Burlington Free Press columnist Steve Lemcke meets up with the Matchbox 20 guys at Club Toast and gives them the Burlington tour. They drink profusely, run from screaming fans, and Lemcke tells them their music sucks.

A couple of months ago, I took my usual walk downtown to check on the local club scene. It was a Tuesday night and it was about 9 o’clock and I was bored. In a town whose nightlife rarely gets a head of steam going before 11, I knew that I was too early for anything fun to happen, but just as glad of it.

I had recently started drinking alcohol again after a three year hiatus, so I thought that that night might be a good test for me. Go downtown early, have a few social drinks, and leave before I got too loaded. No such luck.

Walking into Club Toast I immediately turned left to go to the office when I saw the three or so people in the club. Nothing happening yet, I thought to myself. I might as well go shoot the shit with Dennis, the owner.

I walk into the office and Dennis tells me that a couple of the guys from Matchbox 20 are in the club having a few drinks. I think “Oh boy, rock stars,” and lame ones at that! Matchbox 20 are in town the night before their show at Memorial Auditorium and are trying to be just like regular folks. It’s probably in their contract. Dennis tells me they’re really nice guys. Sure.

So being Critic Boy, I walk out and get myself a Guinness and spy out the scene. Yep. There two of them are, chatting with each other and having a beer. So I ask the one I recognize from the videos (Rob, the lead singer) if he wants to shoot some pool. Being practically the only ones in the bar at that time of night, he acquiesces and we proceed to play.

They introduce themsleves as Rob and Paul. I say I recognize them as who they are and they accept that without too much attitude. Paul turns out to be the drummer. I didn’t know that, because Matchbox 20 is not a band I care to listen to. In fact for a time I was incensced at them for the brand of moderate, bland, romantic and crappy rock they play and I blamed them for the state of rock ‘n’ roll being as shitty as it is.

But that was soon to change.

The three of us end up having a few. I bought a round of drinks, which I think surprised them a bit; they must be used to playing the big shots and paying for everything. We talked and gave each other our backgrounds (where we were from, how long we’ve lived wherever, what we do, it was obvious to me what they did. You guys play bad rock music for lots of money, right?)

Then people started to show up. I was just hanging out with these guys and all of a sudden once the crowd arrived, there were eyes on us. Occassionally someone would come up and talk to our table. While they couldn’t recognize me, they tried to, considering the company I was keeping.

Before we left, however, one amazing thing happened: As I was playing pool against some random guy, he turns to me and asks me what instrument I play in the band. Granted, I had some cool rock stubble on my face and I was wearing a stylishly retro-collared shirt, but I faltered and told him that I was not in Matchbox 20. Why would I say I was in a band I didn’t like? No, I’m the drummer for Fugazi.

I told this to my new rock star buddies and they laughed and suggested that next time I should say I played keyboards and/or I was the publicity guy.

So after a few more rounds, it was time to leave. We all needed a change of pace. The obscure hits of the 80′s earlier in the night had started to be superceded by the mega hits of that decade and that wasn’t much fun for three guys who had grown up during that era. It was time for change of scenery. Besides Rob was getting a little freaked out by this adoring teenage girl who was staring at him all evening and acting like an idiot. I had fun goofing on her, but they gave me looks like “Oh no, not again.”

So off we go to The Metronome to listen to some house/techno music and there is a good crowd that night. And by this time we are all feeling pretty good with all the drinks in us. Me, I’m still trying to maintain some semblence of tact before finally I had to bring up the fact that I wasn’t too impressed with their music.

So we keep talking and laughing at The Metronome. I got a chance to introduce them to some of my friends and co-workers who looked at me with strange eyes of “How do you know these guys?” and I am laughing hysterically to myself because I am partying with Top 40 rock stars, and I come to the realization that their world is all bullshit anyways, and the distance that the rock world sets up between fans and bands is absolutely ridiculous.

People started circling around our table. They would sit near us and then slyly strike up a conversation. All I got was “Are you in the band?” “Yes, I play keyboards” And then my conscience got the better of me and when I was honest and say “no, not really” they were quickly disinterested.

So the night wears on and the partying continues. We go back to Toast, but have to quickly duck into RJ’s in order to throw off the same underage girl/fan who has camped in front of Nectar’s waiting for Rob to come back out. Rob tells me that while he appreciated it all as a sign of approval, he’s getting a little tired of it.

Strange, because fame is what Americans crave, and here they were — deep within the star factory and they were unimpressed — thankful, but unimpressed.

I was impressed by these guys as people, if not as a band. Here they were, they have three songs in the Top 20, they are being bashed on all sides by critics and making a ton of dough doing what all kids in bands wish they could do. Rob Thomas has been described by VH1′s “Pop Up Video” as “The Death of Rock N Roll”. Any band that can manage to inspire that much hostility from over-cool elitists is starting to be okay with me.

And they are nice guys. Down to earth. Pleasant. They didn’t take themselves too seriously at any point during the night. They were up front about the super-popularity of their music, and knew that it could all end overnight. They seemed to think it was rather silly, but could only do what they could, play what they could play, and the money they were making was worth putting up with the shit they had to.

While certainly having a good time with their newfound wealth, they told me they were stashing it away for the future, because they figured that their time in the sun could soon be displaced by the next biggest thing.

By this time I had told them I was a critic of sorts. With the beers in me, I have a tendency to be brutally honest, and I was pretty up front about why I didn’t dig their tunes and the best part was…. they didn’t mind!!! They took it in stride. They even kept buying me beers. Hell, I catch more ego flack from the local bands I review. Rob understood why people might not like their music, and was totally cool with it. When I expressed my less than positve opinion, he could have been a dick and pulled some sort of prima donna shit, but he didn’t. That impressed me.

What’s more, they never sought out the spotlight during the night. In fact they seemed to be more content just going with the flow. They were friendly enough to people who just wanted to say hi, and to those excited fans they were pleasant and cheerful and not aloof. They didn’t try to work the crowd or pose. They seemed pretty content to sit in the corner and watch the night progress, do some drinking with some random guy they met in a bar in Burlington.

And it was strange, because they kept telling me how nice it was to visit a town where the people were so cool and mellow and they gave me props for being a nice guy and all, but they seemed super-appreciative for the chance to hang out and chill in a mellower scene than they were used to, without all the hype of their Top Forty world.

By this time Paul had left to go get some rest at the hotel, but Rob and I eneded up staying till last call, and then visiting a few more late night houses to continue the bender until the early morn. Business as usual for him, but I was all sorts of out of shape.

And in the late night hours the talk started to get more personal. And while I can’t divulge any of the tawdry specifics of the conversation, it became clear to me that here before me was an isolated man.

He had become a victim of his own success. He was lonely and all he was looking for was the chance to talk to regular people, because in his newfound world of rock stardom, they’re weren’t too many people that gave a shit about him…. only the money his songs could make them. And I felt good that I was able to be a stranger that he could just hang out with and not have to worry about the pressures of it all for a short while.

And that made me kind of sad. So after giving an abrupt and fucked up “I gotta get out of here” I stumbled home with the vague notion that I had partied like a rock star…with rock stars.

Not willing to let this bender die quietly, I called up a friend and she and I went driving around the Vermont countryside that morning, found a swimming hole and I soaked my hangover in it. While in the Vermont wilds, I was glad I wasn’t a rock star, because it wouldn’t be too healthy, and when do they have the chance to go find a swimming hole and just hang out? No wonder, Rob will end up in The Betty Ford Clinic someday.

When we got back into town I finally got the rest I needed. But I was soon awakened, because it was nearing showtime the next evening and having been promised tickets to the night’s show, I was more interested in just saying goodbye to my new rock star buddies than hearing the screams from their teenage fans. Or the songs.

Because Dennis was right. They were nice guys and while I still don’t like their music, it was cool to know that even the crappiest music can be made by the nicest people. And vise versa.

And as I watched Rob onstage, I wondered how the hell he managed to make it through the day, because I was feeling horrible. And it was easy to see that Rob might not have been at the top of his game, either. I could tell he wasn’t feeling all that great by the look in his eyes. The same one I had. That look of over-partying. Which proved once again that rock stars are just like you and me. They get hungover, too.

I never got a chance to say goodbye and/or lie and say “nice show, dude” to my new rock star buddies. The after show gathering was cancelled, probably because Rob wanted to sleep. I know I wanted to.

The whole experience really didn’t teach me anything except that young rock bands should be careful what they wish for. Success brings it its own set of problems. And really successful bands are rarely the good ones. And I also learned a lesson I continue to learn: I am not a good drinker, especially when drinking with rock stars.

Steve Lemcke wishes that the real world would stop bothering him. When he plays Critic Boy, he plays it for the Burlington Free Press. Read his column every Thursday in their Weekend section.

Vermont-based folk singer Rik Palieri is a traveling man, yesiree. And this summer, Rik checked out the 98th Annual Hobo Convention out in Idaho and he lived to tell the tale. Find out how.

For years now, Utah Phillips has been telling me about the National Hobo Convention in Britt, Iowa. This weekend, August 7­9, I made my way through the open fields of grain to check it out. What I found was quite amazing!

Since 1900, the small town of Britt has opened its arms to hobos, honoring them with parades, a hobo museum, the Hobo Cafe, a hobo jungle-complete with showers and cooking facilities-and even a hobo graveyard for hobos who have caught the last train.

When I arrived on Saturday, this tiny town was packed with over a thousand tourists. There was a carnival atmosphere around town with a flea market, raids and games blocking up Main Street.

I parked my rig down near the Hobo Jungle and meandered down Main Street. In front of the Hobo Museum sat my pal “Danville Dan,” the singing hobo, playing his old Resonator guitar. Danville asked me to play a few tunes as he introduced me all around. It was nice to see such a friendly bunch of folks exchanging stories and songs on the street. As we jammed, a crowd of tourists started filling up Danville’s guitar case with dollar bills. He said, “Rik, this is great! You do the work, and they put the money in my case!”

After a few more tunes, I headed out to see the parade. There was a long line of chairs around the parade route and I got there just in time to see the

first fire truck send out its signal, welcoming everyone to the 98th Hobo Convention! The parade followed with a few marching bands and politicians in antique cars ending with the “Hobo Float”, crammed with hobos of all ages.

After the parade, there was a line-up for free Mulligan Stew, a tasty soup filled with meat, rice and lots of fresh veggies made by the local Boy Scouts. The soup line circled around the town green and park gazebo where all during the day time activities were held.

After we chowed down, it was time for the crowning of the Hobo King and Queen. Since the beginning of this convention, this event has been one of the highlights. Every year a new king and queen are selected by a show of applause from the hobos and audience. It was a moving event when the reigning King, “Frog,” and Queen, “Minnesota Pearl,” said their farewell speeches and announced the nominees for this year’s election. Four men and four women were announced and stepped up to the microphones. Each delivered a speech about their philosophy and what they would do if they were selected. The audience applauded, then a hush fell over the crowd as the votes were tabulated. Pandemonium broke out as the MC called out the winners and this year’s royalty met its kingdom.

The new King, “New York Slim,” a huge, eight-foot African-American, and Queen, “Cinders,” a small, friendly woman from a railroad family, were given their crowns (a straw hat with a cut up coffee can on top), robes, and walking sticks. The news media gathered around the new royal couple like sharks around bloody fish bait as the hobo musicians entertained the crowd. I was honored by the hobos to help with the festivities and pitched in with some of the singing hobos: Liberty, Bojangles, Windy City Tom, Fishbones, Blue Moon, Frisco Jack, Wisconsin Dell’s, and Danville Dan, to name just a few.

