So it’s “Classic Rock” night, and in honour of that Ben’s wearing a navy blazer with a stonewash denim collar and jeans. Adding denim to a navy blazer is about as effective as giving Aaron a fauxhawk. The outfit looks like something his Dad might wear in an effort to be a happenin’ dude. Ben claims that the remaining contestants have such hardcore fan-bases that listening to the performances and voting for the casual viewer is a waste of time. I’m paraphrasing here.
Jake has once more matched wardrobe to personality and worn a beige suit. He ignores Ben’s question about what to expect and instead talks about how back in the Palaeolithic artists wrote songs because they had something to say and didn’t do it for money. No Jake, they did it for far, far nobler reasons – getting laid and getting high. The huge piles of cash they raked in were just a nice bonus.
Farley’s swapped the brocade on his cream jacket for some moss-green stripes. He’s made the transition from living room to patio, but he still looks like a couch. Ben asks him if it will be hard for the contestants to sing with a band, and he agrees that it will be a nice test after obviousing that in the real world they will have to work with a band.
Sass has once more brought the girls out for some fresh air in a sea foam rack display unit. She says the challenge of being a rock singer is that you need an “immense amount of primal energy”. I’d say it’s being able to channel that energy into something listenable. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, Goudie. Stop hurting my ears. Sorry, getting ahead of myself, here.
Zack’s in a black leather jacket and a T-shirt from his old band (rumour-mill says: bought on E-bay). “Shut up, Ben” – I’m paraphrasing, again.
Ben intros that we’re celebrating “guitar-wailing, piss-pumping arena-filling anthems”. The clip defines classic rock as essentially post-Beatles cock-rock. We’re here to celebrate bloated, wretched excess in our rock, and damn glad to be here. The clip runs through a number of iconic figures from the era, none of whom we’ll hear tonight.
In our time zone, RockStar:INXS airs in the hour before Idol, so I tape them both and watch them back to back. So you’ll excuse me if the Geritol Jammers introduced by Ben don’t quite cut it compared to the stunningly talented House Band (alternatively known as Our Band: House). Sorry Mr. Lalama and Mr. Isaacs – yer jest not roit.
Melissa interviews that she’s never fronted a band before. She developed all her chops singing in her bedroom? She’s singing Alone, so not so much with either the “classic” or the “rock”. I realise there’s lots of ways to define “classic rock”. But they just gave us their definition not 5 minutes ago, and dispense with it on the very first song of the night. Now “classic rock” also includes late 80s power ballads that they play on some radio stations that also play 30 year old arena rock. Hokay.
Melissa is wearing jeans and the corset she should have worn under last week’s outfit. She’s also got a plaid shirt-shawl thingy and I’m starting to think she’s got a real phobia about shoulder exposure. Perhaps she’s from some weird religion that thinks it’s OK to sing power-ballads about scheming to get your man into bed whilst wearing a leather corset, but bare shoulders are verboten. Anyways, Alone is one of those soft-verse, full-throated chorus arena ballads that Heart made a lot of coin on, long after they were any good as a rock band. The fatter Ann Wilson got, the worse the songs got and the more money they made. It seems an apt metaphor for America, somehow.
Aside from the fact that I’d much rather have seen Melissa tear into Crazy On You, it’s a pretty decent job. The verses seem a little low for her, but she finds her footing with the chorus and belts the glory notes that will keep her in for another week. She’s once more an engaging and entertaining karaoke singer, offering nothing we didn’t hear on the original but not screwing up, either. In short, the Idol ideal.
Jake said that without the band, she wouldn’t have had the big dynamic part in the middle. Without the band, none of these performances would have been worth a damn. Must be the season of the suck. Farley says that the show calls for people to be a chameleon, and that she really studies up and gets into it. Sass says all the Jessicas and Ashlees better watch out because she kicked ass. Zack says she does her thing like she just doesn’t give a shit. So scatologically, she’s OK.
Rex provides another verse and chorus about how performing with a band is different/better than with a backing track. Or at least, I think he does, it’s all mumbled in Newfese and a little hard to track. He’s doing Turn The Page, an old Bob Seger song by way of Metallica. I can totally get with Rex doing Seger, but something a little less droning and monotonous would have been nice. If he’d done Old Time Rock and Roll though, I would have been forced to unleash the assassins.
