Uptown with Uptown Sinclair

So you go along for days, weeks, even months (or, God forbid, years!) sniffing around, jonesing for that next big fix. You find yourself slinking around in places you’d never thought you’d wind up (slapping your steering wheel to the beat of a new Sugar Ray single, calling radio stations late at night requesting that infectious Natalie Imbrugalia song), you bounce from moment to moment in a glossy-faced daze. And when the latest to-do don’t cut a buzz that feels right you slink into your dank basement and try to jack yourself up with those old vices “Look me in the eyes and tell me that I’m satisfied”. Amen. And it always works, for at least a moment, no matter what your latest frenzy because Msr. Westerberg knows. He’s singing for me, you, and every other music junk abuser who has ever suffered from the terrible pitfalls that come along in this wicked life. Not just singing, but rather, he is us.

Yet, of course, there in your basement, curled up on your well traveled futon, some old familiar analgesic slow drip coming outta your stereo, soothing the jitters that the latest scene has set upon you, you pull a shawl up around yourself and ache. You know that something…some-goddamn-thing that’ll feed your craving is out there somewhere. The old and reliable does you well, but we all know that this beast is all about finding the next. It always has been, when you were twelve, thirteen, or whathaveyou when you first dropped a buck for a Sweet “Love is Like Oxygen” 45 and then listened for days to that one song - relentlessly.

Surprised by your own chaotic obsession, you found yourself knobbing the radio up and down the digits, looking for another sound, something new. You scrapped together dimes, quarters, nickels, and pennies. Your pocket rattled like a janitor’s key chain as you flipped through racks of 45’s, hoping to find something that might just feel right. You didn’t know the names, the titles, the songs, but who cared - you had to get something. You went home and plowed through your brothers LP’s, playing bits of every last one (hmm, Rubber Soul? Sounds pretty good).

You’d flip through records at cousins, friends, neighbors, and libraries. You couldn’t go on without something new, another kick, another high, another piece of round black plastic to slip under your tongue to take you away. It never ended; it never ends.

Yeah sure, you get older, you get wiser, you realize there so much more you want to hear, so much more to feel, to absorb (Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, the Kinks, Coletrane, CCR, The Only Ones, Peter Tosh, early Who, all of the Clash, London Calling!!! Etc. etc.). So you pour through it all, a remorseless journey that makes you a beast in some eyes and a saint, lord, and lover in others. You fall into tighter and tighter circles, never knowing where this whole psychosis will deliver you next. It doesn’t really matter because you’re going there, you’re bound forever to walk, run, crawl on bloodied hands and knees to the next place where you might (no guarantees, as you’ve so readily learned) find that next BIG (and I mean KING-HELL kick).

Through it all you hit those satisfying spots where you’re pretty contented. There are many, many good moments in this sort of affair, enough to outweigh the depressing sink holes that remain inevitable, but there are also those few fantastic, utterly unbelievable, whoop-ass, enormo-buzz, kick-in-the-ass flash highs that make it all the worthwhile, the ones that take you someplace you’ve never been, or back to a place you want to keep going. The ones that just keep ya movin’ on.

These are, ultimately, the reason (to borrow a phrase from friend Jim DeRogatis’ “reasons for living”) - life itself. Music is art, make no bones about it, and art enriches, nourishes, and helps to define living. And those wicked rockroll kicks, the ones that inexplicably effect something in your being, define a part of you, well they rip through your soul and joyfully scar it forever. You’ll wear them on your rockroll/music psyche into infinity - with earnest pride. It is what you live for; it’s why you do this music thing, and it’s why you can’t kick it.

Preaching to the choir again, I know it. But the choir is, sometimes, all that shows up to get some religion. So preach on we must.

It never ceases to amaze me when I stumble into that feeling again. It usually comes out of nowhere and kicks my heart into a buzzing flutter, sets my neurons (if that’s the stuff that makes the brain go - ah, fuck it, you get the idea) into spastic overdrive, and pretty much sets off a intense sensation of knowing euphoria (huh? I get HIGH from the stuff, okay?!).

It hits and I ease back into it and go along for the ride - for however long it may last - because it still feels so damn good. But it isn’t just a feeling; it takes so much more than that little tingle that a whole lot of good music sets off. It takes a whole solar system of stars aligning, it takes the new colliding with the old, and it takes smarts, beats, hooks, personality, and energy. It takes something that cannot in any way be described by my fingers plucking away at these letters on a keypad. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably been there, and hopefully you’re smiling in recognition. If you haven’t, well you will someday, I promise you. Don’t ever stop.

Why this essay now? What set the fuse on this bomb? Well, I’ll tell you (because it isn’t any fun finding that BIGASS-KICK and not sharing - it’s why a holy fool like me does this writing schtick) what set me off: this whole spiel is inspired by one thing - one band and one band only - the latest greatest hope for rockroll’s eternal salvation, Uptown Sinclair! Believe it.

Now, I’m not fool enough to tell you what you will like, but I am audacious enough to tell you what’s saved my soul for now and why it may just revivify your possibly beleaguered rockroll faith.

Uptown Sinclair came to me in what seemed like a smoky dry-ice dream. Chance and Happenstance got together, knocked on my door (actually, wound up with my e-mail address), and invited themselves in to share their wares. I, a sucker for such a sales pitch - especially of the rockroll sort - graciously accepted the chance at door-to-door fate (why not? It’s one of the vices of this habit). Supplied with the junk, I took to it immediately and voraciously ravaged (and have been every day since that day, nearly three months ago, that those two dapper salesmen of destiny sold me their snake-oil) the stunning eight songs that now infect every cell of my being. It is that good.

Oh yeah, right, like we’re gonna listen to a junky like you. I know how your minds work, because, like it or not, we are one and the same. But I ask you not to hear me, but rather to buy into the ideals of which I write (isn’t that, after all, the point of all of this? To try and convey some sort of tones that’ll make you want to believe me). I haven’t been this wound by a band (note: I say band because this is the whole enchilada folks, the cats, Dave Hill, Tim Parnin, Rob Pfeiffer, and Bill Watterson, deliver the goods as well live as they do on disc - and the live gig is something to be equally cherished, what we have here is an honest-to-god rockroll band) in quite some time.

So we start with the obvious: the sounds. What do these guys sound like Mr. Pusher? Well, hmm, they sound like I always imagined rock and roll to sound like to tell ya the truth. I’m not just feeding you a bunch of lines here, this disc (and 8-song demo type thing) comes off as it did the first time I’d ever laid ears to it. It’s a party flooded with killer melodies, slashing hooks, sing-along smarts, guitars grinding against bass and drum rhythms that set hips a’grindin’. You can dance to this stuff, or you can just sit back and bop your head to it. You can toss it into yer car stereo, roll back the top, and do the Dr. Dre sway to it while cruising the shoreline checking out the honey’s rollerblading in bikinis (and they’ll turn their pretty little heads to look because the tunes on this thing are so completely - the only word for it is - SWANK). It’s up, it’s hip, it’s smart, funny, fun as hell, and perfectly well-written.

Girlfriend girlfriend such a tragic weekend / girlfriend girlfriend falling off the deep end came back an e-mail from a friend I’d sent a copy of the disc to. Pulling the above line from the band’s insanely epidemic “Girlfriend” he too found himself caught up in the moment of Uptown Sinclair. And, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t a bit surprised. I doubt any discerning rockroll nut would find a flaw here. From the sing songy pimpin’ rap (not that singer Dave Hill is “rapping” insofaras the rap thing goes, rather he’s struttin’ his words like a swaggering stud) that fires outta the gate on “Face Down”, riding on the insane jackhammer of Pfeiffer’s beating the skins senseless, through the piano intro on “Intermediate”
(“Welcome to my heartache / lose it all on high stakes”), to the do do do dododo’s that intro “Whatever You Want”, this is as assured rock and roll as you’ll ever find first time around these days.

In addition, beyond the snap melodies and energy-crisis-what-energy-crisis? rock stance, we have here a set of tunes that lyrically, finally, has the balls to eschew the teeny-bopper demographic and sets out smartly into adulthood. Hill (the chief songwriter) never once settles for a dopey or obvious lyric, most of these cuts settling on the whole boy/girl relationship thing as it pertains to, um, like real (re: adult) life, not the pubescent fantasy of living that rules the day. Not to say that it’s a crime to dig the young’uns, it’s just that when adults are making music for gum-snapping Junior Varsity cheerleaders it doesn’t seem, shall we say, genuine (of course, the entire industry is currently living out one enormous Lolita fantasy - perhaps the sad result of a pathetic baby-booming generation of executives).

Okay, it is to say that it’s a crime to dig the young’uns - fuck it. But Uptown eschews the teen dreams for the girl down the hall in accounting who’s twenty-eight, very smart, very cute, and very available. She’s choosy, but who can resist the power of rock?

These are sublimely mature lyrics, entertaining words that have meaning (you’ll find yourself actually listening to them - wanting to know what they say - underneath all of the double-barreled pop power), and they’re attached to some strikingly superior tunes.

Dave Hill never wrote a thing before he sat down to pen this batch of music. He plays bass in the art-rock-alt juggernaut Cobre Verde and hardly so much as fingered a guitar in the recent past. But something got into Hill one night, call it inspiration or call it insanity (or maybe the drink), but Hill started playing his acoustic guitar and writing some tunes. He kept writing, and writing, and writing.

All through the night - Kerouac with his parchment scroll - on a never-ending trip. He didn’t stop until much of what appears on the new disc was written. What a night! Hill will tell you that he thought he had “some pretty good” stuff in that batch, so he called on old friend and ex-Sons of Elvis bandmate Tim Parnin to come around and help fill the songs out with some of his brick-solid guitar work. Drummer Pfeiffer was turned on to the project and jumped at the chance to crush out some backbone for the songs. Watterson joined last on bass and brought along a good dose of punk energy and attitude.

“Then we decided to get out and work the songs live for awhile,’ Hill says. Thank God they did too. The Uptown Sinclair experience, as I’ve said, is total. And the live part is as urgently essential as any recording could be. For any band that, regardless of Hill’s having written the tunes and fronting the band (which, by his own confession, still “scares the shit out of” him - although I’d dare you to say you could sense that after a gig), knows its sum is obviously the total of its parts the live show will either strip the phonies naked or completely reveal the real deal. Watching Uptown take to their Christmas lighted stage, siren lights swirling (all done with maybe just a little bit of tongue in cheek), done up in sporty where’d-they-get-those duds, only to set themselves off like a Fourth of July firecracker and frenetically conquering the stage is something you just don’t get very often in the rock game anymore.

The sly come-hither struts, blown kisses, and quips of frontman Hill; the pogo-ing power chording Parnin; Watterson pounding, beating, wounding the strings, his head throbbing up and down to every beat of his bass; and Pfeiffer drumming the whole thing together with astonishing command, power, and alacrity (try the short jugga-jugga-jug fill in “Whatever You Want” - right near the start, after Hill sings the word “routine” - on for size).

The entire deal comes together as the kind of over-the-top rockroll party you’d always imagined that this gig might someday give you (that idle rock-talk you used to always toss around: “what if the best band on the planet played some small club, like the house band to a very cool rock and roll party”). And once again, you just gotta believe.

“A mirage” you’re thinking. “A figment of his misguided imagination”. “Insane and unfounded hyperbole.” “This guys either full of shit, or in the goddamn band.” None of which is true. I’m just another loser, another hopeless rock and roll dreamer who lives for the sort of clear blue high that these Uptown Sinclair cats have set upon me. And I swear to the highest of powers that I don’t ever wanna come down; I just want some of the other hapless believers like myself to come along on another one of those wild, narcotic rocknroll rides.

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