Later that night there was a big feed and concert down at the Hobo Jungle. The Jungle is a field on the outskirts of town with a large open air kitchen and an open boxcar to sleep in. It is available year ’round for traveling hobos. As this was the big convention, the fields were covered with tents and sleeping bags. The town paid for the free meal and the hobos provided the entertainment.

Today there seem to be two groups of traveling communities: the old hobos who carry on the old traditions of working odd jobs, story telling, playing music and traveling, and a group of young “punk-thrashers,” who call themselves “the new kids.” The new kids, dressed in skin heads, black shirts, combat fatigues, and big, black biker boots, are into body piercing and tribal tattoos, and use freight trains as a way of life.

These two groups are at odds with each other, as the old hobos are a very friendly group who are carrying on the old hobo ways, while some of the new kids are of a more violent nature. Almost a “Lord of the Flies” gang, riding freight trains. Since their arrival, there has been a bit of trouble which keeps the community wondering about the future of the convention.

The evening’s concert started off with the old hobos singing old songs and reciting hobo poetry. It was family entertainment. Later, after most of the townspeople went home, the new kids took the stage. At first they sang a few songs to a borrowed guitar, then sang old folk songs, unaccompanied. Later, they asked everyone to sit in a circle with hands joined and then together created a “sound wave.” Everyone added some sort of note, wail, yell, bellow or scream, producing a sort of new age Harry Parch kind of music. Then they picked up bits and pieces of scrap wood and started beating them into tribal rhythms. One of the group sprang up with two lit sticks and did a fire dance, walking through the camp fire barefoot, swishing the flames around his body. He then held up his head and spit a wall of fire into the air. The group found some old kitchen pots and plastic tubs and pails and continued drumming. Two men jumped up and started dancing around the campfire and peeled off their clothes. Soon a young woman joined them, stripping off her dress as they all danced to the throbbing rhythm of the drums.

The drumming continued as police cars pulled into the jungle. The young, naked woman disappeared into the darkness as the police surrounded the campfire. The officers did not want any trouble at two a.m. with 50 or more young kids still beating on their drums, so they asked them to stop the drumming, then left.

The old timers stood shocked as they watched this new generation perform their tribal rituals around the old campfire jungle. I sat there wondering how these two groups could reach some common ground. I decided that the next time I come I’ll bring along my didgeridoo!

Rik Palieri is a traveling singer of folk songs. He has traveled the world, telling stories and singing songs. His latest album is called Panning for Gold.

Burlington’s improvisational scene was given a major national boost recently when our homies Strangefolk signed on with a major international record label. What does it all mean? How will they handle it? And why is this just another step on the slow, inevitable path of Strangefolk? Andrew Smith sits the boys down at the Good Citizen office and they talk. You read.

The story of Strangefolk, so far, is so casual and natural, it’s hard to imagine that it could have happened any other way. Three UVM students (and one childhood friend from home) form a college band. College band gets a groove going. Big crowds. Everyone graduates. Crowds disappear. Band hits the road. Road hits back. Friends of band work for band. Crowds build again, this time all over the country. Band builds big buzz, signs to major record label. Good story, so far. Now what? Andrew Smith asks that very question, among others, and Matthew Thorsen shoots the pictures.

Andrew Smith: How do you describe Strangefolk?

All: (Collective) Whew.

AS: Well, let me rephrase that. What descriptions of Strangefolk have you agreed with? Have people figured you out?

Reid Geneur: I like it best when people sort of, and this is kind of what we’ve done in our press kit too, when people pick up on the elements of the music that are…sort of like the features on a face. You know what I’m saying? I don’t really want to do it, but like, describe the elements…you know “soaring guitar lines, melodic harmonies, songs that tell stories…”

AS: The improvisational aspects of your music are obviously very important, and the live performance aspect. How many shows do you guys play a year?

RG: I don’t even really know…between 125 and 150 I think for the last three years.

AS: That’s a lot of playing. When did Strangefolk first start?

Luke Smith: (Pointing to Reid and Jon) These two guys first started as a duo in 1991.

RG: There was kind of a sliding scale after that…we really started playing consistently as a band in the fall of ’93 and the spring of ’94. And then we started in the fall of 1994 as the quote-unquote professional rock and rollers.

AS: Is that pretty much when you guys finished school?

RG: Pretty much. Jon was still in school…

Jon Trafton: Yeah, I was still in school for the last half a year.

AS: Are you all University of Vermont grads?

Eric Glocker: Everyone but me.

AS: Is it fair to say that you formed on the UVM campus? Is that how the connections were made?

LS: Yeah, except for Jon and Erik, who grew up together.

AS: Where was that?

JT: Augusta, Maine. Erik and I grew up together…we’ve known each other since the third grade, so it was only natural…Erik used to come and hang out in Vermont all the time. He was working in Florida for a while and he came to Vermont as we were starting things up, kind of thinking more in terms of a band set-up for Strangefolk instead of the duo.

EG: I’d been playing in a band after I moved to Florida and it wasn’t really going anywhere. I was playing guitar in that band and Jon asked me if I’d like to try playing bass in a band with he and Reid. They didn’t have a drummer yet, but I was psyched to play with Jon. I knew it would be a good thing.

RG: And Luke and I had been friends from the dorm and we’d jammed, y’know with congas and me strumming. I don’t remember exactly when it was, but Jon, Luke and I set up in the ballroom at UVM.

LS: That was the end of our sophomore year…’92.

RG: The great part of that was that in the process Luke caught some kids stealing the stereo out of there, and we had the keys so it was definitely our responsibility. So we tracked them down…chased them down the road as they’re running with the stereo components. (Everyone laughs.)

AS: Strangefolk: crime fighters!

JT: Maybe UVM will send you a little certificate of thanks.

RG: That never came to light until now.

AS: I’m sure they’re long-gone by now.

RG: It is safe to say that we spawned on the UVM, uh, lily pad.

EG: I feel like I went there anyway…I went to all the UVM parties.

LS: That’s why I’m in Vermont, that’s why Reid’s in Vermont, that’s why Jon’s in Vermont. We all came to UVM together.

RG: People still see Erik out on the streets in places like San Francisco, anywhere, and they say “Yeah, I think I knew you from UVM.”

AS: What other bands were you playing with back then, when you were first getting started?

RG: Uh, Chin Ho! (Everyone laughs because AS is in Chin Ho!).

AS: I’m trying to remember who the other bands were in the early 90′s…

All: Wide Wail…

AS: Yeah, they were UVM students too.

Chorus of Indecipherable Voices: Chuck. Which grew into Belizbeha. Motel Brown, Uncle Juice, Rina Bijou.

AS: Strung Out.

JT: Invisible Jet.

LS: Motel Brown. They were obviously a lot bigger than we were.

AS: It seems like they were big when we started Chin Ho! too, which was maybe just a little before you guys started the duo. It seems like Motel Brown was always big in Burlington.

LS: I remember being a freshman in 1990, and seeing the guys from Motel Brown walking around campus and being like (fakes a whisper): “Those are the guys from Motel Brown!”

AS: I heard that they just played their last show. But, this is at least their second “last show.”

JT: Do you remember the Mighty Loon? Were they playing around then?

AS: That was Bob Bushnell’s band, right? Before he was in Motel Brown? They were covered on the first Burlington Does Burlington CD.

JT: I remember seeing them at parties all the time…they were very entertaining.

AS: I didn’t really know those guys back then. At least, I don’t think I knew them. Max Owre is in (sic) now but was in Rina Bijou and then Motel Brown for while, and when we first met he told me that he had actually had his picture in Good Citizen. I didn’t recognize him, but sure enough, there he was in our very first issue.

RG: It’s kind of bizarre, now, and I don’t know how the other guys feel but I’m a lot less in tune with what’s going on, but there’s this whole new generation of bands now that I’ve yet to hear.

AS: Well, you guys are never here anymore.

JT: Yeah, we have to miss a lot of great music, being gone, and that’s one of the downfalls…missing what’s going on in our own backyard.

RG: But we see a lot of great stuff, too…on the other frontiers.

LS: I don’t know if you guys will remember this, but I remember we did that gig in the fall of ’93 at Toast, with Uncle Juice and Wide Wail. I remember thinking then that Strangefolk, Uncle Juice and Wide Wail were contemporaries in the same pocket of time.

AS: When, and I guess how, did you start the touring? Was it a gradual build?

JT: Yeah, basically it was.

AS: It seems to me that the bands from that era who have succeeded, not on an artistic level really, but on an economic level, are the bands that left town. The bands that traveled have really kept it together.

JT: We kind of had to leave town, really. We were playing every week and I think it got to a point where people were like “Why go see Strangefolk tonight when I can see them tomorrow night? Or the next night? Or next week?” I think, we got the sense, that the whole crew of people, the people who came to see us, that we played to through the academic year, when they graduated the next year it was a real wake-up call for us. That’s when we realized that we should just head out of town and find other horizons and then we just did it slowly. Maine, Boston, New York City. Just gradually got it going.

LS: Schools like St. Lawrence…Reid was doing most of the booking.

RG: I wouldn’t call it booking, I’d call it begging. (Everyone laughs.) But seriously, I had just graduated from college, and the pressure was on, just to feel like we were actually doing something. So we played whenever we could. For the first year, we never even took any of the money that we were making as a band. We all had other jobs and just worked when we could.

AS: What did you do for jobs here in Burlington?

EG: I worked at the Lighthouse Restaurant. The day that these guys said that I should quit so we could start touring was like “Yeah! Get me out of this kitchen!”

AS: And you guys all had a house together, right?

JT: Still do, actually, although I think it’s finally over in the fall, we’re going to scatter a little bit. We’ve been living together for over three years, right?

RG: And before that, it was half and half, Erik and John, me and Luke. So, in one way, shape or form, we’ve lived together for over five years.

AS: Does that put extra stress on the band?

JT: I never noticed it until people started saying it to me all the time; “You must get on each other all the time,” and I’m like, “No, No, we don’t really.” You know, we do and we don’t, it’s kind of like a family, you know. You get irritated about things, but that’s only normal, and I think we deal with those things really well.

EG: We’ve learned what buttons to push or not to push.

JT: We know each other too well…we have the secret weapon!

AS: How did you guys get your management team together?

JT: That fell together just like everything else. Brett Fairbrother was a friend of mine and Erik’s. We grew up with him. I sent him our demo tape and he liked it. He was in Oregon, working, making calls selling grass fertilizer or something like that. He was good on the phone and thought he could contribute to our cause and make calls for us and see if he could book us into places. He really learned the ropes as he went, and he’s still learning, as we all are.

RG: Shortly after that, but around the same time, Andre (Gardner) became our road manager. He was living with Luke and I at the time, and he was sort of in the twilight of his college days…he had something going on but none of us were really sure what. He always came around with us all the time. I remember him saying that he wanted to do something. And then Sam came and he was going to stay in our house for like two weeks and then get a place in Montpelier and he ended up staying for a year.

JT: In a closet off our bathroom!

RG: And the deal with him was that he was just kind of working for us in exchange for living in the house.

LS: That was around the time that Russ started, too.

JT: We were recording Lore, remember?

EG: When Russ started, he made us sit down and actually chat. He organized a meeting every week, and that really helped us out a lot. We used to do it at Nectars. And the Metronome. We used to sit there for hours, not eating.

RG: Then when Russ stopped working at the Metronome, we had to move the meetings. (Everyone laughs.) The funny thing, and it’s been our blessing and our curse, with everyone, the four of us musically, and the components of our extended family, is that it just sort of evolved. There were good intentions and a really high energy. A lot of unfocused energy, but gradually over time it focused.

