Silos leaders Walter Salas-Humara and Bob Rupe closed their recent show at Cabaret Metro with a strange cover–a thumping, cheerfully undifferentiated take on “One After 909,” the very early (1963) Lennon-McCartney composition the Beatles disinterred for Let It Be. A lot of what the Silos are about these days is the Salas-Humara-Rupe partnership: their rhythm section is a pair of hired hands who are treated that way. “One After 909” was a nice (and modest, really–the song is nothing special) tip o’ the hat to another, earlier friendship. The all-ages crowd at the Metro watched curiously. Twenty- five-year-old Beatles songs go right over kids’ heads these days.
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Briefly: Salas-Humara is Cuban; he met Bob Rupe while playing in various garage bands in Florida as a teenager. He split with Rupe to go to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he founded a band he christened the Vulgar Boatmen. One of Salas-Humara’s teachers at Gainesville was one Robert Ray, an English prof with a strong interest in popular culture. Ray originally contributed artsy multimedia effects–light shows and such–to Boatmen concerts. Salas-Humara was only a part of the original band’s creative trust, and eventually left to study art in Brooklyn. There he bumped into his old friend Bob Rupe. (An interesting parallel to the story of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who played together as children and then met more than a decade later on a bus.) The pair formed the Silos and a record company, Record Collect, which released the first two Silos records.
Ray and Salas-Humara had remained in touch too. (All of the Silos’ records have minor contributions by Ray.) The first two Silos records, About Her Steps and Cuba, were major succes d’estime: each sold about 40 copies, but critics were creaming their jeans over the records’ unadorned expositions and moody textures. After Cuba Salas-Humara recorded a solo album and went on an acoustic tour with his brother. (At Metro in late 1988 the pair did a lovely set that included a funny version of the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia” that the crowd responded to with about as much enthusiasm as their counterparts did two years later with “One After 909.”) In 1989 Salas-Humara produced the first Vulgar Boatmen album, You and Your Sister, with Ray, and then busied himself with the long-delayed third Silos album, which was eventually released last month as The Silos, on major-label RCA.
All of this contrasts interestingly (for me, at least) with the Boatmen, who are trafficking in a much more oblique and self-referential style. Where the Silos have now demonstrated themselves to be supremely authentic, the Boatmen are playing around with what the postmodernists call “inauthenticity.” You and Your Sister, as I’ve written before, is a riot of asides and homages to the blues, country and western, pop, and rock. On “Here’s to You” Salas-Humara and Rupe bring their set closer on home with a “big” guitar solo and a lot of bombast, all of which is nice, and all of which works. The Boatmen, by contrast, finish their album up with “The Street Where You Live,” which begins with the hilarious title reference to My Fair Lady and ends with Lawrence (or Ray, I can never tell which) moaning “Who do you love?” over and over, like a de-braggadocio’ed Ronnie Hawkins or an extremely forlorn Bo Diddley. Too, the Boatmen indulge in occasional wordplay that the Silos would find effete: one of my favorite moments on the recording is during “Margaret Says”: “She asks me a word / I don’t know right away / She says it’s hard to pronounce / But it’s easy to say.” When you first hear Ray (or Lawrence) sing the thing, it sounds a little sexy, particularly with its overtones of Dylan’s “Memphis Blues Again.” (“She said you know I know about your debutante / But your debutante just knows what you need / And I know what you want.”) Actually, like the Silos’ “Margaret,” the song is about a kid, and, like “Margaret,” is named after Ray’s daughter, who’s not yet a teenager and already has had two of the coolest bands in the world name a song after her.
Back at the Metro, the Silos showed that postmodernism isn’t everything. A Silos show is not a hugely spontaneous event–the set list changes not at all from night to night. And again, while the pair’s rhythm section is introduced–Graham Maby, a Chicagoan, on bass, and drummer Brian Doherty (an earlier show I saw included a keyboardist as well)–there’s a palpable distance between the frontmen and their backers. But there’s a glow of assurance that hovers around both Salas-Humara and Rupe. The Silos haven’t toured as a group for two full years; their last time out, they looked and acted like your typical indie ensemble, headlining a small, half-filled alternative club. Now they’re cloaked in confidence, and they act like a world-class rock band, which is what they’ve become. Rupe is stocky, with an angular face and hair as long as Neil Young’s ever war; Salas-Humara is lean and ascetic looking. Occasionally the two grin at each other amid the noise.
One of the things that gives the band such texture is Rupe’s songwriting, which isn’t extensive (just one or two songs each album), but which holds its own against Salas-Humara’s precision. Rupe has a broad, blues-soaked voice; sometimes he drawls like John Fogerty, and he’s at his best when he’s limning the visions of a grandiose dreamer:
We’ll go out of town
Maybe down south
And if we’re lucky the southwest
We won’t have to work, well not very hard
And anyway, we’ll have a good time.
Rupe’s some guitarist as well. On “Anyway You Choose Me,” from the new album, a creditable blast of feedback and whine segued the group onto Cuba’s percolating “Just This Morning.” Salas-Humara’s pretty “Porque No” (it’s a Spanish love song to his wife) followed. The show ended with a brief and lovely “Margaret” and “One After 909.” Everybody went home happy.
