The Squirrel Nut Zippers’ Katharine Whalen got a slow start at their Boulder show on Wednesday, but once the songs got faster and more familiar, all was well in the world of nostalgia. Photo by Joshua J. Smelser via myspace.com/snzippers.
At the old on Wednesday evening, surrounded by well-meaning dorks like myself, I felt like Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” as he cruises through a roomful of yesteryear’s partygoers. The Squirrel Nut Zippers are a band of another yesteryear — one so recent it seems absurd to be already wallowing madly in nostalgia. Whatever happened to the swing/jazz trend, boisterous enough to spawn Gap commercials and victory rolls on the temples of countless teenagers? Well, it’s mostly dead, but it still feeds nightly in dance halls across the country. However, to a band that’s built itself on looking backward through American music history, anachronisms are always in fashion.
Sharing a name with a nutty penny candy chewy enough to pluck your grandma’s dentures plum out, the play not just shades of jazz and swing but a generous spectrum of Americana as well. From my seat in the balcony, surrounded on either side by older folks cracking dad jokes, I watch as Katharine Whalen sashays onto the stage in a ruffly thing with dots and begins to croon, “(You Are My) Radio.” She’s somewhat demure onstage, if that’s the proper word for it. “Sedated” or “somnolent” might be more appropriate; she weakly lifts her arms and then drops them to dangle loosely at her sides. Perhaps she feels that the music behind her is rousing enough.
The tunes are jazz with gumption, played a little tightly. The notes never spill out on the sides, and each instrument refrains from riffing unless it’s allowed to do so during a bridge. It’s dance music for string beans like Olive Oyl– all long limbs and big joints and arms in sharp akimbo. Whaler continues to wiggle oddly like a sideshow automaton, while behind her, the only people who seems to be having a grand ol’ time is the drummer and their excellent trumpet player, Je Widenhouse. The songs move blithely from an upbeat stomp to striptease-tempo.
If the Squirrel Nut Zippers were a landmark, they’d be a joint that once had razzle-dazzle and Monroe sightings and now only attracts salty, lipsticked barflies with rich pasts. I’m sure the Zippers would be pleased to hear it, however. Their songs often hint at the ghoulish and broken-down, the brass section glinting faintly like the shimmer of a dusty costume jewel. The music sidles easily through the old architecture of the theater, seemingly moving in time to the disembodied cocktail trays that sail gently through the crowd.
At some point, it appears as though the muscle relaxants everybody took have worn off. The ditties get faster and brighter, the legs get shaken and the rugs get cut. Suddenly, they’ve got the spirit of a band urged to play during a disaster, like the poor fellows who went down with the Titanic. The overtures get sillier and the dialogue cornier, as evidenced by a faux midway monologue performed by Jimbo Mathus. I was actually disappointed when I realized no “Bobo the Sword Swallower” was going to appear onstage.
The rest of the evening chugged steadily along with, among others, “Prince Nez,” a tune similar to one favored by Michigan J. Frog; “My Drag,” a melody tasting of borscht and sour cream; “Hell,” that ol’ one-hit wonder from 1997; and “The Ghost of Stephen Foster,” which would be a somewhat unremarkable number if it weren’t for the glorious Fleischer-style animation that played along with it. The show ended to thunderous applause and wolf-whistles, and the encore went a little lukewarm with a Christmas tune. But it seemed that, although the Zippers needed some coaxing and a little joint juice, they were almost wholly oblivious to the passage of ten years, and the audience was grateful to go out and dance on a cold night.
Alex Edgeworth is a Denver writer and a regular contributor to Reverb.