Rex is wearing black bike leathers and jeans, and the dorky white hat again. No, not last week’s dorky white hat, the other one. He’s completely at ease working with the band, obviously having fun. Perhaps he should have been a little less relaxed and more concentrated on the singing part of singing. Because there’s maybe a grand total of 5 notes in Turn The Page and he missed every one of them at one point or another. It was ear-bleedingly god-awful. Nice leap there at the end, though.
Farley says he’s “stiff as a rock but [he] rolls with soul” and puts a lot of passion into his performance. If he could actually put some singing in along with the passion, I’d be a happier Dwarf. Sass labels him the “stiffest man on the planet”. I guess a girls gotta do something when her man’s on the road with last year’s Idol. Zack said it was a lot of contrived nonsense, but that it doesn’t matter anyways. Rex stares daggers at him. Jake said that true rock and roll is about passion and it doesn’t matter if you sing bad notes. I beg to differ, your beige-ness.
Casey interviews that classic rock is a challenge because you have to keep that same vibe but you want to inject a little of yourself into the song. And she has injected any of herself into which of her previous performances now? From every interview and performance so far, the impression I get of Casey is that of a cipher. She’s elected to sing I’ll Stand By You, which is an interesting choice. The Pretenders were one of the bands from the late 70s doing their level fucking best to annihilate any trace of the old arena rock bands. If half of them weren’t dead, they’d beat the shit out of you for calling them “classic rock”. Chrissie Hynde once booted the window out of a cop car while hand-cuffed in the back. She sang lyrics like “I shot my mouth off and you showed me what that hole was for”. If Casey ever met the original Pretenders-era Chrissie Hynde, I think a four-square block area of London would have been levelled, it’s like bringing together matter and anti-matter. At the very least, Chrissie would have kicked Casey’s ass up around her shoulder blades.
Casey’s wearing jeans, high-heeled boots and a diaphanous green flower-patterned shawl/poncho/whateverthehellyoucallit thing. I think she’s going for a sort of sixties wild flower child kind of vibe. It’s kinda sorta there, like her entire performance. She’s picked a lovely song, even if not in the same area code as the theme, and she sings it fairly well. Well enough that Mrs. Dwarf and I both looked at each other at the end and said, “wow, that… didn’t suck”. She’s come a long way to merit a “didn’t suck” from either of us, I’ll tell you that much. She’s still got the 4-year old hip wiggle, and when you look into her eyes you pretty much see the back of her head, but still…. surprise of the night, for sure. She might expand her voting base to Nova Scotia and PEI with that one. One wonders what she might have done with Tattooed Love Boys, though.
Sass backhands that it was her best effort so far. Casey takes that as a compliment and waggles her hips like an appreciative puppy. Zack says that she’s gotten hit in the head enough times to sing like a grownup and labels it “pretty good”. Casey once more takes what she can get and does a little “tada, here’s the Buick line-up for ’72” pose. Jake said she sang with vulnerability, heart and meaning and called it by far her best performance. Hip-waggle. Farley calls it her most impassioned performance and gets a giggle and a shrug.
Aaron interviews that before he did musical theatre, he sang Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. Sorry, Aaron, we can’t afford those good bands – how’s about you make do with a crappy old Foreigner song? He says that he loves the band and that it’s a magical thing to be right in the middle of all this loud music. Tell that to Pete Townshend, now outfitted with hearing aids and performing in a special cone of silence space on stage. Aaron’s about to proclaim loudly that he’s Hot Blooded. Would you believe “well-insulated”? Judging by the heebie-jeebies that he gives Mrs. Dwarf (especially in the shorts) not so much with the fever-inducing hotness. I confess that Hot Blooded is one of those songs that I’ve never understood. Who actually likes this shit? Is it the same tasteless idiots who bought Boys in the Bright White Sports Car by the truckload?
Aaron’s got a pretty cool faux-vintage T and jeans and has his hair moussed about a third of the way towards the faux-hawk. There’s some big men who could sing this sort of “my dick’s really big, want some?” song and get away with it. Aaron could maybe be the dorky sidekick of one of those guys. If this were camped up just a little bit more, it could’ve been a Chris Farley shtick on SNL. Vocals are fine, blah, blah, but I’m not buying a second of it. After Greeley, this is the worst good singer we’ve seen on the show.
