Fringe Music
The Tubes
Liquid Room
FIVE STARS
Rob Adams
The Tubes and the Fringe are two phenomena that were made for each other. Currently celebrating their fortieth year, the San Franciscan band is rock ‘n’ roll theatre incarnate, a spunky, funky, tighter than tight circus burlesque with frontman, Fee Waybill the ultimate ringmaster-cum-court jester.
Waybill arrives onstage in Sam Spade hat and overcoat to declaim the dismissive This Town and during a set that, with encores, clocks in at over two hours, he’ll reappear in a straitjacket, which he escapes with expert timing, wearing a leather mask, a straw boater and candy-striped blazer and before that, an outrageous wig and stack heels for the ultimate Tubes anthem, White Punks on Dope.
He’ll be sixty-five next month, he reminds us, but he and the band are ageless. The songs, including Rat Race and No Way Out, are dispatched with brilliant, at times Zappa-esque musicianship, driven by the effervescent Prairie Prince on drums, and when guitarist Roger Steen stretches out with fretboard-burning intensity on the glorious I Don’t Want to Wait Anymore he’s also giving Waybill time to don another costume, another persona in a performance masterclass.
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