|
Girls just wanna have fun at Jacques
The leggy transvestite outside gives you a sisterly "Hey, mama, lookin' good'' on your way in. The doorman is wearing a tuxedo, and takes your $7 cover with the graciousness of a four-star concierge accepting a big tip. Inside, the old Bay Village barroom looks like a VFW hall in drag and smells like the perfume counter at Bloomingdale's, courtesy of a full corps of 6-foot glamour girls in Saturday night regalia, mixing through the crowd like ladies of the court. No wonder Jacques has become the toast of the bachelorette party set. Everyone gets treated like a queen. Downstairs, at the opening party for Jacques Underground, the female-friendly vibe continues. The new club, which had been in irregular use as a rock room since the Elevator Drops started up a scene there eight years ago, is officially back in business and it's safe for girls. The room has had its first thorough cleaning in half a decade, for starters - "I mean thorough, like a girl cleans,'' says DeNiros bassist Melissa Wells, who appears tonight with her cover-band side project, the Electrolytes. She says the idea was also to "make it a little more chi-chi'' in here - relative, that is, to the days of brew-spraying punk rock mayhem. Now the back of the stage is draped with a glittering curtain of gold Mylar, and there are some cushy couches in the back of the room to lounge on. That's about it in the way of luxury for the time being - otherwise the club is a pretty basic box of a rock room. But it's comfortable here. The layout works - a horseshoe bar in the middle of the room, with plenty of stools; there's room for dancing in front of the stage. Not to mention such homey touches as the complimentary pretzels, offered straight out of a plastic bag sitting on the bar. "Look at this, I love this,'' says Frank McPhillips, a friend of Electrolytes guitarist Pat Wallace, as he reaches in for a handful. "It's like being in someone's house.'' It does feel like a house party, once the action gets going. Not only are the queens actually gracing the scene with a visit (it has not always been the case), but Sabina Sidney, protege of the late Jacques legend Sylvia Sidney, is dancing with the drummer's wife. Everybody's up on the floor - the middle-aged blue-collar types with pre-trendy tattoos, the young artists and rockers with the creative hairdos. For boys, girls and everybody else, this is a comfortable, enjoyable scene, unthreatening and unpretentious. The Electrolytes, featuring a girl-group vocal front lineup that includes two astonishingly feminine transvestites, is the perfect house band, in spirit and style. It's their policy to play only bummer-free songs, and they have a great ear for oldies people love to hear. They do Motown moves, change gowns between sets, and have enough energy at the end of three sets to respond to the clamor for an encore with an extended cover of "Venus'' - the Bananarama version. Even when they're rough, they're charming. This is such a likable band that they might entertain reasonable hopes of fulfilling their dream - to play weddings - in spite of the odd disadvantage of the transvestite factor. After all, they won over the crowd full of old people at the Italian barbecue they played in Wilmington recently. "Of course, at first, it's all kind of whispery,
and looking at us like deer in the headlights,'' says Wells. "This
is what usually happens. Then, halfway through the set they just kind
of forget it's a drag-queen group, or just accept it, and start dancing.''
|