Seventy Sevens

Item: 8ighty 8ight / When Numbers Get Serious
Author: Chris Estey

8ighty 8ight / When Numbers Get Serious

(2000)

Reviewed by Chris Estey

Discogs Bandcamp

Label Fools of the WorldBandoppler2000

alternative rock blues rock

This is a deluxe re-release of the only official live album in the 77s couple-decades-long daddies-of-real-Christian-indie-rock existence, Eighty-Eight. How deluxe? It also features an additional brand new live disc, entitled When Numbers Get Serious, recorded during the same period, and later on at shows in the 90s. Nice packaging and descriptive, personal booklet notes make it irresistible to the 77s fan — and the set is not without songs to convert the new listener, even in their live context.

With this gussied-up, sleek, fat reissue, the 77s have done a great job in marking their historical territory, showing just how great they were/are live, and it reminds one just how sadly neglected their genuine ability to rock and rock distinctively has been.

Mike Roe's one of the best singers in rock music, period — his sweet clear mid-range voice is capable of both great pathos and humorous slapstick, elegant emotional depth, and flat-out rage, yet unfettered by any poseur hard rock exaggeration or tweaked alt distortion. You actually hear his soul speaking, it seems, at the most tender moments. His guitar work has always been juicy and delightful, rich with pastiches from Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, and even Robert Johnson. And of course, the musicians he's had backing him for almost twenty years of playing in the underground — Jan Eric, Aaron Smith, David Leonhardt, Mark Tootle — are as frenzied-creative as they are spit-polished, sort of like a Crazy Horse after rehab.

I will confess that I am more partial to the band's less jammy, less metal songs. Throughout the 90s, it seemed that Mike and his bad company were more interested in locking into the 70s hard rock/funk grooves of their initial musical heroes, than doing what they sometimes did in the 80s (along with their then-contemporaries) by being a catch-all Christian alternative music jukebox, processing contemporaneous post-punk pop/rock stylings. That may have been a misunderstanding on my part, though, about the earlier phase of their career — they could have just been wearing their influences on their sleeves (they were more general-market oriented back then anyway). But the band's muse is their business, and both discs of the re-release are generous with every styling the band has ever attempted — from full-on New Wave anthem ("Can't Get Over It"), to rockabilly swagger ("Mary & the Baby Elvis"), to those strangely bittersweet midtempo ballads ("Alone Together," "Flowers in the Sand") no one else quite does.

The initial live album and its new companion are proof that the 77s are truly unique in rock music history. Rarely bands with this broad a canvas have songs of such intense emotional impact. As I wrote earlier, as special as this will be to the converted, it actually should gain a few more scalps.