Bob Malone }-- Reviews

On a cold February night in Hoboken, Bob Malone spent the first moments of his inaugural Writer's Hang performance squarely in Chris Barron's shadow.

Audience members stood shoulder-to-shoulder to see the former Spin Doctors lead singer, multi-platinum seller and Rolling Stone cover boy. Even Malone found himself pushed into a corner of the stage, his keyboard wedged up against the bar's cherry wood walls. Like Mark Anthony waiting for his turn to speak in "Julius Caesar", Malone bided his time.

After Barron completed his first tune, Malone adjusted his paisley vest, brushed his long, wavy hair off his shoulders and danced his fingers across the keys. The mood switched from coffeehouse to roadhouse as Malone launched into the bawdy, New Orleans-style "I Know He's Your Husband". By the time Malone belted out the final stanza "I know he's your husband, but he don't know that I'm your man," the audience was his. The front room of the former Liquid Lounge roared like a turbine and the audience spent the rest of the night cheering for Malone as if he were the headliner.

In short, he blew Chris Barron off the stage. A few months later, when the Writer's Hang returned to the new Goldhawk bar, audience members were still buzzing about Malone's performance. Almost without hesitation, Hang host Scott E. Moore asked Malone to come back for an Aug. 2 gig.

"That night was the highlight of my tour," Malone says. "Nobody expects to like someone they've never heard of."

The easygoing and jovial Malone joins Moore and Flamenco musician Romero for his latest New Jersey homecoming. A Milton native, Malone began dreaming about piano after hearing Billy Joel's "Scenes From An Italian Restaurant" playing in the electronics department at the Willowbrook Mall Sears store in Wayne. He soon found, however, that living in Milton wasn't exactly conducive to a music career.

"Where I grew up, being a kid who played piano wasn't cool - football was cool," he said. "I was in the school band and we played for a team that, from what I could remember, didn't win a game for all four years I was in school, yet the football players were cool, and I wasn't. We had a little square where we were supposed to go and play after victories, but we never got the chance."

Toward the end of high school, Malone got turned on to Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and Ray Charles and wrote his first song at the age of 15. Though he went to Berklee School Of Music in Boston in 1984 to study

classical and jazz piano, tinges of Dr. John, Professor Longhair and Leon Redbone began to creep into Malone's repertoire. By the time he graduated college, Malone said he had written his "first good song" and began playing bars around Boston.

"You'd think my parents would be mad about that after sending me to school to study piano, but my parents didn't really like classical music." he says.

Malone made an even bigger leap in 1991 when he took his act westward to Los Angeles. After four years of playing the local bars and clubs and writing countless songs, Malone recorded his first album "The Darkest Part Of The Night" (Delta Moon/1996) in one day on a pittance.

"Recording it in one day was the only way I could afford to do it," he said. "We went to the rehearsal hall, set up the band, did 16 songs, had some pizza and then did them over again."

The album was filled with Bourbon Street stompers like "I Know He's Your Husband," "It Took An Older Woman (To Make A Man Out Of Me)" and "Just 'Cause I Came In Here Alone (Don't Mean I Want To Go Home With You)" that played well on the bar circuit and even down in New Orleans. His sound, his look and a gig opening up for the Neville Brothers have somewhat muddied Malone's perception among the Crescent City's citizenry.

"Every time I play that town, people assume that I'm from there," he says. "There's a place down there called the Irish Channel that was basically settled by people from Brooklyn where the accent is similar to that in New York, so they think I'm from there. I tell them I'm from Jersey and they just laugh."

Malone's place of origin hasn't been nearly as thorny an issue as his music's classification, however. Considering himself "indie by default," Malone says record executives have been unable to categorize his music and have steered clear of it thus far.

Recently, Malone's succeeded in landing gigs at venues like Manhattan's Living Room and at the Writer's Hang. He's also been playing larger venues, opening for acts like Boz Scaggs and Al Green. After spending all of the money from his last tour paying bills and putting out his new CD "Like It Or Not" (Delta Moon/2001), Malone continues to tour relentlessly no matter who he shares the stage with, or blows off of it. Malone says his mom will still be making the vests he wears on stage and his friends from the old neighborhood will still only see him when he plays on the Jersey side of the Hudson.

"When I play Manhattan, my friends from New Jersey will say things like 'oh, we'd love to see you, but you're playing in the city,'" he says. "It's nice to play in Jersey, but I think some people in Jersey believe New York City is on another planet.