The Streetchoir

The short extremely happy, history of The Streetchoir began a few Fridays ago at an Adams House mixer. Crowds at mixers are not generally known for their intelligence and concentration, but that Friday, as fact and fuure legend will bear out, 90 per cent of the crowd stopped dancing and stood around the platform to watch Streetchoir's galvanizing first public performance. The tidal wave of applause that followed their last set rivalled the electrical intensity of Michael Tschudin's powerful organ solos.

This, perhaps, is the only history that matters. But for the record, lead guitar John Hillman found harp-player Peter Ivers playing on a subway, and singer-bass player Gilbert Moses met Tschudin putting on plays in the NYU Drama Department. The previous friendship of Tschudin and Ivers brought the duos together, and the four auditioned for a drummer, luckily finding Jay Rubero. Ivers '68, a classics major who looks like a cross between Dennis the Menace and a Marvel superhero, proudly tells us that the new rock-and-roll group is based in Boston so he can finish college.

Aspiring lawyers at the Harkness mixer Saturday night deluged The Streetchoir with requests for Louie Louie and "something slower we can dance to," but for the most part the group only plays its own material, a hard blues-rock incorporating the best of Chicago and San Francisco, frequently extending toward what's best in modern jazz. When they do play someone else's songs (Mick Jagger's Empty Heart, for one), Ivers tends to throw his harp away and accompany the other four with a running chorus of "I hate this song!" yelled at the audience. "We're The Streetchoir," whispers former Renaissance man Tschudin into the microphone, "and we don't play anything you've ever heard before."

Streetchoir's material comes mostly from Gil Moses, the leader: once a playwright, his songs frequently conceal complex and sensitive lyrics beneath tense, often loud, always fascinating arrangements. Ranging from blues ballads to wistful humor, his songs hit a kind of rightness, a truth not often found in lyrics. In Endless Dialogue, Streetchoir's bitterest, best ballad, a verse runs:

They say the world is cruel but it's crueler than they know

If you can't make it

If you can't take it

They'll put you down

They know you'll drown

They'll watch you sink

Their eyes won't blink

They'll stare ahead

And smile instead

At the shadows of the dreams you wanted so.

About the group's best rock number, intriguingly titled Saptapper, Moses, says. "A saptapper is someone who latches on to you. And when it's a girl, well, you know what that can do...." and quotes his own lyric:

She'll step on you

She'll ride you high and leave you to die,

So watch what you do.

On stage, the 5-man Streetchoir is a pulsating unity. "We need another two months to really get to know each other," says Tschudin; but even now, when one of them takes a solo break, the others move around him, beaming with pleasure when he does something new and it works, each one truly interested in what the other is trying to do.

As soloists, the five are diverse and brilliant. Ivers, the most aggressive, plays harp at capacity volume, punctuating his solos with sharp staccato blasts shaking him from head to toes. Tschudin, scorning more pedestrian methods, gets high on his organ and builds climatic crescendos of musical phrases. As for Hillman, the other four call him the Ghost Rider, because "he can draw fast enough to shoot a knife that's being thrown at him." He has a wonderful habit of bending the final electronic note of his beautiful guitar solos--a habit which invaliably draws a series of awe-struck screams from his delighted fans, the audiences happy to discover a 3-performance-old group in Cambridge who know where it's at, and enjoy letting us in on it.

All lyrics copyright 1967 by Gilbert Moses