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Music Preview BY TOM MURRAY Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra Saturday, April 29 at the Rev Okay, gather round you little munchkins and I’ll tell you a story that’ll rattle your bones. A tale of redemption, whisky, sin and the twin poles of good and evil. The story of Jerry Jerry, a man who haunted these parts until he took his Sons Of Rhythm Orchestra to far-flung Montreal in the late 1980s, where he was welcomed with open arms and also incorporated in that city’s formidable canon of local legends. A man with a shot of bourbon in one hand, a cigarette in the other. A taste for chaos and a love for Elvis both fat and thin. It’s easy to mythologize a character like Jerry, whose appetite for life is large and whose self-effacing wit and charisma has lit up many a stage in his time. After 13 years as a much beloved denizen of Montreal, Jerry has moved back home to Edmonton. In his last interview with the Montreal Gazette, questioned as to his motives for moving back to Edmonton, Jerry observed that he "might have gotten a little too civilized, a little too eastern." Well, Montreal’s loss is our gain. Jerry’s music has always been synonymous with good times, drinking, dancing and just plain fun. Sort of a mixup of a sleazy lounge act ("I used to bill myself as the Merv Griffin of soul"), the locomotion of rockabilly and the original spirit of punk. Or think of it as an alternate dimension where Jimmy Swaggart fell completely from grace and began fronting Booker T and the MGs in Vegas. And that’s just to start. As bassist Sherry Lee Heschel describes it, "It’s just primal, very sexy music. You can just dance your ass off." "I like music with physicality to it," observes Jerry, "not that kind of one nerve twitching near your eye kind of physicality. More like the car careening wildly sort of thing." And he comes by this honestly. He started as a participant in the early stages of the underground (read punk) music scene in town during the late ’70s, when genres were thrown up in the air and no one really had a job description as to how to be punk. The former Jerry Woods and friends mixed and matched members of Joey Did and the Necrophiliacs (with Mike McDonald) and SNFU, the Modern Minds (with future Pursuit of Happiness singer Moe Berg), to name just a few, until he got the Sons of Rhythm up and running. A cloud of doom followed those early gigs. "The Edmonton gigs were the most chaotic. There never was a show without a threat of violence, whether you were playing on stage or in the audience . . . and that was exciting. I liked that. And I always liked to run counter to what’s been happening as much as possible. It usually works out to be about the same as the other way. Or maybe not. I don’t know." The band started as essentially a joke, when those sorts of bands were all the rage in the scene. "Lets see . . . there were the Superior Beer Gods, the Live Sex Shows, the Sex Beatles. It was more a party thing than a band. I really didn’t consider myself a singer back then. But you do something long enough you get half-assed good at it. You do something for 15 years, you hope to get really good at it." Those were whimsical times, and the music certainly reflected it. Anything and everything happened at gigs during the early ’80s. "Oh yeah. We were living the life of Riley: you play, people applaud you, you drink lots of free beer. How could it not be whimsical?" When Jerry took his band to Montreal to begin his rock career in earnest in 1986, it looked like a sure thing. Settling in the east, signed to the Pipeline label with the Doughboys and Ray Condo, Jerry’s incendiary live show guaranteed the band large audiences across the country. Unfortunately, with the label folding and the indifference with which the Orchestra pursued greater success, the band remained stuck in a sort of hinterland of public consciousness. The rotating members of the Sons Of Rhythm were always fine players, characters in their own right and excellent musicians. But his albums never quite took off. After the independently released Road Gore, Jerry followed up with Battle Hymn of the Apartment and Don’t Mind if I Do, both albums building on the Orchestra’s initial rockabilly/country sound, flirting with straight-ahead rock and even soul and jazz. Jerry’s voice, always deep and sepulchral, sweetened and he began playing with a lighter tone. There were saxophones, back-up singers, pianos. But with no one to actually push the albums, it was left to the group to essentially sell them off stage, and that only gets you so far. The run ended with The Sound and the Jerry, essentially a solo album with overdubs, lacking the actual Sons Of Rhythm but containing some of his best and wittiest songs. Realizing that cross-Canada touring was a dead end, Jerry made a stab at the U.S. that was too little and too late. It did bring about some once in a lifetime experiences though. "We did get to play with some interesting people, and some of the bands are way out there. Deadbolt, for instance. The singer Harley Davidson, that’s his real name, would ask for lipstick from the audience. He would put it on and then say, ‘There, am I pretty for ya? Am I pretty?’ and the rest of the band would start chanting ‘prrettty . . . prrettty’ for about five minutes straight. Way past the point of funny, over into very uncomfortable. Between songs they would hit a switch and In The Ghetto would start playing. When they started up again, someone in the crowd yelled ‘More Elvis!’ and the singer yelled back, ‘How about a Hound Dog up your ass?’ The drummer asked me if I had ever hit a woman." Yikes. "But we liked doing stuff, too. We enjoyed quoting lines from the movie Blue Velvet. We got one of those fluorescent lights they put under cars. When a song would end, Archie (his guitarist) would hold it under his face and say, ‘Would you like me to pour the beer, Frank?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I want you to fuck it!’ In the larger towns people would get it, but in other towns they would have no idea what the hell you were doing. Sometimes, in the early days, Paul Soloudre would read snippets from a Margaret Laurence book in between songs." Jerry’s new band consists of Sherry Lee Heschel (Luanne Kowalek Band) on bass, Anthony Pavlic (Capt. Nemo) on guitar, and original Sons Of Rhythm members Rockin’ Roland and Ed Dobek on guitar and drums respectively. And suddenly Jerry is very much in love with being in a band again. "Oh, we’re all tremendously fond of each other. I enjoy being around these guys a great deal. Even after our six-hour practices." So this band feels different than the others? "Oh hell yeah. I didn’t even practise in the ’90s." So what was just a fun attempt to get together with friends that he genuinely likes seems to be snowballing into something bigger, with Heschel around to prod things along. "Oh yeah, Sherry is very much the sparkplug. And, you know, I always wanted to play with Ed and Roland again. We’ll be playing after this show on Saturday at the North and South Country Fairs. There’s a few other gigs and then there’s the European tour. It’s looking like Norway, Holland, Scotland, Belgium . . . " he lets it trail. "We’re trying to capitalize on that whole Terrence and Philip Canadian thing. You never know." And in the meantime, the band will continue to mine the very deep weirdness that seems part and parcel of the Jerry Jerry experience. "We did a New Year’s Eve show here quite a while back. It opened with a 10-piece Chinese orchestra, followed by a duet that eventually moved to France to become sort of famous for playing some kind of dance music. They played in a cage covered with bones and mimed to their record. After that was the lingerie show, and then us." Heschel breaks down laughing. "We could play and have a lingerie show," she suggests. "That would be good, especially on Ed’s part. He’s been known to wear a negligee in his time." Can you guarantee that Dobek will wear a negligee at the show? "No," counters Jerry, "that would make it a job and therefore demeaning. But if he wanted to, that would certainly be fun."

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