AS: It does seem like it’s been a very natural progression for Strangefolk.

RG: Yeah, it has been.

AS: What about the audience? When did it really start building?

LS: Well, like Jon said, we had a great audience and then they all graduated. And when they left and we lost our concrete audience, we started over again. I mean, we had great crowds and it was like a roving party, but when they left, it was like ground zero.

AS: And that’s the breaking point for most UVM bands. Most UVM bands don’t seem to survive that period after graduation. Every year, there’s a UVM band that gets all huge and then after May hits, they vanish.

JT: We went through that, definitely, and that’s when we all sat down and said, “Are we gonna do this or are we not gonna do this?” And we decided to do it. Basically, I think we just started going to places where we knew people, or the colleges that Reid put together who would actually have us. But, basically…we’d go play for friends and they’d bring some of their friends and then later on they’d bring some of their friends and then eventually the original friends were too good of friends to care about the music anymore. But then their distant friends became actual fans of the band. And it went from there.

RG: It’s still happening. There are a lot of places that we’ll show up and there will be only forty people but half of them are friends of somebody’s or sisters or brothers of friends…

LS: We can make some connection with them; “You went to school with my boyfriend’s sister,” or whatever.

EG: That’s one thing that I’ve noticed a lot is the network that these three guys have…college friends and prep-school friends. We were able to use that, and we did and it’s done wonders for us. If you’re a band from East Bumfuck and you don’t have any friends, it must be a lot harder to start out.

JT: That seems to be a key ingredient…getting to a place where people will actually come, even if it’s a few, and just play your hardest. I think that’s the premise behind all live, traveling music, is to try to get people to come back. It’s kind of cool to watch as the waves spread out from the core friends to the peripheral friends to the people that there’s no connection at all. I can see people that I don’t even know who they are. For a while I felt like I knew everyone, and I still do, I still feel like I know a lot of the people who come and see us, but I don’t recognize a lot of them and that’s kind of neat. As we get older too, there’s an age difference starting to happen, too.

RG: I remember the first time that someone said they had actually heard of us. He said, “Yeah, my friend saw you play,” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s working!” (Everyone laughs). It was exciting.

AS: So, it’s been seven years. What do you consider to be the big marks, the big moments in your career? There was the first demo, from Channel Two…

JT: That was definitely huge for us, and that kind of solidified us as a band, I think.

RG: But, like, getting a gig at Metronome! “We’ve made it to the big leagues now, we’re at the Metronome!” That was big. Or even before that, Jon and I just getting a paying gig!

JT: Oh, that was huge.

AS: Where was your first paying gig?

JT: Middle Earth.

AS: Oh cool, I played there a lot.

JT: We had Wednesday nights, all summer long, every Wednesday night, until they decided that they didn’t want live music anymore. We just showed up one night and there was a sign on the door “No Live Music Tonight!” I guess they wanted to watch

TV. There was a game on, or something.

AS: That was a great place, while it lasted.

JT: Yeah, I have great memories of that place.

AS: That guy Marcus, the manager, he saved my life one night. I was drunk out of my mind at a Chin Ho! show there and I jumped up on the bar because there was no room left on the stage and Marcus reached out and grabbed me and pointed up to the ceiling. I looked up and I was inches away from a big rotating fan going full speed.

JT: Ouch.

AS: They were good guys. They gave a lot of local bands their first gigs and let us hold some cool parties there.

EG: Was that our first gig as a band, too? As a full band?

JT: No, Reid’s basement.

RG: Rasputin’s. SAE. Blarney Stone.

EG: Rasputin’s was tough.

JT: Rasputin’s almost made us decide to stop! (Laughs.)

EG: No one was watching us…we were playing like “Hey Joe.”

JT: That was so bad. That was the first time we’d ever played through a PA system. We were kind of freaked out by that.

LS: I was on brushes, too.

JT: Well, that was fun.

LS: At Rasputin’s, with brushes. (Laughs.) I was trying to play quietly. I was still trying to figure out what the sound was gonna be. From a drummer’s perspective, it was so important to me to make sure that the guitars were the focus because they always had been as a duo, and I totally appreciated that. I didn’t want to overpower, I wanted to accompany and help color the whole thing. So that took me a long time, once I picked up the sticks, to learn how to kind of keep it down. I was always kind of a Bobby Brady meets Keith Moon kind of drummer. I’m still trying to learn how to keep it mellow!

AS: And it was your first time through a PA.

EG: Monitors! What a concept!

AS: You can hear yourself!

JT: Monitors, it never seems like you can hear yourself. You can hear something, but it’s usually bad. Sometimes they make it worse. I think we’ve sung better harmonies sometimes when our monitors were broken down, for some odd reason.

AS: What’s with the “Let Luke Sing” bumper stickers anyway?

LS: Oh, I sing regularly, I just don’t have a microphone. (Everyone laughs.)

AS: Is there a strategic reason for that?

LS: I think you’d have to ask these guys.

JT: I think you have to ask Luke. We’ve given him a microphone a few times.

LS: Yeah, once in a while I’ll get my chance. I think I shot myself in the head.

JT: No, we’re not still holding that against you.

LS: Well, I held it against myself for a long time.

AS: What?

LS: Down in Middlebury.

JT: Oh, that was great, though. That was funny.

LS: In hind sight. But, I really aggravated some people in the band. (Everyone laughs.)

EG: I was sleeping and we had a gig in Middlebury, and Luke came over to wake me up to go to this outdoor gig, and he hadn’t slept at all.

JT: He was still at UVM.

LS: Half in the Bag. It was spring semester, senior year.

EG: Somehow he finagled a microphone while we were playing.

LS: And Reid is up there, singing his heart out, and I’m in the mic going “Yeah!” “He was a man!”

EG: Reid’s singing, “He was a man” and Luke’s going, “Yeah! He was a man!”

JT: And didn’t you do the “Rapper’s Delight?” That was pretty classic. You had red and white checkered pants on, too.

AS: Who actually started the stickers?

RG: I I think, in the Grateful Dead days, there were stickers that said, “Let Mickey Sing.”

JT: “Let Phil Sing.”

RG: There was “Let Mickey” too, that had Mickey Mouse on drums.

JT: Once the stickers started up, it kind of spun into it’s own thing. But basically, it’s three part harmonies because that’s really enough to handle for us. We have some three part harmonies that we can do in our living room but sometimes we get on stage and it’s horrifying. And we’re really slow to evolve. And in this organization, if you wanna do things, you just have to do them yourself. We’re slow to change.

RG: Some of the big moments that I remember about the band so far…

JT: The CD release party at the Paradise, for Lore, that was huge.

RG: Moments of clarity, feeling like we were actually coming together. The first time we played the Paradise, with Percy Hill, and sold it out. That was a momentous occasion. Getting an office space, so that everyone was forced to converge and communicate.

JT: I remember those first meetings. Mike Luoma (from WIZN) would come and sit in with us and he was a really big help.

RG: Dennis Wygmans (from Toast) has always been a really big help, and a great sounding board.

LS: I was thinking about that gig, around the time that Lore came out and we played at Toast, and there was a line going down the block! I was looking out of the band room, and going “Holy shit!”

JT: That was huge.

RG: A lot of what we’re talking about is like, looking back on our career, but we’re really just starting now.

AS: You really are. There’s a level, and a level, and a level.

RG: Yeah, we’re picking up new information, but there are always new hurdles.

JT: One cool thing, as we collect all these milestones, all along, the most important ones for me are the moments, on stage, musically, when we really hit it and we’ve just known that we hit it. It feels good. Those are the moments for me when I know that we’re really doing it. When we come together, even for a short moment. All these other things are sort of external rewards for, hopefully the music and what it’s saying to people, and when it says it to us…that’s a pretty powerful thing.

Part Two of the interview will appear in Good Citizen #11 out in December.

Andrew Smith interviewed Trey Anastasio of Phish in Good Citizen #7 and #8.

“Mr. Charlie” Frazier, host of WIZN’s Blues for Breakfast radio show, gives us the low-down on the Burlington blues scene and talks about Derrick Semler’s new album.

It has been a fairly quiet time on the local blues release front, though new live albums are rumored to be in the works from Seth Yacovone and the Unknown Blues Band. By the way, the new Unknown Blues Band Revue with Sandra Wright smokes! Catch em soon.

Anyone wishing to submit for the Best of Green Mountain Blues – Vol Three, the deadline for a four minute or less original on DAT us August 15th. Volumes One and Two raised $2000 for Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, so thanks to all the bands and everyone who bought a copy. You can call me at 802-434-4947 or e-mail me at mrcharlie-b4b@juno.com for information.

Derrick Semler has just released his second album in a year’s time, entitled Golden Opportunity. He uses the album’s nine original tracks to look back with a touch of melancholy, but also ahead with a sense of optimism; resigned to what’s done is done.

The influences of his favorites; Hubert Sumlin, Robert Jr. Lockwood and Lowell Fulson are readily apparent in the CD’s smooth, quirky style. Favoring uptempo numbers myself, stand outs include “Leadfoot Annie” (the nickname Sandra Wright gave to Derrick’s bassist, Diane Levine,) “Davenport, Iowa” and “Good Rockin’ Mama”.

Twenty-plus years after the Vermont heyday of his bands, the N-Zones and Wild Rice, Derrick is still turning out his unique blend of blues and soul. ViperHouse’s Phil Carr on drums and Pure Pressure’s Bruce Sklar on piano add just the right coloring to all the instruments Semler plays, resulting in yet another audio gem.

Upcoming blues show: Chris Duarte- August 5th at Metronome. Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues band in Waitsfield at the Mad River Music Fest in August, BB King, The Neville Brothers, Dr. John and Storyville on August 30th at Sugarbush and on August 9th, Ray Charles w/ Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters at Sugarbush.

See you there.

“Mr. Charlie” Frazier is host of WIZN’s Blues for Breakfast radio program and leader of the band of the same name.

Our friend Matthew Thorsen is a pretty interesting guy. Not only does he shoot the majority of photographs for Good Citizen, but he’s the main photog for arts weekly Seven Days and he has shot just about every musician in Burlington. Cathleen P. Warren meets the man and we had Matt’s old friend Martin Shields draw him.

Matt Thorsen has been described as strange, eccentric, weird, flighty, brilliant, odd, incredibly cool, and out there. But, the reigning king photographer of the Burlington music scene is not a slacker, martyr, starving artist, trustafarian, yuppie, burn out or snob. He has simply had a life far more exciting than most.

At first, Thorsen is a difficult interview subject. “How old are you?” I ask.

“Twenty-six,” he answers, straight-faced as a nun at a funeral.

“Are you lying?” I ask.

“Yes.”

He spits out non-sequiturs and mumbles, refusing to repeat himself. He resists explaining things simply, such as why his Walkman contains a subliminal tape titled “Productivity.”

“It’s like…really weird, like…warped-sounding music…I like being productive” he says, his eyes looking far, far away.

He thinks aloud about painting a husky’s heart-shaped anus with blue nailpolish that turns pink in sunlight.

He gives me unsolicited hair advice.

He tells stories with very non-specific time-frames.

He avoids questions, toys with his flip-flops, and admits that he likes to scratch mosquito bites.

He is tall with silvery-blonde hair and a deep, almost sporty, tan. His left thigh boasts an impressive bullet scar where he accidentally shot himself with a .357 Magnum when he was twelve. He looks thinner in person than he does in pictures. Thorsen photographs himself constantly. But his self-fascination seems less out of arrogance than convenience: why bother with a model when he can get exactly what he wants on his own?

