OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW INTERVIEW

STRINGS 'N THINGS

Old Crow Medicine Show bring their old-time stylings back to Virginia

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: August 15, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/music/

UNPLUGGED IN: Old Crow  keep the energy high acoustically.

From the foot-stomping fiddling of the raucous "Carry Me Back to Virginia," to the folksy acoustic guitar strums of the Dylanesque "Ain't It Enough," to the bittersweet harmonies of the ruminative "Ways of Man," Old Crow Medicine Show's new Carry Me Back (ATO) delivers twelve tunes that, as the title hints, carry the band way, way back through decades and decades of American popular song. Indeed, if it weren't for the crisp production, one could easily mistake just about any of the tracks here for a long-lost field recording of an Appalachian string-band hootenanny, replete with dueling banjos and thumping upright bass, as well as plenty of fleet-fingered clawhammer picking and a touch of sonorous accordion flexing. Just strings and things that you don't gotta plug in. 

The Old Crow boys – multi-instrumentalists Critter Fuqua, Ketch Secor, Chance McCoy, and Gill Landry, along with bassist Morgan Jahnig and "guitjo" player Kevin Hayes – have been putting their own often revved-up spin on folk genres that pre-date the electrified dawn of rock and roll for nearly 15 years. But the band's real roots go back further, to the early days of the alt-rock ’90s, when Fuqua and Secor, two of the last remaining members of the original line-up of a band that's seen a number of players come and go, began their musical partnership. They were both junior high schoolers in Harrisonburg, VA, and, as Fuqua recalls from a tour stop in Vermont, old-time string-band music wasn't on their radar just yet.

“I grew up with the same kind of stuff in my household that most kids my age did," he says. "And I really wasn't that different from most of my classmates. My parents listened to Neil Diamond, the Beatles, the Kingston Trio, and NPR. I was into Nirvana, Guns N’ Roses, and skateboarding. And Nirvana was really the biggest influence Ketch and I shared when we were 13 or 14. But then we started listening to Bob Dylan and I think that made us want to dig back further into the music that influenced him."

While there are echoes of early Dylan in the Old Crow repertoire, the only real vestige of Nirvana rests in the energy and attitude the band bring to the table, particularly when they're playing live, which they'll do Friday in Salem and Sunday in Charlottesville. "We may not sound like Nirvana," Fuqua readily admits, "but the drive is in there."

Fuqua and Secor's formal introduction to the musical styles they'd go on to pursue with Old Crow came by way of West Virginia's Augusta Heritage Music Center. "He went for old time banjo and I went for blues guitar," Fuqua recounts. "And we both just caught the bug."

Back in Harrisonburg, the duo hooked up with Robert St. Ours, a fellow Virginian who'd go on to start the like-minded Charlottesville string band, the Hackensaw Boys. And, happily, they found themselves in the midst of a growing scene of musicians who'd unplugged and found inspiration in old American folk idioms. "When the band we had with Robert broke up, we started the Crow and he went on to the Hackensaw Boys. . . There was just a real resurgence of that kind of music in Virginia for young people at the time."

Beyond Virginia's borders, there were broader signs of a renewed interest in old-time music, spurred on by the release of Dylan's "Bootleg Series" recordings, which began with the first three volumes in 1991, and The Anthology of American Folk Music, a six-CD collection of folk music originally released by Harry Smith between 1927 and 1932, compiled on vinyl by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, and then reissued in 1997 to much acclaim. But the real tipping point came in 2000, with the arrival of the soundtrack to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a compilation of trad country, gospel, and bluegrass that topped the charts with multi-platinum sales, and went on to win several Grammys, including album of the year.

"We were playing that kind of music before O Brother came out, but that was when the industry finally started to notice that there was a big audience for it," Fuqua says. "I don't think it was ever a conscious decision for us to stop listening to rock and roll and play old-time music. And, for me, it really wasn't that big of a jump. I look at us as a link in a chain. You've got the old time fiddlers and the English and Irish ballads, and then the progression to bluegrass and Ralph Stanley and Earl Scruggs, all the way on up to the Grateful Dead and Dylan. It's a progression of artists who keep going back to the sources and making it new in some way, and then newer artists start there and reach back to the some of the same sources to make it new again. We took Nirvana and the other music we grew up with, and reached back to all this great old-time fiddle and folk music, and whatever else we could find, and tried to make it our own. We just played what we loved to play and, in an organic way, it turned into what we do now."

        Just don't ask Fuqua to put any labels on what it is that Old Crow do. "I don't know," he laughs. "My job is to play. I think you have to realize that this stuff was just music back in the day. There was no label for it, especially for the artists. So I don't worry about labels too much. And I really don't know what you'd call Old Crow.” 

