Keeping it anything but low-key
Ladyfingers takes up residency at the Redwood Bar this week
By Bliss 11/26/2008
“I keep it pretty low-key/ Can’t you tell I’m so damn low-key?”
So snarls Adam Weiner, musically known as Ladyfingers, on the title track of his newest, self-released CD, “My Handbook,”a collection of songs recorded hodgepodge in motel rooms across the country. Low-key? Hot-wired is more like it.
As musical personas go, Ladyfingers is fairly shticky, punctuated with self-conscious rockabilly hiccups and stutters. But he’s also got a delirious, Hasil-Adkins-meets-Captain-Beefheart-in-a-whorehouse vibe — and he works it, well. Onstage, Jersey boy Weiner is all wicked humor and coiled intensity, ready to pop. There are moments when he seems to put aside the wisecracking persona and get quasi-serious, as on “Sweden” (“They cut my records in analog just to keep me in the red”) and “Genius Friends” (“They all respect me/ So much love between us, yeah/ But they all neglect me”), an impression boosted by his dramatic wail and taut guitar playing. But here’s the trick to Weiner’s act: He never fully gives it up. That keeps audiences off balance, uncertain where he’s going to come at them from next.
While he scolds himself (on “Scoliosis in Secausus”), “Gotta get my mind outta the gutter,” most of the time he’s pumping his salacious alter ego: vamping on Shirley Temples and “Richard Simmons doin’ cartwheels in the nude” and referring to himself as “the minority whip” over barrelhouse piano (his snappy theme song “Ladyfingers”), riffing on Adam and Eve meeting in the garden of Eden (“Game of Love”) and getting laid (the falsetto “Australia”), and expressing caustic support for an errant lover on the dark, driving “Cocaine” (“You’re comin’ home at 7:30/ And you show me all your money/ I said I’m happy for you honey/ But I’m only happy when you’re sleeping”).
The erstwhile playwright (his play “Lapdog” received a one-night workshop at New York City’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club last year) is currently planning a European tour for 2009. In the interim he’s coming to LA for a weeklong residency at the Redwood Bar, starting this Saturday and wrapping up the following Friday — the night of the Redwood’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition (a show that will also feature drummer D.J. Bonebrake’s jazzy band the Bonebrake Syncopators). With his floppy forehead curls, sideburns, cuffed jeans, guitar, amplified maple stompbox, ready quips and vaguely Waitsian sensibility, Weiner fits the friendly but street-wise aesthetic encapsulated by Redwood regulars like Jake La Botz, Quetzal Guerrero and Mike Stinson. Usually he plays solo, but considering his appreciation of chaos and spontaneity, it’ll be interesting to see what guests pop up to sit in while he’s here. Don’t miss him.n
Ladyfingers performs at 10 p.m. nightly from Saturday, Nov. 29, through Friday, Dec. 5, at the Redwood Bar, 316 W. 2nd St., downtown LA. Call (213) 680-2600 for details. www.ladyfingers.org
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