Episode 7: I would do anything for a Klondike bar

Episode 7: I Would Do Anything For A Klondike Bar
6·17·09

The Band:
Loblolly Boy
Luke Kalloch - Guitar, Vox
Katy Pearson - Ukelele, Banjolele, Clarinet, Drums, Mandolin



The Scene:
It's a drive. And by drive I mean a haul.

Nick and I are heading up Downeast to pay a visit to Loblolly Boy and Bearkat. We're heading out past Damariscotta to a small fishing village known as Round Pond.

Loblolly Boy - A.K.A. Luke Kalloch - is staying with Katy in a house there.

And by "house," I mean a free house. The Loblolly Boy Myspace page says his location is "Anywhere that's free, Maine." He doesn't mean that in some hippie-utopia sense. Not entirely, anyway. Through a complicated web, he is staying at a free house in Round Pond. He and his Lord of the Rings tattoos and Katy-also-known-as-Bearkat.

Also, Luke is from Round Pond - which sweetens the prospect of free house. His mother, he happily points out, is about two miles down the road.

Round Pond is, lamentably (for us) just an extended layover in the post-college journey for Luke and Katy. They're leaving for the Other Portland in early July... but they are doing it in style, with a tour. You can catch 'em at the Northstar Café on July 6th.

Luke and Katy have been playing together since January. They complement each other well. As Luke sings, you can see Katy watching back. More than watching, she peers into him as he plays. She strums and thumps along, adding dulcet melodies to lovelorn tales of woe.

A little sneak preview for next week: It happens the other way around, too. Although Katy admits she can't look at him while he sings. You'll have to ask her why that is.

Loblolly Boy sings a lot about death and destruction. He also sings a lot about love and loss. Apocalypse and Heart are key elements in his music, even as he plays in a domestic home in coastal Maine.

Or maybe especially as he plays there.

The sea is harsh and fishermen live rough lives. Missing fingers, miserable, deadly weather, long weeks on choppy seas where salt-water spray, high winds and harsh sun beams tan skins into leather. Fishermen's wives are known for being just as rough, attached to men they love but knowing that at any moment, Poseidon could strike and make her a widow.

Fishing communities snap Loblolly Boy's dichotomies into focus.

Even the wanderlust in Luke's life is echoed in the long trips to sea. Luke and Katy have stories from all over the country, crushing bread in Denver parking lots, eating canned tuna in Seattle, and the drive through Virginia's foothills.

Man, they've been everywhere.

But Luke shares a happy connection with Downeast. He rattles off facts about the lighthouse on the Maine State Quarter and the coast. He laments the old stories he'll miss that the old fishermen tell. Stories about the history of the place. He knows that everyone in town knows he was visited by Nick and I because a few residents in town saw my car crawling down his road.

And he's got a bit of a history bug. Take for instance, his name. A "loblolly boy" served on 18th and 19th century ships, doing anything the surgeon wouldn't do. Holding down patients, cleaning tools, tossing amputated limbs overboard and "bedpan duty."

Consequently, his music sometimes feels like songs you'd hear in a wharfside pub. A whiff of sea air as he whispers and wails about being together at the end of it all. There is a connection in his songs between death and love and sea life. As much as Luke sings about bombs dropping, there is a Downeast boy under it.

But he knows he's got to move on, ramble on. Sights to see, places to be. There's a positivity that beams electric from Luke after a few minutes of meeting him, where you can't help but feel the same wanderlust. Maine's home, sure, but you've got to get out sometimes.

Fishermen head out on the open waters and breathe salty air and face death for a simple trade. Loblolly Boy heads to an inland sea, breathes dust and exhaust and breath and sings simple songs.

Episode 6 - Mustache Wall

Dog And Pony Episode Two-point-two - D. Gross: Mustache Wall
1.23.09 + 5.21.09

The Band:
Dana Gross: Vox, Guitar, Mississippi Sax, Banjo



The Scene:
Nick and I pull up to a quiet South Portland suburb. Everything is white from recent snow, the street has about an inch coating.

The car crunches snow into a dense layer. The area's so quiet that as we approach Dana's house, you can hear some music emanating from within. It's something old, sounds like maybe one man and a guitar. Sounds like maybe it was recorded on a Texas Porch next to a glass of whiskey. It adds a surreal quality to the general atmosphere of a Puritan winter as we walk up to the front door and press the buzzer. Dana answers the door promptly. It's Lightning Hopkins playing out of an iPod.

Dana shows us in to a very domestic living room. The room has a certain simple style. Not that there isn't decoration... and colorful decoration at that. There are multiple serapes and a large painting of a Paper Doll Ballerina. But something about the room suggests simplicity. There are plants at all corners and under all the windows, echoes of July reaching out in defiance of the January hush.

