The cliches are flying fast and furious through my brain:

Grrls just wanna have fun.

Grrl power.

Guitars are a grrl's best friend.

The grrl's gotta have it.

Catchy slogans, all, and if I were running a T-shirt company looking for snazzy slogans, I could perhaps make a mint. But by now, the whole Woman in Rock phenom should be simply that: women in rock. That's what this evening of music was all about--three bands either fronted by women or, in the case of S-K, comprised entirely of women, presenting some slamming rock music on its own terms. No Rolling Stone covers anymore, no MTV specials. Those days have past, and maybe now it's finally time for the idea of a woman--or a grrl, or whatever she wants to be called--kicking ass in rock to be accepted as nothing more than what's expected, and not as some kind of marketing novelty.

Not to suggest that this could happen soon, or that we're even close--cock rock like Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock rules the roost right now, and if you take an incident like, oh, say a RAPE conducted in FULL VIEW of a MASSIVE CROWD during Limp Bizkit's set at Woodstock '99 as some kind of microcosm of the state of gender in rock today, then we've taken a few steps back from even the commodified acceptance of Lilith Fair. (Cue "Battle Hymn of the Republic.") Then maybe this evening of music was some kind of brief glimpse of where we should be, tomorrow, someday, soon.

Having said that, there was a teensy whiff of gender issues in the air. More on that later.

The Gossips

"Was that rockabilly, or just some approximation of it?"

That's what a scary bald guy asked me after the Gossips had wrapped up their set. I immediately walked away, because when weird guys talk to me at shows, it's somehow weirder than when weird guys talk to me anywhere else. That's why I don't talk to anyone I don't know at shows--I ain't weird, ya know.

The Gossips may have offered some approximation of rockabilly, but not enough of one to leap into the genre--in an X-ish way, they circled the fringe of that music, mostly because of the decidedly Billy Zoom-esque riffs of their lead guitarist. But their sound also takes a few pages from some leading sixties lights; early Kinks made an appearance, as did the minimalist edge of the Troggs. The band also benefits from a lead singer with a full-bodied, soulful voice, almost Aretha but not quite. The fullness of the lead singer's voice almost competed with the guitar licks at times for control of the songs, creating an interesting tension.

All in all, a full-on rock assault from the trio, with a surprisingly full sound considering the absence of a rhythm guitarist or bass player. Also present onstage with the Gossips was an inexplicable man who simply danced throughout all the songs to the right of the combo. He may have sang vocals on a few numbers before I arrived, or perhaps he's simply the Gossips' answer to Joe C. --MS

Bangs

Bangs might just require some new terminology to describe their approach.

It's fascinating to me to observe in a few of the current grrl bands that when women do take up the mantle of the punk pioneers, they sometimes add as much typical rock swagger to the mix as they do the expected DIY fire. It's like half punk and half eighties' hair metal, a curious and fun blend of passionate music and rockstar posturing. That's certainly what's happening with bands like the Donnas and Kittie, and that's what seems to be going on with the Bangs.

The three-chord splendor--that's all punk. The shout-out infectious choruses--that's all metal. Lyrically, they also seemed to romanticize the teenage girl experience with just enough of an ironic sneer to qualify as a nice mix of punk disrespect and metal sex worship. Even the brief mic checks by guitarist Sarah Utter and bassist Maggie Vail tended toward rawk, as they shouted "Testing, testing, one two THREE!" with a 'tude that would have put Vince Neil to shame. The set that followed embraced punk ferocity and married it to rawk swagger, and easily passed the usual hard rock test at the Metro--if pieces of the ceiling over the stage start to crumble down as you play, then you're kicking major ass.

So what do we call this? Tit rock? They're straight-ahead, in-your-face songs about life, love and boys in the grand tradition of Motley Crue, the Ramones and Poison. They're also catchy punk pop fun--and since breasts tend to be more confrontational than your average vagina, "tit rock" might just have to do. (I gotta run over to the copyright office. Excuse me.) --MS

Sleater-Kinney

"You're No Rock 'N' Roll Fun," Sleater-Kinney's scathing indictment of too-cool-to-be-loose rockers, popped up about five songs into their Chicago set. By then, it seemed clear that for the most part, the crowd wasn't much rock 'n' roll fun either--with the exception of the small group who made it up closest to the stage, fans in attendance put on their best indie cool faces and expressed their intense passion for the music by nodded their heads slightly. Meanwhile, the band onstage before them was delivering a blistering set of raw rock.

