Parlay
Grand Emporium
May 31, 1999

Review by Danny Alexander

After chastizing everyone last week for not hitting the Zone Monday show until midnight, I fell asleep on the couch this evening and didn't make it down until well into Parlay's set. Everyone told me that Big Tobacco was great, so, hopefully, someone else saw the set and will want to write it up. We do accept submissions.

Anyway, Parlay continued to play for well over and hour after I got there, which means it was a 90+ minute set. The band was a little concerned with how they sounded after the show because they have been in the studio and felt a little unpracticed live. (Not very, though, because it was only two weeks ago I remember seeing them at Davey's Uptown).

No matter what they thought, Parlay rocked as hard as any band I've seen in a long while. Ernie Locke really is a Kansas City treasure. First of all, he is a musicologist. Though his roots seem to be in punk, there isn't a genre I can think of that he doesn't go deeply into in some way, and Parlay is a band that hands him the ability to explore all of his options.

The hard wound ties Locke has explored between punk and the blues (particularly amped harmonica, Chicago-style blues) in Sin City Disciples and Tenderloin is just as brilliantly present in this band. But it's fascinating to hear the band go with dramatically different impulses. The raw "Vietnam," and its musical cousin, "Billy Badass" defined the ties between blues, punk and Southern rock. Covers of Otis Redding's "Fa Fa Fa Fa Fa (Sad Song)," Smokey Robinson's "First I Look at the Purse," and the Chambers Brother's "Time Has Come Today" took Memphis, Detroit and L.A. and threw them into the mix, which bordered on metal at times and allowed guitarist Claes Lillig to trip from dead-on blues licks to full-tilt psychedelia. The anchor that makes such a fine band work though, aside from a charismatic front man like Locke, is the solid rhythm section provided by bassist John Cutler (who sang on a number of cuts) and drummer Rob Vietch.

By the time the call and response of "Time is Come Today" carried a shouting crowd into hand clapping funk with "Parlay," the show had reached heights few bands of any tier imagine. Sad to say, too few people were there to share in the moment, maybe Monday knocked them out on the couch as well.

--Danny Alexander