About two years ago Bob Log III was in Adelaide and played at Jive to a fairly small crowd. My friends and I who saw him were in awe of him and when we found out that he was coming back to Adelaide for the Fringe we eagerly booked our tickets to go and see him again at Jive last night.
To try and describe Bog Log III. He describes himself as a one man band from Tucson Arizona. Don’t let the one man band description put you off though. He’s got a very rich sound for a left foot playing the bass drum, the right foot playing the cymbal and drum machines and the hands playing the guitar. I’m not much of a guitar expert but he’s a pretty damn good guitar player. I would describe his music as blues on speed.
But to the look of this one man band. Bob Log wears an all in one lycra bodysuit. He also wears his sound apparatus – a bike helmet fitted with a telephone/microphone for his sound and because the microphone is fitted through his helmet it provides a distorted sound so the lyrics can be a bit hard to understand. You can, however, understand what he’s saying between each song, things like ‘It’s really hard to see what’s going on up here’, when a girl through a half-filled plastic cup of beer onto the stage after Bob Log had requested a drink. She did it twice and when he finally realised what was going on he got his spotlight torch and shone it up on her. Bob Log also described us, his audience, as his apparatus in his Tucson Arizona accent – very endearing even when he’s paying the audience out.
Back to the music. He started off by playing his guitar while running through the audience, even upstairs. He then hooked up to his microphone which plugs into the back of the helmet and sat down at the rest of his band. As the last time as soon as he started playing I couldn’t sit down. It’s not the type of music where you can sit at the table and watch, you have to get in amongst it. It’s really funky and passionate and my friend said afterwards she felt absolutely post-coital. He’s quite sexy in a weird kind of way.
He does involve his audience in a couple of his songs – Boob Scotch being one. Would you like to be known as the girl who went and put your boob on Bob’s scotch up on stage and then Bob drinks some and passes it around to the audience so they can have some as well? No girls in Adelaide put their boobs in Bob’s scotch this time. Probably because the audience mainly consisted of men and mens boobs wouldn’t do for the boob scotch job. For another song he gets two girls from the audience to sit on each knee which of course he’s using for the drum and the cymbal so girls jiggle quite a bit.
He even had the Town Bike dancers with him this time. The Town Bikes are two girls from Melbourne who had some very fine costume changes and danced to about four or five of Bob’s songs. Altogether, a right fine cabaret type act if you’re into Blues on Speed and it’s good to see he’s now got more of a following in Adelaide.
