CD Revue | Bradford & Gadette on I’m Not There

This week, Ryan Bradford and Jamie Gadette take on I’m Not There (Columbia/Sony), the soundtrack to Todd Haynes’ forthcoming Bob Dylan biopic (see Cinema Clips). The double-disc release features 34 artists covering both popular and more obscure works by the formidable folk icon. If you dig Tom Verlaine, Nels Cline, Lee Renaldo and Smokey Hormel, take note: They bolster several tracks as The Million Dollar Bashers.
RB: At least this album tries to avoid alienating non-Dylan fans by delegating covers to Sonic Youth, Jeff Tweedy and even Karen O (Yeah Yeah Yeahs). I’ve never understood the universal hard-on for Bob Dylan, but these artists mix enough of their own flavor into the songs to keep somebody like me interested. And then Eddie Vedder comes along …

JG: Wow. You’re either very brave or very stupid to dis Dylan. Maybe both. I’m definitely not a fan of his voice, but I’ve always respected him as a songwriter you can’t deny he played a significant role in shaping music as we know it. Hearing my hero/boyfriend Stephen Malkmus resurrect “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Maggie’s Farm” confirms my suspicions that if Dylan tweaked his voice just so, I’d probably be a big Dylan-head (Dylan-ite? Dylan-er?). Malkmus, like the majority of I’m Not There contributors, scores a perfect balance between Dylan’s delivery and his own signature style. A few—Hold Steady, Willie Nelson, Jeff Tweedy—pretty much sound like they always do. And yes, Eddie Vedder provides an uninspired, totally unnecessary take on “All Along the Watchtower.” They should have included Jimi’s version and called it a day.

RB: So maybe I am naive when I dis an artist like Bob Dylan, but it’s your kind of blind devotion to his untouchable reputation that warrants all these self-important biopics. If “playing a significant role in shaping music as we know it” is synonymous with playing an acoustic guitar, does that mean you’re extra giddy for Jack Johnson’s cover of “Mama, You’ve Been on My Mind”? He plays the guitar and many people consider him a skilled songwriter, so what’s the difference? I think the most successful tracks are the ones that stray furthest from the source material, to provide a fresh sound to new listeners. Like I said before, Sonic Youth’s cover of “I’m Not There” provides enough sonic weirdness to make it not a cover, but rather a re-imagining.

JG: Did you just compare Jack Johnson to Bob Dylan? I think I just threw up in my mouth.

RB: And that still sounds better than Dylan’s voice.

JG: You better take cover, Bradford. A hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

Music | Fake It Till You Make It: New SLC band The Market doesn’t current success

  It started as a lark for Bryan Schuurman. “I was just kind of disappointed with how the music industry was working, so I decided to be the industry myself—to be ‘the market.’” A clever ploy, but do others get that inside joke? “[Laughs] No,” he says, “They all think I’m talking about a supermarket.” Despite the dubious choice in the band name, The Market has certainly made an impact since August of this year.

Schuurman played mostly drums in more than a dozen bands before forming The Market, but his solo project took him in another direction. “One day, my band was on a break, and I just decided to write some songs,” he says. From there, he picked up a guitar and began to write, recording his material on a MacBook in his bedroom for his four-song debut. Schuurman played all the instruments as well as produced and mixed the EP, which was originally released under the name Industry Company Incorporated (another wink at the music industry). While the EP is very raw (a fact that Bryan blames on not getting it mastered), there is undeniable talent in the lyrical arrangements. This strong impression of The Market found its way to X96, where it was played not only on Live & Local, but also on Todd Nuke’Em’s “Todd’s iPod” segment. “The first thing that caught me was his lyrics. Nuke’Em says he certainly has something to say, and he conveys this in his music in a way that relates to this generation,” “It was interesting to be exposed to Bryan’s darker, more thoughtful side.”
Radio exposure led The Market, now padded with current members Danny Wariner, Anthony Webster, Brent Redd and Scotty Moses, to a spot on last summer’s X96 4-Play local concert series. “It was a great response for a fairly new band,” Live & Local host and City Weekly contributor Portia Early recalls. “I’d say about 40 kids came to see them.” While The Market didn’t go on to open for X96’s Big Ass Show, they did well for a bunch of newbies.
Catching up with the band as they performed a set in Ogden, they joked around, giving the impression of a band much tighter than their brief years together might suggest. Of course, they’re not coasting yet. “I’m recording a couple new songs, and I’ve just been jamming with these guys to catch them up to speed,” Schuurman says.
“We also played a hoe-down in someone’s back yard,” Moses says with a laugh. “It was a neighborhood party, but it was fun.” Better yet, the party attracted more than a few new fans.
“We had a lot more MySpace people talking to us, telling us we did a good job at the Big Ass Show,” Schuurman says.
“I think there’s a lot more song recognition going on at our shows,” Wariner adds. “People are starting to know what songs we’re playing and grooving to the music.”
Fans are just perks, however, to the pleasures gained from performing. They play full speed ahead, which obviously gets the crowd riled up. Sometimes, though, “You have to fake it,” Schuurman says. “I never fake it,” Redd says. “Fake it till you make it,” Moses says, “unless you’re Brent.”
As for the future, Schuurman has it all laid out. “I’m gonna try and record some more later this year, get some money saved up for that,” he says, adding that the band won’t be in on the act. “Right now, I have a super-sweet deal where I have to do it in studio by myself—plus, it would take three times as long.”
“Probably because of the attitude problems, I guess,” Redd says.
Thankfully, there’s no faking The Market’s promising road ahead.

Music | Khaaan!: Blacksnake and BBQ get saucy

  I should have guessed that two guys who call themselves Blacksnake and Creepy were going to mess with me a little bit. But some journalists never learn. That’s why reporters have the same public approval rating as used car salesmen.
Blacksnake (aka King Khan) and Creepy (aka BBQ aka Mark Sultan) are former members of defunct punk band Spaceshits, the one-time antiheroes of Montreal’s music scene long before Arcade Fire graced the cover of Time.

The Spaceshits were famous for raising hell, inciting riots and alienating uptight club owners with their insane stage antics. Although plenty of naysayers predicted that the young rabble-rousers in the band would end up face down in the gutter (permanently, not just for an hour or two), Blacksnake and BBQ harnessed their unadulterated love of rock & roll, refined their musical chops and persevered after the Spaceshits called it quits.

Blacksnake—who fell in love with Germany during a Spaceshits tour and decided to stay there—adopted the name King Khan and formed countless bands, including a solo project called King Khan and His Lonesome Guitar. BBQ stayed in Montreal, joined Les Sexareenos (a band named after a seedy pulp novel), started cranking out solo material and adopted several names.

Eventually, BBQ—Creepy’s one man band—did a show in Germany, which led to some jam sessions with King Khan, which led to a joyful Creepy/Blacksnake collaboration called The King Khan & BBQ Show.

Shortly after the band’s inception, The King Khan & BBQ Show’s irreverent yet undeniably seamless blend of punk, psychedelic rock, doo-wop, R&B and good old classic rock & roll began to produce, as the band’s Website so eloquently states, legions of “overenthusiastic psychos who knew all of the words.”

Some of those overenthusiastic psychos who knew all of the words were members of up-and-coming bands, such as Atlanta’s Black Lips—who are definitely in the process of amassing hordes of overzealous fans who know all the words to their songs. The Lips were so taken by The King Khan & BBQ Show that they formed a close friendship with the duo, collaborated on a few obscure 7-inches and dubbed King Khan the secret fifth member of their band.

The King Khan & BBQ Show live performance has developed a small but devoted cult following. Audience members are converted by the band’s catchy R&B and rock & roll rhythms and charmed by their sentimental-yet-profane lyrics.

