[oh, he means it.]
Monday night I found a good way to keep my weekend birthday celebration going: by checking out Raphael Saadiq at the Ram's Head. I previewed Saadiq's show for City Paper last week, but there's far more to be said aside from what I heard on the record and in my interview with the singer. Namely the muscularity of Saadiq's stage show and the devotion of his fans in the audience.
Saadiq bookended his set with versions of the 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In," playing a pearl-white telecaster himself and dancing gamely while doing it. He then jumped into a set of songs from his album, The Way I See It. "Let's Take A Walk" started with about 16 slow, crashing 7-chords that hit on the last syllable of each of the opening lines ("This place is CROWDED--" BWAAAANNGGGGG!!!" etc.) then jumped right into the stilted, mid-tempo groove of the song. This song really highlighted two things for me. First, as my concert companion pointed out, Saadiq only sings songs about love and sex (and bluntly!: "This place is crowded / Don't know 'bout you / But I need some sex / Some sex with you / 'Cause you're on my mind..."), and second, soul rhythm guitar, while hardly thought of as a virtuoso pursuit, can be really effing impressive. Rob Bacon, Saadiq's touring guitarist, literally never stops riffing. It's true that soul tunes are highly chordal: meaning, they're based on definite, discernible changes, usually based on the blues (I-IV-V and II-V-I etc.), but Bacon was just killing it with these neck-sliding 9-chords and blues turnarounds right in the middle of lines. I was sort of entranced.
But enough guitar nerdery. Let's talk real for a minute. And by real I mean an 8-and-a-half minute, 5-song medley of Tony! Toni! Tone! slow jams that Saadiq inserted almost exactly in the middle of the set, including "Anniversary," "Lay Your Head On My Pillow," and a few others whose names fail me despite my extensive command of the Tony! Toni! Tone! catalog. As soon as the slow jams started, most of the crowd -- largely 35-45-year-old black couples, which was refreshing to see in the usually frat boy-choked Ram's Head -- paired off and started slow dancing like they just couldn't wait to get home and get their clothes off.
If the slow jams were ecstatic, the stuff from the new album was paradise. "Staying In Love" and "Sweet and Tender" were full-steam energy. Saadiq's two back-up singers were hopping and jogging in place, both, like him, wearing suits and skinny ties. One was a peppy little pistol of a woman and the other was a tall man who had sweated through his shirt (but refused to remove his sport coat) by minute 2:00 of the 6-minute extended version nof "Sure Hope You Mean It," complete with minimal, Four Tops-style turn-and-step choreography. I felt like I was seeing the closest thing available to an early sixties soul show, or maybe just like I was in the James Brown scene from Liberty Heights.
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