Big fun The Gentlemen ride again BY BRETT MILANO

The Gentlemen were responsible for two of the most enjoyable, and most diverse, local-band gigs I heard in 2004. The first, last winter at T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge, Mass., was full of big bluster and hair-shakin’ rock anthems and ended with a double-lead-guitar duel and a jump into the audience. The second, last summer at Johnny D’s in nearby Somerville, was played at lower volume to accommodate the club and was hung on slinky grooves and rhythm jams. It was the same guys and mostly the same songs, but few bands can evoke Booker T. and the MG’s at one show and Foghat at another.

A little sublime and a little ridiculous, in other words, but that’s rock and roll. And that’s the Gentlemen, who can remind you of how much fun the stuff is supposed to be. Emerging out of the friendship between Figgs singer/guitarist Mike Gent and the instrumental core of the Gravel Pit (guitarist/singer Lucky Jackson, bassist/singer Ed Valauskas, and drummer Pete Caldes), the band started more as a movable party than as a career move. And it’s pretty much stayed that way, even as the Gents have grown into a local institution of sorts. They won the WBCN Rumble two years ago; and the past month alone found them backing up Graham Parker at the Orpheum on First Night (taking the Figgs’ usual slot as Parker’s band of choice) and making a bunch of baseball players sound good at the "Hot Stove, Cool Music" benefit at the Paradise. And the individual members have been all over the place: Caldes plays with Kay Hanley and Juliana Hatfield; Valauskas plays with Hatfield and Andrea Gillis and did a tour with Wheat; Gent released the Figgs’ best album (the double CD Palais), played on a Candy Butchers disc, and made a solo debut last year. But the Gentlemen still have something most of those other bands don’t: boozy camaraderie and two very loud guitars.

Both entitles are in evidence on their third album, Brass City Band (on their own Gentlemen’s Recording Company label), and the band will launch the disc with an appropriately big blowout at the Abbey Lounge this weekend — three nights starting tonight (Thursday), with a round of opening bands including Heavy Stud tonight and the Brett Rosenberg Problem tomorrow. But the new disc also serves notice that the Gentlemen are largely out of their arena-rock phase. This phase peaked on their previous disc, 2003’s Blondes Prefer the Gentlemen, the album with "rock and roll" in two different song titles, with all three singers starting to sound like Paul Stanley, and with "Riding in the Backseat" (the song that always occasioned the stage jumps and the guitar duels) as the finale. "It’s our cock-rock album," Gent said at the time.

So it’s telling that they didn’t stick to their original title for the new album, For Those About To Salute, We Will Rock You. An AC/DC-based joke wouldn’t really suit the songs on the disc, which lean toward rootsier influences — Memphis soul, pub rock, and especially the Rolling Stones. "We also vetoed having another joky ‘gentlemen’ title, like Gentlemen Start Their Engines," Gent explains over the phone from his Providence home. "I figure that if this band’s going to have any legs, we needed to get away from that. I got the arena-rock thing out of my system last time." And Valauskas points out, "There was an effort not to make it a lot of super, overdriven guitar and big, massive rock. We wanted it to sound like Fender combo amps instead of big Marshall stacks. That kind of brings it back to the way we started, playing at the Lizard Lounge."

As usual with this band, record collectors and other music nuts will know they’re among friends. There are Stones homages all over the place, some subtle (the samba-like "No Need To Leave" is Gent’s tribute to the discofied sound of the Black & Blue album), some not so (the opening "Flame for Hire" starts off with a riff that practically screams Keith). The Cars’ keyboard sound is evoked on "A Lot To Say"; the unlikely duo of Jed Parish and Van Morrison get a nod on "He Had a Mother Tongue." The title namechecks Parish’s band, and part of the lyrics are pinched from Morrison’s "Wavelength." "Silver Boogie" sports ZZ Top guitars and Yardbirds harmonica; "100 Stone" harks back to the Faces. ("We’re definitely the kings of reference rock," Valauskas claims.) In the lyrics department, Valauskas plots a Memphis elopement in "Three Minute Marriage Proposal" (and reminds his beloved to bring the weed), Gent meets his partner’s exes on "Creeping Secrets," and Jackson warns, "Don’t fuck with the brass-city band," on the closing title track — the one song here that would’ve fit comfortably on Blondes Prefer the Gentlemen.