The King Khan & BBQ Show has also produced a string of kitschy music videos. The video for “Waddlin’ Around” features a snaggle-toothed sock monster in hot pursuit of puking puppet versions of Khan and BBQ.

Mind you, the name of the band is The King Khan & BBQ Show, not King Khan & The BBQ Show, as BBQ adamantly pointed out in an e-mail. If you’re unfortunate enough to put the ‘the’ in the wrong place, prepare to get growled at by BBQ.

In fact, my first round of questions received a rather volatile response from BBQ. I was convinced he hated my jaundiced journalist guts until I got King Khan on the phone.

“Don’t mind BBQ,” Khan said, in the same tone of voice that my grandma once used to smooth over my grandpa’s pissy outbursts, “He gets a little grumpy sometimes.”

Khan—an extroverted father of two young girls who alternately sports a World War I helmet and army fatigues, and a makeshift Tina Turner costume, complete with a fringy purple dress and wig, onstage—talked with me for nearly an hour with tremendous energy and enthusiasm about Haitian and Turkish voodoo; hexes; gypsies; Indian witches; black magic; mustache-growing contests; Georgia; Florida; Brooklyn, N.Y.; New Orleans; Berlin; hot dogs; beer; salacious botched interviews with French journalists; and burning upside-down cop cars in Montreal, among other engaging and unprintable topics.

Khan even admitted to blowing chunks outside of a famous Chicago hot-dog restaurant, much like the puppet version himself in the “Waddlin’ Around” video.

Somewhere in the midst of our conversation which ranged topically from the Brazilian reverence for a nice butt to how Khan almost met the one and only Fats Domino in New Orleans, I told Kahn to apologize to BBQ on my behalf for my subpar questions.

“Oh, don’t worry about. It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said, with a slight laugh. Then, under his breath, he added, “It’s kind of a joke.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that BBQ was pulling my leg, but when it dawned on me, I put my head in my hands and laughed.

Of course, it’s possible that a person who has toured extensively with a one-man band and appeared in multiple photos with a bucket on his head is in a chronically bad mood. Perhaps BBQ was only half-joking when he said “the only thing I fear is half-thought-out questions like these.”

In any case, it’s an honor to be duped by Blacksnake and BBQ—even if they think my questions are subpar.

Eagle Twin

UT riffers melt audience's faces

Posted // August 30,2012 - The Riff. The almighty ostinato. What is the Power of the Riff? Well, it’s a two-day, bi-coastal metal festival and, as of about a week ago, it’s from whence   Eagle Twin came. “I’ve come to think of riffs as these bigger-than-life things,” says singer-guitarist Gentry Densley. “They’re kind of universal in a way, you know? Like mythology—where it’s passed down. And there are certain archetypal things about it. It’s almost like this big entity you can channel through instruments and walls of amps. I don’t know what the power of it is, but it definitely can move people.”
Densley and drummer Tyler Smith played the West Coast edition of record label Southern Lord’s popular festival. Virtually every band on the schedule, whether considered stoner, doom, sludge, punk or experimental, is quite handy with the riff—which, by the way, is a short repeated musical pattern. In metal, that’s the low, guttural guitar sound that causes fans to thrust devil horns in the air. For unifying an audience, it’s as good or better than an anthemic chorus because it’s the harbinger of awesomeness present and yet to come.
Eagle Twin is especially adept at riffage, which Densley also likens to language. “There are different kinds of cadences or phrases or things that you can add to and subtract from,” he says. “It happens best when you let it flow.”
Since forming in 2007, Densley and Smith have cultivated such fluency. Their shows are legendary face-melters where the songs can go on walkabout through hyperbolic forests to emerge “exhausted and hoarse,” holding the severed heads of nonbelievers. Densley ascribes this to spontaneity and an unspoken negotiation between him and Smith. Densley says the fun for Eagle Twin is blurring the line between transparency and ostensible magic and “being able to shift on a dime. You gotta get the other guy on the same page—or not. You just juxtapose two ideas and … hammer it out in the moment. People tell me they like to watch that kind of chaos solidify into something.”
Eagle Twin coalesced similarly, although not through chaos. Densley is a local, almost mythical, guitar hero since his days in post-hardcore/jazz group Iceburn. That band predates, by no small margin, even the Napster-era Internet and still enjoys a cult following. Several projects later, Densley wound up in Form of Rocket with Smith. “Smashy Smashy kinda turned into Eagle Twin, in a way,” Densley says. “A lot of the ideas carried over. They just kept getting heavier, slower and louder. And a little more focused.”
Now paired as Eagle Twin, the duo has already released their sophomore album, The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale (Southern Lord), and is gaining traction. They have toured the United States, are heading to Australia and New Zealand with Russian Circles later this fall, and return for a November jaunt with Earth. Even better: Guitar World recently premiered the track “The Ballad of Job Cain Part II,” giving Densley a taste of long-deserved recognition. Densley says, “That was pretty awesome,” but modestly credits the efforts of Southern Lord and his publicist, Dave Brenner.
He’d also probably balk at lofty appraisals of his band, or giving Eagle Twin its own mythology. It’s not like they came together across vast deserts or galaxies. But there’s something there.
The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale picks up where 2009’s The Unkindness of Crows left off. In Crows, birds engaged the Sun, got burned and fell to Earth as blackened serpents. When writing Feather, Densley did “my own weird research into snakes and horned snakes and different native myths” and borrowed from poets Ted Hughes (the primary muse on Crows) and Federico García Lorca, as well as the Bible. Initially, Densley says, Eagle Twin wanted to “get back to the egg,” whether a bird’s or a snake’s. They wound up resolving to crows, but the concept is the same.
“It’s about following the arc of life,” Densley says, influenced by a period where “things were getting pretty dark in [our] lives.”
The Feather Tipped the Serpent’s Scale, then, is about suffering, punishment and ultimate transformation as the crow-snake-crow experiences a corporeal and spiritual shift. Densley realizes this is “pretty epic” and is willing to negotiate its interpretation. “It’s kind of like the music takes from everywhere but allows you to form your own aesthetic through your own filters.” As to its impact, Densley leaves that open, too. “I’m a realist and I’ll keep my day job … for now. Everything kinda builds on itself. I’m just happy to leave a good lineage. Maybe the music will outlive me.”

Music | Ch-Ch-Ch-Changey: The Legendary Porch Pounders’ Dan Weldon flips his guitar.

  As one-half of local treasures The Legendary Porch Pounders, Dan Weldon is famous from his home base of Ogden to Provo to Sun Valley to Austin. But before he and Bad Brad Wheeler found blues-folk alchemy together, the 50-something singer-songwriter-guitarist put a lot more interesting stickers on his guitar case. He’s been to Korea, Japan, Turkey and still other countries and, as Jon Bon Jovi once intoned, “seen a million faces and … rocked them all.”