The whole effect is very southwestern feeling... with hints of the Far East. Although I must point out that the fireplace mantle feels very New England. Which makes sense. Buildings in the southwest have no need for a fireplace. So the pine and berries on the mantle fit.

A southwestern living room in a Yankee winter.

But that was then. That was four months ago. This episode really starts now, in the spring. Lilac blossoms fragrant, trees budding and bees getting to work. A time of new life and growth, a natural resurrection from the North's bitter winter.

It's the perfect time to pay a visit to D. Gross.

Answering the door today, there's no music in the air. Folks are tending to their gardens across the street. Dana answers the door in a white t-shirt and rolled up pant legs, looking a little peaked from recent exertion.

A puppy twists around his legs to sniff out visitors.

"We've just run around outside, trying to wear her down," Dana says as Lily noses our shins. Satisfied we like dogs and aren't there to ransack the house, Lily retires to a pad in the corner, flopping down and stretching out for puppy nap time.

Sam James lauds D. Gross, calling him "the only guy who can write a song about nature that doesn't sound corny." It fits, then, that we visit Dana's house at the height of vernal budding, the heady green stasis of summer has yet to sink in and the memory of winter clings in nighttime frosts and adds import to every budding leaf.

Dana's music plays to something similar, a natural awakening in the ol' corpus. The songs often have a simple enough structure... but the precision and intricacy of the picking and strumming, the interplay of vox and harmonica add new depth and complexity.

It is a simple enough thing to enjoy a flowering rose bush, but the red petals represent long seasons mining the earth for water and nutrients, drinking in light and feeding off the very air. A simple rose is anything but, complicated chains of hydrocarbons and chemicals waft through the air, waking other plants and stirring bees into pollenatory action.

And suddenly a simple song is not so simple.

Suddenly Dana's fingers are hitting eight notes a beat and he's playing the B minor chord in three different spots on the guitar neck so he can pluck out an enchanting melody. Suddenly the hypnotic steadyness and drone of a song becomes a baffling display of virtuoso technique.

He straps a harmonica around his neck intermittently, blowing and drawing like a man possessed. His banjo is tiny, it has no resonator and is rather old. It was made for his grandmother. She passed it along to his father, who learned to play about three songs on it and passed it along to Dana. Dana's using it well, just listen to the steady strum and thrum of Hummingbird in the video.

He had to be persuaded into the purchase of his guitar. It's a 1973 A. LoPrinzi that a fisherman had had on layaway at Buckdancer's Choice. The fisherman went out to sea and never returned.

"Never returned?"

"He died." It sounds like Dana's realizing the heaviness of the situation every time he says it.

It sure is a nice guitar, though.

And finally there's his voice. He sings rich and weathered out the side of his face in a way that masks a soft sibilance in his speaking voice. Watching him play you can see him concentrating on the music, dialing in and knocking it out.

Dana has been playing solo after years with Los Federales, recording, teaching, working construction etc. etc. He went solo to improve his focus and concentration. He has a tendency, he says, to drift in band situations. Which can be good or bad, depending on where you are in the song and the band. Performing solo has forced him to concentrate more, to focus in on the music he's making. As a solo performer, drift and sway can hold no court, no one but you can hold down the song.

But after two and a half years of solo performances, Dana says he's been practicing with some other folks. An exciting prospect, to be sure.

After stomping, strumming, singing through about twenty minutes of material, Lily wakes up. We break from the music and the living room and step outside into a suburban yard. A chair and a cup of coffee are set up in the morning sun, evidence of a morning spent outside among the verdant growth, the new life.

D. Gross stands amongst it.

Tower of Song - Episode 2

[dog] and [pony] - Tower of Song Sessions
Episode 2 - Lady Lamb The Beekeeper
05.23.09


The Band:
Aly Spaltro - Vox, Guitar, Tambourine, Floor Tom, Whistle
TJ Metcalfe - (Drums), Vox, (Bass, Synth), Acoustic Guitar



The Scene:
There is a glee - quiet and meditative at first, then expanding outwards to fill the room, the corner, the street, the city. The glee starts inside a person, or people - as it may be, it spreads out through finger tips into instruments, it flutters vocal chords and parts teeth as it gets picked up by microphones. It vibrates ear drums and sternums and windows and wires. It bounces off brick and tar and glass and bone.

That glee is music. It took over Portland toward the end of May. It grabbed the microphone at the Tower of Song and wouldn't let go for hours.

That glee is Lady Lamb the Beekeeper. For about an hour, anyway.

Front woman - and currently the only member - Aly Spaltro is the little girl with the big voice. I remember the first time I heard her at Dead of Winter '09 as a watershed moment in Portland music - for me, anyway. Tiny Aly Spaltro took the stage. Hidden behind an acoustic guitar, Spaltro stood in front of a room of carousers, drinking and conversing, making merry.

