INDY'S WEEKLY ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER HIGHLIGHTING ARTS, ENTERTAINMENT AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Web exclusive: Local scene

This week: Stanhope, Scumbag, hospital music

Thursday, March 27 at Local’s Only (2449 E. 56th St.), melody and misanthropy will collide in a show that features stand-up comedian Doug Stanhope and punk trio Up! Scumbag. Stanhope, who might be most widely known for hosting the final season of “The Man Show,” has appeared in a wide array of questionable television work while reserving his most substantial and politically involved work for live shows. Up! Scumbag has a full-length, “Reality TV Causality,” on the way next month. Just $15 gets you in to the 8 p.m. show.

Rock stars will never end up saving the world, no matter how many star-studded benefit songs they slap together, but some do-gooders have certainly made a dent in pernicious social problems, and not always through potentially cumbersome events like Live or Sport or Farm Aid. Take Musicians on Call, for example, which has a mission to bring live or recorded music to the bedsides of patients in health care facilities. A benefit for MOC will be held at the Hard Rock Café (49 S. Meridian St.) Thursday, March 27 at 9 p.m. and feature a performance by Australian-American pop-punk band MINK. A $5 donation to MOC is the suggested admission fee. More info at musiciansoncall.org.

Last week: cello, socks at Radio Radio

“You are the Queen of the Weird,” I overheard someone crowning her friend after the premiere of Paul Velat’s “Sock: an Operetta of Epic Proportions,” in recognition of her ability to find quirky events. I’ll make no judgement on whether or not she’s worthy of royalty, but those that turned out last Thursday got to see a couple inspired performers that might well be called Kings of the Loops for their skilful individual improvisation work and deployment of live looping.

Cellist Tom Abbs took the stage first, a tall guy in his mid-30s clad in a black shirt and skinny, short red tie. He began his set with a few blows on the didgeridoo before picking up his cello, which he would stick to along with a bass guitar, for the rest of the performance. He sat behind a snare and cymbal, which punctuated all riffs on stringed instruments, and which he struck most often with an elbow or a free hand, with rare recourse to a drumstick.

Abbs plucked and bowed all parts of the cello and bass, making use of all possible sounds (including tapping the cello as a drum), and spending more time near the bridge and tuning pegs than in more familiar territory on the fingerboard. He generally kept a consistent beat (sometimes by keeping time with a drum, other times by recording a loop on the bass before moving back to the cello), but didn’t stick with any one riff for long; arriving at a recognizable set of notes or melody, he then set about torturously deconstructing that tune, moving on to friction-inducing frantic bowing or percussive, unmelodic plucking. His work was unsettling and engaging, and perhaps his 30-minute performance was the ideal length for engaging but not overwhelming the audience.

Paul Velat (aka Lord of the Yum-Yum) started the performance of “Sock” by doing a soundcheck on the wheatgrass above the bar (wind running through a wheat field) and the Exit sign (a low-frequency buzz), and then bringing the two together to “form a really cool hip-hop band.” Those throw-off lines, moments when Velat broke character to share a joke with the audience (and there were plenty of them), were some of the funniest and most engaging parts of his performance.

But the play’s the thing: It opened with Velat’s character waking up to find he had lost a sock, singing the opening lines, “Somebody stole my sock while I was sleeping; that son of a bitch will pay.” Much of the libretto was written in the same style. Velat sang his lines against an improvised looped beat-box background, and when I say sang, I mean talked within a few notes on a single octave.

Velat moved away from the stage as he descended into the underworld. Along the way, he met Veronica and Joshua, naked mole rats played by two audience participants who threw socks with protruding paper teeth on their hands. He then ran into Tonka Truck the Troll, who wore a cardboard mask, which was destroyed by a hyperactive audience member who volunteered to play the part. Velat’s character finally rescued the sock from a character wearing a cardboard reindeer mask, and returned to bed at the close of the piece. I enjoyed “Sock,” although it all depends on how entertaining you find Velat’s nerdy humor and DIY props.