Richard Barone, Glenn Mercer & co. pay tribute to the artists who inspired them with Hazy Cosmic Jive

ROBERT WASILEWSKI

Glenn Mercer and Richard Barone perform at The Avenel Performing Arts Center, May 20.

Richard Barone and Glenn Mercer played a show full of covers with their band Hazy Cosmic Jive, May 20 at The Avenel Performing Arts Center. But the music still felt very personal. “This show is, in a way, a trip through our record collections: records that made us want to pick up guitars and play with our bands that soon followed these groups,” Barone told the crowd, early on.

Singer-songwriter-guitarists Barone and Mercer have been friends since the ’80s, when their respective bands, The Bongos and The Feelies, helped to create the Hoboken alternative-rock scene. They formed Hazy Cosmic Jive — the phrase comes from the David Bowie song “Starman” — with Mercer’s Feelies bandmate Dave Weckerman on drums, and Bob Torsello (of The Slambovian Circus of Dreams and other groups) on bass, and have just released a self-titled vinyl debut album that combines studio and live tracks.

All 24 songs that were performed in Avenel were originally released from 1970 to 1977, with the majority coming from the years of 1972 to 1974. They included both hits and lesser known album tracks by T. Rex, Roxy Music, Lou Reed, Mott the Hoople, Iggy Pop, The New York Dolls, Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, in addition to Bowie. Some of them could be described as glam-rock, others as proto-punk or experimental pop.

Some of this was stuff you could readily hear on the radio back then (Bowie’s “Suffragette City” and “Rebel Rebel,” T. Rex’s “Jeepster”). Other songs, though — like the material from Eno’s solo albums — you had to be a pretty serious music fan to know about.

ROBERT WASILEWSKI

Bob Torsello at The Avenel Performing Arts Center.

Barone and Mercer split the lead vocals about 50/50, and both stretched the songs out with adventurous guitar solos. Appropriately enough for a show that blurred the lines between glam and punk, Barone often seemed to be coming from more of a glam direction, while Mercer balanced that out by emphasizing the songs’ punk sensibilities.

Barone, for instance, sang “Satellite of Love” with more theatrical flair than Reed did in his the original recording, while Mercer snarled Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel” in a more blunt and earthy way than Bowie did. (Weckerman and Torsello also contributed to the lead vocals, singing Manzanera’s “Big Day” and The New York Dolls’ “Who Are the Mystery Girls?,” respectively.)

Recalling his own “Music + Revolution: Greenwich Village in the 1960s” shows, Barone — who handled all of the show’s between-song talking — occasionally discussed the music that Hazy Cosmic Jive was playing, underscoring connections between the artists. Eno and Manzanera were both members of Roxy Music, he noted. Bowie produced and/or wrote music for Reed, Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople during that early- to mid-’70s period. Roxy Music opened shows on Bowie’s landmark Ziggy Stardust Tour. Bowie and T. Rex were connected behind the scenes by using the same producer (Tony Visconti) and manager (Les Conn).

ROBERT WASILEWSKI

Dave Weckerman at The Avenel Performing Arts Center.

Though the show didn’t include any songs by Reed’s mid-’60s to early-’70s Velvet Underground group, Barone felt the need to talk about them, too. “Lou was instrumental in the glam-rock movement, even if it wasn’t really his actual thing, or his image,” he said. “But David Bowie was so much influenced by The Velvet Underground, and they kind of led to a lot of these other bands forming, and I know that Roxy Music was extremely influenced by The Velvet Underground.”

Bowie really came off as the scene’s central figure, or “hub,” to use Barone’s word. “He somehow was able to take handfuls of drugs, and tour constantly, and make his own albums, and also produce many artists — many of whom were his heroes,” Barone said.

Bowie’s songs were also emphasized in the setlist. They made up seven of the show’s last eight songs — everything except for the last encore, Roxy Music’s “Do the Strand.”

In the ’70s, each artist whose work was represented in this show seemed like a singular phenomenon. Hazy Cosmic Jive helps us see them as a movement of like-minded visionaries, scattered across The United States and Europe.

At the same time, it’s a long way from, say, the somewhat retro-sounding rock of New York Dolls to the otherworldly sonic experiments of Brian Eno, and it is a remarkable feat that Hazy Cosmic Jive — a four-piece band, with no keyboards — can do justice to all if it.

ROBERT WASILEWSKI

Glenn Mercer, Dave Weckerman and Richard Barone at The Avenel Performing Arts Center.

Here is the show’s setlist (along with the artists who originally did each song) with a video featuring part of “Third Uncle,” from the show, below it.

FIRST SET
“Virginia Plain” (Roxy Music)
“Editions of You” (Roxy Music)
“Needles in the Camel’s Eye” (Brian Eno)
“Third Uncle” (Brian Eno)
“Hangin’ Around” (Lou Reed)
“Satellite of Love” (Lou Reed)
“Vicious” (Lou Reed)
“All the Young Dudes” (Mott the Hoople)
“Big Day” (Phil Manzanera)
“Funtime” (Iggy Pop)
“Raw Power” (Iggy and the Stooges)

SECOND SET
“Who Are the Mystery Girls?” (New York Dolls)
“Baby’s on Fire” (Brian Eno)
“The Slider” (T. Rex)
“Jeepster” (T. Rex)
“Mambo Sun” (T. Rex)
“Starman” (David Bowie)
“Rebel Rebel” (David Bowie)
“Diamond Dogs” (David Bowie)
“Suffragette City” (David Bowie)
“Moonage Daydream” (David Bowie)

ENCORE
“The Man Who Sold the World” (David Bowie)
“Star” (David Bowie)
“Do the Strand” (Roxy Music)

_________________________________________