Citylink

Dik Shuttle lies flat on his back on a Miami street amid three manhole covers, a Fender Music Maker guitar still strapped around him from an earlier set at Tobacco Road. He cradles a cocktail in his left hand and a cigarette in his mouth. He’s wearing dark sunglasses, even though it’s midnight, and a green polyester blazer with the shirt beneath unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. “This is how our gigs usually end,” he says about his sets with Shuttlelounge, a keyboard-and-guitar lounge act devoted to covering bands such as Interpol, Steely Dan and The Clash in the most ludicrous manner possible.

“An apt metaphor for our career,” adds Shuttlelounge’s other half, Cassius Casio KRS Lejuan Love Johann Sebastian Bacharat De La Fender Rhodes. He also has sunglasses on. “I’m seeing everything in Shuttle vision.” Twenty feet away, outside Tobacco Road, two drunks scream an enchanting dialogue: “I just needed money for my motherfucking cab! I don’t need you!”

“That’s our fan club,” Rhodes assesses. His glass is empty, and he’s looking for a refill. The Shuttlelounge set usually begins with a couple of rounds of Blue Hawaiis, fluorescent-colored cocktails from 1950s swingerdom now found on cruise ships or hotel bars, like the Ramada Inn in Melbourne, Australia, where Shuttle says he’s the house band. A former merchant mariner, Shuttle began cruising Florida’s fabulous Space Coast club circuit to support two ex-wives and a few kids. He’s not sure how many.

And if all of this sounds like bullshit, that’s because it is.

Dadaist in intent and supremely schmaltzy in execution, Shuttlelounge has offered its twisted take on indie, pop and classic rock to South Florida for two years with a show marked by short sets and plenty of self-deprecating humor. “I get to be a lout and not hurt anybody — except myself,” says Bill Mentzer about his Dik Shuttle persona. “Actually, I’m amazed that anyone’s interested. It’s not like we’re really trying to play out, but people keep calling us.”

For a second impromptu set, Shuttlelounge sets up in the Road’s back patio. Shuttle warms up with licks from Heart’s “Crazy for YouYou”” while Rhodes (real name: Christian D. Spano) breaks out batteries for his Casio keyboard. A dozen people are scattered around tables and in booths, but no one’s sitting near the ’Lounge, or paying the duo much attention, for that matter. Undeterred, Shuttle takes a big slurp from the straw floating in his drink and belches, and the pair kick into Madonna’s “Get Into the Groove.” “Get into the beat/What smells just like feet/Hey, are you eating Chee-tos or what?” Shuttle sings. He then tells a bad joke about a guy, two thumbs and a blowjob. He chain-smokes throughout the set, in which the duo also covers Burt Bacharach’s “This Guy’s in Love With You” and The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” in which Shuttle croons the last line before the chorus like a ranting cheerleader: “The jet pilots wai-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-haaaaaillled!”

Fans of theater-metal rockers Tenacious D or standup comic Neil Hamburger will recognize that irony and blatant mediocrity is at the heart of Shuttlelounge. The duo is intentionally bad, but not because Mentzer doesn’t know how to play. Even while covering songs in a style that is trite at best, he’s all over his guitar, slipping in sly chord changes and countermelodies only a musician with chops could muster. “I did way too much [amyl nitrate] while watching Monty Python at the Eastman School of Music,” Mentzer says of the summer he spent at the prestigious University of Rochester school in New York while on a tuba scholarship at a nearby college. “I switched to guitar ’cause chicks don’t like tuba.”

In the mid-’80s, he moved to Miami, finished his bachelor’s at the University of Miami’s School of Music and began working cover gigs on cruise ships and in hotel bars in Key West and Miami Beach. But he also played it straight, launching the funky, 12-piece worldbeat collective F.O.C. (Funk on Crank), which Budweiser sponsored for a Southeast tour. Along the way, he worked with Jaco Pastorius disciple Charles Norkus and drummer Mackie Jayson from hardcore-punk outfit Bad Brains. In the late ’90s, Mentzer landed a gig touring with Latin pop singer Chayanne in a last-ditch effort as a paid musician. After that, he decided on a day job as a tech head for a bank but kept the local fires burning with bands such as rock group Shuttlecock and surf-rock outfit The Marisleysis Alien Conspiracy. By the time he created Dik Shuttle in 2001, Mentzer was ready to front a band and spread his own style of subversion.

