October 28, 2004

Big Record Deal Dries Up, but a Rocker Still Rolls

ke Reilly is on a tour that will not end until the world says uncle.

On Tuesday night he took his band, the Ike Reilly Assassination, to the Magnetic Field bar in Brooklyn Heights. There were two dozen people in the audience, the cover charge was two bucks and the frontman was pushing a voice that had picked up a lot of mileage lately. Near the end of the set, he did the math.

"Yeah, I think I've given you about $1.80 worth," he told the audience. "Let's see if I can't give you 20 cents' worth more."

And so he did, ending another stop on what the band calls the "It's All Right to Die" tour. During the one-hour set, Mr. Reilly and his four band mates appeared both to terrorize and to amaze their audience, playing post-punk jams that careered from gut-bucket blues to white-boy raps. Mr. Reilly, a former bellhop and gravedigger, leaned hard into songs from his new CD, "Sparkle to the Finish," an incendiary collection of wiseguy sonnets that is being released this month. He looked hard. He often does. The downtown weekly New York Press described Mr. Reilly as the bad boy in a boy band composed of serial killers. The band will be at Arlene's Grocery in Manhattan tonight.

There is no major label backing Mr. Reilly this time, as there was for his "Salesmen and Racists," which came out on Universal in 2001, and few big label amenities. The band is touring in the kind of large van that is generally parked in front of a senior center or special education schools. There has always been critical swooning for the I.R.A.; Blender magazine compared Mr. Reilly to Paul Westerberg, Bob Dylan and Beck in a single sentence. But there has never been much in the way of airplay. A 42-year-old working rock guy with a wife and four kids back in Libertyville, Ill., Mr. Reilly keeps the faith, a hardy version of it, one rowdy, brilliant show at a time.

"Faith is knowledge without proof, isn't it?" he said. "What would the proof be? Sales, a hit single, more press, a new can of pomade? Maybe."

"I've sold my family down the river for this," he said, by way of explaining the stakes. And after 13 years of working as a bellman at the Park Hyatt hotel in Chicago, Mr. Reilly knows how high they are.

"Through a series of events, I rose quickly through the bellman ranks," he said over the phone from his van last week. Working the front of the hotel, Mr. Reilly said, he watched and learned from the swells, the crooks and hookers who came floating in on the tide.

"I was attracted to the romance of it. - still am," he said. "I was immersed in a hardcore union, surrounded by the immigrant community working the hotel, and witness to a lot of big-money hustles. It kept me in a position of invisible observation."

"Standing there, I saw a cabdriver from Ghana trying to raise enough money to buy a medallion, bums hustling bus fare and booze money, and the power elite of Chicago doing what they do," Mr. Reilly continued. "We live in a class system, and I had an opportunity to watch it up close."

The result of all that watching is clear-eyed, romantic and clearly apparent on both the current record and "Salesmen and Racists"; it is a vision of America that does not get a lot of rotation on MTV.

"Cars and girls and drinks and songs make this world spin around," he shouts in "I Don't Want What You Got Going On." "What about love and what about trust? What do you know about my love?"

Mr. Reilly sings of Ludacris, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis in a single verse, jumping decades to make a point about fleetingness of fame. His assault on pop culture might be written off as the rantings of a suburban father, which of course he is, but he is less bitter about that than amazed. He views his trip through the music industry as just that, a trip. "I was signed by an ex-golf pro who used to caddy for R.E.M.," he said, laughing at what passes for credibility in today's music industry.

"The record company gave me a chunk of money, which was great, because it signified that this is what I was going to do," he said. He signed the deal at the rebuilt Park Hyatt in Chicago. "I was able to say, 'All right, I am going to stop denying who I am and what I am really trying to pursue,' " he said.

"The record did not sell, for whatever reason, and that was that," he added. "I never had any expectation that it was going to change my life. It was money that I went to the track with and didn't win."

The band can continue to tour; in both Chicago and Minneapolis a crowd will show up for the band as many times as it wants to play. But to sell "Sparkle to the Finish," it needs to get in front of bigger audiences, because it has no shot on the radio.

"Look, we are not some conceived band," he said. "I didn't conceptualize this. We are a band, a real band."

Mr. Reilly has played with some of the band members for more than a dozen years, but there is always a bit of mystery when the band hits the stage. Mr. Reilly will share a funny look with the guitarist Phil Kamatz and a song will head right off the rails, ricocheting through Television-inspired solos, only to be grabbed back at the last second.

"My band is good, but they don't get full of themselves, they just get more uninhibited and risky with every show," he said. "It's close to being dangerously unhinged. I love that."

Mr. Reilly has few musical heroes, in part because he is enchanted by the music of everyday life. The toll taker, the coked-up family man, the banker, the Promise Keeper, the Ecstasy-popping mom - they all live on his twisted ark. And they all have to do what they need to do to survive, as Mr. Reilly seems to point out in a dreamy chorus on "The Boat Song":

"When it sails away, you will hear people say, you'll never get no play, from the cheap seats, boys," he sings. "We're getting loaded."