Hometown reunion for Roberts, Dummies

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This article was published 10/10/2010 (5813 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As far as reunions go, this won’t rank up there with the Police, Soundgarden or the Pixies, but for Crash Test Dummies fans, this weekend at the Burton Cummings Theatre was as good as it gets.

On Saturday, main Crash Test dude Brad Roberts was onstage again with four-fifths of the Winnipeg folk-pop group responsible for ubiquitous early 1990s nuggets like Superman’s Song and Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm.

Ellen Reid has appeared on every Crash Test Dummies album and is touring with Roberts and guitarist Murray Pulver (Doc Walker), but Saturday was a rarity as they were joined by Roberts’s brother Dan on bass and Mitch Dorge on drums, along with New York’s Rob Morsberger, who handled keyboard and accordion duties. Ben Darvill was the only original Dummy missing, but was in town last week with his Son of Dave blues project.

The show was the first local gig for any version of the group since a disastrous appearance at the 2001 Winnipeg Folk Festival when a drunken, expletive-spewing Roberts sent fans fleeing for the exits. He never stopped writing and recording under the band’s name, and has since been forgiven by his fans, it seems.

And why not? There are far worse horror stories in the history of rock ‘n’ roll shows than getting drunk and swearing at folkies.

The current version of the Crash Test Dummies attracted 800 of the band’s fans, friends and family to the Burton Cummings Theatre in the middle of the Thanksgiving long weekend for a 90-minute, 17-song set of old favourites and new material that fit in just fine with the band’s most famous songs.

The sextet took the stage to the mellow strains of Ghosts that Haunt Me, possibly one of the only mainstream pop hits with an accordion solo. They kept the low-key vibe going with God Shuffled His Feet before Reid, who was a bundle of energy all night, took a solo turn on a cover of XTC’s The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead.

Roberts explained the band was asked to do the song for the Dumb and Dumber soundtrack, but was unsure of whether or not to record the tune for the Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels film until he heard they were being offered $50,000.

“Now keep in mind all I’ve got to look at is this script… seeing Jeff Daniels sit on the toilet for a long time is funny, but when all you have is the script to look at, it’s like ahhhhh,” Roberts said to a theatre full of laughs.

After Knights and Maidens, the rhythm section left, leaving only Roberts, Reid and Pulver — who had his own cheering section from his hometown of Portage la Prairie — onstage. It’s this lineup that has been touring North America and the stripped-down setup worked surprisingly well for new songs like And It’s Beautiful and You Said You’d Meet Me (In California) which are filled with a variety of sounds on the just-released Oooh La-La!, an album mostly written using an Optigan, an organ produced by Mattel in the 1970s (the instrument is too fragile to take on tour, so Roberts left his collection at his New York home).

The band and trio setup would alternate throughout the night with the full group returning on stage to play the group’s biggest hits, and leaving the trio to handle the newer material. Some set highlights included the group’s catchiest song, the poppy Afternoons and Coffeespoons; the quirky smash Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm, referred to by Roberts as “the money track;” the Replacements cover Androgynous; and the haunting closer, Superman’s Song, which someone yelled out for an hour into the set.

“I’ll get to it in good time, and if you don’t like it, get your own band,” Roberts said with a giant smile to roars of approval.

The frontman, whose distinctive bass baritone has aged extremely well over the years, garnered plenty of laughs throughout the night with his between-song chatter, from humourous anecdotes to showing off various rock star moves he had to strike because he wasn’t playing a guitar on tour.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca