At the Nicholas Tremulis show Thursday night, comparisons tended to run from Rolling Stones to Zeppelin, but the one that seemed to hit closest to home song after song was Little Feat. Early Little Feat.
And no less a concert-goer than Dr. Roger Wood of HCC laid it flat on the line: "this is the best rock show so far of 2009."
I wasn't going to argue with the man. But I did wish that every band in town had been there to see what it's like to be a pro, to be a gun-slinger, to drive 8 hours from Oklahoma City, set up, plug in, and kill. And that's what Tremulis's band of bluebeards and swashbucklers is. They're killers, and they know how to do the job with precision.
Houston Symphony electric bassist Joe Abuso kept raving about the drummer Larry Beers and he had a point. Beers' drumming is nuclear. But fact of the matter is, the whole band is nuclear.
When I asked band members if they thought it would be fair to describe Tremulis as a tortured artist, they said no.
"A better description is he's a tortured person who happens to be an artist."
Whatever he is, if you missed this one you missed one for the ages. As promised, it was an earthquake of a band.