“It’s a bit of expression of anarchy,” he explains. “Pop and rock music is very controlling. As much as people like to express it as counterculture, a lot of it is selling alcohol and other kinds of merchandise. I mean, where’s the art? I think most professional musicians, if they had their druthers, would play something more adventurous.”

“This is an adventure, one that Bill very graciously pulled me into,” says Spano, Shuttlelounge’s other half. Mentzer credits Spano as the brains behind the ’Lounge because of the off-kilter keyboard warble that gives the songs their B-grade appeal. “I’ve been playing the Casio all my life, and he’d come over to my house and be baffled by the number of cover songs I knew,” Spano says. “The worst thing for an indie-rock musician is to be part of a cover band. But I didn’t really know how to play them. I faked it. He liked that better.

“I’ve been involved in local music down here for 10 years. For nine of them, I played as a semi-serious musician. It really never garnered any attention whatsoever. Now, I’m doing something totally fake, and we’re getting all kinds of attention,” Spano says of Shuttlelounge’s steady gigs and recent cover shot on StreetMiami, a local arts and entertainment weekly. “On the other hand, it doesn’t get any more real than this. I think Miami finds beauty in style over substance. We’re the perfect band for down here. Our mission statement is to take away everyone’s expensive, bitter import beer and replace it with a Blue Hawaii, so they can all become as sick as we are.”

How sick are they? Deranged enough to play Steely Dan covers at a tribute show to The Police and to launch into The Doors’ “L.A. Woman” in the middle of Joy Division’s “Shadowplay.” “The crowd lost it; they didn’t know what the hell was going on,” recalls Ed Artigas, drummer for Bling Bling and founder of local indie label Spy-Fi Records. Artigas assembled a Joy Division tribute show in 2001 and invited Mentzer to perform after hearing him cover a Pixies song with a bossa nova beat. “It’s Joy Division, and you hear this nutball doing lounge. Those two types of music usually don’t go hand in hand.” But Artigas says that kind of nails-on-chalkboard pairing is perfect for an act that revels in its silliness. “Dik Shuttle is the drunk guy who’s playing at CocoWalk, or the asshole who plays in the Key West restaurant, the guy playing ‘Margaritaville’ for the 150th time in the day. Most of those cover gigs are people just being a glorified jukebox — except there’s something wrong with Shuttle’s jukebox,” Artigas says with a laugh.

It seems as if the oddness is contagious. Shuttlelounge has spawned an ever-growing roster of associates. Besides Shuttle and Rhodes, there’s Shuttle’s lawyer and rival, Ravelstein (local musician and producer Ariyah Okamoto) and research scientist and philosopher Herrmann Cohn (photographer Stephen Watt). Known as Shuttlerounge, the two hijack the stage from the ’Lounge in a barrage of insults and arguments. Then, there’s Sylvia, Ravelstein’s love interest, and Mavis, a Palm Beach-cum-Hialeah socialite. “It’s just another way to express something beyond conformity,” Mentzer says about the circus. “Time to let loose.”

Shuttlelounge is doing just that when it closes out its Tobacco Road set with a cover of Interpol’s “Obstacle 1.” In a Mel Tormé-and-atonal-goth delivery, Shuttle offers his interpretation: “I wish I could eat the salt off her margarita glass/And we can move to Pembroke Pines/Living only miles from the ’Glades/And we could chop up some lines/If we only had some razor blades.”

A man and woman on a date settle on a nearby bench and turn their attention to the show. They’re half-smiling, not sure if what they’re seeing is a joke. By the end of the song, they’ve moved to the far side of the bar, away from the ’Lounge. Mentzer is delighted. “If you don’t get it, you get it,” he says.

Shuttlelounge will perform 8:30 p.m. Saturday at the City Link Music Fest in downtown Hollywood. See schedule for details. For more information on the group, visit http://groups.msn.com/shuttlelounge.

Contact Emma Trelles at citylink@citylinkmagazine.com.