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THE HEATERS
Live and Live Again (Epilogue)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
The Heaters were Seattle's best rock band in the late 70s and early 80s. Period. There were some other hot acts at the time, but they all knew they were in the long shadows of the quartet who packed the clubs with rowdy, happy fans. And fans they were. It was a weekly routine to find out where the guys were playing and head to the show, and many of us in the crowd got to know each other. Some even married. What we all had in common was rabid devotion to a band who gave us songs we couldn't ever get out of our heads (and still can't over twenty years later). They went on tours with The Knack and The Kinks but never made quite made it, although their name is known by power pop fans in places they never even played. Such was their legend.
A few years back we featured them in an installment of Underrated, with an article I wrote. It generated a gratifying amount of e-mail from people who had been part of that scene, many now scattered around the country, who just wanted to say "thanks for letting me show my wife and kids what I've been going on about all these years." Well, I hope those people are still reading now, because they need to know about this 2-CD set. Live & Live Again is a then and now thing, with disc one featuring sound board recordings from their earliest shows in 1978 to shows in 1981. Disc two is one concert recorded October 12th, 2001 at Waldo's Tavern in Kirkland, across Lake Washington from Seattle.
Oh, did I forget to mention they're at it again? Well, they are, minus guitarist Don Short, who not only refuses to play with the band, he won't even talk to them or about them. Musta been some fight. Only they know. So apparently after twenty-some years had gone by, someone got the idea for original bass player Keith Lilly to replace Short on guitar and vocals, with his one-time replacement, Wayne Clack, returning on bass along with original members Kenny Deans on drums and Steve Pearson on guitar and vocals. A lot of bands get together for another show years down the road, of course, but this was done with some difficulty as both Clack and Deans live in the Los Angeles area while Pearson and Lilly live near Seattle. They rehearsed in pairs to cassettes made by the other pair, then did a reunion show that was a smashing success. Pretty impressive, huh?
But what about this release?
The recordings on disc one are clean and crisp, taken from the sound board. The only downside to sound board recordings is that you only hear sounds that came from directly in front of the microphones, so the crowd (behind the microphones) can barely be heard on many of the tracks, which means that while the talent of the band is clear as a bell, the crowd-generated portion of the excitement that was Heatermania is just not evident. At the end of the disc there's a bunch of bonus tracks that were obviously recorded at the same show, as they're basically seamless cover tunes, and at least one microphone is turned toward an excited, hard-partying crowd. It would have been nice to hear a typical crowd all the way through. What IS nice, to say the least, is that we get to hear the band kicking ass, sounding hotter than the sun on their classics "Call Yourself A Man," "I Don't Like Your Face," "Have An Idea," "Some Other Guy," "Let's All Smoke" and "When You're Mine." 25 songs, 70 minutes of memories for those of us who were there and awesome discoveries for those of you who weren't.
Disc two presents the reunited band in a single show just as it was, with no cosmetic repairs or embellishments. Keith Lilly, who mostly sang harmonies in the early years, is now singing Don Short's parts and it turns out he possesses a trained voice and is the best pure singer in the band. At first, this was a little disconcerting to me. Hearing a fairly smooth voice with a controlled vibrato singing "Night Shift" left me a bit shell shocked and, frankly, worried about the rest of disc two. There also seemed to be a tendency to play the songs a bit slower than usual, but as the show moved along the pace picked up, Lilly's voice began to fit, and I realized it was just me adjusting. By the midway point, the band was cooking and the crowd was into it. In the middle of all their original tunes they pulled out a nice cover of The Byrds' "Feel A Whole Lot Better" with Lilly on vocals. By that point the tempos were right on, the guys were relaxed and talking to the crowd and everybody was having a good time. The harmony vocals go horribly wrong in a few places, but the concept of presenting an honest "warts and all" recording is so rare these days (and admirable) that I doubt anybody's gonna mind. What I think will happen is that people who live between Seattle and Los Angeles will be looking for the band at their local bars once they realize how much fun their shows still are.
The imperfections of this package don't add up to diddly squat when stacked next to the positives. You get to hear live recordings of the band in their prime, which spent the last twenty-some years locked away and being heard by no one, you experience time travel into the 21st century to attend a show by the middle-aged Heaters and discover that they're still a good time, and you get a nice package with a cool cover by Krys Lilly (Keith's wife, who he met at one if their shows in the 70s), liner notes by several musicians and journalists (including me) recalling the band's heyday, and a bunch of pictures of the band, both posed and live, both then and now. I've spent years whining about how unfair it is that this band didn't make it big. I've probably whined more than any of them have about it. It suddenly occurs to me that they did make it big. Hey, it's two decades later and a lot of people are talking about them, writing about them, buying their new CD, going to see their shows and, just like the good old days, singing along word for word with "I Don't Like Your Face." From Washington to Oregon to California to Idaho. They obviously touched a lot of lives. If that isn't making it big, what is?
© 2002 - DJ Johnson