As $1,000 Wedding, the Chris Gaffney sideman/producer Wyman Reese, Tracy Huffman, Brian Hall, John Senne, and John Sleeger project surly, sarcastic smirks you’d like to slap off their faces if they didn’t play so well and their lyrics weren’t so outrageously, unrepentantly against the grain. Forget peace and love, live and let live; self-described jaded individuals, they hate the Doors, they hate the ocean, and they poke fun at musical sacred cows.
The title track and “Nadine Doesn’t Like Us” were inspired by a local critic. After seeing $1,000 Wedding open for Gaffney, the critic complained to the club owner the band should never have shared the stage with such an “exalted artist”. Doubling the musical irony on “Nadine’s Probably Right” (in which they refer to Gaffney as “Americana Sam”), the band skewers the critic by singing “the band was loud/they played too long/they took a break between each song/never played a thing you would know” over a facetious, too-perfect Americana strummer.
The band freely mixes styles, coloring the music with pedal steel, Whiter-Shade-Of-Pale organ, even touches of Queen-ly piano power pop. Rockers such as “What’s Wrong With Mrs. Ray”, “I Hate The Doors”, “Keep It Down” and the slinky slam of rockabilly hipsters, “Daddios”, are where $1,000 Wedding excels, particularly when Huffman and Hall prove the wicked rock guitar solo is not extinct. And on “Not John Cougar’s Small Town”, cheesy lounge disco guitar cross-pollinates with country steel, creating an appropriate background for the hero to philosophize: “I drive around in my Chevy Malibu/Windows down, speakers pumping/Man, Ozzy rules.”
Brash, punky, sarcastic, ironic, viciously irreverent? $1,000 Wedding sounds like smart, melting-pot rock. Nadine’s definitely wrong.