In his studio, Thorsen comfortably sips a Heinekin and shows a slide show comprised of his and his father’s work.

The slideshow is littered with pictures of Deadheads, roadkill, medical-research monkeys, rockstars, Tibetan and Chinese children, and corpses. His work ranges from innocent and playful to macabre and brutal. He is fascinated by dead, twisted, barely recognizable forms. He sings the Jane’s Addiction lyric “Show me everybody/ naked and disfigured/ Nothing’s shocking.” As he flips through the slides, he introduces exotic pictures with “Oh, this is from the Savoie region” or “This is when I was in Kashmir.” Thorsen’s slideshow ain’t your grandmama’s vacation snapshots.

“When I take a picture,” he says. “I want to stand somewhere no one else has stood. I’m trying to find out something for myself.”

Born October 10, 1967 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, Matthew Grant Thorsen was the youngest of four children. His upbringing spread over three states and can only be described as unusual.

“My parents were selling monkeys for medical research,” he said. “My dad worked with Jonas Salk. He worked all over the country. Animals were big then. The first monkeys that went up in space were my dad’s.”

“I went to tons of labs and saw people with huge-ass grants. I saw what they were doing and seeing and working on. I think maybe that’s why I needed a darkroom. All the stainless steel and trays and chemicals and stuff. At first I wanted the chemistry aspect but have since found otherwise.”

Thorsen’s father, George, gave him his first camera.

“I definitely wanted a camera.” he said. “And my dad bought me this Keystone 110. This tiny little pocket camera, like, not even a spy camera. And I totally thought it was crap. But when I saw the pictures from it, I thought ‘oh, this is neat.’”

Around 1979, the Thorsen family moved to Enosburg, Vermont.

“I totally stuck out like a sore thumb,” he said. “I had this wicked Boston accent. But I was the strongest and fastest kid.”

Thorsen’s high school years and his parent’s 1984 divorce brought a turning point in his personal development.

“I started doing not so good in school. Well…I just never went. When I did my homework I got A’s but I used to skip school all the time. I was old enough so, I could write my own excuse notes but, it got ridiculous.”

Thorsen was thrown out of Enosburg High School because the administration believed him to be a drug user.

“I didn’t drink or smoke!” he laughed. “I couldn’t believe they thought I was on drugs. I wasn’t into any of that. But…I’d drive kids up to the strip clubs and Montreal. I guess I was just looking for attention. It was just as easy to be bad as good. You could say I did it on purpose. It was pretty easy to be a freak.”

Walking around downtown Burlington with Thorsen is like being a rockstar by association. He knows everybody and people are attracted to him like mosquitos. He tiptoes the fine line between laid-back shyness and high-profile celebrity.

While eating lunch on the grass across from Club Toast, we are joined by Steve, a young passerby and acquaintance of Thorsen. Steve proceeds to dominate the conversation with praises for Thorsen’s photos. He tells of a particular photograph of a severed arm in a pile of scrap metal.

“That’s a sick photo,” he says, rolling his eyes in ecstasy. “You gotta take a look at that one.”

Steve exits the scene, working his way up Church Street with a feigned crippled strut.

“I don’t really know him very well,” says Thorsen, engrossed in his tortellini and zucchini salad. “I met him on the bus the other day.”

While eating ice cream on St. Paul Street, Thorsen is approached by a middle-aged wino.

“Hey man, you wanna lend me twenty-five dollars,” the stranger says in a gravelly whisky-soaked voice. “All I need is twenty-five dollars.”

At first, Thorsen passes him, paying strict attention to his chocolate sundae. Then, he turns back.

“I can give you one dollar,” he says apologetically.

“C’mon, I just need twenty-five dollars,” whines the stranger, holding his hands out like a third-worlder on a Sally Struthers commercial.

“Well, what are you gonna do for me?” asks Thorsen. “I mean, I’ve got business on the west coast.”

The stranger then grabs a street sign and hoists his body up until he is perpendicular, like some dangerously inebriated sideshow. His dismount almost causes massive bodily injury.

Thorsen laughs and hands him the bill.

“That was worth a buck,” he says. “Man, I see the weirdest shit.”

After taking a few college classes at the Community College of Vermont and the University of Vermont, Thorsen dropped out and decided to visit China. From there he traveled extensively through Mongolia, India, Tibet, Pakistan and Nepal. He crossed borders hiding in trucks, photographing his journey and companions.

In Tibet, he met Anne, a french doctor.

“She came up to me at camp and asked if I wanted to go to Mount Everest with her,” he said. “She was this beautiful, unbelievably smart woman. I was like…okay.”

He moved to France to live with Anne in a bona-fide Alpine mountain village. He climbed peaks and looked after local children. His life was a dreamy chocolaty fairy tale.

But, after, two years, Thorsen began having difficulty with his European situation.

“I had to find work and it was almost impossible. Our love affair just burned out. Until then, I really didn’t think I was going to come back to the United States.”

In 1996, he returned to Vermont and lived with several local musicians. Soon after, he began taking photographs professionally for Seven Days.

“I had a photo in the first issue. It was Slush. Then I didn’t get an assignment for like three months. I approached them and they gave me a gig that day. I’ve worked for them for like two years now.”

Thorsen’s assigned subjects range from rockstar portraits to politicians to dogs to landscapes to bottles of Viagra.

“It’s all fluff but…it’s keeping me pretty tame. What I want to do is not pretty and this is teaching me to be pretty. I never would’ve pursued portraits on my own, taking pictures of famous people because of who they are or who they know. It’s really hard to get people to do what you want in a picture.”

While shooting photos to possibly run with this interview, Thorsen loses all self-consciousness and wields a Polaroid instamatic like a puppy chewing on a frisbee. He moves about the room with a furious energy, rearranging furniture, changing the lights. He gives simple instructions, snaps the photo quickly, and squeals as the image develops.

He doesn’t get tired but wants more film, more chances to take just the right shot. He incorporates a hatchet, a wall-hanging of Buddha, and a television movie about Jake LaMotta. He throws himself into precarious positions, climbing a rain-soaked column on my front porch and dangling himself above a shock of tiger lilies.

He loses himself thinking about each photo. He is somehow able to find something interesting in even the worst pictures. He recognizes the cheap instamatic camera as a completely legitimate tool to create a masterwork.

This is a man who loves his job.

But he claims to have no idea why people ask him to take photographs. Nevertheless, his pictures infest the weekly pages of Seven Days, plaster the walls of Club Toast, periodically pop up at the Firehouse Gallery, and coat almost all surfaces of his studio. He has been published by the Boston Phoenix, Boston Globe, and several deadhead magazines.

Yet, with a strange mix of modesty and general bewilderment, Thorsen dismisses his talent as ordinary.

“I don’t know anything about photography,” he said. “I took a couple of classes but, all they teach you is how to use the camera as a tool. I don’t even know how to use my flash. I mean, I still use my old textbook.”

Matt Thorsen is locked out of his studio. He uses what used to be Club Toast’s band room. Now, the space is sealed off from the nightclub and features maximum seating, a small bathroom with stand-up shower, refrigerator, and darkroom. Thorsen uses the space free of charge, a fact that he is immensely grateful for.

After trying to jimmy the lock with a credit card, remove the hinges with his fingernails, and screaming through Toast’s mailslot, Thorsen stares blankly at the unbudging door.

“This is the first time I locked it,” he says. “I can’t believe I left the keys inside.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off the door.

“I think it’s locked,” he says.

Thorsen has already lived some of the wildest times. Thus, his wants are for simplicity. He wants to continue his career as a photographer, maybe dipping his toes in advertising. But, in ten years, he just wants to be taking pictures.

“In the end, I’m just going to end up being alone with my camera,” said Thorsen. “I’ll be making my own pictures, the pictures I want. I guess that’s what every photographer wants.”

Thorsen walks home through a torrential downpour, complete with too-close lightning flashes and raucous claps of thunder. Rivulets of rain stream down his cheeks, running off his jaw. His clothes are waterlogged and heavy, his flip-flops annoyingly collect gravel and sand. He walks a quick pace, shrugging his shoulders forward, wincing at oncoming headlights.

He stops at the streetlight on the corner of Main Street and North Winooski Avenue. The light reflects off his skin and, for a moment, he looks like somebody famous. He remarks that he wishes he had a camera right now.

He turns up Main Street and disappears.

Cathleen P. Warren reviewed Kristen Hersh for Good Citizen in Issue #6.

Canadian producer extraordinaire Glen Robinson was behind the boards for the recording of some of rock’s biggest albums as chief engineer at Le Studio in Quebec, and in the last four or five years, he has produced some of Vermont’s biggest bands. Bands like Envy, Wide Wail, Five Seconds Expired, Chin Ho! and Non Compos Mentis have all had discs produced by Robinson, and we thought it was about time we told you who he is. Chris Parizo writes.

“Yeah, I think you can do it better. Let’s do it again.” The voice crackles through my headphones.  I groan. I shuffle my weight to the other foot. One more time…this will be the one.  I am standing in the recording room at Archer Studios attempting to lay down one half of the rhythm track to the recording of a single titled “Low Flying Planes.” We are entering the beginning of the third hour and I am getting frustrated. My headphones are beginning to feel uncomfortable and the temperature feels like it has risen twenty degrees…this is starting to suck.

Glen Robinson, the producer from Montreal who we chose to help us reach our sound, is determined that we will eventually nail down the recording that we are looking for, and he has also decided that we are going to record our parts separate from each other…the drummer and myself are the first up.

“Here we go.” he says “Recording.”

And then comes that opening riff…that damn opening guitar riff that is permanently branded into my brain after hearing it umph-teen times today. All I have to do is play along…why is this so damn difficult? It sounds fine to me? What is it that this guy hears that is wrong? I am ready to scream.

Who am I kidding? I am having the time of my life.

I would not go through this process if I didn’t know for a fact that Glen Robinson was one of the best producers in the eastern part of North America. His work can be heard on such local albums as Five Second Expired’s monster sounding Null, Wide Wail’s Wide Wail and Never Again’s Through Bleeding Hands . He has produced major label acts such as Headstones (MCA), G.W.A.R. (WEA) and Canada’s over-hyped The Tea Party (EMI). In his earlier days, he worked as an engineer on the recordings of Tori Amos, Thomas Dolby and even rock legend Keith Richards.

Glen’s finished products are enormous. Huge, in-your-face guitars with an enormous rhythm section are characteristics of a Robinson recording. The vocals are crisp and clear and never over shadow the musicianship of the band. He is willing to sit and wait for an inept bassist to nail a recorded track perfectly. He is patient. He can read a musician’s talent almost immediately and knows when you are performing at the top of your game. I wasn’t. He knew it.

“He definitely knows his shit.” says Mark Lucia, guitarist for Never Again. “He’s a nice guy — great guy — but he gets very serious when he is in the studio. For us, it took a couple of songs before he knew what we were all about…but he got it. The guy definitely knows his music better than…uh…anyone.”

Robinson got his start back in his late teens. He grew up in Montreal and began playing guitar with local bands. A friend of his father’s, who just happened to manage 80′s heart-throb Corey Hart, got Robinson a job sweeping the floors at Sol Soleil Recording. He spent the rest of the year watching and learning, and within one year’s time he would find himself sitting behind the tables as engineer on an album by the legendary English new wave band Gang of Four.

At the age of 25, Robinson became a master of his trade and would accept the position of Chief Engineer at Le Studio in Morin Heights, the principle recording facility for many Rush albums, and would work with 13 Engines and Queensryche.

