The BoDeans Took a Sold-Out St. Louis Crowd Back in Time

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Ky Katzman

The BoDeans played City Winery on Saturday.

Forty years into it, BoDeans are still on the road. These days, that means that founding member Kurt Neumann is still singing and playing the easy-going rock & roll songs he wrote with BoDeans co-founder Sam Llanas, who is no longer with the band. With Neumann the sole focus, BoDeans played the last show of the band’s current tour at City Winery, a convenient tour finale given the band’s newfound St. Louis connections.

First, current BoDeans drummer Brian Ferguson grew up in St. Louis and is in the process of returning to raise his family in Webster Groves. Second, the Bodeans’ new tour manager is none other than our own Ky Katzman, a local music mainstay best known as the manager and media guru behind Sean Canan’s Voodoo Players, seen briefly on stage Saturday night delivering Neumann a tumbler of hot tea.

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The City Winery was sold out with a crowd of BoDeans faithful who responded favorably to Neumann’s reminders of how much fun the 1980s were. As the City Winery floor is packed solid with tables, dancing (or even standing) space is limited, so most of the evening’s visible enthusiasm was kept to amiable head-bobbing, and the expensive drinks and the 9:45 p.m. last call did little to help encourage liveliness in the crowd.

However, the four-piece BoDeans sounded uniformly excellent with a terrific mix in the room highlighted by Neumann’s luminous guitar tone. The 61-year-old, wearing a headscarf and sunglasses, played without a pick, using a thumb-taxing technique to conjure up flawless chiming chords and tasty solos, holding everything together as the only guitarist on stage and making it all look easy.

The band time-traveled around eras, working in three songs from last year’s 4 the Last Time, including the rousing “Ya Gotta Go Crazy” driven by Ferguson’s train beat, but BoDeans knew the audience showed up for the oldies. Therefore, the band kicked early into the guitar crunch of “Only Love,” a song that could only be released only ’87, and “Dreams,” doubling down on the ’80s by folding in the chorus of Modern English’s “Melt With You.” (Another St. Louis connection: We will get to hear the original when Modern English plays Evolution Festival in August.)

“My Hometown” was not the Bruce Springsteen song but a BoDeans original about Neumann’s Wisconsin roots. The band did, however, turn in a version of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire,” a welcome surprise even if it is the Boss’s most over-covered song. “Naked” was the best of the band’s ’90s offerings, before which Neumann advised, “Let’s get naked!” It was hardly that kind of party, but Ferguson earned his payday on the song anyway with some frenetic hi-hat-happy skinwork.

Italian keyboardist Stefano Intelisano broke out the accordion for a mid-set run of Tex-Mex-embracing tunes, including the Johnny Cash-inspired “Flyaway” and another ’80s nugget, “Still the Night,” which finally got three ladies in the crowd to their feet. “Texas Ride Song,” the night’s peppiest song, kept the momentum going, complete with some synchronized stage strutting as bassist James Hertless worked the upper frets and Neumann peeled off a lyrical Jeff Beck-ian solo.

The rest of the set was reserved for biggies, at least by BoDeans standards (“Runaway,” “Good Things”) that had most of the crowd standing and the band jumping in place. A three-song “encore,” before which the band never left the stage, included couples skate “Say You Will” and a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” with Nuemann handling Mick Jagger’s falsetto whoops on the guitar and Ferguson doing his best Charlie Watts, which had even the waitresses dancing.

Finally, the ’Deans couldn’t send us home without “Closer to Free,” the group’s big smash and the moment everyone was waiting for, a final push of pure ’90s nostalgia that rattled the room’s decorative whiskey staves and shaved 30 years off of the crowd. Everybody one, everybody two, everybody free.