Tragedy - House of Blues, Anaheim, CA - 04/12/09

Tragedy is the #1 Heavy Metal Tribute to the Bee Gees in the World and they certainly made their case in “Anaheim City” last night as they decimated Disneyland. While the notion of combining ‘80s metal and the Bee Gees initially sounds like a joke, and there was a lot to laugh at especially with the between-song banter, the band is comprised of serious and talented musicians who made clear that the brothers Gibb could have taken their falsetto voices to the Sunset Strip during the 1980s and scored big.

The band is comprised of singer/guitarist Barry Glibb, singer/guitarist Mo’Royce Peterson, singer/guitarist/cowbell player Robin Gibbens, the powerful rhythm section of bassist Gibbous Waning and new drummer The Lord Gibbeth, and back-up singers Women’s Gibb, individually known as Angelpussy and Olivia Newton-Chong. Stagehand Lance, who toweled off the musicians and sprinkled the air with handfuls of glitter, was also a contributor to the festivities.

They opened with “Night Fever” and received a raucous round of applause, which Barry Glib stated was unnecessary because the band knew it was awesome. A special treat for those who own their album We Rock Sweet Balls And Can Do No Wrong is the three-song block of non-album tracks: “Grease,” which they claimed was originally entitled “Lube;” “Nights on Broadway;” and the Gibb-penned, Barbara Streisand hit “Woman in Love.”

In a nod to the satanic motif of metal, there is a silly, spooky spoken-word interlude a little passed the halfway point of “You Should Be Dancing” that tells of pagans capturing the town virgin so the dark angel can have his way with her when he descends from heaven. After their union, “dead babies springeth forth from the virgin’s vaginal womb” missing a number of vital organs, but since they do have baby goat hooves protruding from their genitalia, “the beast, their father, instructs them to dance.” A bit of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” closes the song.

They closed the set with “Tragedy,” and were joined on stage by guitarist Ian Fowles (Eagle "Bones" Falconhawk) of the Aquabats! who was pulled up from the crowd and contributed some masterful shredding.

The tragedy of the evening was the band’s set was less than hour and though they satisfyingly ripped the heads off everyone in the joint, they didn’t encore. In their place, the equally talented and coincidentally identical-looking Saturday Night Beavers, the #1 Heavy Metal Tribute to the music of Saturday Night Fever not performed by the Bee Gees in the World, took the stage. They played Yvonne Elliman’s “If I Can’t Have You,” which was written by the Bee Gees, and The Trammps “Disco Inferno.”

When Tragedy comes to your town, you must get off your back and see them play or your life will forever be unfulfilled and that’s no jive talk. Not since Dread Zeppelin’s act of an Elvis impersonator singing Zeppelin tunes with a reggae arrangement has a humorous genre-crossing musical concept been executed to such perfection.

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