LIVE: Lettuce @ Empire Live, 04/21/2022

The concert scene in Greater Nippertown is light-years ahead of where it was even ten years ago. That said, there hasn’t really been a club-level site that could handle both national acts and the crowds they draw – that is, until Empire Live opened for business in 2021. The former home for Capitol Rep has become the crown jewel for the promotion Step Up Presents, replacing the truly dowdy Clifton Park venue Northern Lights.

Mind you, Northern Lights did have one thing Empire Live doesn’t: Seats. Apart from two chairs and four high-tops, EL is a huge high-ceilinged open space with nothing between the two bars and the stage but state-of-the-art light & sound boards in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by metal barricades. But while that’s not a great situation for old people with bad backs, for the prime demographic Step Up has been serving all these years, it’s heaven, as is the more intimate Empire Underground in the basement. And the bouncing crowd stretched from the bar to the stage as Lettuce funked it up for two glorious sets.

I can count the bands that have stayed together 30 years on the fingers of one hand, and one of those is Lettuce. It helps that most of the original band – drummer Adam Deitch, guitarist Adam “Shmeeans” Smirnoff, bassist Erick Coomes, and saxman Ryan Zoidis – has stuck it out, adding key pieces like keyboardist/vocalist Nigel Hall and trumpeter Eric “Benny” Bloom. Lettuce alums include killers like guitarist Eric Krasno, keyboardist Neal Evans, and brass members Sam Kininger & Rashawn Ross, so it’s not like the band just got rid of a few time-wasters. Even so, none of them were missed on this night.

Lettuce has a lot of badass bands in its lineage, including Prince, The Time, and George Clinton’s towering monster Parliament/Funkadelic. The former bands live inside the group’s skin-tight arrangements and percussive horn charts, while the latter raised his head when Lettuce slipped out one of their compositions to nail the P-Funk classic “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker).” The crowd went wild, jumping on the tune’s infamous chorus instantly as they celebrated the end of almost two years of lockdown and mask mandates.

Computer-controlled lights bathed the crowd in their multicolored glow; the lights were aimed primarily at the audience, sending the unspoken message, “YOU’RE the star of this show!” Unfortunately, that situation left the band completely in shadow; the spotlights were also computer-controlled and forced the standing players to stay completely still – an amazing feat, considering the white-hot funk Lettuce was dealing out. Zoidis and Bloom are rocking soloists with or without the effects boxes they occasionally used, but together they are a whole separate force with just as much throw weight as Deitch and the front line.

While Empire Live is primarily geared towards concertgoers that weren’t even born when I dove into the live scene, I’m ecstatic that the club is as hot a ticket as it is. As I mentioned earlier, we get bands in Greater Nippertown that would have passed us by ten years ago, but EL can be a prime draw for acts that wouldn’t fit in The Egg or Troy Music Hall. It was worth the fistful of Advil I slammed when I got home to see Step Up’s great new house and consider how it’s going to contribute to the scene in the near & far future.

Photo Gallery by Rudy Lu