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Cobra Verde is back with "Nightlife" album
The Plain Dealer When rock stars take time off, they usually do so in exotic locales or by kicking back at home. John Petkovic of Cleveland's Cobra Verde went to Seattle to eyeball the unrest surrounding the World Trade Organization meeting there. "I was there near the end of the thing," says Petkovic, 34, a Plain Dealer staff writer who founded Cobra Verde in 1994 following the dissolution of his previous band, Death of Samantha. "I just wanted to watch. "What I found most interesting was the number of people who were kind of like a second tier of protest. It was a ripple effect; a lot of people were angry that canisters of tear gas were lobbed into their neighborhood, that people who were walking to school or walking to work were being pushed aside by cops. They became part of the protest, de facto." Observing is something Petkovic does well, whether he's making music, writing articles or producing a program on the Balkans for WCPN FM/90.3. But on Cobra Verde's new album, "Nightlife," he asks a provocative question - "How does it feel to feel?" And the album's 14 songs, influenced by the glam of vintage Roxy Music and David Bowie as well as the fury of the Stooges and the MC5, tackle that subject by examining the role that night life plays in the collective consciousness of a population enamored with at-home cocooning and virtual existence on the Internet. "People do live in a disembodied, touristlike state now," explains Petkovic, whom Magnet magazine recently dubbed The Last Rock Star. "They're not in touch with many things. They feel alienated and distant from one another." "Going out at night," he says, "doesn't necessarily alleviate that feeling. But it does "offer that hope of proximity, the hope of meeting someone and making some sort of connection. That's a powerful illusion for people." "Nightlife" also trumpets a rebirth of sorts for Cobra Verde, whose previous albums have been lauded in publications such as Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. Two years ago, Petkovic and his group set aside the material they had started to work on for "Nightlife" and joined forces with Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard as co-producers and collaborators on the GBV album "Mag Earwhig!" The group brought a tougher edge to Pollard's brand of pop, but the personalities didn't mesh and the association ended after the tour to support the album. "It was fun to do," Petkovic says, "but that whole independent music, indie rock scene, I never felt part of it. I've never been into that whole lo-fi stuff and that whole "authentic' attitude. I like the false. I like the false backdrops in Fellini films. I like the artifice of a lot of glam music and stuff like that. "The whole indie scene has this notion of wearing your heart on your sleeve and presenting itself as authentic. Well, authentic sometimes turns out to be the biggest lie, you know? I don't want to keep it real; if you keep things unreal, it's a lot more fun." Petkovic emerged from the GBV association having to reinvent his band a bit. Guitarist Doug Gillard opted to stay with Pollard. Bassist Dave Swanson left the group before "Nightlife" was released, and multi-instrumentalist Don Depew decided he didn't want to tour anymore. These were not necessarily insurmountable problems; after all, Petkovic has always approached Cobra Verde as a collective to pursue his creative visions. But he says the current incarnation of the group - guitarist Frank Vazzano, bassist Dave Hill, theremin/synthesizer player Chas Smith and drummer Mark Klein - is the most cohesive unit he's worked with, as well as one of the most interesting. Smith, for instance, is a music instructor at Cleveland State University. Vazzano designs juggling pins. Hill is a part-time wrestler and wrote the theme music for HBO's "Reverb." Klein is a studio engineer. Everybody plays in other bands. "Everyone brings different things to the table, musically and personality-wise," says Petkovic, who expects the next Cobra Verde release to be "more of a band record." "There are a lot of different influences and disparate backgrounds. Everyone inhabits a larger part of the Rubik's Cube - a Rubik's Cube that never gets solved, by the way." Graff is a free-lance writer from Beverly Hills, Mich. |