(Another 'off the cuff' & 'after the fact' attempt at getting the vibe)
I never saw Supergroove back in the day - too much teen testosterone for my taste - but Nat Rad's 'Music 101' recently featured SG singer Karl Steven's new band, The Drab Doo Riffs - & they sounded more like my cup of ethanol. 'Twas a Sunday night, & really sh*te weather, but it turned out to be well worth the trip - a pity a few more couldn't have made it out there
Walked in the door at 9.30, & there was already something going on; a woman playing 12 bar on a gat, & a guy in a suit on his knees at the front of the stage. He looked like what the Brits used to call 'a Spiv' (for any cinephiles , imagine Vincent Price with his pencil moustache, clad in a cheap-ish two-piece, complete with 'bootlace' tie). He was wailing into a harmonica like nobody's business - how he had time to breathe was beyond me. Personally I can't stand 12 bar blues (& when it comes to worshipping at the alter of SRV et al, I'm a complete frakkin' atheist), but the guy was pretty much ignoring all the cliches and conventions, doing his own thang - & it was great stuff.
Next up were bunch of locals, or so I guessed; the sax player definitely was. Dunno their name. Seemed nice enough, but the set was just one big ugly thrash, fun ta watch, but not to listen to, and seemingly held together by the bassplayer, with the sax guy blowing into the mess as best he could. Maybe it was some kinda mutant 'free jazz' (ya know how that is ; they spend years learning technique & theory... in order to sound like a cat being strangled by a hiccupping donkey). Anyway, moving onto less-prejudiced matters;
The Drab Doo Riffs doo-ly came on, & it turned out that Vincent Price was Karl Stevens. Not much of a singer, either - at least in the more conventional vocal department - but he sure was a hell of a frontman. The bass player looked like a time-traveller from Seattle, circa 1994; ˜flannel' shirt & more hair than all of Maiden China combined, but his monster bass sound sure made up for it. On one side of the stage a woman alternated between wailing into the mic & plinking at the tiny keyboard of a Korg effects gadget that was spewing forth noises like a Theremin on Methedrine (that's the NICE speed kids, well before this nasty 'P' rubbish).
Comparisons usually piss people off, but WTF - to me the Drab Doo Riffs sounded like post-Brian Gregory Cramps, gone into orbit around Altair IV (that's the Forbidden Planet folks). All that was missing was 'Robbie the Robot' in a leopard skin g-string.
You missed a fun night
and believed that the blues, particularly that of the 12-bar variety really sucked the big fat one.....anything remotely bluesy was automatically associated with Clapton playing a 15 minute solo 