Zack blames the song for being vaguely “Ramada Inn-ish” but says he’s got no beef with Aaron taking the cheese and rocking it. Jake says it’s “almost unfair” for the rest of them because he’s so natural. No, last week Aaron was in his natural element. This week he’s a fish out of water. And yes, I know whales are technically mammals… Farley says people love him and he likes the energy. Sass says she like his sense of humour and that it was about 75% there. She says he “sang the cheese and grilled it” which for some reason cracks Zack up. Look, rack of Werner.
There’s another L’Oreal pimpmercial and Jon does something unfunny about moustaches, and we’re on to Suzi. She says she loves Janis Joplin but didn’t want to be too predictable. Because Piece of My Heart is such an obscure piece out of Janis’ back catalogue. Suzi enthuses that playing with a band is the best because music is about uniting people. It’s a Hallmark sentiment, but she means it, bless her l’il Gem doll heart.
Suzi is wearing a black dress with fringed sleeves over black bell-bottoms with big black boots and a shiny black belt. It’s all “look at me, I’m rawker chick”, as usual. It doesn’t do much for her. She’s rocking the black extensions on the pink hair which isn’t quite working, also as per usual. And she runs through another stompy, shouty, bar-bandy version of a rock song, also status quo. This should have been her week to really show us what she can do, and it turns out she can do Janis by the numbers.
Jake says it’s hard to sing Joplin and not be compared to her. One way to do that might be to not do a note for note copy. He’s happy she brought the pain. Farley thought it was a good song choice and that it fit both the theme and her voice. It certainly fit the theme, the only song so far to do so. Sass says she’s feisty and emotional and that it “just works”. Maybe if your expectations are low – if Casey had done that, seismographs would have recorded the collective national thump of people falling out of their chairs. For Suzi, the nation heaves a collective yawn. Zack observes that in a theme-oriented show like Idol, when a person gets to do exactly what they do, they should win or lose it right there. I’m not so sure he’s correct. We already know what she does, and as the voters proved, seeing her do it again, not so thrilling. But if people do unexpectedly well, they get rewarded. I’m looking forward to what she might do with The Guess Who.
Josh interviews that he’s ecstatic – it’s been eight weeks since he’s played with a band, and “there’s so much energy everywhere”. He bumper-stickers that “live music is best” and says he’s happy to be home doing what he does best. He’s planning to sing Layla, which he’s selected more because he likes Eric Clapton’s playing than his singing. Here’s a song more famous for it’s signature riff and extended ending solo, not so much with the good choice for a singing competition.
Like Rex, he’s got the biker leathers and jeans. The comb-forward is back, along with the 3-day beard. After Jordis tanked with this one on RockStar, she said it was a deceptively hard song to sing. Josh doesn’t do anything to disabuse us of that notion. Aside from a few unfortunate Josh-y type wails, he sings it more or less straight up. But he’s so preoccupied with playing with the band that he seems to let his attention wander and it’s just not quite there. Not so horribly off the mark as Rex’s shitefest, but there’s enough clunkers in there to derail the thing. Also, if you are not a fan of his rocker tone as opposed to his crooner, this would not be the song to make you a fan. At the end, Josh stands behind the guitarist and plays the signature outtro riff. Badly. You’d think that if he were going to orchestrate a stunt like that, that he’d take care to make sure his 5 second bit was smokin’.
The judges are not amused. Josh is too busy hugging the band and congratulating himself on all the rocking-ness to listen to their comments, which pisses them off. Farley says he fulfilled his destiny as a rock and roll guy. Sass says he ran out of steam halfway through but praised the “dramatic ending”. Zack labels playing the guitar as cheating but says that he rocked the house. Jake says it’s a hard song to sing because there’s not a lot of melody and Josh agrees. At this point Josh has interrupted and chatted so much that he’s really pissed Zack off. We felt the same way and I think the sentiment was pretty much Canada wide. Shut up, Josh. It was at that point that Mrs. Dwarf turned to me and said, “he’s a goner, isn’t he?” Ayup.
Next week: Hopefully Shoebox is recovered sufficiently to recap the slaughter of her beloved Guess Who.