CONFIDENCE MAN: “I know what I’m going to say,” says Dave Berndt. “So when it’s time to say it, I better say it like I fucking mean it.” |
There’s a song on Logan 5 and the Runners’ first album, Featurette, where Dave Berndt sings, “I wish I could see you at night/Naked through your window.” It’s a quick, dirty come-on that gets more sinister and weird the more you hear it — especially since you can’t tell whether the sentiment is coming from a smooth operator hitting the club scene with an unbuttoned shirt and a chest full of hair or a horny teenager with a fledgling moustache in an anonymous chat room.The Runners, who are self-releasing Featurette this Saturday at Great Scott, are a two-year-old band from Boston with their feet planted firmly in this city’s long-established Anglophile scene. On record, Berndt has this throaty Jarvis Cocker thing where he ends every other line with “Yeeeeah . . . ,” as if he were cranking out Soloflex reps inside a reverb chamber. It’s an intimidating thing to imagine walking in on.
When I sit down with three members of the band at Bukowski’s Tavern on Dalton Street, it’s a bit like meeting the men behind the curtain, the guys sitting back at the controls while their avatars do the posturing on stage. Everyone picks at a plate of steamy ranch fries. Guitarist Nick Balkin has just stepped in from his nearby desk job at Berklee; drummer Mark Beaulieu is carrying a brand-new hard drive he’s just received in the mail. (The line-up is rounded out by keyboardist/trumpeter Chris Barrett and bassist Mike DeLisle.)
“You can’t just get up there and be the same guy that was at the office all day,” says Berndt. “You’ve got to free yourself up to say things you normally wouldn’t say and do it like you mean it. You could say the same thing into a microphone with no band behind you and it would be a little different.”
Berndt’s alter ego came about when friends noticed his more-than-passing resemblance to Michael York, the thickly maned star of the 1976 sci-fi flick Logan's Run. York’s Logan is a straight-ahead guy who tells Jenny Agutter’s Jessica, “You’re beautiful. Let’s have sex.” Brendt’s Logan seems more like the guy who’d spend the night staring at a girl across the room, pondering how much like a lit, bitter cigarette his inevitably hopeless fling will be.
Still, borrowing the name is a start. Featurette is a gallery of cocky adolescent spite, defiant mood swings, and persuading girls to do things their parents don’t know about. Which would make it weird if it were, like, the guy from your office singing it.
“I’d love to say it was all off the cuff, but I don’t know,” allows Berndt. “If you have a sort of character to start off with, it helps. You have the songs written — I know what I’m going to say, so when it’s time to say it, I better say it like I fucking mean it.”