In 1996, Glen entered the studios to remix some historic concerts for the King Biscuit/BMG catalogue. Among the artists whose work he remixed included David Crosby, Joe Satriani and the legendary Joe Cocker.

So with all these huge money-market major label bands that he could be working with full-time, why is he bothering to work with bands from Burlington, Vermont?

“The scene is supportive,” he says. “In a lot of other areas, there is a lot of trash talking. In Burlington, you rarely hear a band come down on other bands.”

Glen’s first introduction to the Burlington scene was with the now-defunct Envy, a band that featured Matt Hutton and Shawn Toohey of Warner Brothers-signed The Red Telephone and former Zola Turn drummer Ann Mindell.

“I was working at White Crow (Recording Studio in Burlington now closed) and they were there working on some stuff. We ended up hooking up and recording their first CD (1995′s Distorted Greetings.)

From then on, I would hear about a band and check them out. I’d go to their shows and see what they were all about. Talk to people, that is how it generally goes.”

According to many, Glen’s best piece of work with a Burlington band is Five Seconds Expired’s Null, that was released on the indie label Another Planet. The album is furious. Glen made the rhythm section shine with a loud and in your face groove that was not distorted or sloppy. The guitars were clear and aggressive, and the vocals weren’t too bad either. It is apparent that Glen shines on the harder material.

“Incredible,” says former Five Seconds Expired frontman Jeff Howlett. “…the chairman of the boards.”

His latest project with a Burlington group is a new recording by Wide Wail. The band went up to Canada and spent a weekend recording material for an upcoming release. In the recording, Glen decided to use a new approach to laying down material.

“We decided to record the material live… everyone playing at the same time. The recording came out killer! We went in and I said: ‘No headphones!’. They all played together, recording at the same time.

The sound is more live, more emotional. I have this new motto when recording: ‘Don’t listen to yourself, listen to others’. This way everyone plays off of each other, listening to what the others are doing. It feels better and it sounds better.”

When it comes down to WHERE a band is going to be recorded, Robinson likes to move around a little bit. He is used to being on the move, never being in the same place for too long, and his roster of different recording studios can reflect that.

“I’d get bored if I was in one place. I really don’t like being stuck in the same studio working with the same equipment. That’s why I don’t think I’ll open my own. Using new equipment keeps things fresh. I have been collecting vintage recording gear but I am not planning on keeping it in one place for too long.”

In the future, Robinson plans on creating more and more records. Working with Burlington music has become more than a hobby, but a chance to capture up and coming artists at their trade…waiting for the scene to break.

And when it does, you can bet that our six foot eight inch friend from the north had something to do with it, whether behind the boards or dropping names to the right people (which he by the way does).

Back at Archer Studios, we finish recording the track and spend the next couple of minutes listening to the play back. “Yep. I think that is it,” says Robinson.

Three hours, I am done. I pass Dave Morency setting up in the hallway, getting ready for his turn in the pit.

I wander into the board room and melt into a couch. Robinson turns to me with a smile, picks up a guitar and says: “Hey! That didn’t take too long.”

With no sarcasm.

Chris Parizo is the bass player for Chin Ho! Glen Robinson produced Chin Ho!’s last single “Low Flying Planes.” Now there’s a shameless plug for ya. Read about it in Vox soon.

If you’ve heard the new Cranial Perch CD Fringe Benefits, you might suspect that you’re dealing with a weird bunch. You just might be right. Our man in the know, Mister Max Owre, attempts to explain the unexplainable, Burlington’s art-rock intellectuals Cranial Perch.

What are balls? They can be bouncy sports objects, or they can be testicles. Music-ally, they can be the impressive skills of a “tight” jam. I think the best balls are the symbolic ones that come from truly uncompromised people throwing all caution to the wind-showing the world the beauty of musical creativity with all of its warts and pimples. The sheer daring and in your face nature of one Burlington band in particular, Cranial Perch, dangle as an example of this, my favorite balls.

Cranial Perch is an enigma. My visual image of them contrasts strongly with the aural one inspired by their music. I can see Jamie Williamson up there on stage, looking smart, and Peter Danforth with his saxophone, looking tall. Peter is very tall. Anne-Marie Costa as the vampire queen beseeching the underworld to rise. The picture is quite surreal. Add the incomparable troubadour Dave Jarvis and wild-man drummer Jamie Schefer (Hey, didn’t I see you with Spray Nine?), and the mix becomes, quite frankly, baffling.

Cranial Perch’s recently released debut compact disc Fringe Benefits is a most hip aural landscape. This album oscillates nicely between melodic pop that is radio ready and the scary side of musical cerebralism, which by its very nature is liked only because it freaks us out so much. This album has many twists and turns and a discerning listener will enjoy the ride while occasionally jumping out of the way of the huge flaming oil tanker flying across the medium. Jump! Whoa, close one.

Back to the band. One might hear the saxophone and imagine that this is some kind of jazz act. The singing at times backs up the assessment, but trust me, this misconception will disappear after the manic energy of a nerd-pop song like “Marginal Man” smashes down and makes your skull a hoof. A hoof! Their brain splitting jams are somewhat reminiscent of the crazy vibe of Sun Ra, or perhaps Buckethead, slowed down a little, playing the Carpenters backwards.

Imagine the hippy Peter, Paul and Mary your Catholic Mom would play as a poor attempt to be “cool.” Was that your mom? Okay. Try again. Imagine new folk music turned in upon itself with a healthy dose of LSD and Sonic Youth. Throw in some of the B-52′s campiness and early Genesis’ art rock anthems, and mix in all of Jamie’s references that were above my head (Gong, It’s A Beautiful Day) and you have Cranial Perch.

Williamson says “Cranial Perch started at the same time my daughter was born. One day she was in the room singing ‘He’s a Marginal Man, a military dude.’” According to Williamson, Cranial Perch has the most children of any band in town, with band members Anne-Marie Costa, Williamson, and new father Dave Jarvis all boasting of progeny. I however disagree-I know some local bands composed entirely of children! Regardless, it is encouraging to know that there is a second generation of freaks out there.

As for the name, “Cranial Perch,” it is apparently what you will get if you jump into a swimming pool without water. Although, from the sound of their song “Swimming Pool,” where this theme is repeated, that can be a peaceful and almost pretty thing. I was laughing at myself for buying into the musical sentimentality of this piece, while Anne-Marie and Jamie tell a macabre story of lonely death in a swimming pool. It is silly, scary, and weird! Another example of the ‘Perch paradox’.

What are we to do with Cranial Perch. Do we attempt to classify them? How can they be sexy? The one thing that stands out most about this band is a real lack of pretension. Honesty is a virtue, and they are the hermaphroditic Abraham Lincoln. They are so damn intellectual that you forget that they are joking at times. Then again, they are so silly that you forget they are making serious comments on society, art, and life and death in general.

A good example can be found in Williamson’s “Bridge to Nowhere,” and the reference to fifties TV and our society is both eerie and funny. “The bridge to the past sucks a void in my mind, painting pretty pictures round faced shit-eating grin, The Beaver’s got it hard-June’s award (sic) is a sin. We cleave to makeshift hopes, con rhetoric swells, We wallow in the ooze-Dick loves Jane’s smell.” Such sentiments are always tempered by the perturbations (and sometimes masturbations) of Perch music that leave us guessing as to the true sentiment.

When I asked Jamie Williamson how they came up with this crazy stuff, he said “The stuff I write and bring in, I don’t tell other people what their parts are. Pete makes up his saxophone parts, Jamie his drum parts, and so on.”

What about these people. First is Williamson. He is well spoken and a take-no-shit intellectual. I mean this guy actually teaches at a major university (UVM! We are not worthy). He is like the Steven Seagal of the Science Fiction/Fantasy community. Whether he likes it or not I would have to label him ‘the leader’ of the band. This way he can take issue with my article, and only one of them has to fight me. He has a knack for writing songs that move us (it could be to tears or to fears, but not to Tears for Fears) and teach at the same time. His guitar style is intimately aggressive and, along with Peter’s horn, provides the atonality and drive which make the ‘Cranial Perch sound.’

I’ve known Anne-Marie Costa since she was in the eighth grade. She sang at a talent show with two of my best friends and even then she stole the show. Her voice sometimes reminds me of Grace Slick and other times is more like a howling banshee ripping the flesh from a baby goat. Yes, a baby goat. She is a remarkable wordsmith, creating landscapes that are dotted with powerful mythic images, as in “Artemis,” or playful sexiness as in the pseudo-rap of “Doctor With a Medal”. She compliments the band with her vocal delivery of epithets like “666-fuck you!” Anne-Marie has those balls I was talking about.

I have always had a great respect for Dave Jarvis. He has done a lot for this music community and any project he is involved with will benefit from his experience and professionalism. In Cranial Perch I would classify him as the ‘Rock-n-Roll’ guy. The first strains of his song “Lois” lilt out of the stereo and suddenly it is 1968 and I’m in Gary, Indiana watching Jim Morrison and Grace Slick jam with Iggy Pop and Robert Fripp. A great deal of the variety that I so love about this band is being generated by Jarvis’ distinctively different song writing style and delivery. This band has the luxury of having three strong voices to lean on and it is refreshing to hear them use the smooth Jarvis to his full effect.

Really though, Peter Danforth is THE MAN! Screw this whole front man crap. Peter is out there on every song putting that sax stamp on the music which says “I’m here, and I won’t be predictable”. This is true musicianship. I know that Peter plays every note on the fly and from his

heart (except for all those obviously crafted melodies), and from this we see a great heart-at times begging the listener to cuddle up with a warm jazzy lover, and then screaming at you like Rodan (not the sculptor Rodin, although that works also) to wake you up and remind you, “I am not predictable!”. No Peter, No Perch, Period.

Last, but certainly not least, let’s talk about the drummer. Visually, Jamie Schefer is one of the most entertaining drummers around, and aurally he nicely manages to clomp like a rocker when he needs to and then play softly and subtly when he needs to. Working with the other instruments in this band must be challenging and Jamie and Jarvis together provide a solid foundation for the other musician’s quirkiness. Nicely done.

Look, you might not be ready for Cranial Perch, but they are so much hipper than you are. I for one would much rather be disturbed by music than bored by music. Peter Danforth called Cranial Perch “the Bearded Lady of the Burlington Music Scene.” He is right on there. But, pull off that beard and take off the clothes, and you will see a delectable she-beast with seven swollen vaginas and a lot to say. When they score their first #1 single, I will look back at this and say, “I told you so, all you need is acid and an open mind.” ~GC~

Max Owre is a guitarist and Napoleanic scholar. What else can you say?

Vermont’s most prolific singer-songwriter ain’t your everyday folkie, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Her last album, I Used to Be Nice, has shown just how far Rachel has come from her early days as a Johnson scenester. Our editing egomaniac Andrew Smith finds out that despite her album title, Rachel Bissex is still as nice as they come.

Ask any Burling-tonian who’s been around for a few years to name their favorite local folk singers, and I’ll bet the farm that they’ll mention Rachel Bissex. Ask Rachel Bissex the same question, and she’ll probably name anyone but Rachel Bissex. You see, Rachel Bissex knows that Rachel Bissex ain’t no folkie. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but just because she’s a singer-songwriter who writes lyrics for Martin Luther King and covers the occasional Jackson Browne tune doesn’t mean she’s one of, uh, y’know, them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Even though her new album is called I Used to Be Nice, we’ll let you in on a little secret…Rachel Bissex is as nice as they come.

