John Corabi – London’s Boston Music Rooms 2022 – Review by Dawn Osborne

John Corabi is doing a UK Tour and appropriately to accompany the release of his book ‘Horseshoes and Hand Grenades’ his gigs are covering material from all his previous bands and feature stories between songs as a taster of what can be read in detail in the book.

Kicking off with The Union number ‘Love (I Don’t Need It Anymore)’ the acoustic format really does demonstrate every whisky laden nuance of Corabi’s voice showing it off to its best advantage. Next up is solo number ‘If I Never Say Goodbye’. It is songs like this that show how good a songwriter John can be on his own without reliance on anybody else. John has always taken other people’s songs though and made them his own and the first cover of the set is Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Who’ll Stop The Rain’.

No Corabi Show is complete without his extensive oral digressions and at this point he explains how wrong the rest of The Scream were when their comment about ‘Father Mother Son’ was that it was Country and Western. Luckily Eddie Kramer backed him up and it made the record, it now being one of the most revered songs on that album. Corabi underlines his faith in the song by giving us a stunning pared back version, again having me marvel at the emotional quality of his voice. If anything is too beautiful though the modest side of Crabby has to stop anything getting too pretentious. So at this point he starts taking the mickey out of three passionate drunken male fans who have been singing along with gusto by calling them The Crabettes. Boy do they love the attention!!

Following a redhead joke attention moves to the Dead Daisies as John tells the story of how he joined the band before doing ‘Revolution’ and after more banter with The Crabettes and a couple of off colour jokes (this is in general a PC free zone) ‘Dead and Gone’.

Moving on to Motley John shared his thoughts on The Dirt film and what Tommy, Mick and Nikki are really like and tells the story of how he joined the band before doing his own versions of ‘Misunderstood’ and ‘Loveshine.’

Having had the Bruce Kulick connection from Union Crabby has performed at Kiss Conventions including with Peter Criss. The story he chooses to tell is how one Kiss fan wandered up to him at such an event to tell him he was singing ‘Hard Luck Woman’ wrong as it should be ‘I can’t forget about ‘CHA’. So for comedic effect John does the song with the syllable ‘Cha’ emphasized in a mock annoyed way much to the amusement of the crowd.

‘Robin’s Song’ follows an intro to the background of that song, John’s love life being, of course, the prime subject of a number of his songs.

We are into the home straight with Crue’s ‘Hooligan’s Holiday’ and well known cover ‘Drive’ by The Cars all which inspire ferocious crowd singing. Thanking the crowd for thirty year’s support we then get ‘Man In The Moon’ with an Zeppelinesque bridge, before John makes sure to talk to every member of the crowd waiting to talk to him despite a very long queue.

We sure are blessed with the access to such talent afforded by such personal events. We can especially appreciate this after the Pandemic when nothing like this was even possible. John is in the UK till December 4^th if he’s coming to a town near to you you’d be a fool to miss it!

Dawn Osborne