So, what exactly is a "brass city band"? "Brass City is the nickname of Waterbury, Connecticut," Valauskas reveals. "It was just a phrase that Lucky thought sounded good; he wanted to change it, but we liked the fact that it didn’t mean anything. Plus, you can’t deny that chorus. John Davis of Superdrag sings on that, and he’s a pretty big born-again Christian now. So I love it that we got him screaming ‘fuck’ on a record." By now, the band’s three songwriters have staked out separate niches, with Jackson doing the big rock anthems, Gent the more traditional pub-rockers, and Valauskas the quirkier pop things. "Mike is definitely about keeping things simple and straight-ahead," Valauskas says. "Every time I bring in a song, he’s like, ‘Why do you have so many fuckin’ chords in this?’ "

In truth, making the album was a bit less enjoyable than it sounds. Because of their various other commitments, the band stretched the sessions over a year when they’d planned to knock it out in a few weeks; they wound up adding horns and keyboards in the second round of sessions. "We put down way more shit than we wound up using on the album," Valauskas says. But making the album proved to be therapeutic for Valauskas, who had an especially crappy 2004: he developed carpal-tunnel syndrome while touring with Hatfield — "I had these burning, shooting nerve pains on every song" — and then came home to find he needed surgery when a tumor was discovered in his left eye. If you saw him on stage last fall looking as if he’d just been punched out, that was the reason, but he’s since made a full recovery. "It was a combination of music and the Red Sox winning the World Series that got me through it."

Meanwhile, the four Gents have their hands in the usual rounds of projects. Gent remains the most prolific writer, and he admits that the difference between a Figgs and a Gentlemen song often comes down to which outfit likes it better. "If a song needs two guitars, then it’s a Gentlemen song. But there’ve been times when I’d show a song to the guys in the Figgs and they’re not particularly hot on it, so I’ll see if the Gentlemen can do it. There are people who love the Gentlemen and never heard the Figgs’ records, and vice versa. My philosophy is that I like making as many records as possible — that way, maybe one of them will have a chance of getting into a store."

Gent and the Figgs recorded the next Graham Parker album over three weeks in December; though they’ve been his on-off touring band since the ’90s, this is the first time they’ve backed him on a studio album. And that’s good news for jaded Parker fans who think his folk and country albums are fine but really wish he’d get back to the old sound he had with the Rumour. Parker even penned a song called "Local Boys," an answer to his 1979 classic "Local Girls." "It doesn’t sound like any of his last few albums," Gent says. "In fact, whenever we did a rock and roll song, he’d be saying to me, ‘Think Brinsley’ [Rumour guitarist Brinsley Schwarz]. There’s some good rockers on it, a couple of Byrdsy mid-tempo things, and he loves reggae, so we cut two reggae songs. I wound up playing a ton of slide guitar; when I heard the playbacks, I was amazed at how much slide I’d done."

The bigger surprise is that Jackson, Caldes, and Valauskas are planning to reunite with Jed Parish for a new Gravel Pit album — the first in four years for a band who never formally broke up but seemed a fairly dead issue by the time Parish moved to New York last year. Says Valauskas, "We discussed it drunkenly at a Christmas party and decided it would be fun to do. I really want Jed to write a record this time, as opposed to our other albums, which were either collections of things we were playing live at the time or digging into his giant back catalogue."

But the Gentlemen plan to continue as long as it’s still fun — and by all accounts, it still is. Says Gent, "There’s always the question of, ‘Where do we want to take this thing?’ If we do a fourth record, I can see it being more acoustic, doing a Beggars Banquet–type thing." Adds Valauskas, "It’s all pretty loose. We don’t rehearse; there’s always an element of ‘We don’t really know this song but let’s see what the fuck happens.’ The thing with us is that we’ve all known each other as friends for so long that we want to see each other do well and make good music."

The Gentlemen play this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, January 20 through 22, at the Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts's Inman Square; call (617) 441-9631.