Spangly stardom and filthy lucre may not have been in the cards for Weldon when he played with cover band The Movie Stars on those United Service Organization tours, but he gathered experience and stories aplenty. Like that time in Korea, must’ve been 1982 …

“It was my very first USO tour, and we’d just gotten to Korea,” Weldon begins. The band was doing 45-minute shows, and the rest of their time was theirs to make merry. Early in their Seoul engagement, Weldon got wind of “this huge music store, about the size of one of our small malls” with “hundreds of Fender guitars.” At the time, Weldon was sporting “this wild Dean guitar”—a pointy job like late Pantera guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott once played. The guitar was too flashy, too mean, for smilin’ Danny Weldon—“It definitely didn’t fit my personality”—and he was on the prowl for somethin’ better, namely a sweet little Telecaster. A trade on his mind, Weldon’s wheels started to turn. How does a Yankee, speaking virtually no Korean, wheel and deal with his no-English Korean counterpart?
“My guitar was blacklisted in Korea; they couldn’t import it,” Weldon says. “So I knew it was valuable there.” Weldon ran back to his hotel, grabbed the guitar and returned to the shop. “I could see the guy eyeballing it, and he’s really lovin’ it.” They settled on a word to describe the deal: “changey.”
The shop owner produced a scrap of paper, and the two men scribbled figures. Weldon, however, wasn’t able to convince the proprietor of the Dean’s value—“he thinks I’m just makin’ it up.” Then Weldon recalled that his bandmate had a copy of Playboy, and in among the cheesecake photos and really good articles was a featured ad for the Dean guitar that even showed its retail price.
Two cab rides later, Weldon was back at the store. The shop owner snatched the magazine out of Weldon’s hand. “[He] starts thumbing through it, not even caring about the Dean. Then he gets on this little intercom and the next thing you know, there’s 30-40 little Koreans that come out of the woodwork and they’re all thumbing through this magazine, goin’ crazy with it. They’re feeding me coffee and pastries and stuff just so I’ll sit there patiently.”
Eventually, they got back to business. Weldon got his Telecaster and an off-brand case with electric blue fur lining. En route to the hotel, he realized he forgot to keep his semi-sentimental guitar strap, a gift from his ex-wife, attached. “I knew, after all that, that I’d never be able to convince this guy that it wasn’t part of the trade,” Weldon laughs. He couldn’t go back anyway—The Movie Stars had a gig.
With the USO, says Weldon, sometimes they played for 10 people, other times many more. This particular show was at a nicer theater, there’d be good sound, good lights—and about 1,000 people. Tonight it behooved them to be “on.”
Weldon strapped on his new Tele, and the band went into “Too Much Time On My Hands” by Styx. “We’ve got a smoke machine goin’, everybody’s waiting to see this big band from the United States rock out,” Weldon says, imitating the tense, pulsating synth part: “Be-bo-be-bo-bow-bow-bowbow.”
In the song, the tension is released by a big, sustained power chord. But Weldon, a feel player, fretted the chord without looking, forgetting that the scale length on a Fender guitar is shorter than a Dean’s.
“Sometimes you can get away with hittin’ a bad chord,” he recalls, “but I hit the worst one I’d ever heard. It was freakin’ terrible. The band looked at me in amazement and I just stopped playing, held my guitar out, and flipped it off. The audience thought it was part of the show; they just went crazy.
“I hit the second chord and it was back on.”

INVDRS

Heavy Hitters: INVDRS resurrect black metal in Salt Lake City.

You’d think that describing yourselves as the only “true” black metal band in Salt Lake City would get your ass kicked somewhere along the line. But to date, nobody has yet stepped up to prove INVDRS wrong. In fact, over the past couple of years they’ve nearly single-handedly brought local interest back to the genre and reinvigorated the fan base that had given up hope of seeing another dark spawn from Zion.

Forming out of the disintegration of the band Spur in 2006, drummer Gavin Hoffman and guitarist Dave Moss looked to start a new band with a greater metal focus. They picked up bassist Sean McClaugherty and former God’s Iron Tooth singer Phil White, forming the new group based on one successful practice session while White was in town on vacation. The combination worked so well it prompted White to pull up stakes from Long Beach, Calif., to join the group. Playing random gigs and producing a three-track demo, the group quickly gained a following at Burt’s Tiki Lounge as the act to see, prompting interviews and reviews among metal worshippers and a spot on SLUG Magazine’s Localized showcase.

“I’m not one to actually pay attention to that type of thing,” Hoffman says about the fan base they’ve gained. “If we play to five people or if we play to 200, doesn’t matter to me. It’s gonna be the same show, with the same volume and the same intensity, regardless. However, the feedback we have gotten from people has been incredible.”

With momentum behind them, the group made their way into the recording studio with producer Andy Patterson, working on-and-off for a good year—or, as the band described it, “a pain-in-the-ass year.” While feeling some trepidation that they were entering the studio sooner than they were ready, INVDRS pressed on to record the best they could, throwing out the bulk of their material and keeping only what they felt was the finest. To add to the already stressful process, near the end of recording their deal with a local label fell through.

Once Patterson completed the final mix of the album, though, the band landed on its feet, signing with Oregon-based Corruption Recordings and hiring artists Sri Whipple and Damon Smith to create the impressive album art.

Reflecting on the now-finished album, Hoffman says, “As its own entity, I’m very pleased with the finished product. But I think it could have been better, which is a pretty standard way of looking at it, being as picky as we are.”

Exploring the album, Electric Church is damned heavy but somehow powerfully rhythmic. Tracks like “Black Altar” and “Church Burner” carry measures and beats that could give you a heart attack live, with thunderous chords howling from the amp. Throughout the short, eight-song experience, White’s vocals echo throughout every track as if he were gargling nails in his throat, raw emotion pouring into the mic and the singer not caring if he lost his voice mid-session, especially on songs like “Death Dealer” and “Hammers of Hell.” But the entire record bleeds passion. On every song, you hear four guys giving their all, as if nothing else matters but to drag you through the destruction and filth they concoct, leaving you deaf in their wake.
Upon the album’s completion, the band faced a lineup change, as McClaugherty’s life started to change pace due to his job, family and college. Taking his place is Julie Stutznegger (Azon), who has been a major supporter since INVDRS inception, adding a whole new level of enthusiasm and musicianship to the group. You can catch the new lineup at the Electric Church album release party this Saturday. 

Miike Snow

Happy Accidents: Miike Snow’s jackalope hops along the path of least resistance.

If you take Swedish production duo Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg—who make songs as chewy and artificially flavored as Swedish Fish candies—and mix them with Andrew Wyatt, the hairiest frontman in pop music, the result could be as scary or intriguing as, say, a jackalope. Branded as Miike Snow, though, in 2009, the trio delivered a fan-friendly self-titled debut album full of pop-dance cuts with insightful lyrics. Their ever-changing live shows feature a perverse amount of digital equipment smothering everything in heavy delay and synth. All three are well-seasoned pop-inclined producer-songwriters with loaded résumés. Wyatt was the in-house producer for Downtown Records for years and part of bands The A.M., Fires of Rome and Black Beetle. Karlsson and Winnberg, under the guise of Bloodshy & Avant, have written and produced for Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears; they’re responsible for Spears’ Grammy-winning “Toxic.” In the flippant fashion that Miike Snow has become known for, Winnberg claimed in one interview he keeps the award in a box in his attic. After the trio met through a friend, they hit it off because of a shared snarky humor as well as musical inclinations, and they began recording together in 2007. Success has come easily for them since, partly because of their collective track record and partly because they take advantage of what comes their way. For one thing, there was never a lengthy discourse to choose their band name. It came via an e-mail from a guy named Miike Snow—easy enough. As they released their first single, “Animal,” in March 2009, they wanted an image to stand behind, allowing the music to stand on its own— being recognizable pop stars is their worst fear. They asked Winnberg’s tattoo artist for help, and she almost instantly decided on the mythical jackalope. They quickly agreed and used it as their professional facade, not revealing their true identities until June 2009. Jackalopes are said to only breed during electrical storms—fitting for a band that’s so hard-wired and techsavvy. However, their approach to songwriting is more like rolling thunder than lightning bolts. There’s no pop psychology, no magic formula for success. “Our music isn’t very calculated. We just play around and whatever comes up, we go with,” says Winnberg by phone from the road. Miike Snow pulls from various music traditions, but is irreverent toward them overall: sonically dissonant yet poppy, lyrically abstract yet hook-filled; mainly, it’s a compilation of happy accidents. In the studio, sessions are loose and have a revolving door with bandmates coming and going. Whether making original songs or remixing cuts from Vampire Weekend or Passion Pit, the only stipulation is making something unique and fresh. “We like stuff that doesn’t sound like anything else, (as if) maybe someone is falling on the keyboard,” Winnberg says with a laugh, noting his own affinity for hardware and gear. “The weirder the gadget, the better. We use our gear in a completely different way than the original purpose.” He says he and his bandmates are total music nerds— geeky to the point of obsessive—which comes across in the music’s pristine production values, despite the laissez-faire approach to recording. They bring that same musical awareness to their live shows. Unlike many up-and-coming dance-pop acts that might sing along to tracks on a computer or iPod, Miike Snow play real instruments. “If we are going to play 200 shows or more (a year), we’d be fed up if we just had to push a ‘play’ button,” Winnberg says. However, they can’t perform like a typical rock band because of the intricate soundscapes they produce. Essentially, they had to invent their own way, with miles of wires coming from dozens of machines. And, at times, the system fails. “There are a lot of happy accidents. When a machine drops out—and that happens a lot because there is so much that can break down—someone has to fill that spot, and it might be cooler than the original recording,” says Winnberg. “[The music] constantly changes. We want it to be as organic as possible.” An open structure and no set length to each song creates something new every time they play “Animal” or “Plastic Jungle.” While Miike Snow aren’t as tangential as Phish or Miles Davis, Winnberg says there are influences of jazz and improvisation when the songs are played live. Adding to the performances this tour, they hired a former Thievery Corporation light engineer to create a psychedelic ambiance. As our phone conversation ended, Winnberg hinted that big improvements were in store for their upcoming fall tour. “It will be pretty crazy, something that hasn’t been done before. It will be pretty mind-blowing.”

