VERY ZESTY

Tony Peyser
Mirror contributing writer

   There’s a burger commercial where two guys gleefully say "Zesty!" when seeing a pretty girl and a cool car. However, when a guitar-wielding dork is seen singing a few bars of an idiotic song, the guys sadly shake their heads and announce, "Not zesty." There are people who think that’s what all folk music is and they’re way off. 
   John Gorka is one of the bright lights of the modern folk movement and shows it in spades on his eighth album, The Company You Keep. First of all. Songs like "Oh Abraham" have wonderfully poetic lines: "I was born by a Kerouac stream/Under Eisenhower skies." In tracks like "Shape Of The World," Gorka also reveals real insight about the way we live our lives: "So I go about my work/Making my mistakes out loud/Maybe everybody’s failures/Are in earshot of the crowd." 
   He’s also pretty funny with "Hank Senior Moment," an ode to Hank Williams Sr.: "Lonesome and gray/You cannot say/Where all the dough went/You’re having a Hank Senior Moment." Gorka’s melodies will linger in your memory like the lilting "What Was That" and the piano-driven "Joint Of No Return." Gorka has clearly been going through a lot of the same ch-ch-changes we all have and is like an old friend you never knew you had. (He’s also going to be McCabe’s on Friday, March 30.) 
   When Gorka was a kid in the 1950s, a B-movie formula was a group of big city fellas traveling to a small town, pulling off a big heist and shooting up some locals on their way out. I was reminded of those dark thrillers when I got hold of Raisins In The Sun, the debut CD by a group of the same name. Take away the heist and gunplay, it’s a musical variation on that theme. 
   Seven session vets met in Tucson and holed up in a hotel. Ten days later, they left --- not with stolen loot but a rocking and rootsy album that sounds like a great, albeit grown-up, garage band. Between them, the Raisins worked with The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, The Bangles and lots of other major folks. The band is comprised of Harvey Brooks on bass, Paul Q. Kolderie on keyboards and guitar, Jules Shear on vocals, Chuck Prophet on guitar and vocals, Sean Slade on guitar and keyboards, Winston Watson on drums and legendary producer Jim Dickinson on keyboards. 
   They wrote and recorded the entire album in that week and a half. Vaguely mysterious, sometimes serious and partly delirious, this quirky album of desert-grown tunes is hard to classify but easy to like. Shear shines on the romantic track "Old Times Again." Dueting with Prophet, they sing the hell out of "Candy From a Stranger" and strut their stuff like Eric Clapton and B.B. King on their Grammy-winning single, "Riding With The King." And the pumped up "Stringbean" is as good as any Top Ten rocker the J. Geils Band ever came up with. CDNow has The Company You Keep for $12.58 and Raisins In The Sun for $13.99. 
The Goofy Band Name Of The Week is ...The Blizzard Of Oz.