Rachel Bissex is a thirty-something native of Newton, Massachusetts who landed in Vermont at the age of twenty-one. She spent five years at Johnson State College, and eventually settled in Burlington after the birth of her first child Matt. She worked for the Mayor’s Arts Council, programming the art gallery and various festivals in the city. Rachel had a second child, Emma, and in 1989 she started the nomadic Burlington Coffeehouse.

The acoustic music forum was created to showcase singer-songwriters like herself and it was around this time that Rachel made the big plunge, with the urging of her husband, musician and playwright Steve Goldberg, and became a full-time musician. Her first album, the self-released fourteen song Light in Dark Places, was released soon after, in 1990, to local accolades and national attention.

Rachel spent most of the nineties making music and trying to make enough money to make more music. She fears that she oversaturated the Burlington area with her frequent performances and claims that to this day she still can’t get booked for First Night because of it. Quick to admit mistakes, she says that she “…pretty much spent nine years learning the music business.”

In 1993, Rachel turned over the keys to the Coffeehouse to Jeff Miller (who continues his stewardship to this day) and developed a touring regimen that she eventually turned into a successful route of performances at clubs and festivals up and down the east coast, from southern Florida to northern Maine. Rachel appeared at local festivals like the Ben and Jerry’s One World One Heart concert and the Champlain Valley Festival, and she shared the stage with a varied roster of major headliners including Ray Charles, Shawn Colvin and Joan Armatrading.

Worn down by the years of do-it-yourself booking and promotion, in late 1994 Rachel signed a record contract with Waterbury-based Alcazar Records. Alcazar promised tour support, promotion and distribution, and Rachel was happy for the help. Alcazar was a small Vermont label, homegrown out of Joan Pelton’s Silo Distribution, and that year the company ambitiously signed Rachel, Gordon Stone and George Pettit to long-term record contracts. In 1995, the company released Rachel’s second album, the thirteen song Don’t Look Down. Featuring an all-star cast of Vermont’s finest musicians including Stone, Martin Guigui and Chad Hollister, the album included the song “Dancing With My Mother,” which had drawn much attention to Rachel when it was included on the Acoustic Alliance compilation CD in 1994.

Alcazar promoted the album as zealously as they could, and Rachel credits the label with helping her expand her audience and grow her art. Her third album, the 1997 release I Used to Be Nice, demonstrated a growth and maturity in her work that was almost dramatic to witness. Including guest stars Dar Williams, Stacy Starkweather and Gabe Jarrett, the album showcased a seasoned depth in her songwriting and some truly world-class performances. I Used to Be Nice should have been Rachel’s big break, but unfortunately by the time of the album’s release, corporate support at Alcazar had dwindled to such a point that she now considers the album unpromoted. Alcazar dropped all of their artist roster in early 1998 and has devoted themselves solely to the creation of “concept” albums, leaving Rachel to find a new home for her music.

If you’re gonna keep climbing, you might as well find some new roads to explore, and this year Rachel will continue to travel, singing her songs. Next month she’ll play her way down to Texas, do the Kerrville Folk Festival in Kerrville, Texas, and then she’ll play her way back. Next fall she’ll be in the bay area of California for three weeks, performing with her friend Annie Wenz from Northampton, Massachusetts. And locally, Rachel has started playing with a band (including her husband, Rachael Beddoe and occasionally Stacy Starkweather or Billy Patton on bass) at the new Red Square on Church Street in Burlington. ~GC~

Andrew Smith was in a Johnson Players production of a John Ford Noonan play with Rachel Bissex a few years back. She didn’t remember him, though.

The second half of our exclusive Good Citizen interview with Phish’s Trey Anastasio. Vermont’s biggest rock star sat down with Good Citizen editor Andrew Smith for a long, relaxed conversation about Vermont, the Vermont music scene life, a possible Surrender to the Air follow-up, and life as a member of a world-famous rock band.

PART II

On a cold winter day in early February, Phish guitarist and vocalist Trey Anastasio stopped up at the Good Citizen office high over Pure Pop Records in Burlington. Fresh from a much needed vacation in Florida with his family (which now includes his wife and two daughters), Trey sat for a photo shoot with Matthew Thorsen and then we wandered over to Coyote’s for a late lunch. I knew that Trey had not done any interviews on the last Phish tour and I was a little nervous that there might be things he wouldn’t want to talk about, subjects that he might be skittish about. However, I found Trey to be his usual, amiable self and we soon settled into a long, friendly conversation that rambled in many directions and illuminated the crossroads that Phish finds itself at approximately fifteen years into their career.

In Good Citizen #7 Trey talked about Vermont, The Vermont music scene and the enviable position that our piscatorial brethren find themselves in fifteen years into their career…

AS: I’ve always felt that your studio albums were always unique pieces and they’re all different.

TA: Yeah, sometimes I think that some of our albums don’t have enough cohesiveness because our trying to do everything at once and that has been our downfall in the past. Live it works, but sometimes the albums feel like they don’t have enough cohesiveness, but different ones are different. I really like the last one. So we’ve got all these different ideas now and the first concept is to go in the studio with a producer and try to put it together in one whole but then the argument goes back and forth that it might be better if we just took the separate pieces and made four separate albums. One of them is the improvisations, one of them live stuff, one of them would be like demos for songs, which I love. We’ve got all these eight track demos for songs, and a lot of them I just love the way they came out just as they are… done on a little Mackie board with the eight track…so I was thinking that maybe that would be cool just like that. I mean, why go recreate it if you got the magic on the first take? I mean, you can make it sound a lot bigger, but there’s something about that first take that’s so cool.

AS: Yeah, sometimes demos are so much cooler than the final version.

TA: I love demos! This is where we’re at right now. These are the options…we could put out each album on its own, which wouldn’t do anything for the record company because they would all be really little releases. The other option is to go into the studio with a producer and try to take the best of each one, track some of the songs and try to make one album.

AS: Is Elektra the kind of label that might let you do the big album with them and release the other things on your own?

TA: Well, that’s an option because our contract is up for renegotiation now, so I think that we could try to do something where if they wanted to put it out, they could. It’s all so up in the air.

AS: Yeah, you’re at quite a crossroads.

TA: It’s a big crossroads. It’s a cool place to be. A real lucky place to be. It’s all about demos…that’s kind of where I’m at, you know? We’ve got a live album that we really like, and the demos…we’ve got like thirty two minute demos on eight track recorded with real cheapo mics and a little Mackie board of all the songs that are supposed to be the next Phish album.

AS: Are they all new songs?

TA: Yeah, they’re all new songs. And I love ‘em just they way they are. I feel kind of sad about going in and re-doing them.

AS: It would seem like a Phish fan would really like to hear that stuff.

TA: Probably, yeah, I know I would. In my heart, I think it may be more exciting to let people hear it exactly the way it was written, the way it lays right now, you know?

AS: It sounds like you’re much more excited about the smaller way…

TA: I think I am…but that’s the problem, well it’s not a problem…but a lot less people will hear it. So you have to ask yourself ‘why? why do you really care?’ And see, that’s what’s weird about doing this interview today is because today is the day we’re trying to decide all these things. And on one hand I think it might be cool to take these demos and see how far we can go with them. I was on a conference call with Page and John this morning and in two days we have a meeting with a producer…it’s a big decision, but it’s a great place to be.

AS: How does the instrumental thing compare with the Surrender to the Air project?

TA: Surrender to the Air was kind of a blueprint for it in a way, but Surrender was a lot more extreme…which I liked…

AS: I love it…

TA: Yeah, this is the same basic concept but different people, and the comfort level that the four of us have together makes it a lot different. With Surrender to the Air we’d never played together…this is a little bit more…uh, slimy.

AS: Do you think doing Surrender outside the band allowed you to do it inside the band?

TA: Yeah…I wanted to do something outside the band anyway, just to kind of open that door…we’ve been together so long I think I wanted to feel out how we would in the future approach something like that. Because we’ve never done anything, since we were eighteen, away from each other. So that was probably part of the intent. And also I was really feeling at the time the only way to get better as a musician was to play with other people. And I still think about what I learned from that…I mean, just walking into the room with Marshall Allen…I was overwhelmed by the whole thing. I mean…all of them…but Marshall Allen especially… Just shaking his hand was a learning experience. He’s amazing.

AS: Have you thought about doing it again?

TA: Actually, it’s funny…I’ve been having these funny connections with other musicians from different realms. Like Robert Fripp…I’ve been talking to him on the phone a lot. I met him and he’s been calling me and everything. I’ve been thinking about another one with a whole different vibe with other musicians that I’ve been kind of bumping into…like doing an interview with a journalist who knows somebody and they do an interview with somebody else and say “oh, I was just talking to…” and so I end up talking to them on the phone and stuff. Like Dave Grohl…I might not want to give the idea away too soon. But that’s kind of the idea. Surrender to the Air was all kind of jazz based musicians, and this next one would be more varied. But the same thing, just go in the studio and jam and then edit it all together. I’ve been thinking , what if we had Dave Grohl and Stewart Copland? And what if we had Robert Fripp and Eddie Van Halen?

AS: Awesome!

TA: And Pistol? (Guitarist with Burlington based band The Pants.) And then we were talking about doing a Halloween thing with Tom (Lawson of the Pants) and Gabe Tesoriero (of the Queen City All Stars) and try to get Fripp down for that. He’s totally into anything.

AS: Really? When you read about Fripp he sounds so fussy.

TA: He isn’t really. He’s a really nice guy. I think he could really get into Pistol. I dunno, I have a lot of ideas. The great thing about something like that is that you only have to be in the studio for one day. But that was kind of the idea. Phish has been talking about doing the jamming thing for years, long before Surrender to the Air. Because we do it in band practice everyday, we jam, and we love it and there have been so many times in practice when we said ‘Oh I wish that was on tape.’ So we finally just did it…and it was really fun…we went to Bearsville for three days and then did it again. Two weekends. Page is really spearheading the process. He’s got all the tapes down in New York and he’s doing a lot of editing.

AS: So Page lives in New York now?

TA: Yeah, he does. So what’s going on with Neil Cleary and the Stupid Club CD?

AS: I just read today in the Free Press that he got a write-up in the Option Insider tip-sheet. He’s living in Austin now which I think is a good city for him. I Love that Stupid Club record.

TA: Oh yeah, I love it too, that’s why I’m asking.

AS: That song “Spark” gets stuck in my head for days. I just think about it and it’s in my head. I heard that Neil had all his stuff stolen in Philadelphia on the way down. I think he’ll do well.

TA: I love that album…somebody should do something with that record.

AS: Oh man, there are so many great records that get made in Burlington that no one ever hears. You struggle for so long to pay to make a record and then you get it done and you don’t have any money left to promote it and get it out to people. The new Construction Joe record…man, if no one hears that it will be a shame…

TA: Yeah, I don’t really know what to do about it.

AS: Burlington bands have just got to get out of town, hit the road, and play for as many people as they possibly can.

TA: I feel so lucky, but all I can think about is how we did it. Just touring incessantly and practicing every day and working on the live show until people came to us on the basis of the live show. And then we didn’t even think about selling records. But I know that’s not for everybody.

AS: Yeah, I think it really depends on the genre of music. Most alternative bands can’t play more than forty-five minutes. I mean, I’m glad that Chin Ho! was able to play Nectars and learn how to play all night.

TA: Much of it due to Nectar coming over and telling you: “you’re going on stage now” and “okay, you’re done.”

