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One can never accuse the good people at Jack Daniels of understatement. Almost every available surface of the Varsity Theatre on Tuesday was festooned with the whiskey company's familiar logo during the sponsored Studio No. 7 Concert featuring local sloganeers The Terms and Detroit neo-garage upstarts The Von Bondies. I’ve been to one of these free Jack Daniels events before and the crowd is always a weird mix of older people in the liquor business, ardent fans of the artists and people who were in the right place at the right time to get passes.

Let us get the jokes about The Terms out of the way. They could be called “On Par With Ezra” or perhaps “IN DEFICIT” instead of INXS, and so on. Like Morrissey said back in 92, we hate it when our friends become successful. The Terms' non-confrontational mix of The O. C. indie confection and chimey alternative rock went over well with the mixed crowd. Still, the singer’s comment “You may love this song, you may hate this f-ing song, but we still love you anyway” before “Welcome to the Now (Evo Devo)” – the ubiquitous corporate anthem for the revamped LSU – tells us they know exactly how people feel about the band, and are willing to accept their successes gleefully. Were they terrible? No. The Celebration set I saw a while back was terrible. This was, for this evening anyway, adequate considering the infomercial/concert setting. Still they were an uninspired choice as opening act for the The Von Bondies, which delivered a kick-ass set.

Singer/guitarist Jason Stollsteimer (bested only by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Evan Dando of the Lemonheads in the “Greatest Indie Rock Hair Ever“category) led the Motor City foursome through about an hour of heavy, sleazy riffs, hard boogie backbeats. The Von Bondies proved a good model on how to do it: minimal stage chatter, not a lot of endless futzing with equipment. They took the stage and hit it hard. Being staples of the indie dance rock thing, I think they were a little perplexed at the stoic crowd (Me too. C’mon y’all, you are not going to get in trouble if you move about a little and display public enjoyment of musicz). Nonetheless, the band rained down torrential Stooges-style groovy goodness. My only complaint is that they didn’t play longer, and only did one song for an encore. You got the feeling that those giant projected “Jack Daniels” logos overhead were glaring down at the hapless rockers like Almighty Oz, tapping his watch. I’d love to see this band in a less-controlled environment, where their devil-music revisionism can spiral a little more out of control and make you believe in rock-n-roll one more time.