The Wood Brothers

Posted // August 30,2012 - Oliver Wood is surrounded by a sea of boxes and packing peanuts. Things are in a bit of disarray as his family settles into their Nashville, Tenn., home of three weeks.
For the former Atlanta resident, it was due time to move to a smaller locale, to “take a family adventure,” while landing in a city with an impressive music scene, especially in the country & blues bent of The Wood Brothers Wood’s first change in residency as an adult—to Atlanta—was also about pursuing music. Oliver and his younger brother, Chris—of avant-groove New York City-based jazz band Medeski, Martin & Wood—both left their family home in Boulder, Colo., about two decades ago. Although the two learned to play under the same roof (Oliver even gave Chris his first bass), it took until the late ’90s for them to reconnect, when Oliver sat in on a MMW set.
It was “so fun and felt so natural” that not long after that, the Woods brothers struck out to write some material together during a family reunion. Their first songs including “Tried & Tempted,” a tune that made its way eventually into the duo’s 2005 debut, Ways Not to Lose.
“There’s a connection you get from playing with someone for years and years; there’s a little telepathy,” Wood says. “Chris and I felt that immediately.”
Between their split and reacquaintance, both musicians forged ahead in their respective careers and genres. Chris blazed new roads in trip-jazz and funk-bop with MMW, while Oliver sang the blues over mean and fiery-hot ’Lanta licks as Tinsley Ellis’ guitarist, and later with his own band, King Johnson.
“We cut our teeth and went to the school of the road and really found our identities—both musically and personally—so, when we finally got together, it was really fun to unite the two opposing things and see how they fit together,” Wood says. They matured separately, thereby avoiding a clichéd brothers-band (think Oasis, The Black Crowes, etc.).
“I’m hoping my brother’s family will move [to Nashville] one day as well,” Wood says. Currently, they live 900 miles apart—a distance that makes rehearsal difficult. However, they’ve managed to produce four studio albums this way, including two Blue Note Records releases: their latest, Smoke Ring Halo (2011), on Zac Brown’s imprint, Southern Ground, and an album of covers, Up Above My Head.
In concert, the brothers, now accompanied by drummer/percussionist Jano Rix, borrow heavily from classics in the American music catalog. On songs like “Ain’t No More Cane” (traditional), “Fixing a Hole” (The Beatles), “Get Out of My Life Woman” (Allen Toussaint) and more, they honor their influences while putting a creative spin on them.
“Our goal when we do a cover song is not to be true to the original necessarily at all. Our goal is to put our own stamp on it,” Wood says. “We get inspired and feel songs in the same way [as the original writers], but it comes out different because we do it in a three-piece acoustic way.”
Don’t let the word “acoustic” mislead you, though. The Wood Brothers, in their simple, refined ways, merge Southern rock, Motown soul, Manhattan jazz and Heartland folk.
Much like the covers they reinterpret, Wood Brothers originals also get makeovers and have evolved over the years, which is documented on the two-volume live set, Sky High and Nail & Tooth, released this year
“We’ve sort of come full circle,” Wood says. But he’s not talking about reinterpreting old material; he’s talking about the brothers coming back to the blues, the first genre they learned as young musicians in Colorado. The flair and bravado of the more technical music that they both went on to create are behind the musicians, at least for this project, because it “gets you further and further from the emotional core of the music.”
“We’re just loving the simplicity of [the blues],” Wood says. “[We’re] just loving songs that are real and soulful and pure.”

Soundcheck Series

Workshop series for music industry advice

Posted // August 31,2012 - “You must surrender the sickness of wanting to be creative to a higher power,” said Nashville songwriter Jason Deere at  Soundcheck Series’ latest workshop Aug. 8 at Metcom Studios in Salt Lake City. The standing-room-only audience used pens, pencils and keyboards to eagerly jot down words as Deere waxed on the makings of a successful songwriting career.
The Soundcheck Series is where many local musicians can receive industry advice that they can’t get by playing in area coffee shops and bars. Soundcheck promises to “bring Grammy winners, producers, publishers and other industry pros from places like Los Angeles and Nashville” to Salt Lake City and Utah County for workshops.
Soundcheck director Russ Dixon says that by attending the various Soundcheck Series workshops, local musicians can “make amazing connections and learn a lot about the music industry without flying out to Los Angeles or Nashville, spending all their money and coming back having only met one or two people.”
Since its resurrection in 2010, after a brief launch in 2006, Soundcheck has held near-monthly workshops with industry folks like Finn Bjarnson, Tyrone Wells (on being an indie artist vs. major-label signee) and Neon Trees’ Tyler Glenn (on songwriting) on a wide-ranging base of topics.
The most recent workshop with Deere, however, felt as much like a motivational sermon as a workshop on becoming a published songwriter. Deere, who has worked with big names like Katy Perry, Jessica Simpson, Lady Antebellum and LeAnn Rimes, spent most of the evening relating his success in the music business to his unwavering faith in God. Dixon introduced Deere as the “most passionate” person in the music industry, and that manifested itself in the form of tears from Deere five or six times throughout the two-hour lecture.
While this has rarely been the case at the roughly 40 previous workshops, know that your mileage may vary. Dixon says that some artists want to tell their story, like Deere, while others relate more logistical information.
Deere did share a few strategies of making it in the music world. He told the room that aspiring musicians must have “TRT: Tactful Relentless Tenacity,” and they must find out how to get as much of themselves through the “commercial keyhole” in order to make it.
The Soundcheck workshop is not just about teaching the logistics of the music industry, it’s also about getting inspired—be it by personal anecdotes or hearing success stories in the struggling music biz—and networking at the events.
“There are people here who are great studio musicians, vocalists and songwriters, and you wouldn’t know it just by looking at them, but I know it,” Dixon said. “Guys and girls in this room have done amazing things together.”

 

All Together Now

Sacred Harp members find their voice.

The human voice is the most natural instrument; the first device we use to meet our most primal survival needs as well as to relay individuality and emotion. While vocal music has long provided an avenue of expression for human aspiration, it was the revolutionary spirit of American colonists that created a new form of choral expression, one that would reflect the rules and regulations of a new world. Just like a democratic form of government, Sacred Harp singing was intended to make all voices equal. Created in 18th century England, it didn’t really gain in popularity until coming to America with the colonists. Initially a method to teach singing to those untrained in music, it had critics in New England and finally migrated to the South in the latter half of the 1800s. Eventually The Sacred Harp, a repertoire book referred to as the Cooper Book by the Utah chapter, solidified the style of simple harmonies, and “shape note” singing has withstood assaults by those who would “improve” it ever since.

