March 14, 2005

I keep a short list in my head of things that could potentially make me hate Rockapella, and I avoid them with a religious kind of conviction. Scott's Bee Gees album is on this list, for example, as is the Devil Baby video. At the top, though, is the front row.

I hate the front row. You can't hear anything, and you spend the entire two hours in fear of being prodded by some errant piece of Rockapella anatomy. This show changed my mind. In fact, I was happy for the dumb, logic-free luck of the ticket draw. It was great. I could hear. My biggest complaint is that there was quite a lot of George Baldi III in the very large speaker parked rather formidably to my left, but there are worse things indeed.

Sean Altman, who inspires no such front-row anxiety thanks to the low-key and mostly unchoreographed nature of his show, was the opener. I love Sean Altman, and he intimidates me. He's smart. And he's big. No matter where I stand, I am cast in intellectual and literal shadow. The best I can muster is a postulated "We're not worthy" in a Garth Algar voice. OK, I'd never do that anywhere but in writing, but my point is made. Sean sounded splendid on Saturday night. Maybe it was the occasion. The show was a benefit for a girl named Casey who is battling a rare, aggressive form of cancer. For Casey, who was too ill to attend, Sean, and everyone else, pulled out the stops.

Sean told us about all the things he promised to tell us about, included his former loneliness and broken-heartedness and how he's taller than Jesus, a notion that still conjures a disturbing visual, no matter how many times I hear that song. And I'd seen Sean sing "Left" before with his wife Inna, which is all kooky and darling. In Canton, CT, he sang it with Jeff Thacher, which was neither, but three cheers for novelty value, and for the reunion of Rockapellas past.

To me, Jeff's singing voice is almost a hypothetical. It belongs to some other, more privileged plane of reality that Rockapella does not inhabit. Like Clark and Superman, you will never catch them in a room together. Jeff has a voice that sounds exactly how you would expect Jeff's voice to sound. It's nice. It is to be noted that Jeff wore not one, but two separate outfits for his respective outings with Sean and Rockapella. Both were, to quote several people onstage, sassy.

Then Sean started singing "Home" and Scott walked onstage and sang with him. And the world ended a little bit.

So.

I love Rockapella in whatever shape or form they feel like assuming on this day or that. I loved Barry. I loved Elliott. I know almost nothing about Steve Keyes, except that he uses a lot of falsetto, but I loved him too. Rockapellas, past, present, and future, are sacred in my heart and automatically receive a happy thumbs up from me. But.

Scott and Sean are special. Shut up. They are.

In some way, I really do see them as an instrument-free Lennon/McCartney-blissfully made for each other and yet tragically unable to make their fates coalesce in the same damn room. Blame ego or talent, but for those of us who never saw them perform together on the same stage, it just seems like a big fat shame. Say what you will about Rockaella's ever-evolving cast of characters and the slip-slide of its sound over the years, but never in the band's past, present, or future, has it housed a noise quite like the one that Sean and Scott made together. They opened their mouths, and all was instantly well with the world. Is there anything more excellent-sounding than the two of them cackling like restless ghoulies at the end of "I Found Sugar" or Scott's ballistic riffing under Sean's melody in the bridge of "Falling Over You"? It was wasn't exactly sweet, that pinging, acrid noise-like splinters of glass-but it was tough and otherworldly and so distinctive that to this day, when I hear Sean's solo version of the latter, there's still the strange feeling that there's something missing. Sean singing with Jeff? That's fun. Sean singing with Scott? That's the Holy Grail.

It's no wonder, then, that Rockapella has existed in only two distinct universes since its inception. It was Sean's band, and then it was Scott's, and that's pretty much the end of the story. I'm not sure how many times they've sung together since Sean left the band, but I'm sure I can count the instances on one hand. So you can only imagine my excitement-my embolism-when Scott strolled leisurely onto the stage in a Hot Wheels t-shirt to relieve Sean of the second verse of "Home".

It was blissful. Time has melted the icy hard the edges off that distinctive Scott/Sean sound, it seems. Never have they sounded warmer or more comfortable in their respective voices. It's easy, of course, to draw heady inferences from this kind of stuff, given the lethal combination of Scott and Sean's vaguely mysterious mutual history. When it was done, I weren't sure if they were going to hug or hit each other. Thankfully, it was the former. In fact, the Scott/Sean love abounded for the rest of the evening. Maybe I was hallucinating, but it seemed downright effusive at times. Planets aligned. Maybe one of them forgot to take their medication. I don't know. After the show, though, all I had in my mind was this image of a backstage pow-wow that sort of resembled the last scene in The Way We Were, where Sean brushes those blond wispies out of Scott's eyes and says, "I love you, but we can't be together and we both know it. So I'll raise our daughter, don't worry." Pan back to a shot of Central Park.

Sean talked about selling the Lower East Side apartment that he's lived in for fifteen years. As he was closing the door for the last time, he remembered auditioning Scott Leonard there. He said that Scott sang for about four minutes and the decision was made. And after their "Home" duet, he also presented Scott with a cookbook of Elvis-inspired recipes. Later, during Rockapella's set, Scott actually credited Sean with one of Rockapella's arrangements. Not that this was a fair trade, but in that small gesture lies a true whiff of progress, I think.

There was a telling moment, though, late in Rockapella's show that pretty much summed up how things stand between Sean and Scott. During his opening set, Sean described Rockapella's former (and more implicitly, current) level of success — compared with that of say, Green Day — as "mid-level." It's a lyric in one of his songs, and while he seems to be kidding, there's an uncomfortable glimmer of truth there. It's not much more than a glimmer, though, and I wouldn't challenge Sean on his choice of words. Someone else who could, though, happened to be in the room that night.

During Rockapella's set, Scott turned his head offstage and said, "What was that word, Sean? 'Mid-level?'"