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Wednesday, November 27, 1996

CONCERT:

'Party of Five' theme song shines spotlight on band's successful historyBy Jeff Hilger

Daily Bruin Contributor

When a band has been making music for 13 years and finally scores a top 20 single, one might expect it to make sure it capitalizes on the success.

The Wisconsin-based BoDeans, however, seem perfectly content to continue what they've been doing for 10 years: making solid, tuneful albums and playing at clubs and small theaters filled with a strong, supportive core group of devoted fans.

At a sold-out House of Blues on Saturday, the BoDeans did just that. Taking the stage at 11:15 p.m., they played on until nearly 1:30 a.m., and the crowd sang and danced along throughout.

After making three critically acclaimed but moderate selling albums in the mid-1980s, the band had a strong following in many Midwestern cities and towns, but had yet to find mass critical success elsewhere in the country.

With their fourth album, the Bodeans expressly tried to create a more commercial, radio-friendly sound. It succeeded, but no major single came out of it.

On the fifth album, the band's two lead singers and song writers, Kurt Neumann and Sammy Llanas, decided to just forget about the whole commercial side and just write songs that they really liked. This collection contained a track, "Closer to Free," which some music executive at Fox TV apparently heard and liked, and it became the theme song for the sitcom, "Party of Five."

After that, the song became a

top 20 hit, and the band's album, released soon after, sold 200,000 copies (as opposed to the 30,000 predicted by the record company). Now, the BoDeans have released their sixth studio album; their stop at the House of Blues was part of a nationwide tour to promote it.

The majority of the crowd at the show clearly wasn't there just to hear "Closer to Free." They sang along most fervently with the band's older songs.

Neumann and Llanas, although part of a band, are really a powerful duo in the tradition of the Indigo Girls. Their two voices were clearly distinctive but they blended together beautifully. The songs that they performed were often about personal stories and issues.

The band opened its two-hour set with "Idaho," a rolling melodic tune from its fifth album. A few songs after that, Neumann sang "Hurt by Love," a song he wrote for his father when his parents divorced after 36 years of marriage.

The most powerful point in the main set came when Llanas sang a song called "Naked" from the fourth album. In the song, he wants to start over with somebody and wants to bare his soul to his partner. The previously mentioned "Closer to Free" closed the main set, and made room for what eventually became three encores.

The highlight of the encores came when the duo returned for the second encore and said, "We're going to try to do something different here." They then proposed that they were going to go "completely unplugged."

It's common these days for bands to do a few acoustic tracks during the show and call them unplugged, but they always do the songs with at least some amplification (in other words, mikes are on and acoustic guitars are plugged into the speakers).

However, what the BoDeans proceeded to do was to step in front of their mikes and sing to the somewhat rowdy, definitely drunk crowd of people who'd been jumping and dancing for the previous two hours. It took over a minute for the crowd to quiet down completely and achieve the campfire atmosphere.

As soon as they did, the singers launched into a beautiful rendition of "Only Love," a tune from their second album. It was a risky move, and not everyone in the crowd remained silent throughout, but it definitely worked.

The final song , "Still the Night," came from the band's first album, and was one of the only songs where the two singers trade lines back and forth throughout the verses. The set, which focused mostly on their most recent two releases, definitely pleased the crowd, who left content knowing that this band will be around for a while.

GENEVIEVE LIANG

BoDeans play to a sellout crowd Saturday.