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Review: King Khan
King Khan doesn’t have much regard for the fourth wall. He was in and out of the crowd Sunday at Mohawk more times than Eddie Murphy was in and out of the hot tub on “Saturday Night Live.” For his finale, he was led by one of his saxophone players through the crowd and upstairs to the balcony, where, arms raised triumphantly in the air, he brought his band’s frenzy on the stage below to an end. It was total rock ‘n’ roll down to Khan’s outfit: tight wrestler shorts, a cape, and a medieval helmet that covered his entire face.
Rewind to the beginning of the show. Khan and his escort, a female with gold pom-poms who would shimmy next to him for the entire set like a B-movie go-go dancer, had just joined the eight other players in King Khan & the Shrines onstage. At this point, Khan was wearing a white suit and black shirt in the style of John Travolta circa “Saturday Night Fever.” Immediately, the three-piece horn section, drums and percussion, and twin guitars lit up, as Khan broke into “Land of the Freak,” one of the “greatest hits” on his European group’s Vice Records compilation album, “The Supreme Genius of King Khan & the Shrines.”
“It’s gonna get nasty tonight,” Khan concluded. And indeed it did, at least nasty enough not to be recounted verbatim here. Let’s just say in between fervent R&B and soul songs like “I Wanna Be a Girl” and “Welfare Bread,” Khan got frank about transvestitism and offered $5 to anyone who would puke down from the aforementioned balcony (there were no takers). Shtick like that, plus the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins vocal manipulations and staff-wielding, was essential to the act. And Khan was fine with it. On the song preceding his interactive finale, he and his bandmates harmonized, “No, I don’t regret a thing.”
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