King Khan & the Shrines - Wexner Center

I’ll admit that when I first heard about King Khan and the Shrines, I wrote them off as another gimmicky band with a retro schtick. It all seemed like a big joke—the outrageous costumes, the sweaty, man-boob-bearing bandleader, the various genre-aping from the ’60s.

But last Thursday at the Wexner Center, I became a believer. I was putty in Khan’s hands, and from the looks of it, the rest of the crowd was, too.

After removing the aforementioned preconceptions, listening to King Khan and the Shrines is like rummaging through a box at Used Kids and discovering a dusty LP with a faded cover image and browned record sleeve, putting it under the needle and realizing you’ve just discovered an unfairly discarded relic of yesteryear. Eric Khan, the Montreal-born son of Indian immigrants, audaciously borrows from classic soul (think James Brown and Little Richard) and filters it through the Rolling Stones. It’s garage rock/punk with boundless enthusiasm, not unlike Vice Records labelmates the Black Lips, but with more bombast, theatrics and a sense of humor that could make robots chuckle.

Khan’s lyrics aren’t just tongue-in-cheek. They’re completely over the top, which matched his leopard-skin coat and the band’s matching gold-and-black outfits (including Bamboorella, a go-go dancer who gyrated with pompoms throughout the set). This is a guy who wrote a chorus that goes “My baby’s fat, she’s ugly/She’s fat and she’s ugly but I love her.” You can find that one, “Took My Lady to Dinner,” on The Supreme Genius of King Khan and The Shrines, which Vice released in the U.S. last year as a best-of compiled from his previous internationally released material. (Vice also released What Is?!, featuring some of the same tracks, last month.)

It can be pretty hilarious (and raunchy) but this wasn’t a comedy show—even when Kahn came out shirtless for the encore, beer gut flapping, with a golden cape and battle helmet. The band played some great tunes, and played them well.

While Wexner Center crowds are usually pretty tame, Khan had the Black Box on the Mershon Stage going nuts the entire time. I’ve seen a little bit of moshing here and there when punk bands play the Wex, but this was a whole other level. A room full of twenty-something white dudes (and some women scattered throughout) freaked out to the Shrines like college girls at a fraternity party do when they hear “Come on Eileen.” Insane. I even saw a guy up front smoking a joint and then attempt to pass it to Khan, who either ignored it or pretended to ignore it—a prudent move, since security was all over it.

The Shrines—all 10—were no less tame. The keyboard player made Jerry Lee Lewis’s antics look tame, and the guitarist was never stationary for more than a millisecond. I loved the double sax attack, plus trumpet. Songs like “69 Faces of Love” just scream for that horn section. I didn’t hear the percussionist much, but his oddball stage presence just added to the ambience. “Land of the Freak” revealed Khan at his James Browniest, and “Welfare Bread” (“You don’t have to pay your bills anymore now/You just have to eat my welfare breaaaaad”) sounded most like authentic doo-wop.

The shout-out to the New Bomb Turks, “Columbus’s finest,” probably scored him some points with the crowd, but there was no ingratiating needed. Khan was indeed king.