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.