Squeeze: Rock’s Great Geezers, by Tom Dinard

There’s nothing cooler at the age of fifteen than jumping into the beat-up Dodge Dart of the drunk friend of your nineteen-year-old sister to go to a concert in New York City.

Tom Brennan casually, confusedly and cantankerously wove his way across the Southern State Parkway toward the swampy Meadowlands, with his cigarette pirouetting and occasionally burning the car’s vinyl interior. I suddenly understood the delicious deviousness of rock n’ roll.

As the December night pierced us through the open windows, I was already floating above the lined asphalt and settling into my upper-level seat for my favorite band: Squeeze.

Oingo Boingo opened that show. I can’t tell you much about them other than they played “Dead Man’s Party” and that their lead singer, Danny Elfman, is now an absurdly rich composer of movie scores. Squeeze, however, was a revelation. Fronted by the unabashedly Cockney guitarists, singers and songwriters Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford, the band put forth a mixture of 1960s blues rock-riff guitar, boogie-woogie lounge piano, synthesizer soundscapes and the smartest pure pop-rock hooks since those other two British lads named John and Paul.

I marveled at the performance. They sang every song perfectly and without effort. Their playing was technically flawless, just like in the top-to-bottom amazing “Singles; 45s and Under” cassette I was already on my third copy of. But they were more than that. They were innovative in their approach.

Tilbrook’s high-pitched trills and Difford’s guttural, sandpaper underpinnings didn’t create traditional harmonies as they doubled vocals on many verses and choruses. In fact, they didn’t harmonize. They sang the same melody lines. Knowing that keeping it simple and weaving the qualities of both singers’ voices into a texture no one had ever heard clued me in to the fact that these guys were a few chess moves ahead.

When they appeared on a British television show and the producer forced them against their wishes to lip-sync the song “Up the Junction,” the joke was on anyone who didn’t know their records. The band members switched up their instruments, with Tilbrook sitting behind the drum kit while singing (and faking the drumming pretty damn well, too).

Squeeze is still at it with this high level of prescient prankishness. Not able to secure the master recordings of many of their early albums from a typically fucked-up record label, the band decided to re-record a good portion of their greatest hits with minor alterations. They called it “Spot the Difference.”

Because their popularity in America peaked in the early 1980s, a entire generation of music listeners has virtually no idea who Squeeze is. Here’s a hint: if you’re at a ballpark or in a hair salon and you hear “Pulling Mussels (From the Shell)” or “Black Coffee in Bed” or “Tempted” or “Another Nail in My Heart” or “Annie Get Your Gun” or “Cool For Cats” or “Is That Love?” or “Take Me I’m Yours” or “If I Didn’t Love You,” and you find yourself singing along or tapping your foot or wildly or shaking your knee or hip or vertebral column, well, it turns out you do know who Squeeze is after all.

A few months ago, I noticed that Squeeze was playing at a club in my town. After years of starting and stopping again and getting along and not getting along and changing up the band members and going solo and finally figuring out that they could do it again, Difford and Tilbrook got the gig back on the road. I didn’t hesitate to buy tickets, enthralled by the chance to see the band live for the first time in 25 years and from ten feet away in a venue that holds eleven hundred. This time I drove, and I wasn’t drunk, and my car’s a bit better than a Dodge Dart, although I’m sure Tom Brennan a smaller monthly payment.

And Squeeze, with Difford and Tilbrook well into their fifties and probably a couple of waist sizes larger than the last time I saw them, were just as good. Maybe better. Difford referred to Tilbrook as the “great geezer” while introducing the band late in the seamless set that included every song on “Singles” plus some good new tunes and a few deep tracks from masterful albums such as “Argybargy” and the co-produced-by-Elvis Costello “East Side Story.”

I had to laugh. The “geezers” before me were dressed in fancy suits and playing thirty-year-old songs that sounded like they could have been recorded yesterday and would have been considered the freshest “indie” sounds on radio tomorrow.

A few days ago I surfed around the web for more information on Squeeze. On Pitchfork.com, I learned that the Shins had covered “Goodbye Girl,” a standout track that appeared on “Singles” and had me in tears at the recent show because of its poignancy and musical brilliance and the memories of youth that it conjures. I am a big Shins fan, so naturally I couldn’t wait to hear James Mercer’s vocal take on a Tilbrook masterpiece.

And then I noticed that some writer at Pitchfork who’s likely in his twenties and probably adores Craig Finn but has never heard of Neil Finn, called Squeeze “new wave,” thereby sticking them into a convenient, dusty drawer that also happens to contain the schmaltzy period synth of crap peddlers like ABC, Scritti Politti and the Blow Monkeys.

And then I heard Mercer’s shitty cover. And then I learned that it was recorded for a Levi’s commercial. And then I thought that Pitchfork and Pandora and the internet and “rock” critics and iTunes and iPhone apps and iPods and iPads can fuck off.

I’m gonna stick with the geezers.

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