The Aces at Russian River Brewing, Santa Rosa. 5/21/05

The Aces at Russian River Brewery, Santa Rosa, 5/21/05

The Russian River Brewery on 4th Street in Santa Rosa is a concrete walled concrete floored brewpub just getting started with weekend entertainment. They’ve hung hops sacks from suspended rods on the eastern wall and built the band a carpeted wooden riser in the corner. The dance floor and a lot of walls remain concrete or reflective surfaces. Sound is hard and sharp in the room, with the conversational buzz level high.

With a clientele of heavily 20-somethings either engaged in the pre-mating ritual, attempting to be, or in groups of twos and threes looking, the focus wasn’t really on the music. Almost any band would have been fine with a majority of the audience. I saw several blues and dance people and they were near the dance floor.

The Aces have been out of commission for a while and sometimes the rust showed. The "Punk Blues Band with Attitude" hasn’t played much in recent times. Their PA wasn’t up to the task; you couldn’t hear the vocals in that sound environment. I’ve heard Derek Irving really fly on guitar, and he showed flashes of that at this gig. The Aces have more gigs coming and Derek will work the rust off. When he’s doing flash he really can sell those licks. I particularly like the slide work it changes the way the band sounds and they have a really strong ensemble sound then.

David Burke, who I’m used to seeing at Jasper’s on Thursday night doing leads and rhythm guitar, in the Aces plays "guitar bass" as the Aces have no bassist. He does a magnificent job and really gets a lot of attitude into it, standing with his feet in the A-frame "Elvis spread." He really gets a thump out of that telecaster too, sort of like Brewer Phillips did with Hound Dog Taylor.

Mike Gutsch is unusual as a drummer: he plays standing up. His bass drum playing is steady from that unusual position. He’s visually much more a part of the show that way since he’s so much more visible moving and swaying as he plays. He really held things together in the sound environment. The basic bash-bash-bash of this punk blues band came from him and David Burke.

Sky O’Bannion when he’s on and operating is a powerful singer and harp player. His chromatic harp playing early on was strong and inventive. As the evening progressed Sky got in to his showmanship rolling-on-the-floor routine and some of the edge in his vocals was lost and his harp playing lessened. I did enjoy his Howling Wolf work playing the harp sticking out of his mouth.

The crowd was initially not dancing so blues regulars got to dance. As the young crowd got more lubricated they began to dance and girls began to dance even if the even if the young white guys wouldn’t (they mostly don’t know how). Huge numbers of people never danced at all but stayed glued to their tables or circulated up and down the bar. Large young guys with bald heads sat near me the entire evening never moving, working on their scowls. As people began to dance more and more they started to look uneasy like they were missing something.

I had a pretty fun night and I look forward to further improvements at the Russian River Brewing Co., you can see they’re trying and I hear they are getting their own P.A. for the hall. With more sound deadening for the reflecting treble and standing waves they’ll really have something. The bare concrete floor is hard to dance on over time; maybe they’ll get some parquet for that area.

I’m definitely looking forward to more Aces gigs. As they get back into the swing of performing they’ll really pick up the flow and be their raunchy selves again. They’re back at the Russian River Brewery June eleventh.