Comment on this story What: Saturday Looks Good To Me, with Nomo, Mito Band, and Don Gato When: Saturday, May 29, 9 p.m. Where: Pilot Light Cost: $6

Saturday Looks Good to Me takes its punk symphony on the road

by Joe Tarr

Saturday Looks Good To Me often has trouble replicating its recorded sound live. It’s not that the band relies on studio gimmickry or session musicians, but that its music is lush and symphonic.

The group’s music is a modernized, indie-rock version of Phil Spector’s girl groups and the Beach Boys—a wall of sound with strings, horns, reverb, lots of musicians and several singers taking turns at the microphone.

“There’s a lot of instruments and lots of players. The last record had something ridiculous like 27 people on it,” says Fred Thomas, the band’s leader. “Most of the time we go on tour, the band is really different. We’ve had as few as three people [in the band]. People say, ‘This sounds like the Modern Lovers. Where are the strings? Where’s the girl-group sound?’ And we don’t have anything to say to them.

“This time we’ll have almost everything,” he adds. “There’s full arrangements, full horn section, keyboard, organ—short of a string section and a reverb chamber, we’re presenting everything we can.”

The reason is that the band is touring with another group they’re big fans of, a group called Nomo. An 11-member, multi-instrumental band, Nomo doesn’t have anything in the way of a booking agent and is pretty much unknown. “For them to tour and make money would be impossible,” Thomas says.

So their friends in Saturday decided they could join forces. Several members of Nomo will join Saturday on stage. “We’re not really sure how it’ll go. There’s this one band that nobody knows about and one band almost nobody knows about. We’re not expecting to make much money.”

“We do hope to present a good show and get people to come out,” he says.

Saturday Looks Good to Me was never intended to be a full-fledged band, Thomas says. A veteran of the eclectic Detroit band, His Name Is Alive, Thomas was recording in his basement back in 1999.

“It really began as an accident and continued as an experiment,” he says. A friend of his left a loop of a Beach Boys song at his house, and Thomas started tinkering with it, adding instruments, writing lyrics and then having a friend sing on it. “It was never meant to be a band or anything that was going to leave the basement,” he says. “But it turned out to be really good and connected with a lot of people.”

Thomas released an LP of 4-track songs on his own in 2000. A loose band was formed for some gigs. The group toured with Saves The Day, Ted Leo, and Rainer Maria, among others. During this period, Thomas spent 2-1/2 years working on the follow up, All Your Summer Songs, which was released last year on Polyvinyl. It’s a gorgeous, mournful pop album, with songs about falling in and out of love. The standout single, “Meet Me By the Water,” about a woman who asks her lover to dance with her by the river to his Raincoats 45s, disintegrates into a sea of reverb—an effect that would sound gimmicky if it didn’t work so damn well.

The album references classic ’60s pop at every step. It gained attention from the music press for the number of indie-rock stars who played and sang on it—Jessica Bailiff, Ida, Ted Leo, Tara Jane O’Neil, et. al. Although the approach worked well, Thomas found that the guests overshadowed the music. “Almost every review I read said something about indie-rock stars Ted Leo, Tara Jane O’Neil, Ida,” he says. “I wasn’t going out of my way to get guest stars, I just wanted those people to sing on the record.”

When he writes, Thomas sometimes has someone in particular in mind for a song, while other times it’s whomever is available. “There were some songs I wrote where I thought, ‘My friend Jodi has to be the singer for this song. She has the perfect voice for it.’ Other times it was, ‘Well, so-and-so can’t make it, I guess I’ll have to do it today,’” Thomas says.

On Saturday’s third album, Every Night, due in September, Thomas downscaled slightly and is a little more intentional in his approach. The band is still large, with some 22 musicians playing on it. But Thomas sings all the male vocals, and longtime bandmember Betty Barnes sings most of the female leads.

“The last two records were upbeat and molded from ’60s pop music, arranged with a wall of sound. The next record is less concerned about emulating anything. It’s 12 songs we wanted to record as our band. The arrangements are more deliberate. It’s more about the songs we’re playing.

“It still sounds like our band. It’s growing in some strange convoluted way,” he adds.

For now, he’s excited about the two-week tour with the large band. It might be the last time they have a chance to tour with so many musicians.

“In a perfect world, I’d love to tour with as many people as on the records,” he says. “That might require a lot more people buying our records.”

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse