SCHARPLING & WURSTER at the Mod Club, Saturday, November 28. Rating: NNNN
When you’re a fan of a cult project – band, radio show, sketch troupe, whatever – it’s a strange thing to be in the presence of hundreds of others who love it, too. Especially when said project is a radio show that you mostly listen to alone at home or through headphones at work or on long car rides.
That’s what last night felt like at an almost sold-out Mod Club, watching The Best Show‘s Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster do their thing: poking fun at rock stars and the obsessives who love them. Wurster dynamically (and screechingly) embodied a handful of his bizarro characters – Philly Boy Roy, Gene Simmons, Barry Dworkin – while Scharpling played the skeptical straight man – and Gary the Squirrel for one section.
Laughs went up at every obscure reference – like to the time Scharpling humiliated himself by asking Patti Smith if she liked Humble Pie – while Scharpling proved he’s at his funniest when off-the-cuff ribbing the crowd, as he does callers into the show, which became a podcast in 2014 after almost 15 years on WFMU in New Jersey.
A band joined them onstage for much of the two-hour show, and it included Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham and Biblical/Bart/Saffron Sect’s Jay Anderson on drums, though Wurster, who drums professionally in Superchunk, Bob Mould, A.C. Newman and the Mountain Goats, also took a turn behind the kit.
There was some awkwardness and lulls – the overly hardcore musical numbers an interview segment between Scharpling, Abraham and comedian Nick Flanagan that never quite took flight – but a cutting bit about Record Store Day – when else do you get the chance to buy a Mighty Mighty Bosstones reissue on 180-gram vinyl, Scharpling asked – went over big.
And Scharpling and Wurster customized the show to the city, name-dropping Toronto bands at every turn. We got Philly Boy Roy singing Kim Mitchell’s Go For Soda and references to Crystal Castles, Rush, Drake, Sloan, the Cowboy Junkies and the Viletones. It all built toward an all-star-jam ending of the most verbose and ridiculous song in history, Rock N’ Roll Dreams’ll Come Through (by Wurster’s Dworkin) that saw Abraham holding Scharpling on his shoulders and spinning the unlikely rock star around and around.
Rock and roll dreams do come true.
carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis
