MOXIE: Great Local All-Woman Cover Band Shines at "Twilight in the Park" August 8

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 8) I went to the “Twilight in the Park” concert at Balboa Park’s Spreckels Organ Pavilion to see and hear MOXIE, one of my favorite local bands. MOXIE is an all-woman cover band featuring Marci Knoles (keyboards), Nancy Shields and Pynne Looper (guitars), Susan Stevenson on bass guitar and Wendy Conners (drums). I’ve seen them several times before, mostly at previous “Twilight in the Park” concerts, though their best appearance was at a semi-private street party they threw on Adams Avenue in the late 2010’s. What made this one special was that in addition to playing three blazing-hot rock sets, they started with the individual members of MOXIE playing singer-songwriter type originals – which led me to wish that MOXIE would give up just being a cover band and start incorporating original material, since they’re quite good songwriters. I got off the bus one stop early thanks to the city of San Diego blocking the parking along Park Boulevard due to “special events” – in this case the long-awaited return of pandas to public display at the San Diego Zoo – and so I had to walk an unusually long distance to the Organ Pavilion from the Zoo stop. When I got there MOXIE were already in full cry, doing a sound check with a scorching version of Etta James’s soul hit “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” but I didn’t get there in time actually to see them perform it.

That was especially disappointing because their technical opener was a cover of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.” It was a surprisingly dull version, and I suspect the reason was that Eurythmics’ version was synth-driven (Knoles’ rack of electronic keyboards includes a synthesizer but she didn’t make that much use of it), and the band’s co-founder, Dave Stewart, once said he wrote the song based on a drum machine pattern. (He joked that afterwards the drum machine demanded royalties and threatened to sue the band.) Afterwards they headed back to their comfort zone for more congenial material: “Feel It Still” by Portugal. The Man (a name I’ve long made fun of because obviously he doesn’t want to be confused with Portugal. The Country), Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” and “Cold, Cold Heart” – not the one by Hank Williams but a modern song by Dua Lipa. After that they announced that they were going to do a Crosby, Stills and Nash cover and wanted people in the audience to sing along – if they could, since they said the song was “alliterative” and therefore hard to sing. I thought they might have meant “allusive” but it’s possible they meant “alliterative” in the literal sense, since the song’s title, “Helplessly Hoping,” is indeed alliterative. Then they did Keith Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color” and Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers,” her ode to self-love (the catch line was “I can love me better,” presumably adding “than you”). They also did Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” Ed Sheeran’s “Shivers” (whose catch line is “I like it when you do it like that”) and Megan Trainor’s “Like I’m Gonna Lose You.”

After that they did a haunting song whose catch lines sounded like “Listen to the radio” and either “Roll me over” or “Roll me home.” This song almost totally stumped Google’s song-identification app; for a while I thought it might be Ken Yates’s “Roll Me On Home” but that’s a completely different song. Though the mystery song was one of the best things all night, I was a bit disappointed that MOXIE were doing so many slow or mid-tempo country covers and wanted them to pick up the energy level. Fortunately they did just that with the next song on their agenda – also a country tune, but a fast and upbeat one: Brooks and Dunn’s “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” Then they did Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman,” after which they shifted gears altogether for another uptempo song in a different vein, Prince’s “Kiss” from Parade, the soundtrack album for his film Under the Cherry Moon. That was the lame-brained movie in the middle of which Prince fired the director and took over the job himself, and he filmed it in black-and-white because it was set in the 1930’s even though Prince’s over-the-top costumes demanded color. Fortunately, though the film predictably bombed, the soundtrack generated two great hit singles, “Kiss” and “Mountains,” and I was amazed that MOXIE sang it as Prince had written it and didn’t change the pronouns. Instead they left the line “You don’t have to be rich to be my girl” exactly as was, creating the kind of accidental genderfuck that was quite common in the late 1920’s (Bing Crosby singing “There Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears” and Red McKenzie crooning “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man”) when music publishers didn’t allow singers to change the lyrics to match their genders or real-life sexual orientations.

They closed the show on a high note with Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” (though this remains one of the most disgusting songs ever written; when Winehouse died, predictably, of a drug overdose I started singing a cruel parody: “She said she wouldn’t go to rehab, and now she’s dead, dead, dead!”) and the B-52’s “Love Shack” (a great song, though there’s an even better one hiding in plain sight just before it on the Cosmic Thing album, “The Deadbeat Club”). The organizers of “Twilight in the Park” let the show run overlong – they’re supposed to last an hour (though usually they’re 65 to 75 minutes) but in this case they let MOXIE stay on for nearly an hour and a half. MOXIE got the usually obligatory encore, and for the first time I’ve ever heard them they did not close with Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.” Instead they returned to their doo-wop roots for a medley I’ve heard them do before: The Chiffons’ “One Fine Day” (the song Gerry Goffin and Carole King originally wrote for Little Eva, then gave to The Chiffons when Little Eva turned it down – though they used the same backing track, so you hear Carole King’s hammering piano playing the fills as the Chiffons sing them, giving away that the track was originally recorded for a solo singer rather than a group), The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and back to the Chiffons for “He’s So Fine.” (That was the song George Harrison inadvertently – he said – plagiarized for “My Sweet Lord,” and the most ironic commentary came from Ann Murray, who recorded a cover of “He’s So Fine” and had her guitarist copy Harrison’s solo from “My Sweet Lord.”) It was a good way for them to take out the gig on the right sort of party-hearty-but-not-too-hearty atmosphere, and though I’ve seen better and more exciting MOXIE gigs this was a good one and I had a lot of fun.