There are now Sacred Harp groups all over the country, and the local one is organized by Jenny Jenson, although “organization” isn’t quite the word to use for it. Jensen explains, “It’s not a performance, there is no lead voice, and people can participate whenever they want.” These people sing for the sheer joy of it. She admits that it’s all one volume; there are no dynamics and it can sound a bit harsh at first.

The texts are overtly Christian, but the group is nondemoninational, and their meetings are not religious services. “We sing in churches because they’ve opened their doors to us,” she explains. The group has been at All Saints Episcopal Church for four years, and before that at This Is the Place State Park—where Sacred Harp members were also welcome—for five. The fewest number of people required is four, one for each part of the vocal harmony. “We’ve never had to go home for too few people,” she notes. Their last gathering included 13, although they’ve had as many as 400. “Some people are regulars, and some only visit once. You either love it or hate it.” Anyone in the group can pick out a song, and they arrive at “singing the pitch’s convenience” in a range that they can all sound comfortably. No one brings an agenda, and she has found “I’ve made some nice friendships I wouldn’t have made otherwise.” The group usually flourishes in college towns, and she says it has become especially popular among BYU students.

Sacred Harp singers from all over the country connect on Fasola.org, an online community that also hosts get togethers including an annual summer singing camp in Alabama.

“We have found it easy to communicate over the Internet,” Jensen says, “but there’s also the possibility to mutate. Things outside the tradition tend to stay outside.”

With occasional new additions to the repertoire, it’s a tradition that appears alive and well. The movement gained some notice several years ago when it was featured in the movie Cold Mountain, and the DVD extrasincluded Sacred Harp gatherings. The documentary film Awake, My Soul came out in 2008 after seven years in production.

All this demonstrates that there is still an urge within people to let the vocal chords flail in expression of something deeply held inside. It’s one of those things you can’t quite fathom until you’ve witnessed it for yourself, and then you understand their fervor, and the freedom the lack of criticism gives them. Like democracy, every voice is heard with equal weight, and though the results sometimes aren’t pretty, there’s a value in the activity taking place. The unpredictability can be exciting: “You never know who’s going to show up; anything could happen,” she explains.

“It‘s different every time. The first few years, we sounded really ragged. But, once you get it in your ear, when you try to sing something else, it’s difficult.”

Roll Call

Dave Payne’s Old-School Tracks

Sometime after 6 a.m., David Payne is on Fox 13’s Good Day Utah. It’s disorienting.

Payne’s just not a 6 a.m. dude. Salt Lake City’s own Thin White Duke is most often out late, rocking onstage with one of several bands—Red Bennies, Glinting Gems, Ether Orchestra, Starmy and Purr Bats. He strolls casually next to Fox 13’s jolly Big Budah—a stark contrast to Payne’s tall, lanky, blackclad figure and casual deadpan demeanor.

It’s very Interview With the Vampire. Indeed, Payne seems to feast on Budah, denying any knowledge of old school hiphop artist Kurtis Blow—“I know who he is,” Payne says later—and, playing along with the local news morning show hijinks, themselves contrary to Payne’s, for lack of a better word, hipster cool. More askew, however, is Budah’s use of the word “principal” when addressing Payne. Like he’s suddenly the head administrator of an educational institution, the Principal Skinner to someone’s Bart. Turns out Payne is in fact the big man on campus—at the Rock ‘N’ Roll Academy. It’s a role for which he’s well suited. The son of a 1970s singer-songwriter and vocalist mother, he has a slew of musical siblings, Payne has also played in umpteen local rock bands. If there’s one guy in town who should be running a school for potential rockers, it’s Principal Payne.

A day after Payne’s Fox 13 appearance, he’s outside City Weekly’s satellite office (aka my humble abode), swinging in silhouette on the adjacent playground. Dismounting his perch, Payne approaches in a gait that combines rock & roll swagger and Transylvanian nobility—with the faintest hint of videogame-geek awkwardness. He holds a spool of 50-75 compact discs. “I actually don’t have an iPod,” he says. “But I have a stack of CDs in my car that is pretty random.”

No matter. There’s enough variety among the stack or pre-recorded silver discs and burned CD-Rs with scribbled titles. Many of the discs are by Payne’s own bands and fellow locals like Tolchock Trio and defunct punk group Knvs. There are several CDs by his father, Marvin Payne, and the cover band he and his sons recently formed. One disc—from Time-Life’s The Story of Soul collection—jumps out, as does a copy of Tears for Fears’ The Hurting. Both, the new Portishead, a Small Faces album and a little sumpin’-sumpin’ from bass funkateer Betty Davis (suh-weet). I play “shuffle” and select a few for review as Principal Payne briefs me on his activities.

“I became a father,” he says of the twin daughters born to him and wife/Glinting Gems bandmate Leena two years ago. Fatherhood has slightly impacted his rock & roll lifestyle. Each of his bands remains active, and he estimates he plays between one and five gigs per month including a weekly event at The Urban Lounge called “Time to Talk ’Tween Songs.”

“I like to talk to my friends at shows,” he says, “but I hate to have to yell over the music.” It’s a strange declaration from the guy who fronts one of Salt Lake City’s loudest bands (the Bennies), but he has a point, and the idea of seeing a revolving cast of local bands play at a reasonable volume is appealing. Especially since it means hearing some bombastic Bennies songs and Gems gems rendered in entirely new arrangements—like a whole “Indian thing,” replete with electric sitar.

Fatherhood also inspired Payne to get a day job playing shepherd to Salt Lake City’s upcoming rock royalty. He started as a faculty member at Paul Green’s School of Rock in Sandy. When one student’s father approached Payne about opening another school, “I moonlighted there for a while until they fired me—as well they should have.” Payne enjoys his work at the Academy where he can—alongside fellow local musicians Mike Sartain (Starmy), Shane Asbridge (Laserfang) and Greg Midgley (Rubes, Rodeo Boys)—teach youngsters that music is about “personal expression” and not stardom. “That’s the root of my own musical experience, so that’s the best place to start teaching them.”

Retribution Gospel Choir

Loud Learning: Retribution Gospel Choir steps out of Low’s comfort zone.

Alan Sparhawk is still learning how to become a responsible performer. As the man who has guided solemn indie-rock act Low for more than 15 years, he is no stranger to the stage, but in the younger, livelier Retribution Gospel Choir, the guitarist/vocalist is exploring areas he isn’t certain how to navigate. “There’s some little luxury in Low,” Sparhawk says. “I was able to trust in the moment.”

In his older band, Sparhawk could “completely fall apart with an arrangement” during a show, and if he did, his wife/Low drummer Mimi Parker would be there to rescue him. This is not the case with Retribution. Instead, if Sparhawk screws up, his bandmates (bassist Steve Garrington and drummer Eric Pollard) are more liable to keep on without him. Thinking that something can go wrong and not be repaired immediately is an idea that gives the frontman an adrenaline rush. “Those moments still happen one out of eight shows, and it confuses the hell out of me,” Sparhawk says. “Part of the excitement of the band is that it can be that risky.”

Failure is a concept that threatens to affect the one-time Utah resident and BYU student, too. When a song doesn’t work for a few minutes, it means a few lost minutes for the audience. “There are only so many shows you see in your life, and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time,” he says.

While Sparhawk had been familiar with Garrington and Pollard before forming Retribution, he fell into playing with them by happenstance. After Low was once forced to back out of a local bill, Sparhawk decided to pull in the other two players for the concert. Instantly, he knew that this combination would go on to outlast a fill-in spot.

