Death Cab For Dube: A Review Of “The Dream Engine” at Joe’s Pub, March 24-25, 2006.

By Michael Dube

The Dream Engine, a new nine-member band put together by Jim Steinman, is made up of eight humans and one goddess, Adrienne Warren. The online poker generation wouldn’t recognize it as a band – its leader is a middle-aged piano virtuoso who wears the same Salvador Dali shirt to every performance, one of its female singers sang a duet with Joe Jackson in 1984, and every song is depressing. But it’s a band. So where do I begin to tell the story of how great a band can be? Perhaps with the story of how mediocre their show was just six weeks before.

The scene of that crime was Joe’s Pub on Lafayette Street on February 12, 2006. Yes, that February 12, 2006. After shoveling my way out of my driveway, shoveling my way into the 30th Street Station parking lot, and enduring a four-hour train ride from Philly to New York, I met two friends in Midtown and we headed down to the club. As we stomped through the dirty slush to get there, I promised them that the show was going to help them understand my soul better. As it turned out, the performance was one botched lyric, missed harmony, and illogical artistic choice after another. (Insert joke here.) Sure, there was a glimmer of hope here and there, mostly in Adrienne’s city-stopping (the next step after show-stopping) performance of “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be,” Jim’s body-dropping (the next step up from jaw-dropping) new song “We’re Still The Children We Once Were,” and Rob Evan’s soul-wrenching (one better than heart-wrenching) vocals on another new song, “What Part Of My Body Hurts The Most.” But, on the hole, the band might as well have been called Swiss Cheese.

Jim Steinman is no longer the coolest songwriter in the world. That title belongs to Jens Lekman, who recently remarked on his web site that he was “starstruck” when he met “Mako, the bassoon player from Maher Shalal Hash Baz.” (Huh?) Jim, however, is certainly still the most touching songwriter in the world. I’m therefore happy to report that his band doesn’t suck anymore – in just six little weeks’ time, The Dream Engine turned from a nightmare into, yes, a dream. Their March 24 and March 25 shows at Joe’s Pub, meant to showcase their debut album “Bat Out Of Hell: The Next Generation,” were unbearably unbelievable. Being there, you had the feeling that despite everything else that was simultaneously occurring in New York City, you were at the single best thing. And you were.

Joe’s Pub has tall ceilings, but not much else in the way of room. So when the show began with “Is Nothing Sacred,” a plaintive piano ballad with a corny but apt Don Black lyric, all 200 of us were huddled close to hear it. “Is nothing sacred anymore / Is forever just another word? / Is a promise something people used to keep / When love was worth the fighting for? / If we can say goodbye, / Is nothing sacred anymore?” Rob Evan, late of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, stood center cramped stage, crying the unspeakably beautiful melody as Adam Ben-David, on piano, dutifully handled never-ending key changes with aplomb.

Then, with Adam moving to synthesizer and Steve Margoshes (the Dali-donning virtuoso) taking over at piano, Adrienne charged in to sing “The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be,” a holdover from the show’s February incarnation. Adrienne, who looks like she’s barely drinking legal, sounded world-weary and was interrupted by woops and applause once a verse. Singing lyrics written in the mid-1980’s, but truer today, she let us know that “I never knew so many bad times / Could follow me so mercilessly / It’s almost surreal, all the pain that I feel / The future ain’t what it used to be.”

Then, with Matt Zebroski’s snare drum leading the way, the band launched into “Great Boleros of Fire,” a hard-rocking, loaves-to-the-wind instrumental that Steinman wrote for Meat Loaf’s notorious 1977 tour. The lights flailed, the walls shook, and all of a sudden it was thirty years ago. (It gave me the same I-wasn’t-alive-when-this-happened chills that seeing “Chicago” on Broadway did.) Alex Skolnick’s electric guitar made amply clear (pardon the pun) that Jim Steinman knows how to rock as hard as any guy that ever lived. The next tune, a new song called “Only When I Feel,” continued along the same musical lines. “There are endless nights / They just go on forever / There are scars on scars / That I know will never heal / There’s a ruthless pain / That tears at me forever / I’ve got to pretend it ain’t real / But at least it only hurts when I feel.” Half heartsick, half headbanger, Jim smiled with satisfaction from the wings as the crowd went crazy.

After Rob Evan and Elaine Caswell capably traded insults on the oldie-but-greatie “Loving You’s A Dirty Job But Somebody’s Gotta Do It” (my favorite barb: “You’re so busy trying to get even you never even try to get close”), Adrienne belted out Jim’s lost below-the-belt classic “Safe Sex.” This is a song that British rock critic Neil Jeffries once called “mind-bogglingly magnificent multi-faceted mayhem.” Indeed. Not only is “Safe Sex” Jim’s lost classic, it is perhaps the lost classic in the history of pop music. “I’ve got no illusions now, I guess I lost them long ago / You’re not gonna get me with this / ‘Cause I already know / Baby there’s no such thing / Baby it just ain’t true / And there’s no such thing as safe sex / When it comes to loving you / There’s always the danger of losing control / And of breaking my heart / And exposing my soul.”

Neal Coomer, Elaine Caswell, and Rob Evan led off hit parade with “Objects In The Rearview Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are,” a song from “Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell,” with the band faithfully reproducing every brick of the wall of sound, and then some (they put an addition on). Elaine Caswell kept the hits coming with a breathtaking rendition of “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” which Elaine originated on the 1989 CD “Original Sin.” Getting swept up in the emotion of it all, Elaine forcefully slapped the piano in time with the words “baby, baby, baby” and then started singing into the wrong microphone. And when honorary Dream Engine member Bonnie Tyler (“speaking of originals, speaking of originators”) sang a pitch-perfect, passionate version of Jim’s #1 “Total Eclipse Of The Heart,” a crowd of grown, straight men pumped their fists in the air to the sound of those electronic explosions that changed all of our lives in 1983. Then, upping the ante (speaking of poker), Rob Evan delivered a Meat Loaf-worthy “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” complete with background vocals sung by the 200 of us In between all of this, Rob Evan and Adrienne Warren tortured us with the show’s only misstep, “An American Elegy,” a bad re-write of a bad re-write of a song that started out as one of Jim’s best, “Braver Than We Are.” Ah, well, like they say, four out of five ain’t bad.

The three new songs at the tail end of the show were each classics in their own right. “Not Allowed To Love” is a classic Jim Steinman cliché-twist song, complete with call-and-response guitar and a killer punch line: “But my head will be unbowed / I’m certainly no fool, I’m no fool / For I know I’ll always be allowed / To find exceptions to the rule.” “What Part Of My Body Hurts The Most” is a classic Jim Steinman lost-love song, complete with definitive thoughts on losing it because you lost it: “You’ll always be here with me / You’re a ghost and I’ve been cursed / But if you were exorcised / It would only make it worse / Demon or angel, it doesn’t matter all that much / I toss and I turn every night and I try to feel your touch / And I can’t stop wondering, I can’t stop wondering / What part of my body hurts the most.” And “Still The Children” (as it’s now called) was a classic Jim Steinman counterpoint song, with Rob, Neal, Elaine, and Adrienne deftly handling the four-part harmonies and Adrienne entreating the listener at the tail end of it to “take me home – now.” No one heard the last word, though – our hearts were all beating too loud. The snow had melted, the 1962 Mets had become the 1969 Mets, and, for the first time in a long time, all was right with the world.