With two minutes to go until his scheduled set time of 9:15 p.m. last night (April 1), Albert Hammond Jr. stormed the stage of The Middle East’s tight downstairs club. The crowd was already locked in, erupting in cheers when Hammond started singing “Caught By My Shadow,” sans his quintessential white Fender Stratocaster with the red-and-white lightning bolt guitar strap — a look etched into the minds of most Strokes fans. But then Hammond picked up his axe and ripped through a couple of licks, setting the quick pace and high energy that guided his entire set.
Hammond played songs spanning his entire solo career, including recent solo LP Francis Trouble, in the nearly 90-minute set. The music was good, but the performance was better. His light twirling of the microphone cable, with his shirt sleeves rolled up, offered shades of a Roger Daltrey type frontman, or even of his comrade Julian Casablancas. His ecstatic moves — reaching for ceiling pipes and venturing into the crowd, at times — were more of a Mick Jagger goes punk hybrid.
“I caught someone mid drink,” he said after pacing around the crowd for a couple of seconds near the end of “St. Justice.” “They were holding two drinks and they were like ‘Oh shit.’” Chuckles and hip motions ceased and the band went into a Francis Trouble number just like that.
It is hard not to think of The Strokes when Hammond is rocking a couple feet away, strumming his guitar the same way as he does in his “other” band. After all, he is one in the same. Even his new band backing this latest solo effort has trickles of Strokes-iness, as the tight drum beats kept the band and crowd in check in similar fashion. Some licks made this writer do a double take to ensure Nick Valensi hadn’t sneaked on stage.
But it’s also easy to see how this man, nearing two decades in the game, has crafted his own craft. “Free from it all, I’m not gonna change ’till I want to,” he sang on 2006’s “In Transit” as his set neared an end, the silhouette of his curls more visible than his face on the dim-lit stage. The songs are his. These hits don’t resonate the coming of age chord as much as the music from his past life, but they resonate something else — a kind of yearning with a splash of sappy but we can still dance to it. He offers us different tales. Good ones, at that.
It must have been a quarter past 10 when the band left the stage to “end” the show before returning for the seemingly mandatory encore bit every act does nowadays. Hammond started early and ended four minutes or so earlier than his scheduled end time suggested. His performance, though, wasn’t short of much.
Photo by Alejandro Serrano; follow him on Twitter @serrano_alej.