Sparhawk describes his partners as “perfectionists” and adds that each has a knack for improv. He testifies to their abilities (Garrington, for example, has a past in jazz) in a way he wouldn’t dare speak of himself. “We’re not playing jazz or anything, but there’s something about a bold jazz background that comes into play if you’re willing to jump off the cliff with a rock three-piece,” relates Sparhawk. “There’s a level of musicianship these guys have that’s beyond my understanding. “ Aside from the fresh cast, the major difference between Retribution Gospel Choir and Low lies in the thresholds of volume each adopts. While the soporific Low sticks to subdued, docile limits, Retribution’s Americana-bred indie-rock is cranked up to quake amps. Adds Sparhawk, “With Low, it was very much about trying to sound large but be quiet,” while his current group is willing to go both large and loud.

Amplification is a key component to Retribution’s approach to music, but it’s hardly the only interesting thing about the band. The soaring guitars and crisp drums give off a wistful, agitated spark, and Sparhawk emits a cry that rotates between thoughtful and passionately pained (sometimes both at once). Comparisons to Crazy Horse have become ubiquitous in the press, which is a notion that sets off an intriguing chain of comments from Sparhawk. “I grew up a couple hours south of Neil Young and two, three hours south of Bob Dylan. There’s something about being isolated on the edge of the glacier there. You feel this will to grab a hold of and ingest this open expanse.”
Sparhawk talks about music like a man more fascinated by raw emotion than cultivated skills. In that spirit, he is not afraid of things going wrong in public. “I’ve had shit thrown at me in Phoenix. I told 25,000 people in Madison Square Garden that they’re a bunch of pigs. Sure, something could totally throw me off, but I don’t care,” he says. “It’s worth taking that chance because I want to be free.” 

Summer 2012 Music Fests

   

With Desert Rocks Festival and the Ogden Bluegrass & Acoustic Music Festival from oh-so-early in the summer behind us, the festival outlook for these hot, hot months might seem bleak. Two words: road trip! Options abound in the Intermountain West, from intimate affairs to colossal music carnivals—the choice is yours.

Targhee Country Festival
It gets pretty damned hot in Nashville in the summer, so it seemed like a good idea to bring the city—or, at least, some of its crooners—up to cooler latitudes for the first-ever Targhee Country Festival. With best-selling Dierks Bentley headlining Thursday, and country mainstay—actually, he shows these new whippersnappers the ins and outs of traditional honky-tonk and Bakersfield country—Dwight Yoakam headlining Friday, it’s sure to be a scintillating first edition. Alta, Wyo., July 26 & 27, $35-$47 per day, $67-$75 for two-day pass, GrandTarghee.com

Oyster Ridge Music Festival
While the headliners (Young Dubliners, Nicki Bluhm & the Gramblers, Royal Bliss) are impressive for this free festival, the annual band scramble is even more so. Around 30 players throw their names into a hat and several bands are pulled together at random. Then, they take an hour to practice before taking the stage in competition for fame—or infamy. Kemmerer, Wyo., July 27-29, free, OysterRidgeMusicFestival.com

RockyGrass Festival
It’s been 40 years since Bill Monroe and the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society founded what’s now called RockyGrass Festival. This three-day event carries the intimate charm of the early days of the now bigger but one year younger Telluride Bluegrass Festival (run by the same folks, Planet Bluegrass), yet boasts an insanely amazing acoustic-music lineup. Lyons, Colo., July 27-29, sold out, Bluegrass.com

Sawtooth Music Festival
What had been a one-day festival since its inception, the Sawtooth Music Festival launched a Friday-night pre-festival concert in 2010, which was so successful it turned the event into a two-day spectacle—Idaho’s biggest little music festival. The Cave Singers and Langhorne Slim headline. Stanley, Idaho, July 27 & 28, $15-$45 per day, $50-$55 for weekend pass, SawtoothMusicFestival.com

Targhee Bluegrass Festival
At 8,000 feet above sea level and sitting in the shadows of the Grand Tetons, Targhee Bluegrass Festival’s locale is as cool as the caliber of musicians it attracts—and without all the fuss over the other, bigger mountain bluegrass festival in Telluride. Truth be told, even the artists feel like they’re on vacation. Leftover Salmon, Del McCoury Band, David Grisman Quintet, Infamous Stringdusters and Donna the Buffalo lead a killer lineup. Alta, Wyo., Aug. 10-12, $45-$65 per day, $119-$159 for weekend pass, GrandTarghee.com

NedFest
Nestled in the Front Range just west of Boulder, Nederland is a place all its own. Homegrown brews—among other “homegrown” things—and music make it magical. The powerhouse trio of Steve Kimock, Keller Williams and Kyle Hollingsworth along with Melvin Seals backed by the Jerry Garcia Band make this fest one not to be missed. Nederland, Colo., Aug. 24-26, $35-$55 per day, $105 for two-day pass, $130 for three-day pass, NedFest.org

The Mynabirds

Omaha band makes a return flight

 The Mynabirds' Laura Burhenn

Posted // August 2,2012 - A catchy tune is always welcome, but it’s even better when the singer brings something personal to bear. Secretly, you want to believe that beyond the artifice of the stage and the performance, there’s a real person whose art communicates something authentic. So, let it be known that  The Mynabirds' Laura Burhenn is just as wild, soulful and seductively intelligent in conversation as she is on her two very different albums.
Her latest, Generals, departs from the lush, baroque ’60s pop and sultry Dusty Springfield-soul sway of 2010’s What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood into a moodier, grittier, more exotic, less orchestrated sound. Center stage is Burhenn’s smoky, shimmying croon, sidling over songs that highlight the political and social fissures quaking beneath our feet.
“It does kind of go all over the place and we have different people or inspirations in mind on different pieces. For example, I feel on ‘Disaster,’ there’s just as much Tribe Called Quest as Low-era David Bowie,” Burhenn says from her Omaha home between discussions about string theory and love. “I think of this album as an expressionist album, where the last album was more like paint-by-numbers in that we picked colors—we drew the outline and we filled it in. It felt very much like a cohesive thing. This one, it was all kinds of different canvasses from moment to moment.”
She wrote the album—much like the last one—largely in the shower. She had been trying to get away from writing on guitar (as she’d done most of her life) when she discovered her new hot-and-cold rehearsal space. She confided at the time of her debut that she was also wandering around her house banging a tambourine trying to make up songs.
While she still relied on the shower, she also purchased an old drum set with the intent of making this a more rhythmic album. You can hear it on tracks like “Body of Work,” bouncing over a sputtering Latin-tinged beat with pulsing keyboards that recall the electro-folk of Beth Orton.
Burhenn received a lot of help with the arrangements from Richard Swift, who also produced her first album. A talented singer/songwriter in his own right and touring keyboardist for The Shins, Swift shepherded Burhenn through the rough patches and intermittent catch-as-catch-can recording schedule.
“At one point, I lost my voice for a week or two. I’m writing this album totally about having a voice and totally losing mine,” she chuckles. “It was intense, but at that point Richard and I were really close friends and we kind of holed up in the studio, and we kind of went to the next level of consciousness that week.”
Originally from Washington, D.C., Burhenn had self-released some solo music before she connected with John Davis (Q & Not U) to form the duo Georgie James. They imploded in ’08 after one very well-received album. The band’s breakup accompanied a romantic dissolution for Burhenn and she fled to Omaha, right into the arms of Bright Eyes. After licking her wounds and touring with the band for a while, she started anew with The Mynabirds, vowing to keep her eye on the prize this time.
“We were both surprised at the success of the project, and pleasantly so. Then to have that pulled out from under me was a shock,” Burhenn says. “Suddenly, I have this fear, I’ve been making music for 10 years, and what if I don’t bounce back? What if that’s the pinnacle of my musical career and those are my glory days?
“What I did is I just set out to write a record that was in my heart, so if the record failed I could at least say that I made something that was 100 percent true to what I was,” Burhenn continues. “I felt like it was sort of what I was meant to say, what I was meant to do with my life. As long as I felt I was true to that, then I didn’t care if I sold a single record.”
If she keeps making music this sultry and inviting, she’ll sell a lot more than that. 