        (Old Crow Medicine Show and the Lumineers perform this Friday, August 17, at 8 p.m. at the Salem Civic Center, 1001 Roanoke Blvd., Salem, VA; tickets $35.)

        (Old Crow Medicine Show, the Lumineers, and Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three perform this Sunday, August 19, at 7 p.m. at nTelos Wireless Pavilion, 700 East Main Street, Charlottesville, VA; tickets $38.)

WHOABEAR

ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING

Whoabear dive into the deep end of electronica

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012

WHO: Whoabear and Red Rattles

WHEN: July 27, 10 p.m.

WHERE: Bull Branch, 109 11^th Street, Lynchburg, VA

COVER: Free, call (434) 847-8477

THREE OF A KIND: Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert at play.

Right around this time last year, Beau Dodson was sitting rather pretty with what most young musicians in town would consider a good gig, as the latest in a string of drummers who'd signed on to back veteran singer/songwriter David Sickman in the Bell Weather States. Dodson and the band's other two principals, bassist Adam Penkert and keyboardist Andrew Dillard, were forging a strong musical bond, and

Sickman, who'd made a name for himself as a founding member of the Charlottesville roots group the Hackensaw Boys a decade earlier, was using his old connections to generate a steady stream of gigs. Nothing to complain about.

       But just a few short months later, all that changed when Sickman rejoined the Hackensaw Boys, the Bell Weather States were put on indefinite hiatus, and Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert found themselves stuck without anyone to front the formidable musical force they'd become. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts: Dodson had a backlog of songs he'd been working on for several years, and he'd had a chance to perform a few of them at what turned out to be one of the last Bell Weather shows.

       "I sat on those songs for four or five years," Dodson recounts. "And then one of our shows in November at Rivermont Pizza got a little out of hand. . ."

       "We took a break outside," Penkert interjects with a puckish laugh. "And when we came back in I told Beau to start rapping. I took over on drums, and David was playing bass."

       "We had so much fun with it," Dodson continues. "And I remember on our way out of there Adam just said to me, 'Man, we gotta do something with this stuff.'"

       What they began to do with that "stuff" — mixing elements of rap, rock, and electronica — may have seemed like a major left turn for three guys who'd found a peaceful, easy Americana feel playing trad instruments with Sickman. But it rapidly evolved into a coherent, if somewhat quixotic, vision that coalesced around the trio’s deep appreciation of groove, with Dillard manning a growing arsenal of synths and sequencers, Penkert taking over on drums, and the long-maned, tattoo'd Dodson emerging as a fierce frontman. Indeed, they finished recording the three tracks for their self-released debut EP Hold Me, I'm Fascinating, and even completed a video for the electro-rap-rocking cut "The Day the Board Game Died,” before they finally managed to settle on a name for the band: Whoabear.

       Jump ahead to a humid Saturday afternoon in July. Whoabear are gearing up for their fifth gig, a show this Friday at Bull Branch. The EP's been mastered, pressed, and packaged, replete with an official Whoabear logo — a rough black-and-white drawing of roaring bear head. There's merch too, including rubber Whoabear wristbands, paper Whoabear masks, and even a complete Whoabear "care package," along with a solid ReverbNation website (http://www.reverbnation.com/whoabear), a YouTube "intro" to the band (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?

v=uzUrdGpFgmA), and, of course, the video for "The Day the Board Game Died" (http://www.google.com/url), which has the look and feel of a "Sabotage"-style Beastie Boys production.

       Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert are sweating it out on a couple of makeshift benches, waiting to shoot their second video in the middle of what they refer to as "Sickman's farm," a small piece of land littered with random piles of wood and populated by a small cadre of goats who seem intent on eating just about anything that won't bite back. It’s a rather paradoxically pastoral setting for a trio who, with the exception of live drums, have essentially eschewed organic instrumentation for the tools of techno. But the members of Whoabear don’t make any clear-cut distinctions between the two.

“It's hard to really say what it is that we do,” offers Penkert.

“I've gotten to the point where when people ask what we do, I just say alternative-infused dance music,” Dillard suggests. “Basically, we've all been live players and now we're getting into sequencing and electronics. But everything I do when we play is live. So it's always a little different.”

Penkert nods and adds, “We all have jam roots and a lot of times I feel like we get going and then everything still comes together organically.”

That’s perhaps best reflected in the dramatic leaps of genre the band accomplishes in just three tracks on Hold Me, I’m Fascinating. Dub-inflected keys and a vaguely reggae beat lay the foundation for rapid-fire rapping on “25 Happy Street,” a track that works itself up to an aggro climax that’s heavy without the metal. “Long Time” rides a pair of glitch-pop synth lines into a prog-rocking chorus as Dodson delivers what amounts to a straight-up love letter, half-rapped/half-sung. And, “The Day the Board Game Died” is a throttling techno thrasher with melodic respites that serve as a base for intriguing internal monologue, a bit of mischief Dodson says was inspired by nothing more than a boring night alone at home.

“It’s about a guy's conscience catching up with him,” he explains. “I don't even know what he did. I'm big on user interpretation. I don't know what any of it means. It could mean a million things and that's kind of cool to me. Someone told me that the title meant a lot to him. And I was like, it's just a play on the title ‘The Day the Music Died.’ It's kind of like the board game dies and electronic music takes over.”

And yet, Whoabear haven’t been entirely taken over by electronics. As Dodson is happy to point out, “Every show's different, every song ends up different, the words are different each time. Nothing ever ends up the same and that's part of the fun.”

“A lot of that stems from David,” Dillard says of their former Bell Weather Statesman. “He led us off on all kinds of tangents we weren't expecting when we played shows. And, he was instrumental in getting us to this point. We played over a hundred shows with him. Basically, he showed us what was possible and now we're taking it from there.”

Okkervil River. . . Pretension is in. Being a fucking idiot is, apparently , out. . .

 Music review: Okkervil River deliver an indie magnum opus

Okkervill River, I Am Very Far (Jagjaguar)
The Burg Staff on May. 11, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Rock songs that deal with the trials and tribulations of being in a rock band are a tricky business. I mean, do we really need any more songs about how hard life on the road is? And does anyone who works a 9-to-5 job really care that getting paid to play can have an adverse effect on the artistic temperament? Then again, we tend to have a certain fascination with the human trainwrecks who populate “reality” TV franchises like MTV’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and the rise/fall/redemption storylines that kept VH-1’s “Behind the Music” in business for so many years.
     Will Sheff, the main brain behind the Austin-based band Okkervil River, expertly tapped into the allure of the troubled artist on 2005’s “Black Sheep Boy,” an album loosely based on ’60s folk singer Tim Harden’s struggles with heroin addiction — a battle he finally lost when he overdosed in 1980.
     Sheff’s way with words, his storyteller’s eye for detail, and his moody demeanor all helped elevate him to a top spot among indie rock’s literati (see Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, and Win Butler of the Arcade Fire). And “Black Sheep Boy” not only inspired a sequel — the 2005 EP “Black Sheep Boy Appendix” — it also led Sheff to mine the lives of other tragically flawed artists, including the poet John Berryman (suicide, 1972) in “John Allyn Smith Sails,” and an obscure, probably schizophrenic glam-rocker Jobriath (AIDS, 1983) in “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Hotel Chelsea, 1979” (both from the 2007 disc “The Stand Ins”).
     So, yeah, it would be entirely fair to say that Sheff has rarely, if ever, shown any fear in the face of pretension. And he’s never wavered from the grand gesture, a tendency he exploits to its fullest on Okkervil River’s new “I Am Very Far.” (BTW: the band’s named for a short story by the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstoya.)
    There’s no overarching theme or concept uniting the 11 tracks on “I Am Very Far,” unless you count Sheff’s unwaveringly grim worldview. A dark shadow lies over the thump of “The Valley,” a wordy epic that finds a characteristically poetic Sheff watching “The sun switching in the sky off and on/While a friend stands bleeding on a late summer lawn/A slicked back bloody black gun shot to the head/He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead.”
     For someone who’s always seemed more than a little suspicious of music industry machinations, Sheff’s got Okkervil River sounding suspiciously like Grammy winners the Arcade Fire on the neo-new wave “Pirates,” where he cryptically croons about “a murderess/Moved by writing a song/We agreed that it was wrong/And to believe in it,” and even more so on the urgent, orchestral “Rider,” a track filled with apocalyptic visions like “Over the ruins like we’re staggering apes/What we get is what we take/In a split open place where a man can get kinged/In a palace of panic and flames.”
     Sheff, who produced the disc, even does Win Butler’s two-drummers trick one better: “Rider” and the plaintively pounding “Wake and Be Fine” are fully stocked with two pianists, two bassists, seven guitarists, and, yes, two drummers.
     For all its arty extravagances — along with tympani, tuba, and bassoon, Sheff employs the found sounds of crashing cabinets, unreeling duct tape, and, on “Pirates,” a fast-forwarding cassette tape — “I Am Very Far” manages to stay within the bounds of indie-rock accessibility a la the aforementioned Arcade Fire and Decemberists. If that means Sheff may soon be dealing with some of the same pressures that ultimately undermined Tim Harden’s career, at least it’s a subject he’s studied well. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_okkervil_river_deliver_an_indie_magnum_opus
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg who teaches journalism at Randolph College, is the former music editor for the Boston Phoenix, the former reviews editor for CJJ New Music Monthly, and a fan of music of other cultural emissions.

Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

Music review: Beastie Boys Bring Back the Rap on “Hot Sauce Committee Party Two”

By The Burg Staff on May. 04, 2011
By Matt Ashare

The career length for most rappers isn’t much longer than the wingspan of your average hummingbird. It’s not just that hip-hop tends to be a young man’s game: it’s that the biggest emcees begin diversifying their portfolios early on, moving into film and TV like Ice T and Ice Cube, opening restaurants and creating clothing lines like Diddy. Before too long, rapping becomes a secondary or even tertiary concern.
     Given hip-hop’s penchant for bravado, and the ginormous egos it tends to breed, the odds a rap duo or group will stay intact for more than a couple of Congressional terms are even slimmer. So even if you ignore all of their accomplishments — and up to the release this week of the new “Hot Sauce Committee Part Two” there have been many — the mere fact that Beastie Boys, a trio who stumbled into hip-hop almost three decades ago after cutting their teeth in NYC’s punk scene, are still a functioning musical unit goes beyond mere anomaly. That they’ve managed to remain relevant since the first bratty stirrings of the now classic 1983 single “Cookie Puss” is just plain freaky.
     Of course, I’ve got my theories. (After all, that’s what I’m here for, right?) Maybe they’ve just been super lucky. But Beastie Boys have scored a veritable hat-trick when it’s come to capturing cultural zeitgeist in a bottle. With their 1986 chart-topper “Licensed to Ill” they joined Run DMC in finding that sweet spot between rap and hard rock that brought hip-hop its first mainstream success. Then, on its follow-up, 1989’s “Paul’s Boutique,” they hooked up with future Beck producers the Dust Brothers, and found themselves on the cutting edge of pomo sampling collage, a kind of hip-hop-meets-musique concrete aesthetic that presaged contemporary electronica. Almost 10 years later, rather than just holding steady, they took another major left-hand turn, jettisoning samples for straight up old-school-style hip-hoppery with muscular Mix Master Mike working two vinyl turntables while Mike D, MCA, and Ad-Rock deployed their rhyming skills. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the hip-hop DJ — all but an anachronism when “Hello Nasty” hit the racks in 1998 — and the art of turntablism was undergoing a major revival in the capable hands of masters like DJ Shadow.
     That’s not luck — it’s what I’d call “good taste” coupled with a genuine passion for the genre. Beastie Boys have always been into hip-hop more as style — a mode of expression, if you’ll excuse my pretension — than lifestyle. That’s one reason the Beasties never played much of a role in rap’s notorious East Coast/West Coast rivalry and you just never hear about any of them pulling an Eminem and getting arrested for guns or drugs. Not saying they’re choir boys, but the Beasties earned their stripes in the studio, not on the streets.
     Still, when the trio returned to their original positions (bass, drums, and guitar for MCA, Mike D, and Ad-Rock respectively) on 2007’s “The Mix-Up,” an all-instrumental romp through everything from fatback funk to noisy punk, I thought they were done with hip-hop — that they were ready to ride out their career emceeing larger concerns from the wings of their Tibetan Freedom Concerts. I was wrong. There may be extra-hip-hop excursions on “Hot Sauce,” but the Beasties are fully back to rapping in 2011. “Yes here we go again give you more nothing lesser/Back on the mic it’s the anti-depressor,” boasts Ad-Rock in his now vintage whine (it’s still a bratty varietal) on the disc’s opener, “Make Some Noise,” a wah-wah-organ funk-fueled affair that finds Mike D unabashedly repeating the hook from the Beastie classic “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (to Party!)” and Ad-Rock happily dating himself by referencing Ted Danson and dropping this giddy rhyme: “Leggo my Eggo while I flex my ego/Sip on prosecco dressed up in a tuxedo.”
     Too soon to tell whether the Beasties have again captured the zeitgeist. But the self-consciously stripped-down, lo-fi production of “Hot Sauce” suggests the Boys have been getting down with the underground — what the kids call indie-hip-hop. And the anything-goes infectiousness with which they incorporate everything from live instrumentation (metallic guitars), sci-fi samples, and DJ scratching on a track like “Say It,” along with the fearlessness with which they delve into reggae with guest singer Santigold on “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win,” return to punk-rocking out on “Lee Majors Come Again,” and indulge in some sensual instrumental dub on “Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament,” may just portend the arrival of the global genre-hopping hip-hop band.
     Of course, as long as the Beasties are still with us, keeping their ears to the ground and their wordifying mouths on overdrive, we’ve got at least one trio who are practicing masters of the form. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_beastie_boys_bring_back_the_rap_on_hot_sauce_committee_pa
Ashare, a freelance writer based in Lynchburg, is a former music editor for The Boston Phoenix