But they all shut up when she sang.

The room turned to absolute, cricket-chirping, pin-dropping silence save for Spaltro and her voice and her guitar crashing around the room. Spaltro's presence controlled the room as a pebble dropped into still water controls the waves.

The silence was religious, awing. It was pure and real.

Lady Lamb will do that.

The songs are, at first, at least, simple little tales. Naïve observations. But that betrays a purity at the core of the music. Giggly pop delight abounds as Spaltro coos sweet nothings to the fast food drive through box. But beyond that, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper muses on the simple things that you care about when you're younger. These first values are true values - truer than many that accrue as years pass by.

The irreverence-at-first that shows through Lady Lamb The Beekeeper's music is another facet of the Tower of Song. The festival is a joyous celebration of Portland's music. It's a pop festivity. Songs ring giddy down Congress street as bands blast their music over the crowded square. But that joyous celebration belies a deeper core. The celebration is more than a simple get-together. Just the fact that the Tower of Song exists says something profound about the Portland music scene. It is packed with talent. It is diverse. It is brimming with celebration and passion for the scene.

The Tower of Song is ostensibly just a show. But look deeper and it's a community. The festival had beaming organizers, rows of vendors, corporate sponsorship. The festival had nine bands featuring dozens of performers. The dedication, devotion and worship of a scene coming together for something that is, superficially, just a rock and roll show is so much more.

So when Spaltro vacillates on what size fry to order, she's singing not only about treating herself to a delicious and unhealthy snack - she's singing about everything behind that decision. She's singing about every moment of dread about waistlines, dollars, and commitments to a greener living. She's singing about the desire for a simple loved thing and all the drive and yearning and satisfaction behind that.

The Tower of Song is a festival, Lady Lamb The Beekeeper sings about ordering take-out. But the simplicity of ordering a cheeseburger and Dr. Pepper is fallacious. There's desire and anticipation. And calling the Tower of Song simply a rock and roll show is a lie, too. There's a community coming together beneath every note. Every banjo-pluck and drum kick represents commitment and drive on the part of the organizers, the band members, the vendors, the sponsors.

The performers at The Tower of Song had a level of anonymity. The names, the music, that was there for everyone to witness. But the performers remained locked up in the tower. There was no face to the music. So when Aly sings into a faceless drive-through intercom, she's experiencing that same level of anonymity. She and her greasy paramour are just voices in the night as she waxes romantic about the life they could have.

Eventually these performers will come face to face with their audience. They leave the apartment and mill about in Congress Square. They play a venue. They sell T-Shirts and CDs. Eventually Aly will get her meal, she'll hand over a wrinkled five dollar bill and exchange a look with her confessee. She'll get a burger and some fries and a Dr. Pepper, Dr. Pepper, Dr. Pepper.

That's the final element, of course, is the interaction. Putting musicians up in a Tower will separate them from the city physically, but having them play ties them in spiritualy. The musicians and the city are not oil and water. Without the one there would not be the other. Sure, Portland would exist without the scene, but not the Portland we love. And sure the musicians would exist without Portland, but they wouldn't have this community which breeds, fosters and foments their music.

So it's all give and take. Spaltro sings sweet nothings and gets a meal. Portland gives support, an audience, a base and gets art, pride and music.

Musicians give their sweat and blood and passion.

Portland gets glee.

Tower of Song - Episode 1

[dog] and [pony] - Tower of Song Sessions
Episode 1 - Sam James and Chriss Sutherland
05.23.09

The Bands:
Sam James - Vox, Guitar, Foot Stamps
Chriss Sutherland - Vox, Guitar

The Scene:
The Tower of Song is set in an apartment living room looking over Congress Square. Four roads meet in a blocky, red arena home to coffee shops, grocery stores, the Portland Museum of Art and so on.

The day of the festival the square is home to a few rows of white tents as vendors set up shop. People gather and mill, blankets are laid out, picnics are had.

Portland comes together.

Tower of Song is a celebration of community. Nine bands steam up one fourth floor apartment, stomping, strumming, pounding, wailing, moaning. Hip Hop and folk, jangly pop and indie-rock come together in a beautiful testament to Portland's diverse music scene.

And it makes sense that the festival blasts against the old State Theater. Jesse Pilgrim, the first performer of the day's events, has a theory that because Portland spent so many years without a mid-level venue, the local scene had to improve, step up and throw down. If your only options are whoever's at The Civic Center and what's going on at Slainte, you're going to want to see some good stuff at the cheaper venue.