The Lewis Bros.

Making food truckin' sound good

  The Lewis Bros.

Posted // August 2,2012 - A week after opening, with vintage customized red and off-white paint still fresh on the leased truck, the Lewis Bros.—Charlie and Oliver—cook up banh mi (Asian pork sandwiches) and kimchi hot dogs on the curb in front of Nobrow Coffee. However, for these two local music stalwarts and audiophiles, one thing’s missing: a radio.
“With the amount of moisture, heat and grease in a food truck, something like a car stereo is probably on a six-month replacement schedule,” Charlie says. “Once we get the stereo in, we’ll be a rock & roll food truck, finally.”
The catalyst for the truck itself, which started serving July 3 and whose location you can track on   Twitter.com/LewisBrosFood, can essentially be traced back to rock & roll.
First, it’s worth noting the siblings’ musical history in Salt Lake City. They formed their first band in 1998 while in high school. In 2000, Oliver branched out with Tolchock Trio, which has been his musical mainstay (“He hasn’t been as much of a ‘band whore,’ as we call ’em, as I have,” Charlie says). Around that same time, The Rubes started up, with Charlie playing drums; he’s also played in The Wolves, Band of Annuals and “a bunch of groups that are too many to name.” The brothers currently play together in the Salt Lake Electric Ensemble.
Beginning in 2009, the brothers both worked—mostly carpentry—at Eva for friend/restaurateur Charlie Perry, and got a firsthand look at how a restaurant is run. “It just got the gears turning to do our own food venture at some point,” Charlie says after a busy lunch shift; Oliver snuck away to buy groceries. Charlie has since stopped working at Eva because of heavy touring with Band of Annuals.
Although that band broke up, the extensive traveling became lucrative for food-truck research with stops in Seattle, New York City and Austin, all of which have incredible four-wheel food possibilities. “That’s when I really got into the idea,” Charlie says.
Aside from those travels, Charlie cites David Chang of Momofuku as a major culinary inspiration: “He’s just done some of the more exciting food of the last few years, and influenced a lot of people doing food trucks.” And the simple name and design of the Lewis Bros. truck makes it a blank canvas, as in that the current Asian bent might change. The recipes for a few of their menu items—like the kimchi fries—were created right on the truck.
The spirit of constant, evolving creation makes sense, because creativity is the commonality between the musical and culinary arts. “I think the creative part of your brain becomes developed after a certain number of years, whether you’re working with food or art or music,” Charlie says, adding that, as musicians, the brothers have confidence in creative pursuits, skills at problem solving and that indie, DIY attitude.
The rock & roll lifestyle also puts Lewis Bros. food truck at another advantage, Charlie muses. “We’re aware of nightlife opportunities; we know how those spots work,” he says. There aren’t many local food trucks that will stick it out on the streets to serve the fourth meal. The Lewis Bros. have found a niche—“late-night delicious munchie food”—and will be out serving till 2 a.m. when after-concert and last-call hunger strikes.
So, once they get the stereo in and start rocking, it leaves one question: Will these musicians host Lewis Bros. food truck concerts? “Yup ...” and after a pause, Charlie corrects himself. “I’m staying mum on that. We’ve got lots of big ideas.” 

Lightning Bolt

They just can't, just won't stop

Posted // September 6,2012 - It’s nigh impossible to imagine now, but yes, there was a time when a Lightning Bolt performance did not immediately mean pure frenzy. In 2004, the noise/punk-rock duo played their very first concert while attending the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, R.I., the city that still serves as the home base of drummer/ vocalist Brian Chippendale and bassist Brian Gibson. Chippendale recalls stray details of the inaugural show—a TV displaying red static sat in front of the bass drum for lighting, a Walkman played a noise loop to supplement the band, the set consisted of three songs played to maybe a dozen friends—but by and large, it was remarkably unremarkable.
“People just sort of stood around and checked us out. It wasn’t wild in any way,” Chippendale says. “The shows got wild quickly, though.”
Since then, Lightning Bolt’s reputation as a preeminent live outfit has been their most attractive trait. The pair immerses themselves in blaring volumes, high-speed playing—Chippendale is a particularly savage presence, thrashing away at his kit and screeching through the mic lodged in his homemade mask—and the audiences themselves. More often than not, an opportunity to witness the group in person means focusing your attention on happenings on the floor rather than the stage, as they are fond of swiftly setting up right in the center in a room. This taste for “guerrilla gigs” has informed Lightning Bolt outside of conventional music spaces, too, with the band playing on terrain such as sidewalks and parking lots.
At the outset, the party-friendly band’s preference for playing within crowds was rooted in pragmatic purpose—they felt physically removed from their peers when onstage and moved closer to close the gap—but over time, Chippendale has realized other pleasures, too.
“There’s a certain casualness that the audience feels toward the band. I don’t know if it helps them loosen up, but it just seems to sort of have a positive energy about it,” he says, noting his fascination for the increased potential for things going wrong. “Aspects of my drumming have been informed by being knocked off a beat by something and having to learn how to play beats that are allowed to fall apart and then come back together, just [so I can] step over a kid or something. It’s almost forced me to become a jazzier player just to dodge the missiles that are flying my way.”
That same juxtaposition between fun and danger runs deep within the group’s sound on record. A Lightning Bolt record is a barrage of elements—jangly, distortion-soaked bass lines, cymbals making clatter that’s the best kind of amateurish, unintelligible lyrics propelled from the bottom of Chippendale’s chest—that ultimately sound coherent through sheer force of will. There’s something profoundly, wonderfully naive about how committed the band members are to banging out their songs and engaging audiences, but also something sinister about the unruly nature of their sound and how sincerely they are compelled to maintain such aggression show after show.
While yes, relatively chilled-out songs exist in their discography—two examples are “Colossus” and “Rain on the Lake I’m Swimming In” off 2009’s Earthly Delights, their fifth and most recent record—but Chippendale has little faith that he could calm down for good. “Everything I do, I get really wound up, and I take it a little too far. That’s just the nature of what I do,” he says, considering an option offered in this interview about a particularly strange place for him to end up. “I don’t know how I’ll feel in 20 years. I’ll definitely be more mellow I think. Things will have to have changed to some extent. Maybe I will get a job as a backing band in a Mexican restaurant or something. But as far as I can project forward, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.” 

