.Lila vs. Kells at the Roll Call

It was a hella enjoyable night last week at Kate & Coalmine’s Roll Call, thanks largely in part to the very funny and ultimately surreal set played by Lila Cugini (seen here getting clubbed by, uh… a sadomasochistic police officer?).
The Roll Call, a recurring feature on Wednesday nights at the Toad in the Hole Pub in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square, operates like a well-organized (and, thanks to the beers on tap, well-oiled) open mic. Performers are booked in advance, but the carefree, anything-goes attitude is the same. Basically, you never know what you’re gonna get; a time-honored concept which can be excruciating when it fails but awesomely surprising when it succeeds.
It worked for Lila, who happened to be celebrating her birthday last Wednesday and had plenty of well-wishers in tow. Lila opened her set by showing off and reading from her latest present, just given to her by a friend outside on the sidewalk: an autographed script of the pilot episode from M*A*S*H.
Then, kicking things off with a tongue-in-cheek ditty called “I Want An Ugly Man,” Lila told a story about copying and pasting the song’s lyrics onto a personal ad on Craigslist, just as an experiment. “And here’s the really terrible thing about dating in Sonoma County,” she related: two hours later, she opened an inbox full of responses from 19 homely, disfigured, fat slobs, all professing their undying, requited love.
Lila plays simple chords and sings simple melodies, and even when she forgets her own lyrics, she’s got a charming, hey-I-could-do-that-too thing going on. Her voice reminds me of a younger Lucinda Williams circa Happy Woman Blues, and her songs—“My Lovin’ Days Are Over,” “She Wants Him Back”—reveal a similar plaintive heartbreak.
But it was the set’s closer that brought the house down.
Last time I saw Lila, oh, about five years ago, she dedicated a cover song—Green Day’s “She”—to her son, Adler. On Wednesday, her cover song of choice had changed considerably: R. Kelly’s “Real Talk.” Totally goddamned hilarious. You haven’t lived ‘til you’ve seen a birthday girl with a voice full of heartbreak, strumming slow chords on an acoustic guitar, singing lines like “I been with you five years and you listenin’ to your motherfuckin’ girlfriends / I don’t know why you fuck with them ol’ jealous, no-man-havin’-ass hoes anyway.”
(P.S.: Throughout the set, North Country bike enthusiast and all-around man-about-town Chris Wells projected weird-ass videos on a screen, and just when the night couldn’t get any stranger, he quickly followed “Real Talk” with a candid clip of Lila, Kate and Dani (all of whom were at the Toad, none of whom knew they had been filmed) sitting around a campfire at a dustbowl hoedown party, singing Neutral Milk Hotel’s “King of Carrot Flowers” at the top of their lungs. Awesome.)