A.A. Bondy w/ The Duke and The King, Bowery Ballroom

opens a veritable variety show at New York’s Bowery Ballroom. His throaty crooning is clearly directed and syncopated, but occasionally wavers beautifully. That’s a lot how the show as a whole goes down - an unlikely mix of talented musicians, wowing you in turn while approaching music in very different ways.

The Duke and the King are the meat in this delicious, if bizarre, musical sandwich. The Duke (Simone Felice, formerly of the Felice Brothers) and The King (Robert “Chicken” Burke of George Clinton fame) write well-crafted pop songs that have the soul of Joni Mitchell and the biting honesty of Neil Young, all possessing a sound from another time but nonetheless adapted for a new generation. On ‘Union Street’, Simone remembers being “a regular boy in the Reagan time,” musing, “boy did I want my MTV, and everything was easy, so easy.”

The duo are backed up by The Deacon (Nowell Haskins) on the drum kit and Simi Stone on electric violin, both of whom lend themselves to some impressive harmonies as well. Opening with ‘If You Ever Get Famous’, the group gracefully handle some technical issues and quickly plow through most of their original material from ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’.

Simone Felice’s commanding stage presence embodies the manic minstrel shows led by the pair for whom the band is named in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He possess a frenetic poise that at once soothes and startles. The band’s sound as a whole is just as delicately woven. As they moved on to cover Neil Young’s ‘Helpless’, it became hard at time times to tell who was singing. Just as Simone gets caught up in the verse, a hidden voice surprised us from behind the hi-hat as The Deacon’s gospel-hewn pipes took over.

The band proceede to dance through The Felice Brothers’ ‘Radio Song’ and their own ‘One More American Song’. The Duke and the King have a way of leaving the audience smiling and inexplicably nostalgic. Unapologetically lackadaisical and fiercely collaborative in their approach, they are capable of putting on an amazing show in which the performance and the band are superceded by the music itself.

Of his relationship with A.A. Bondy, Simone Felice says, “We’ve been up and down the river a lot, and it’s nice to be back on dry land.” A former brother-in-law to Felice, Bondy is all too happy to share the stage. It still seems strange that A.A. Bondy, certainly a more mellow act, would follow the boisterous Duke and the King. Perhaps more strange is seeing Bondy on hands and knees, cleaning the stage during his sound check. He is, however, the kind of down-to-earth musician that would do such a thing, and he quickly wins the audience over, despite the hour and the show’s odd sequencing of acts. Beginning as a three-piece, the band’s first few songs, favorites like ‘Mightiest of Guns’ and ‘Slow Parade’, are augmented by pedal steel and synth. The soaring pedal steel work, punctuated by bursts from Bondy’s hollow-body electric, give these tunes some new life.

Soon enough, the backup band exit and the audience is left only with Bondy’s acoustic and his gravelly crooning. His sound, which he describes as “washed ashore after a shipwreck,” is so pleasant that it could almost put you to sleep, but his startlingly poetic lyrics warrant the audience’s attention. In between songs, he has an easy report, his banter wandering from American football to armchair philosophy. The back-and-forth with him is almost as entertaining as the music, but he insists upon continuing, finger-picking his way through a few more like ‘This is a Hammer’ and ‘Black Rain’ before dispensing with the audience to forge on in what he calls “our demented our journey.”