Only One Band Was The Lunatic We Were Looking For

This week, The Next Great American Band not only cut its airing time down to an hour, it devoted said hour to the works of Billy Joel, an American singer-songwriter who has a longstanding, complicated relationship with my psyche. I was all set to tune into my TiVoed version of the show on Saturday, only to find that between 8 and 9 p.m. Friday, my DVR been recorded reruns of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, thanks in part to a) the writers’ strike screwing up the program guide and b) the fact that Band is kind of low on my season-pass priority list. (Hey, at least it’s there, which is more than I can say for the rest of America.) Happily, though, the copyright infringers and spoilers who populate the Internet came to my rescue!

WHO’S OUT: Rocket and the Muggs. Unsurprising, but too bad (almost); you know that Rocket was going to pull a by-the-numbers pop-punk version of “My Life” out of its hat as a weak fuck-you to the increasingly unenthused by them judges.

METAL: IT’S IN LONG ISLAND’S WATER: So basically my deal with Billy Joel is this: I liked him OK as a kid–“Big Shot” in particular was a favorite–but then I hit my “rebellious” phase in about seventh grade, at which point he transformed into the epitome of everything that was Long Island and therefore wrong with the world/the people around me. This irritation was only exacerbated by the fact that he went to my high school (Hicksville High School of Hicksville, N.Y.), and he’d always claim that he was from the next town over (because it was the OG suburb of Levittown, which had more cul-de-sac cred), and we had a three-day lesson on “We Didn’t Start The Fire” in ninth grade, and his songs were always lurking somewhere in the music-geek outposts I hung out in. Also: He graduated the year before I did, thanks to some kid bringing an ice pick to school and the school needing some good PR fast; the powers that be waived his gym credit in order to give him his cap and gown. (And they gave him an English credit for his lyrics, which probably should be more offensive to me, but I was at least good in that class.)

Anyway, having long fled Long Island, my stance on him has somewhat mellowed–although I still think that most of his post-An Innocent Man output is straight-up garbage, and he should never write a ballad again–and as if to prove that I may have been wrong about him as an angry young (wo)man, the kiddie-metal outfit Light Of Doom turned “The Stranger” into a straight-up metal stomp. Their timing was way off and their lead singer kinda lost the plot at one point, but the concept was really just perfect. Much better proof of Joel’s Long Island roots than “The Downeaster Alexa,” that’s for sure.

THE FRONT-RUNNERS: Country balladeers Sixwire played it safe, turning “She’s Always A Woman” into a twangified power ballad. It was boring, but it was the sort of dull that will certainly play to the 400-people-in-Nebraska crowd, and it probably cinched their victory in this whole thing. Especially because fellow front-runners Franklin Bridge totally screwed up their performance of “Big Shot,” and wound up being the night’s biggest disappointment. It was musically competent–and the guitar solo at the song’s end was terrific–but the vocalist completely botched the lyrics, making the performance a bit of a mess. And it was hard to tell if said screw-ups were intentional; after all, they are a good Christian band, and making references to coke spoons and throwing around the word “bitchin'” surely wouldn’t please the Lord.

THE IDOLATOR FAVES: The true standout was Cliff Wagner’s bluegrassy mix-up of “You May Be Right”; it retained the song’s lyrical sass, and wasn’t quirkily annoying the way that genre-switches can be. The Clark Brothers whiffed with a wan performance of “She’s Got A Way” that was, alas, not saved by a little jam at the end; meanwhile, I only saw the first 30 seconds of Tres Bien’s take on “Movin’ Out”–another favorite of mine, especially since I spent my weekend doing just that–but they somehow glommed the jaunty beat from the New Pornographers’ “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism” onto it, and the result sounded kinda herky-jerky and weird.

THE GONERS: Denver and the Mile High Orchestra’s competent, yet boring take on “Tell Her About It” was unimpressive–it sounded as if they’d taken all their cues for their performance from the song’s video, which is probably likely–and Dot Dot Dot was still Annoying Annoying Annoying, as their take on “Pressure” was marred by the keyboardist getting tripped up by the song’s main riff and the lead singer making me want to eat nails. But I suspect that the stumbling Franklin Bridge will be out. And no one else. Did I mention that next week begins the stage of only one band at a time being eliminated?

The Next Great American Band [Official site] The Next Great American Band [rickey.org] Earlier: Idolator’s American Bandom archives]