Maestro Subgum and the Whole are taking a break from rehearsal, but they’re using the time productively to talk of–what else?–bodily functions. “Me and Ned have the Best Combined Odor,” claims trumpeter Bob Jacobson. He’s standing, wearing a low-riding pair of loose jeans and little else, with the rest of the band in the dark recesses of Club Lower Links on a recent Sunday afternoon.
“Well,” says ringmaster Beau O’Reilly, hugging singer Jenny Magnus affectionately, “I think me and Jenny have the BCO.”
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The eight-member aggregation was preparing for this weekend’s appearance, a tape release party at Chicago Filmmakers, where they expect a significantly larger crowd than they get at their weekly appearances at Lower Links. What exactly Maestro Subgum and the Whole is, and what exactly whatever it is does, however, remains an open question. It’s basically a rock group, except that it doesn’t have any electric guitars, relying instead on trumpet, euphonium, and piano for the main melodic drive. Anywhere from one to eight people sing at any one time, though there are generally four lead singers–O’Reilly, his sister Kate, his son Colm, and Magnus. The band is sort of a cabaret act and sort of a performance-art ensemble, with a large debt to mainline Brechtianism –but neither of these descriptions accounts for the band’s recidivist excursions into pop. If you can imagine what the Spike Jones orchestra would sound like conducted by Kurt Weill and playing songs by They Might Be Giants and Karen Finley, you’ll get an idea what to expect from Maestro Subgum and the Whole.
But the best part is the songs themselves: it’s like watching a musical written by people who actually understand the different musical genres they’re working in. Big-band horn figures punctuate one song, laconic country-and-western lilts adorn the next, blues shouts figure later on, and through it all killer hooks rule. BCO medalist Jacobson’s “Gotta Lotta Love” is a pretty love-amidst-the-squalor number that brusquely rhymes “vermin gnaw me” with “because we”; “1-2-3” is a nod to C-and-W weepers (“I thought we’d last 1-2-3 forever / For you I 5-6-7 ate my pride”). Singer Magnus is a standout; she roams the fields of sexual politics with an acerbic charm. (The Finley influence is quite light, actually.) “Well, I believe my favorite part,” she sings on “Circumstance (Love Butt),” “Is that which sits atop the heart / Man tit! / No shit.” And a nightly showstopper is “Jane Says” (adapted from a play by her brother Bryn Magnus), a cheerfully violent fantasy of envy done for eight voices, bongos, and euphonium.
Green news: Jeff Lescher’s Combo plays tonight at Orphans: filling in for departed bassist Ken Kurson is Slammin’ Watusi Clay Tomasek. Green’s new album White Soul will be released domestically within a couple of months, Lescher says; the European version, on Megadisc, has sold out on the continent, and no LP copies made it to America. The CD turns up now and again in local stores. The band leaves for a five-week European tour March 1.
