Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

I have seen Ted Leo play a packed, mid-sized bar; I have seen Ted Leo play the tiny basement stage a floor below that same bar. I have seen Ted Leo play the dining hall of my former college, in the middle of an afternoon, closing with a performance of “Me and Mia” so spectacular that I could momentarily disregard the room’s faint tang of yesterday’s cheeseburgers. I have seen Ted Leo play a massive outdoor festival, while bleeding from the forehead—a self-inflicted microphone wound that oozed a trail down his face all through a blistering encore of “Ballad of the Sin Eater.” The summation of all of these experiences lead me to conclude that there exists no stage that Ted Leo cannot rock down to the splinters, and to vow that there will never come a day when he comes to town and I’m not there. We’ve all made these sort of promises about some band or another, spoken, like so many post-coital I-love-you’s, in the dizzying haze right after the house lights go up on a truly great show. And, later on, we’ve all faced the same sort of questions that challenge the strength of these vows: how awful does a venue have to be, how ubiquitous a cross-over single and certain a threat of that guys in overwhelming attendance, how bad does their current record have to be to make you consider not going to see one of your most personally dependable live artists? Though I’d have never believed it a few years ago, I found myself for the first time, before his show at the 9:30 Club last week, asking these questions of Ted Leo. And it wasn’t the spotty-but-underrated Living with the Living that brought me to this; it was his latest album, The Brutalist Bricks. And also the people who still, in fucking 2010, think it’s funny to yell “Since U Been Gone” at his shows.

Often these questions carry an accompanying suggestion of having “outgrown” a band, but the idea of outgrowing Ted Leo feels absurd and a little bit impossible. As old as I get, Ted Leo will always be a little bit older, will have already charted the choppy seas of adulthood— the nostalgia for scenes past (“Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?”), the inevitable wanderlust (“Ballad of the Sin Eater”), the pangs of disconnect (“Timorous Me”)—shrewd recollections of a hipster aging gracefully, a kind of Diane Keaton to James “Drunk Girls” Murphy’s Joan Rivers. Ted Leo hasn’t made a bad record, but over a stretch that began with Shake the Sheets (2004), he’s begun to package his manifestos in exceedingly sleeker packages. Sometimes it works, successfully transmitting his fervent sermons to his widest audiences yet (Silverchair don’t have shit on “Me and Mia,” the only certifiably fist-pumping anti-anorexia anthem I can name offhand), but sometimes it feels like the nuance and latent emotion of his earlier songs are compromised, the necessary victims of aerodynamics in an attempts to craft songs that travel with the urgency of bullets. The Brutalist Bricks continues with this paring down: it’s a spring-wound assault of power chords and political fury. It’s not a bad record, but, for whatever reason, it leaves me cold. When I heard Ted was touring for it, I bought a ticket, but I made my way to the venue that night with an unfamiliar feeling of impartiality.

For the first hour of the show, Ted—underneath rafters from which hung large stuffed bees that suggested the body of the Blind Melon bee girl swinging limp from the gallows (an image I’m sure will now interfere with your sleeping patterns as it has mine)—played nearly all the songs from the new album. They were good, but not quite enough to make me see The Brutalist Bricks in a more enthusiastic light. He played some old favorites too; “Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?” is as incapable of disappointing live as my hands are of staying cooly by my side at the exclamation point that ends the bridge. Ted and his trusty Pharmacists—who are now guitarist James Canty, bassist Marty Key, and veteran drummer Chris Wilson—were in fine form, but this is never a surprise. There were a few unexpected moments, but they all seemed to be offered up by the crowd. During a new song, a drunk girl leapt onto the stage, did a puzzlingly lascivious dance, and, before hopping back to her spot, kissed an embarrassed-looking Ted on the cheek. Later, at the beginning of the encore, as he was about to introduce “Timorous Me,” Ted was cut off mid-sentence by a fan yelling something unintelligible. When Ted poked fun at the offender, the guy yelled out, with an embarrassing knee-jerk machismo, “FUCK YOU.” Then, quickly realizing what he’d done, a retraction with equally embarrassing kneejerk I’ll-act-real-gay-before-you-get-a-chance-to-call-me-gay,-brah neo-machismo, “I’LL KISS YOU ON THE MOUTH.” Something about it was off-putting, and the question of outgrowing once again began to nag with a queasy persistence. But this guy—Mike? Ronnie…?—received a quick reply from Ted (a cartoonishly outstretched fist and the threat, “I’ll fuckin’...do a shot of Jager off your body, man”) that seemed encased in a wink towards the people who were feeling a little queasy about the whole thing.

What followed, then, was an encore full of welcome dedications to the recipients of that wink. Even though he’s done it nearly every time I’ve seen him, his performance of “Timorous Me”—solo at first and then, with a stomping kick drum that begins the third verse, joined by the band—always bowls me over, and this time was no exception. Then, after quickly conferring with the band overtop the lingering feedback, a seamless launch into the Tyranny of Distance (2001) favorite “Parallel or Together.” They closed the show with the biggest surprise of all: an epic rendition of “Stove By a Whale,” which neared the ten-minute mark, lurching through chords that swelled as big as the sea. Though it’s one of my favorite Ted Leo songs, I’d never seen them play it live before, and the ten minutes that spanned that performance were some of the best in all the times I’ve seen them—which is certainly not something I expected to say when I bought that ticket. It seems like the sort of lesson that Ted Leo has probably, at some point expressed much more eloquently in song: when you let yourself tune out the trivial frustrations and absurdities (bellows of dude-brahs and the ghosts of cheeseburgers past)—and sometimes it’s fucking hard; that dude was somehow even louder than capslock can express—you can find yourself, unexpectedly, enveloped in that familiar, dumbstruck haze when the lights come up. Which is to say, I guess: until next time, Ted.