal bands" (though they do eventually concede that one of them sounds more like New Wave), but in their own thirty minutes they oscillate through plaintive harmonies (even the drummer sings), goofy Zappa/Squirrels-esque falsettos and mock-pompous military marching beats and chiming pop riffs, all held together with the essential melancholy of the lushest psychedelia. Stew can squeeze five emotions out of four syllables--"sub-ma-riiiiiine, down"--or weave beautiful resignation out of longer lines: "You can't fight City Hall/Except with a bomb/You can't fight the hand that bleeds you/Now come on home, brother/You can't fight City Hall/Except with your mamma."
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