AS: Yeah. I love that. We still do occasional Nectars shows under the name Kam Fong because it’s such great practice. And when I play there with (sic)…it’s tough to get the nine of us on that stage…

TA: Yeah…but it’s worth it. It’s weird…I mean, what does it take to get on the radio these days? The boundaries are so narrow…either you’re really lucky and just fall into the boundaries or you don’t get played. It’s a hard road. I always found it much easier to just not worry about it.

AS: Hit the road. It seems to be working for Strangefolk and Belizbeha…they’re out there a lot. I don’t know, I’ve always thought that if I had a lot of money I’d start a record label and sign bands like Construction Joe and Invisible Jet and the Pants and the bands that I really think the world should hear. It’s so depressing to think that the world might never hear some of these bands.

TA: Yeah, like the new (unreleased) Pants album. I listen to that album all the time. I hope it gets out there.

AS: And the Stupid Club record. Have you guys ever thought of starting your own label?

TA: Yeah, I think about it a lot. But it’s such a big job. There’s so much to do now other than play music, and the thought of taking on another whole organization…I just can’t imagine doing it. There are so many musicians in town that I would love to see…Grippo, all those guys…such great talents. Lar Duggan, he’s a genius. I just don’t know what to do about that.

AS: I’ve kind of been hoping that another band would get signed and the industry would come up here and see how much talent there is up here.

TA: It almost seems like the gap is widening between talent and…you know…it’s such big money that’s being tossed around…why is anyone ever gonna take a risk? It’s purely about money…at least that’s the way I see it. That’s why it’s so weird that Ween got signed. I don’t know how that happened.

AS: And they’re still making records!

TA: Yeah!

AS: It does seem like the bands who are having hit singles now are all one-hit wonders…blink and they’re gone!

TA: Oh man, no doubt.

AS: I don’t think that it’s a healthy thing either…

TA: No, I don’t think it is. There’s no band loyalty anymore. You know, you used to be waiting for a bands next album to come out, and now it’s different.

AS: Yeah, I just read something where a high school girl said ‘well, why would I buy their next album when I’ve already got one by the band?”

TA: Right, exactly! It’s like, on to the next thing.

AS: Our attention span is down to the length of a video.

TA: That’s why it’s so weird to me that as a musician you want to get into that world, because if you look at history, you’re doomed! You’re doomed! It’s easy for me to say that, but it’s true. We’ve never really been part of that whole thing. But if you have a hit single, you’re doomed. A year later, you’re gone and you’re never coming back. Forget it. And then you’re drilled into the consciousness as ‘that silly band from that era’. You’re much better off to get a cool deal with a small label that’s going to support you and have a slow, comfortable career.

AS: The Samples for instance. I mean, they got signed to a major right off, and then they got dropped right off.

TA: That’s a really good example! And then they went with Rob Gordon at WAR.

AS: Right. They went from Arista to WAR and then to MCA and now they’re back with WAR again.

TA: Yeah, I talked to Rob about that. Did you know that Rob played bass in my high school band?

AS: Oh yeah, I never connected that it was the same guy.

TA: Yeah, they kind of left and then came back. He’s with them for the long haul. He can’t give them what a major label can, but he’s with them all the way.

AS: Yeah, that’s great. I’ve often thought that if Chin Ho! got signed early on, we’d have been dropped a dozen times by now.

TA: It’s strange. It seems that most of the major trends in music in the last ten years have come from small labels.

AS: It’s almost like the independents have become farm teams for the majors. They’re grooming all these acts.

TA: Who then get signed to the majors. I mean, if you jump into a situation with a major record label, you damned well better make them their money back or they’re not going to waste their time. But of course it could be a lot worse. I remember my first music lesson ever when I was about eight years old and I was taking a drum lesson from this guy named Hy Frank. He was a Dixieland drummer. Ninety year old guy from Trenton. He came to our house. He was a little guy, about 5’2. He came to our house and had my mother fix him a drink. He said “Trey, this is the first thing I’m going to tell you about music. And you better listen to this: never get involved with the mob.”

AS: Even the indies, once they have a hit they get sucked up by the majors. Like Sub Pop…once they had Nirvana they sold half the company to Warner Brothers…and they haven’t had a hit since. It does seem like making a deal with the devil. But it does seem like Phish has been really successful at making it happen your way. And then you get to come home to the most comfortable place on earth.

TA: Yeah.

AS: And you guys are all transplants to Vermont. It does seem like you’re all intent on staying here. Does it ever get weird here for you?

TA: Not really, no. It’s such a small town that I just feel like another person, you know? I think that Burlington is very low key so that it’s not a problem at all.

AS: But you can never leave. Or if you do, you always come back.

TA: Yeah, a lot of my friends who have left are coming back now. They tried to go away, but you can’t! ~GC~

Andrew Smith is the editor of this magazine. Really. Ask him.

For three years UVM grad student Steve Lemcke has covered the local music scene for Vermont’s largest daily paper The Burlington Free Press. Love him or hate him, if you’re a Vermont musician, every Thursday you read him. Our own Dr. Lex interviews the shadowy figure at the back of the club and finds a genuine music fan who happens to have the best circulation in town.

Steve Lemcke doesn’t spin dope beats. There is never a line outside of Pure Pop at midnight waiting to pick up tickets to his Highgate show even if there were to be one. In fact, most people in this fair city who have heard rumors of his existence wouldn’t recognize him if they saw him in person. Mr. Lemcke doesn’t play drawn out solos with a vacuum cleaner. What he does do however, is write the local music review section for the Burlington Free Press, the in-town arm of the steely Gannet publishing fist of love. This occasionally gets him in a little trouble.

Steve inherited his role of reviewer at the Freeps from Brad Searles, whose name should sound familiar to y’all, as he has been in nearly all of the crucial alt/pop bands this town has ever been home to. A few short years ago, Searles decided that he had too much on his plate at the time to continue writing the Freeps column. Enter Steve Lemcke. Now, it is not my job to make any judgment call as to Lemcke’s qualifications for the job, as it would obviously violate the journalistic credo that I so dearly adhere to. Whether or not certain local musicians occasionally call for the head of Steve Lemcke is also of debatable significance. What we all really want to know is who the hell is this guy, and do his opinions hold any force in the local music media?

Steve is acutely aware that he has somewhat of a reputation for being, in his own words “…a little too pointed in his criticisms.” However, he believes that he is only being constructive with these critiques, and understands that any review is the product of individual taste, so is therefore highly subjective. How he views his role in the overall creative process of the artists he reviews may actually shed light on the view that Lemcke takes of music media in general. He states unequivocally, “I’m not asking people to agree with me, I’m just asking them to read it. My skin has toughened, and I am less afraid…I won’t pull as many punches.”

Lemcke believes that the critics play an important role in the overall creative development of the artist in general. Steve is justified in saying that what he offers the musicians on this, an extremely small scale version of a much larger and often harsher music industry, is a good introduction to the critical process. This ultimately, in Lemcke’s opinion, becomes an important part of an artist’s development, like playing before your first audience consisting of more that your sister’s drunk friends or reading that first review of your own released material. So it can be important for the reviewer to call them as he sees them, while at the same time understanding the artist’s newness to this process. Sometimes, for the local reviewer, this is like dancing a ballet in a field of land mines.

And what of the relationship between the reviewer and the reviewed? In a city as cozy as ours, it is entirely possible that the reviewer will often enough be faced with the daunting task of reviewing music made by…(gasp) an associate, or even a friend. Lemcke sums up his experiences in matters such as these “It’s a weird one in a town as small as this, but I know I’m gonna try not to let the fact that I’m gonna see somebody next week affect my review, which is as valid as…the next guy.” Is this what makes him occasionally “controversial?” The approach seems valid to me. I know for a fact that Thursday’s weekend section in the Free Press is lustily looked forward to by more than a few of the town’s musicians. Steve explains: “To look at it cynically, going out to see the bands and saying ‘hi how are ya, I’m watching your bands’ maybe gives the groups a better sense that I am an interested observer and not merely judging them from a bubble or judging from on high or from an isolated position. But granted I can’t go see every band every day, ’cause there’s an awful lot of bands in Burlington.”

But does this music made in Vermont matter? Are we living in an actual cultural landscape, or a manufactured one? Lemcke levels on this issue somewhat sarcastically. “In the ten years I’ve been here, Burlington’s always you know, just about on the edge of something big…a burgeoning flower.” Yet Steve believes the music culture here is valid and deserves to be continuously put up for consideration, whether in the press or in the record stores.

But does Steve Lemcke ever actually listen to this music on his own time? Yes. He sometimes does, but is certainly reluctant to admit his favorites, as one could guess. All in the interest of scene diplomacy of course. Plus it’s his own damn business. It’s Lemcke’s job to write about local music every week, and it is obviously a job that he enjoys. What about the accusations about “scene nepotism?” Mr. Lemcke seemingly believes that the entire scene is not, cannot, nor probably ever be, a giant happy family. But he did say that if you and your band sit around bitching about how Good Citizen magazine or any other music-press related mechanism in Burlington never seems to write about your band, than you just aren’t trying hard enough. The music media press cannot possibly manage to cover every single band in the town at once, but these local media channels are there for everyone’s consideration and/or contributions, thankfully. Lemcke’s role is an interesting one, and he approaches it as no less than a necessary part of the cultural media in the area.

With no plans to stop writing his column in the near future, Steve Lemcke has weathered an initial storm of criticisms, and stepped into the warm light of praise. Having quite a few local bands come and go and a bucketful of member changes in even the most long standing groups, Steve Lemcke may have established himself as somewhat of an institution. His opinions are definitely his own. He makes no claims otherwise. Sometimes I think that he has no idea what he’s talking about when he does a review. But that’s the right I reserve as a reader, and the right that he continues to exercise as a writer. So listen up rock and/or roll bands out there. There is a solitary figure standing at the back of the club, watching you tonight, and his pale shadow falls hard across the dance floor. You have no power against him, he is as timeless as the music itself… He is Lemcke and he reviews you.

Dr. Lex is the man. Without a doubt, he’s it. He wrote about Burlington’s incestuous music scene in Good Citizen #6 and he created the board-game Six Degrees of Denny Donovan. We’re kidding about that last part.

Burlington’s own emo-core band with the all-star line-up prepares to release their debut album and assault the world with their screaming dervish of noise. Chris Parizo makes a whole bunch of phone calls and finally gets Simon Brody to talk rock.

By Chris Parizo

“Uhm… Hey Simon. This is Chris at Good Citizen. Uhm… just calling to see if you were around, I really want to write this article about Drowningman and I know that you told me that weren’t going to be home today, but I thought that I would try anyway. Uh… sorry that I didn’t call you yesterday like I said I would but I got sidetracked and just forgot about it until around eleven last night… I thought that that would be too late to call but… maybe not. And sorry that I didn’t call you on Wednesday, I had to go out of town. Uhm…I really don’t want to write one of those lame `What do you think about when you perform?’ or `So tell me…who is Drowningman… really?’ stories because…honestly…I think they are a pile of shit, so don’t worry about it. So I guess that I’m going to write what I know and hope to hear from you. Sorry that I took up so much of your answering machine tape…uh… call me…you know the number…bye.”

For a little while, it appeared that hardcore was going to die in the city of Burlington. The big acts were dying out, breaking up or dissolving into other projects and it looked like we were going to be in a drought for awhile. And then, almost from nowhere, Drowningman emerged.

The origin of the band can be traced back to the almost legendary Burlington outfits The Champions and Twelve Times Over.

Drowningman’s vocalist, Simon Brody recalls: “The Champions were over so I moved to Boston with Justin (Ballou), we got there and decided to put together a band. We jammed for a while with some guys and did a couple of shows. After that we broke up. I heard that Denny (Donovan) had left Twelve Times Over…I had always wanted to play with him so I moved back to Vermont.”

