Jackson barrels over Allentown with 100 Monkeys

The secret to the success of a 100 Monkeys concert is that the band treats it exactly for what it is: A musical outlet for a hot actor (Jackson Rathbone of “Twilight”) and a few of his actor friends, who happen to also be decent musicians.

There’s no pretense that they are a chart-topping act. They play smaller venues such as Allentown’s Crocodile Rock Café, where they were Thursday night, and charge a pittance of $10 to get in.

They jam in an often unstructured way, with several songs starting in lurches and coming to awkward endings.

100 Monkeys' Jackson Rathbone

Photos by Brian Hineline/Special to The Morning Call

Since their songs are so little known – sold only from their Web site or digitally – that there wasn’t much need to build tension in the set or even set up an encore: 70 minutes and 13 songs into the night, they simply announced, “We’re going to take a quick break,” and left the stage for 15 minutes before returning for another half hour of music.

And there was no big finish. After 20 songs and 105 minutes of music (including two songs they played with the opening act), just past 11 p.m. (probably curfew for a good many in the crowd of about 250 – virtually all female), Rathbone said, “we’re technically past our time already, so we gotta go,” and they stopped playing.

But they clearly enjoyed what they were doing, and damned if the show wasn’t pretty good: Mostly surf-rock songs, a little R&B thrown in for good measure. They were, by turns, hotly tight (“Wicked World”) and very loose, as if thrown together (“Wing’s on Fire”) but still good, and sometimes very good.

They even added the occasional instrumental surprise: Guitarist (mostly) actor Ben Graupner played trumpet and percussionist Uncle Larry flute on “Twenty to One,” and Rathbone mandolin on the nice, country shuffle “Junkie.”  

The band’s practice of its members switching instruments between songs – Rathbone played keyboards, drums, lead guitar, bass and mandolin throughout the night – was interesting, but didn’t affect the music much. Rathbone was decent on all of them – playing keyboard with his arms swinging in a swimming motion, and played decent guitar licks on “The Monkey Song” and nice blues on “Grocery Store No More.”

Rathbone also sang most of the songs, in an affected deep voice. Grauper sang most of the others.

Band members paid tribute to their friend and songwriter, Spencer Bell, who died of cancer --  the band is hosting a legacy concert in his memory April 24 in Dallas. They opened with “Made of Gold,” Rathbone’s tribute to Bell, and he wrote both “The Monkey Song” and “Twenty to One.”

100 Monkeys' Ben Graupner

Despite the band’s low profile, the crowd actually sang the lyrics of some songs – doing a call-and-response with Rathbone on “Orson Brawl.” They also occasionally let loose with some calls of their own: “Love you Jackson!” was heard a couple of times.

And the crowd helped the band do an improv, choosing “Hot Nurses” as the title for the band to sing a stream-of-consciousness song – which they did to a reggae beat.

After closing with “Grocery Store No More,” a song Rathbone said was written in Philadelphia and played live for the first time at 100 Monkeys’ Croc Rock show last spring, the band stayed a good 90 minutes meeting fans, taking pictures and signing autographs.

With that session lasting almost as long as the concert – I’m going to resist the urge to say it lasted till “Twilight” -- it was clear the audience was there for more than the music.

100 Monkeys clearly is no Bob Dylan. They may not even be Matt Dillon. But they put on a good show. And this is, after all, show business.

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