Fortunately, none of the band members took any of their performance cues from the crowd. Dueling guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker took opposing approaches to performing, though both delivered in the songs with equal intensity. While Tucker remained mostly planted before her microphone, sneering lyrics to such new tunes as "Ballad of a Ladyman" and "Was it a Lie," Brownstein stalked the stage between Tucker and her mic, at times ending her trail just in front of Tucker and leaning in close to yell in her face. Tucker never reacted, but you could feel the tension rise in the music, and when the two sang together, the energy exchanges were electric. Brownstein even delivered a few well-placed Pete Townshend arm cranks to drive one tune home.

As intense as the dual fires of Brownstein and Tucker were, however, Sleater-Kinney's true secret weapon is drummer Janet Weiss. Planted upright behind her drum kit like a steel rod--she and Ben Folds Five's Darren Jesse could act as spokespeople for a "good posture in rock drummers" campaign--she pivoted on her chair with an almost mechanical precision. As the set continued, Weiss would lose herself in her rhythms, spinning her head back and forth to the beat, her hair flying into her face. Seemingly from nowhere, she'd unleash a perfectly-timed stacatto blast of beats, or spin the intensity dial all the way to eleven with a driving fill. Every time she nailed one of these moments, her bandmates would respond in kind, and S-K would take the music to the next level.

It seemed as though there was no limit to the levels left to be explored--though the band seemed more reserved at the opening of the set, their energy slowly built over the course of the evening. As their energy built, you could almost see the communicative synapses in the band's collective brain drawing tightly together. By the encores, the trio acted as one, delivering with stunning ferocity on a cover of CCR's "Fortunate Son" for which they were joined by an impromptu dance group of members of the Gossips and Bangs.

The set highlights were many of the tunes off their new record--"Male Model" and "#1 Must-Have" cooked especially fierce. That's fitting, because on one level All Hands on the Bad One examines the state of women in rock today and declares it a sorry one indeed. So it's great that the band not only delivered a powerful set but also drove their message home. On another level, Bad One rocks hardcore, which Sleater-Kinney also managed to do, in spades. --MS

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Schuba's in Chicago is where you go to hear folk music. Not every band that plays there might properly be termed a folk artist, but there's something about the place's elegant archways and intimate atmosphere that makes turning your amp up to 11 seem like a gross faux pas, not as bad as farting at the table but worse than using the wrong fork for salad. Knowing that, it's not unfair to suspect you won't get much in the way of either noise or pop from whoever's on stage, and the pattern held true tonight. But that doesn't mean some damn fine music wasn't played.

Chris Mills

Though I love the acoustic guitar and anyone who makes their living with it, there's no getting around the fact that a guy singing with an acoustic sounds like a guy singing with an acoustic--to really put your stamp on a listener's forehead, you need magnetic stage presence, a completely unorthodox playing style or kick-ass songs. That singer/songwriter Chris Mills was accompanied by a drummer/vocalist helped somewhat--my girlfriend wrote "SEXY VOICE" in my notebook, only later explaining she was referring to the drummer, not Mills--but the partial rhythm section didn't add as much as you'd think; it was still...a guy with an acoustic.

Still, Mills is a pretty good guy with an acoustic: he has a clear, pop-star voice (how pleasant, after the din of last night, to be in a venue where it's possible to hear people sing and understand them!), he plays well, and he knows how to compel an audience's attention: he hunches forward in his chair with a peculiar grin, like an insect hypnotizing its prey before snapping its head off. Best of all, his songwriting is full of eerie harmonies and potent, almost carnal imagery. Some writers have a knack for it, an ear that tells them this note sung over that chord will meld into a third sound that haunts your ear like the distant drip of water in a cave, and if that metaphor is too cheesy to stomach, well, you're just going to have to trust me. --DW

Verbow

During the set-up interval after Chris Mills' set, a roadie brought a cello onstage. "I'm going to like these guys," I thought. In this case, "these guys" are Jason and Alison Narducy, guitarist and cellist, husband and wife, and one-half of the Chicago quartet Verbow. I hadn't heard a thing about Verbow prior to seeing them, and the loss is mine. Half of Verbow is remarkable; the prospect of hearing the entire band is a little frightening.

An amplified cello is an entirely different beast from the instrument in its natural state. You hear every fiber on the bow and every wind on the string magnified with hideous clarity, the kind of sound that would make a classical cellist gag. Yet an adventurous player can take that sound into surpising new territory, which is what Alison Narducy did, repeatedly and with ease. Her husband, no slouch himself, is an excellent guitar player and a powerful singer, with a voice reminiscent of Donovan without the Scotch bard's feyness. Together they made a sound which blasted into every corner of Schuba's: sometimes beautiful, sometimes wild and shrieking. Alison took her instrument further into sonic wilderness by playing it through a slew of effects pedals, or else would just hold it in her lap and pluck it like a bass guitar; she did everything short of wheeling it over her head and smashing it into the stage.

While the band's original compositions are all good, the highlight of the set had to be a cover of Elvis Costello's "Uncomplicated," which slammed with all the fury of the original while finding time for a lengthy guitar excursion that sounded like it could've collapsed into chaos at any moment. It didn't--these musicians know the value of restraint as well as excess, and I was grateful. --DW

John Doe

A man, a guitar, three chords, and...wait, didn't U2 sing something about this?

Unlike his two opening acts, John Doe went onstage alone, armed with nothing but a guitar and a pack of Winstons. Oh, and the cachet of being the co-founder of X, arguably the best punk band America ever produced. Like every other aging rock band, X has become a nostalgia act--albeit a very loud one--but on his own Doe has kept the faith; his solo work borrows from a range of influences to achieve an authority and authenticity that few other artists can match, and his songwriting, while a touch more sophisticated, explores largely the same concerns as do the classics he wrote for X twenty years ago. Come to think of it, Doe himself seems hardly to have aged over the last decade or two; maybe the lines at the corners of his eyes are a little deeper, but middle age definitely seems to agree with him.

His singing, too, has gotten better with age. His is an ordinary voice in most respects, but Doe nevertheless can sing with remarkable compassion and humor, which is a delicate balance to maintain. With lyrics that touch so often on the unfortunate, the dispossessed, and people who've just plain fucked things up, it would be all too easy to beat the listener over the head with these songs, turning them from personal stories into political tracts. Doe sidesteps this trap again and again; sympathetic he may be, but there's a pleasure in telling stories, even sad ones like these, and from the glint in his eye he clearly relishes it. Maybe that's why, unaccompaned as he was, he nevertheless avoided sounding like just another acoustic-lugging folkie. In fact, in concert and up close, he seems less a musician and more a raconteur poet.

The set he played consisted of a roughly even mix of new John Doe, old John Doe, and X material, not that there was any jarring discontinuity to distinguish one from the others. He had no trouble shaping X's old power chord arrangements into something more subtle, and the result was a powerful performance in which anyone looking to simply relive old memories was left to his own devices (as was the poor bastard who kept yelling "'Johnny Hit and Run Pauline'!" until Doe gently told him to shut up).

Highlights of the set were "Beat-Up World," a track from Doe's upcoming album Freedom Is... that got things off to a powerful start; a moving reading of X's "Burning House of Love"; and most powerfully, another new song called "Grin and Wave," which sharply exposes the way in which Americans ignore poverty and deprivation, even--if not especially--when it's right under their noses. By the last few numbers, most of the audience had, incredibly, gone home, leaving Doe to sardonically remark that he probably had time left to take a request from every remaining audience member. A true shame--as Chris Mills had shouted earlier in the evening, trying to stir the crowd from its lethargy: "John Doe! He was a member of fucking X, for Christ's sake!" --DW