Brett Milano reviews from Jazz Fest Day 1, Thursday, April 24, 2025.
Bonerama
You usually have to wait a little while—like maybe an hour or two—to hear your first Meters cover at Jazz Fest, but this year it took me all but five minutes: The second tune of Bonerama’s set was a medley no less, with “Cabbage Alley” and a few choice instrumental bits from the Meters album of that name. (And they followed that a few songs later with a solo George Porter Jr. instrumental, “By Athenish”). Bonerama have gotten a bit closer to big, loud rock since co-founder Craig Klein left the band (and since the other co-founder Mark Mullins’ son Michael, also frontman of Zita, became sometime lead singer). But this week’s set reinforced their roots in New Orleans music, with other dips into the classic catalogue (Toussaint’s “Here Come the Girls”) and their own “Look Out Lonely,” which the elder Mullins wrote as a tribute to the Radiators and pretty much nailed their sound (as Mullins noted onstage, the Rads’ Dave Malone pronounced it “a pretty weird song” when guesting on the record). Mullins Jr still got a chance to wail on Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” but that was just the capper to a winning and wide-ranging set. (Hate to break the news though, but one instrumental that they announced as a new original was mighty close tune wise to Queen’s “Let Me Entertain You”).
Iceman Special
I have no idea if the members of the Iceman Special ever heard of Pere Ubu, the great Cleveland “avant garage” band whose leader David Thomas’ death was announced on Thursday morning. But it was refreshing to hear a bit of the anarchic Ubu spirit—among many other things—in the set that the Special played at the Gentility Stage. This band isn’t just eclectic, it’s wildly all over the place, seesawing from funk to rock to freeform freakouts within the same tune; their improvs seem to be about devising new melodic ideas on the spot (they also probably gave the sound mixer a few nightmares by including a vibraphone in a loud electric band). It’s their willingness to try anything once—and their having solid songs to back it up—that make Iceman Special one of the most interesting jam bands in town.
John Fogerty
All you really need to know about John Fogerty’s set is that the man is 79, and he still sings nearly every one of his vintage hits in their original keys and with their original power, including throat-shredders like “Born on the Bayou” and “Rock & Roll Girls” (only “Travelin’ Band” was pitched down, but he’d had a glass of champagne before singing that one). Fogerty’s “Celebration” tour is built around the fact that he just won a lawsuit and got ownership of his Creedence catalogue—and if that’s what it takes to get a performance this spirited out of him, so much the better (it also helps that his current band, all no-names save for two of his sons, is closer to the Creedence vibe than the studio pros he’s employed in the past). His set is nearly all Creedence these days and while there’s no disputing the importance of those songs, his solo catalogue gets shortchanged (his best solo album, 2007s Revival, hasn’t been touched since the one tour behind it). But the set did have two nice surprises: One was “Fight Fire,” a Nuggets-style garage blast that Creedence recorded in their pre-fame incarnation as the Golliwogs. The other was a special rarity for New Orleans: the Rockin’ Sidney classic “My Toot Toot,” which Fogerty covered with Sidney’s help in 1985, done this week with Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. adding more wildness on rub board. Sets this good from ’60s icons are getting rarer all the time.