Henry Rollins

Spoken-word war on capitalism

  Henry Rollins

Posted // September 13,2012 - When you have at least six full-time jobs and one is trying to change the world, do you sleep? “Yeah,”  Henry Rollins says. “At least five hours. That’s kind of what you get during the workweek. But if you keep the nutrition up, you can get by on that.”
Oh, and he has time to eat right? It’s no big deal, on top of being a publisher, writing books/blogs/articles, doing spoken-word tours, acting, hosting a radio show and fighting for civil rights. And that list once included hosting his own IFC talk show and fronting Black Flag and The Rollins Band. He more than gets by—he’s a machine.
“I’d rather sleep longer,” Rollins says via phone from his office. Given his druthers, he’d sleep in. But he likes working late; creativity hits between midnight and four. And when he’s off the road, he mans the office, which opens at 8:45 a.m. “There are a lot of obligations.”
It’s not much different than the average grind; he’s just working for the weekend. “Friday is my big night to howl ... my big, adult kickass night. But I’m an incredibly boring person. I go out and get coffee and write in my notebook, then I listen to records at home. It’s not a bad way to spend the night.”
As for boring? Riiiight. Ripped, with hair shorn tight and the penetrating gaze of a drill sergeant, Rollins is an intense and imposing presence. When he speaks, you listen; he commands respect and doesn’t rant aimlessly. The well-read autodidact speaks with a deep-seated conviction he’s honed since grade school in Washington, D.C.
Born in D.C. in 1961, by the late 1960s, he was neck-deep in racial turmoil on his grade school playground, where he was routinely shoved around for being white. “I was fairly terrified; it doesn’t take much for a 7-year-old kid to cry. When you don’t understand racism, you don’t understand what you’ve done to deserve that.
“It never made me want to be racist; it made me want to push against it. What politicized me was seeing the disparity between classes of people up close.”
Feeling obliged to destroy disparity is what drives Rollins in his endeavors. His current spoken-word tour, Capitalism, confronts similar inequities—but it’s not a diatribe against capitalism. “I don’t think capitalism is bullshit. It’s out of control. It’s unregulated. People won’t play on a level playing field. They hire lobbyists to go in and regulate and screw people. Like the Koch brothers—that’s the kind of capitalism that gets people killed.”
He says we need capitalism, but it has to be equitable. “You don’t have to be a bastard about it. Capitalism is a weapon you have to use very carefully. It’s rope; you can build a bridge with it or you can hang yourself. I live in a capitalist society, a consumer-driven economy. People buy my books, and I can pay my bills. So I don’t have a problem with capitalism until these sons of bitches come in and rip people’s heads off with it.
“There’s something to be said for moral rectitude,” Rollins continues, “having a civic and a moral compass. I’m talking to you from California. You’re in Utah. I consider your state my neighbor. If something happens there, I can’t go, ‘Oh, sucks to be you.’ I have a responsibility to help you; we’re fellow Americans. So that is how I go at capitalism: morality.”
It’s how Rollins goes about everything. When his call waiting beeps, announcing his next interview, he has to go. Now. No final question; he has an obligation. He’s already given a meaty interview, so it’s totally cool. But 30 minutes later, his manager e-mails, “Henry just shot me an e-mail asking me to let you know that he’d be happy to answer a few questions if you had more.”

Kurt Vile

TCS opener brings a loud buzz

 Kurt Vile

Talk to most musicians garnering a lot of attention in the media, and they’ll tell you they don’t pay it any mind.

Not so for Kurt Vile.

The young singer/songwriter, whose work has elicited comparisons to everyone from classic rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty to less mainstream acts like Animal Collective and Leo Kottke, fully admits to keeping up with his own hype.

“I do it a little less now, but I used to do it all the time,” Vile says in an interview from the road, where he’s basically lived since the release of his 2011 album, Smoke Ring For My Halo. He speaks in a surfer/stoner drawl punctuated with words like “Dude!” and “Stoked!”—an affectation you wouldn’t expect from the sensitive, almost bluesy lo-fi songs populating Smoke Ring.

“I take [media attention] as a compliment,” he says. “I’ve always been driven to get my music out there and just to do the music itself. At the beginning, I didn’t know exactly how to do it. You have to catch a break, basically, to get someone to listen to something they’ve never heard of. It took so long, but it was all really exciting.”

Vile acknowledges that not all he’s read about himself has been good—“I get a lot of shit-talking, too”—but the negatives have surely been dwarfed by the overwhelmingly positive response to Smoke Ring. It’s his second album for Matador Records, and it has allowed Vile to visit places he’s never been and tour with some of his heroes like Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

“I’ve been a lot of places with this record that I haven’t been before. I guess this is the record and this is the tour where I’m seeing much better turnouts and stuff like that,” Vile says, still sounding surprised at his success.

“We got to Denmark and had sold out a pretty big place, and that just weirded me out because we hadn’t been there before at all. You’re playing a big enough venue that you’re disconnected from the crowd—it’s not a pub. And it was full of Danish people, so it was a little like being on a different planet.”

Vile might find Salt Lake City to seem just as foreign for a laid-back dude who just wants to play tunes and chill, although being one of 10 siblings could give Vile something to relate to, with our family-friendly populace.

This will be Vile’s first trip to Utah’s capital; he didn’t even know it was a mountain town until I mentioned it to him. “Where would you be driving to even pass through there?” he asked at one point, and when I mentioned the interstate between Denver and San Francisco, he remembered some long-ago family trip that might have taken him through town.

In other words, Vile’s Twilight show will be a chance for both the performer and the city to make a memorable first impression. The 20,000 to 30,000 people who will fill Pioneer Park will surely make an impression on Vile; he gasped “Oh my gosh!” when I told him the size of the shows, and proclaimed himself “Totally stoked!”

For his part, expect Vile to impress, too. Smoke Ring For My Halo is one of the best albums of the year, with songs like the delicate “Baby’s Arms,” the heavy riffs of “Puppet to the Man” and the orchestral sprawl of “Society Is My Friend” showcasing an artist with a lot to say and an endlessly inventive array of ways to do so.

In fact, Vile is already thinking up new ways to proceed.

“I’m not thinking of sounding the same as Smoke Ring,” Vile says. “My songwriting style or songs are always going to have a Kurt Vile feel, but more and more, I don’t think I’m going to break any insane ground, songwriting-wise. But recording-wise and arrangement-wise, I’ll continue to try and break some of my own ground.”

Calexico

Cinematic sound at Urban Lounge

 Calexico

“Cinematic” is one adjective one might use to describe Calexico, the band led by Joey Burns and John Convertino that infuses traditional rock with mariachi horns and a dash of spaghetti-Western pedal-steel.

That adjective is even more accurate given the band’s activities of late. Calexico has spent the past couple of years primarily in Tucson, Ariz., working on the soundtracks for films like the documentary Circo and 2011 Sundance film The Guard, which is being released to American theaters as we speak.

The Guard is a bit of a buddy-cop-comedy-meets-action flick set in the remote western edge of Ireland—not exactly a setting that seems a natural fit for Calexico’s Spanish-influenced blend of indie-rock, country and even jazz.

“I think that is a good tip-off on the direction of writer and director John Michael McDonagh. He wanted to break the mold of what a Western could be,” Burns says.

The same could be said of Calexico, whose sound at times seems to come right off an Ennio Morricone soundtrack. But as easy as it is to connect Calexico’s sound with the Mexican border near Tucson, Burns considers his band’s sound more worldly than that.

“It’s evocative of a sense of place,” Burns says of Calexico’s sound. “Not necessarily the Southwest. We have a lot of music that’s dreamy or atmospheric that you might hear on NPR. Then again, there’s the full-blown Western stuff that gets used on The Sopranos. We kind of run the gamut.”

Calexico’s sound has drawn the band an ever-growing following. Many of those fans are fellow musicians like Neko Case and Richmond Fontaine’s Willy Vlautin, who have made their way to Tucson to work with Burns and Convertino to try to capture some of that Southwestern grit in their own music.

“It takes a certain amount of character to come down here because you’re really confronted with yourself, and that can be hard for some people,” Burns says. “You realize when you’re here that you’re surrounded by this beautiful and scary Sonoran Desert. I think it’s important to keep that perspective in mind when you’re writing or recording.”

The environment certainly works for Burns’ band. Calexico is working on a new studio album, set to arrive in 2012, but first they’re doing some touring and opening for Amos Lee—another artist who made the trek to work with Calexico in Tucson—along with headlining some dates.

“There are some bands who really don’t like touring at all. We’re not one of them. We love touring,” Burns says. “We feed off that dynamic, and playing on a stage helps amplify our acoustic sound. And I love collaborating with the audience and getting that energy.”