There’s more to rock ’n’ roll than sex and drugs. Debauchery and depravity are nice byproducts, but they’re really just condiments. Rock’s meat is made up of riffs and hooks and knock-you-on-your-can guitar solos.
If anyone has the chance, please tell Hinder this.
The Oklahoma City multiplatinum band, which headlined WAAF-FM’s Dirty Summer Circus Tuesday night at the Bank of America Pavilion with Papa Roach and Buckcherry, was so concerned with playing up its self-proclaimed “bad boys of rock” label, it plain forgot to rock.
While performing 90 percent of its debut and only CD, “Extreme Behavior,” the band spent an hour galloping across the stage, shouting “Boston you f—— rock!” ad nauseum and pantomiming Aerosmith. (Note to frontman Austin Winkler: Steven Tyler doesn’t wear the scarf to be cool, he wears the scarf because he is cool; if you wanna play up your hard-drinkin’ ways, you’ve got to chug something stronger than Poland Spring.)
Through sheer oomph, the band turned the marginal openers “How Long” and “Homecoming Queen” into a pair of forceful rockers. But the wheels came off as Hinder lapsed into a half-dozen of the worst kind of pop grunge: piss ’n’ moan, paint-by-number, hookless drones. By the time the band got to the encore, hits “Get Stoned” and “Lips of an Angel,” it was clear Hinder just didn’t have the songs, or the guitarist, to rock like its ’70s and ’80s idols.
Papa Roach, a multiplatinum rap metal band whose heyday has come and gone, outplayed Hinder on every level. No David Lee Roth – but easily Fred Durst’s equal – frontman Jacoby Shaddix buoyed the band’s set with his hysterical mania.
During “She Loves Me Not,” Shaddix bounded into the crowd and finished the tune running through the aisles and climbing over chairs. Whipping the audience into a frenzy, Shaddix invited everyone to rush the stage and fill in the empty seats up front.
“F— the rules this is rock ’n’ roll,” he shouted. “I didn’t join a f—— band to follow the rules.”
Roach capped its performance with the arena-shaking 2000 hit “Last Resort.”
Buckcherry understands the whole great-songs-make-great-rock thing. But the band has only one great song: “Crazy Bitch.” And while Cherry maximized its calling card with a dirty, funky bass line opening and an outro that included a few bars of “The Stroke” and the Ohio Players’ “Fire,” the rest of the 40 minutes was long on sleaze rock, short on memorable tunes.
WAAF DIRTY SUMMER CIRCUS, with HINDER, PAPA ROACH and BUCKCHERRY Tuesday night at the Bank of America Pavilion.
