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.”

THE HACKENSAW BOYS

String theory: The old-time Americana of the Hackensaw Boys lives on

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: April 04, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/apr/04/string-theory-old-time-americana-hackensaw-boys-li-ar-1818234/

BACK WITH THE BOYS: David Sickman (right) returns to his Hackensaw roots

David Sickman's on the road, hauling a load of wood flooring from Illinois to New York City before he heads back to Lynchburg to gear up for a regional tour with the Hackensaw Boys, the old-time country string band he co-founded with current Modest Mouse member Tom Pelosi back in 1999. It's a tour that'll kick off this Thursday at Mangia, hit the National in Richmond the following night, Growler's in Roanoke on Sunday, and then head south for shows in Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, Birmingham, and Atlanta. But right now, Sickman's musing over an interesting coincidence. "It's funny," he remarks. "We were just out here in the Midwest three weeks ago. So I'm basically driving the same roads that I drove with the Hackensaw Boys, only I returned here as a woodsmith or a carpenter instead of a musician."

       Up until a little over a year ago, the very idea of Sickman splitting his time between banging nails and strumming guitar, much less hitting the road with his old band, would have seem far fetched at best. Sickman left the Hackensaw Boys, who formed in Charlottesville and became something of a local institution before garnering a national and international audience for their traditional, yet idiosyncratic take on folksy country music, in 2005, when the grind of the road got to be too much and he experienced what he characterizes as a nervous breakdown of sorts. "I was never diagnosed by a doctor, but I was pretty low and totally burned out," he concedes.

       "First and foremost it was just physical exhaustion," he continues. "I was away from my family, which was difficult. And I'd basically gotten to the point where I couldn't find the joy in it anymore. That, coupled with how one person's mood can affect an entire band, just pushed me to the point where I felt like I had to quit. We were in London, touring, and I just said, 'sorry guys but I have to go home tonight, after this show, even though we have four or five more booked.' They gallantly went on to perform those shows and kept it alive from that moment on, which is awesome because the Hackensaw Boys were like a gang — a gang of good guys."

       Sickman essentially retired from music to focus on family life in Lynchburg. And, with no hard feelings, the band soldiered on, adding an old friend of Sickman's, singer/guitarist Ward Harrison, to a line-up that's seen a number of players come and go over the years. But, last year, Sickman rediscovered the joys of singing, strumming, and songwriting. He returned to the fold with his own locally based group, the Bellweather States and, in the fall, reconnected with Harrison, who informed him that the last two original members of the Hackensaw Boys were calling it quits.

       "In twelve years, the band has never had a break, even though members have changed a bunch of times," Sickman explains. "And Ward really didn't want the band to stop.” Sickman offered his services, the band liked the idea, and by November he was a Hackensaw Boy again. Just a few days after Thanksgiving, he was on stage with the band at the Jefferson in Charlottesville.

       Since then, Sickman has put the Bellweather States on hold — "suspended animation," is how he describes it — and thrown himself back into the Hackensaw Boys lifestyle, a kind of traveling hootenanny facilitated by an inspired band of outsiders who’ll be heading to Europe for a string of shows in May. In a sense, that’ll bring Sickman full circle, back within spitting distance of the 2005 breakdown that sent him packing. And, back to pedaling the stylized but never quite shticky homegrown Americana stylings, replete with fiddle, upright bass, and a drummer who plays an ingenious, handcrafted rhythm contraption known as the "charismo," that made the original Hackensaw Boys legendary enough to earn a spot on a big tour with the Flaming Lips, Modest Mouse, and Cake, as well as a three-week gig backing country-gospel great Charlie Louvin.

       "We played the Grand Ol' Opry, country music's most hallowed ground," Sickman recalls with pride. "And I got to play at Red Rocks with the Flaming Lips. Our attitude is that we can play with anybody, any time, at any place. We can step out of a vehicle and start playing music; we've actually done that."

       In the years since Sickman took his leave, the Hackensaw Boys have continued recording new material, releasing the full-length Look Out! in 2007, and, more recently, two six-song EPs titled The Old Sound of Music, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. And the band, who at one point grew to include a full complement of eight musicians, has been pared back to five — Sickman and Harrison (guitar/vocals), Ferd Moyse (fiddle), Ben Jacobs (bass), and Brian Gorby (charismo). But, for all the changes the band have been through, Sickman's happy to report that most, if not all of what's made the Hackensaw Boys a uniquely compelling enterprise since their inception, has remained much the same.

       "The band that is the Hackensaw Boys right now is definitely carrying on in the original spirit. I know that I am. And I was there at the beginning. It's never lost the spirit of wanting to provide people with a fun night of dancing, maybe with some ballads thrown in. It's all about, you know, coming out, having a good time, and not worrying about having to go to work tomorrow — just hang out with us for the night. A lot of bands aren't really accessible to their fans. I don't even like to call people who like the Hackensaw Boys fans. They're friends. They're people. Most Hackensaw Boys shows, no matter how big or little, end with us going out on the floor and playing for the last 15 or 20 minutes. We do that every night. So the intentions of the original band, just doing our own take on the music of Doc Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, and, of course, outlaw country guys like Waylon and Willie and Merle, are still there. I know it might sound corny, but a big part of it is also a desire to make the world better place."