Fun and weird in equal measure, Business Lady was a very active band when I was new to San Diego. I’d been gifted a MiniDV camera by a fellow Tulsa expat, Alex Kallenburger, so when I went to go see them play an all-ages show at Gelato Vero, I popped in a fresh tape and brought it along, not knowing what to expect.
Parking was always scarce along the busy little strip of India St., so we parked on the shoulder of Washington St., around the corner and up the hill from the two-story coffee/gelato shop. Upon hiking the steps to the upper area, we found the chairs and tables had largely been cleared out, and Bryan Welch was sitting at the far end of the room setting up things on his computer. As it turns out he was the opening act, performing a lengthy, pitch-shifted spoken word piece in the dark as people filtered in.
After his performance concluded and the lights came back on, a group of young men from Riverside called Quem Quaeritis began setting up a tent in the middle of the floor and loading instruments into it. In what one might describe as “putting the art before the horse”, they performed an improvised set with harmonica, a horn, some percussion, and freestyle distorted vocals from inside the tent.
There was a fourth act that apparently canceled last minute, so Business Lady defaulted to “headliner”, aka playing last. As they got their gear, stage clothes and makeup in order, all the people that opted to smoke cigarettes outside during the jazz tent shenanigans made their way back inside. For the next twenty minutes they fired off a set of songs came that off somewhere between a band that you’d see in a movie in which the protagonist wanders into a club on the wrong side of town, and the high-voltage weirdness that I love about Dead Kennedys… plus an oversized monkey-head worn by the drummer.
I was surprised and bummed when I learned not long after that Business Lady was going to part ways. I felt that their bouncy songs and attention to presentation made them stick out like a sore middle finger among the check-out-my-jean-jacket, fill-in-the-genre revival bands San Diego was so woefully fraught with back in 2004, and that they could have found a much larger audience with some of what is sadly always in short supply for us all… time and opportunity.
RIP Business Lady
Fairly Loud Noises 