Ain’t no Sunshine without the Retro Red-Eye Express

“Collaborate” by Five Star Crush, from Sleepless Nights (self-released):

It’s storming outside the bar. but inside, there’s sunshine.

Sunshine Patten, that is, host of the Saturday night Retro Red-Eye Express show on community radio station 90.1 KKFI. The weather has no doubt kept many revelers away from the Record Bar on this Thursday night, but this party for Sunshine’s 35th birthday (and to raise funds for the station) will not stop for inclement weather.

Sunshine’s show, R2E2 for short, plays the kind of music I used to listen to at my orphanage, when I was a wee, INXS-worshipping urchin, scrounging for discarded potatoes, eyeliner and synth-pop cassingles in the Reagan years. Not really, but I have been an admirer of R2E2 for some time, at least as far back as when former Kansas Citian Angela Penhaligon began making waves in the UK under her quirk-pop solo recording alias, Piney Gir. Sunshine interviewed Piney on R2E2 in December 2004. I stayed home that Saturday night to listen, and I even called in with a trivia answer and won a free Roxy Music tribute compilation. Score one for the Gipper!

Sunshine has been spinning new wave, pregrunge alternative and new and local stuff that fits her format since July 2002. In that sense, she’s a survivor at a station that always seems on the verge of shutting down, either from lack of funding or because of ulcer-inducing FCC battles. But the station always pulls through, and I naïvely like to believe it’s because of the music it allows DJs like Sunshine to play, even when it seems like no one’s listening.

That was the problem during the first of three acts at the Record Bar.

After setting up with their acoustic guitar and acoustic bass guitar, husband-and-wife duo Post Orgasmic Trauma struggled to be heard over the roar of 25 or so blabbermouths at the bar. Back when POT was a full band, in the early ’00s, it contributed to some national underground-rock comp albums and opened for Cheap Trick at Sandstone before going down in “a flaming ball of indifference in 2003,” according to its MySpace bio. Back with a space-opera concept album in the works and looking for a drummer, hip older couple Dana Detrick and Paul Clark, who do not usually play acoustic, seem like they have some interesting songs, but onstage tonight, they’re like nervous teenagers. I would like to hear them plug in and also explain what unfortunate event inspired the name.

Those three little words everyone says at one time or another inspired the next band’s name. Bizarro art-rock duo I Love You doesn’t make music for lovers, though, unless we’re talking about an affair between a masochistic physics professor and a pair of electric nipple clamps. Singer and guitarist Justin Randel begins the typical song by feeding strange, off-kilter guitar patterns into a loop pedal, then fires up a few other noisemakers contained in one of the several open briefcases at his feet. Gradually building a solid beat, drummer Jeff Schlette spins the noise confetti into a solid but shaky column of dance-inducing groove. Randel begins flying about, shaking his hips, whipping his long brown hair and shouting into the mic like a tweaking David Byrne, all the while playing remarkably clean lead riffs on his guitar. It’s fun to watch in a half-empty bar; I can only imagine how righteously these guys would rock a crowded basement.

The evening’s final band, Five Star Crush, sounded the most like R2E2 stock. With a two-pronged attack of Killers and Cure references and a frontman with killer good looks, it’s no wonder every woman in the bar was rushing to get close. The band’s new-wave pop, however derivative, is simple, elegant and fresh. The guitars are loud and ballsy, the beats sharp and tight, and the neon synths unapologetic. But the band is more masculine than fey or pompous. Echo and the Bunnymen would approve.

Shortly after Five Star Crush’s last song, the power goes out in half the Record Bar, sending Sunshine’s pair of half-eaten birthday cakes into darkness. I am finishing my beer across from the dudes in I Love You, trying my best to hang in a discussion of modern composers. (Randel and Schlette are music-composition dropouts.)

Lots of nights end like this: ears ringing, ashtray spilling over and tab arriving, unwelcome. But bonds are made and bands are discovered.

This weekend, though, I think I’ll stay in and listen to the radio.