Filling this gap has given Portland a rich and diverse music scene. For a relatively small city, we've been gifted with a varied pastiche of local music. From Pilgrim's country strumming to Sam James' blues-picking. From Spencer and the School Spirit Mafia's joyous-cult-pop-rock to Fire on Fire's indie-orchestra commune. From Dilly Dilly's Ukulele to ... well, basically anything else she does. The scene is wide, it is filled with talent and it is something that deserves reveling in.

So if Tower of Song only happened because The State theater closed down, I say good. I miss the mid-level acts the venue drew but I think I'm much happier with the eclectic mix Portland has now, the breadth and depth that only happen in a borderline isolated community.

Which brings us to Sam James and Chriss Sutherland.

These two feast on yesterday's music. But they do it in separate ways. Sam's a foot-stomping, string-pickin' hollerin' blues-man. Chriss picks and strums, he sings and moans. Sam sings to his bouncing feet or the neck of his guitar, Chriss rolls his eyes back and sings to the ceiling fan.

And the music these two are blasting from The Tower... Sam James is singing a Leonard Cohen number about the music community, a song with such echoing portent the whole god-damned festival bears it's name. A song written to address music's place in the land and a musician's place in music. Music's import, it's reverence, it's worship.

Musicians are elevated instantly onto a tower.

Chriss Sutherland sings a country-folk staple written by one hero for another. The community of music represents itself another way through Chriss as he wails and moans on Angel From Montgomery. Sam's song is philosophically meta, Chriss' abandons the meta for a self-aware celebration. It doesn't expound on what it means to be a musician, but at the same time it acknolwedges that the players are musical. When John Prine wrote that for Bonnie Raitt to sing, he did it without philosophizing on what it means to make music. Prine and Raitt know that already. Angel celebrates music, Tower celebrates making music.

Both Sam and Chriss have a tendency to keep alive the communal tradition of music. They play songs that you want to hear and songs that are easy to learn and play along to... but they do it in a professional, hypnotic and singular way. Sam and Chriss play simple music in a way that makes you want to listen, want to join in. You want to help this music, you want to be there and experience it.

Sam James and Chriss Sutherland are perfect for Tower of Song. They represent a fundamental, uncomplicated togetherness in music. They aren't pumping out music for money, they aren't defiantly challenging the status quo (though they do challenge it). They are residing in music.

Allow me to clarify that last statement. There is some musicality in all of us. It is a basic element of humanity that draws us to tunes. Songs represent a whole of humanity. When was the last time you were at a party that music wasn't played at? Even solo acts - such as these two - help to bring us together.

People seek out music. We're drawn to it.

Bands, of course, represent a community just by being together and creating something beautiful, but the fact remains that we're bewitched by what Chriss and Sam do. Without their plucking and strumming and wailing and humming we'd be a little more lost and a little less unified.

Maybe you don't like their particular styles, their idioms of playing - this is where they challenge the status quo. Take your genre of choice, it works across the board. Swaying to dreamy electro-pop or grinding to grungy metal or if you're at a bar and RATT comes pumping through the speakers and you see someone else grinning and bobbing their heads, you feel a connection.

That is the essence of the music these two play - of the music anyone plays. Their essence goes back a hundred years, though - again, this is where these two challenge the status quo. The essence of Chriss and Sam is pure community. Their music has roots in a time when this was the only music you were likely to hear. A time when radios weren't all that popular. A time when it was live or nothing. This is the music by the people, of the people and for the people.

The tradition Chriss and Sam are continuing is long and noble. At the Tower of Song Chriss sang, for instance, a song called "All The Little Horses" or, alternately, "Hush-a-Bye." This is a song older than the Civil War. No one knows who wrote it or how many versions of it there are. But you can be sure the version we heard at the Tower of Song was unique and Chriss' own while also being a part of a sesquicentennial tradition. Sam performed mostly originals, but if you ever hear him live you've got about even odds on hearing something old. Real old. He'll tell you he doesn't know who wrote it, but that's only because nobody knows who wrote it.


Chriss Sutherland - All The Little Horses (Live @ Tower of Song)

The songs have lasted that long without an owner and they'll last that long again. Partly because of traditions like The Tower of Song. There is a pure and driven need to rejoice, to get together and to collaborate on music. Music represents community and joy and revelry. There's no better excuse to commiserate or to celebrate, to weep into a bottle or to dance around a bonfire. To ache and to yearn and to breathe and to pity and to love and to gush... music fills all these primal urges.

At the Tower of Song, a fundamental, sublime urge is filled. At the Tower of Song, Nine bands come together. At the Tower of Song, a community rallies at the doorstep to listen. New songs, old songs and cover songs ring through the streets of Portland. Those at the Tower of Song thirsty for new noise leave filled with centuries of humanity.

At the Tower of Song, Portland comes together.