After getting together with Denny, they both agreed to start a project together. Denny was going to write the music and Simon was to write all the lyrics. While working at Tones in Johnson, Todd Tomlinson came in and said “I’m a drummer!” Denny had a feeling that Todd would be a great drummer (he was right) and asked him to join the band. At the same time, Simon had called Justin who was still in Boston and told him to come back to Vermont and jam with the new band. Justin did come back to Burlington, but never got around to playing. He instead recommended Javin Leonard as an excellent guitarist.

“Javin grew (as a guitarist) because he had to keep up with Denny. He is a driven kind of person so he kept up with the challenge, he would sit there and try to figure out what Denny was doing. Denny wrote all the music until Javin began coming to practice with material. After Denny left, Javin took over as songwriter. We spend the first half-hour of practice combing through riffs and keeping what we like and getting rid of what we don’t” says Simon.

So why did Denny leave?

“Why does Denny leave any band” jokes Simon? “Actually, Denny just has a different outlook on music. He just enjoys playing and performing around here. He hates traveling.”

SImon continues “As the band began to grow, we began to get more out of town shows…he just didn’t have the heart to do it. We thought about getting a PlayStation for the van because he loves that shit, and we even thought about getting a replacement guitarist for out of town shows, but that wouldn’t be fair to the other guy…so eventually he just left. Somehow Daryl just fell in.”

Daryl Rabidoux is a bastard. I say this because I have known him since we were both twelve and we spent high school sticking compass needles into each other’s backs. Actually, Daryl is one of those guys that is hard to dislike. He played with Rocketsled through the “glory years” and was asked to fill the hole left by Denny. He fits Drowningman like a glove.

“Band politics are so much easier with Daryl because we just start picking on him” says Simon.

Meanwhile, Dave Barnett was hanging around, watching Drowningman play with another bassist. Simon and the guys knew Dave as a great local bassist (The Champions, Twelve Times Over, late-era Rocketsled, Planet X and Chin Ho!…not at the same time), when the position was open, Dave was invited in.

So here it goes… Drowningman is:

Simon Brody (vocals)

Dave Barnett (bass)

Daryl Rabidoux (guitar)

Javin Leonard (guitar)

Todd Tomlinson (drums)

The music that these men create as Drowningman is…well…hardcore. Heavily distorted guitars, a very ballsy bass sound, a hard hitting drummer, constantly shifting rhythms and lead screams that swing wildly from pain to pleasure without notice. Drowningman shows, locally, are a rarity, and that is because the band is focused on playing out of town more than locally. Keeping their aim on the entire northeast, Drowningman has established themselves as a well known regional act. A recent seven inch release on Hydrahead Records titled Weighted and Weighed Down has been displayed as a “Seven Inch Hot Seller” for two weeks at Newbury Comics (a well known Boston music chain) and Drowningman was recently accepted to play in Boston’s Loud Fest music festival this summer.

Due to their hectic touring schedule, Drowningman have established themselves as a well known act in such areas as Buffalo and Syracuse, NY, Providence, RI and New Brunswick, NJ. Recently, the band recorded a new full length album at Joe Egan’s Eclipse Studios here in Vermont and mixed and mastered at Trax East in New Jersey. The CD will be released on Hydrahead and will be distributed throughout the nation by Lumberjack Distribution, an exclusive distributor for twelve hardcore and indie labels across the country. Expect the release sometime in late March or early April.

And as soon as the CD is released, Drowningman will hit the road. The future for Drowningman is bright. With a lot of options open to the band, it wouldn’t be a shock if this band explodes nationwide. So don’t get caught off-guard, see these guys while you can. ~GC~

Chris Parizo thinks that the hokey pokey is what it’s all about.

Our man Max Owre chats with his pal Andy Cotton about life as a member of the Gordon Stone Trio and the zen of playing bass.

When I was asked to interview Andy Cotton, I had to admit that I may not be the most qualified to give an “objective” interview. He has been a very close friend of mine for close to ten years and those years have included good times and not so good times. We were in a band together called Rina Bijou and since we broke up in 1994, Andy has made a name for himself playing with many local and regional acts including the Parima Jazz Band, Michael Ray and the Cosmic Krewe, the New England Exploratory Orchestra, Tobias Broccoli (with Brian Boyes), Jonestown Punch, and most recently the Gordon Stone Trio. He has also sat in with just about every musician in Vermont.

His style on his instrument is idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable. He is currently sharing his sound and philosophy as an adjunct faculty member at Johnson State College. Andy also wanted me to let the world know that he is open for gigs and lessons, so let’s get his phone ringing…

Good Citizen: Andy, can you run through some of your early experiences? Where did it start? You started on trumpet?

Andy Cotton: No. Saxophone, but…inconsequential. Then years later I was the only one of my friends not to play an instrument, and none of them wanted to play bass. So… I got one.

GC: So life didn’t really start for you until college. Tell me about college. I know that we played together in college at UVM, and you were doing other stuff in Slade Hall.

AC: College was a down time for me. I got to college and got really busy. I took a year off just to play, and that might have made the decision for me.

GC: Is that when you went to Norway?

AC: When I went to Norway, and I lived in the mountains and played and skied.

GC: So, why Norway? Was that a decision based on music?

AC: I’ve always loved mountains and it’s beautiful there and I knew it was a place that would be quiet and I’d have the time to play. I went to a school that supposedly had a music program. I got there and found out there was pretty much a music program for beginners who wanted to play in a marching band and they only taught in Norwegian, which I didn’t know at the time. So I started to self study, and there was a teacher that would come and teach guitar and bass, he was from Chile.

GC: Which is really close to Norway.

AC: So I went to Norway and ended up learning about Latin and Salsa bass. Which was a really great thing… all those crazy rhythms he had me going back and forth between the threes and the fours. He had me playing these really syncopated lines, and really let me play my own things. Came back- went to college, didn’t like it, couldn’t wait to be done, met you and Neil and all those guys (actually two other guys, Oliver Carling and T.J. Stacy) and started Rina Bijou.

GC: Would you say that Rina Bijou was your first professional music experience? In terms of making some beau coup? Like we made a ton of money?

AC: (laughing) Tens of dollars. Rina Bijou was the first of a lot of things, and I’m not sure I can describe what those all are. But definitely the first original music thing that I was involved in where I had a part in the writing of the music and liked the stuff. At the time, with the five of us, it seemed like it was the thing. Like we would do that one band for the rest of our lives. We had our influences but we just kinda went down there (the basement of the Flynn annex), and it was all based on what we thought was cool, and that is how we made our decisions. It ended coming out with really good undiluted music. Then time went on and we started playing pieces like (censored) and said “Okay, we are going to change what we are doing to please the dancers” and it just didn’t work. You know we’re not commercial musicians, Max. I think that we are doomed.

GC: When I first met you Andy, you were very much into jazz, and you sort of denied being a “jazz bassist.” You said that no musician is any one genre, but you have played with just about every jazz player in town. How did the jazz thing start?

AC: Well, I started studying jazz because I wanted to learn more about music. It seemed like if you wanted to learn, you have to learn from somewhere, and every interesting avenue I found had to do with jazz. You can study classical, but I just didn’t connect to that music or don’t understand it- that will be something for later in life that I will grow into. As time went on I learned to listen to forty minute improvisations and really like them and really listen to every minute of it. So the natural extension of it came in college. Somebody gave me a Thelonious Monk tape, and I listened to “Blue Monk” and I realized that what was happening with Thelonious Monk was really burning and I could leave the Dead behind. What I found was a more harmonic and rhythmic intensity, and also a deeper exploration of music.

GC: Knowing you as a musician I think to call you a jazz bassist is a misnomer because you can play in the genre but you are not limited by the genre. That’s what gives people a sense of identity. The same thing is true of rock, don’t you think? With a genre like rock and roll the same confines apply. Especially with rock and roll where you are told: “Dude, play the one on the one.”

AC: Yeah, fortunately I haven’t had too much of that. A little bit of that, Jimmy Branca used to give me the eye, you know like “Play bass!” I’d say, “Okay, I’d rather play saxophone, but I will play bass for you.” There is really beauty in all music, and I’ve had a great time at Charlie O’s with Jimmy Branca. Times when you shut your eyes and the song is over, and you want to start another song before you open your eyes and an eighty year old toothless woman starts drooling on you.

GC: A pretty picture. What is the relationship between ensemble playing and improvisation? There is an element of ensemble playing where you really are restricted to a rote pattern or part and the magic of it is when you realize “I’m playing my part right” and it is fitting in with what everyone else is doing. Certainly bass.

AC: I take a lot of pleasure in that.

GC: How about improvisation. What do you think of it?

AC: (Laughing) I think that the ultimate goal is to become a great improviser. To me the musicians who are the heaviest are always the ones who, whenever they play, it’s always what’s coming out of their heads and it’s always intensely beautiful. That’s where I want to get to. I’d like to be at that point. In the meantime there are things you have to do, like being an ensemble player – you have to learn to get in the pocket on all different kinds of things. Basically, cause I’m not going to just do it with jazz. So, I want to know how to play good funk groove.

GC: What about the bluegrass element? You are playing with Gordon Stone.

AC: Well, we don’t do just bluegrass. We do some bluegrass, but Gordon never asked me to play or learn bluegrass bass. Basically we hold no style as our own. We want to bring out the feeling of each tune, whether it’s a reggae tune, jazz tune or bluegrass tune. Playing real bluegrass bass has a lot to do with having the sound and the feel for time. If you’re a reggae player you feel time one way, and if you’re a bluegrass player you understand it in a different way. I’m neither. I can play those things and it won’t sound like bluegrass or reggae…it still sounds like me playing those things.

GC: Upright bass is a relatively new thing for you. How does it compare to electric bass?

AC: Learning upright has been fantastic. I’ve really enjoyed playing it, it brings out different aspects of my playing. Now, three years into it..it has made me be more careful about the things I play. I like upright and really I’m a student of upright. I do play it out occasionally, but I feel like I’m still an electric player who is upright now. They are really different instruments. You play the same stuff, but you don’t play the same stuff.

GC: The compositional and arranging facets of a group of people writing together is interesting to me. What are your thoughts on this?

AC: Well, Rina was a real lesson in that. We went into it with no idea of what we were doing and our first three songs were verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge. Suddenly, there is a pattern there. Rina was my first experience with that. After that there was a period of freelance work for me. The band broke up, as well you know.

GC: REALLY!!!

AC: Yes, so after that I didn’t make any decisions, but the gigs kept on coming. Then I hooked up with different people to play jazz with. That’s when Mackey (Abernathy-tenor sax) and I started to play at Muddy Waters. Then we got the gig at Parima, and that is where I really learned how to play jazz. When we started to play that gig, I started to get familiar with the music so I wasn’t thinking about every chord change. Eventually the tunes we played a lot I knew well enough so that I didn’t have to look at the charts and I could start to experiment with the notes and try to make it musical.

GC: In the future, do you want to do your own project or would you always want to be part of a group?

GC: How about the musical academia? What are your feelings about that now that you are teaching?

AC: People want to learn, and if you can help them learn, part of that is teaching them things, but people don’t want to be taught things. So as a teacher you’re more of a ‘learning helper.’ There are some schools that can intensify that experience, because everyone is looking for the same thing. The teachers at the good schools are exceptional. I think for years Johnson has had a great program with Andy Shapiro, Steve Blair, Dave Grippo, Joe Salisbury and a strong music faculty.

Now…they have me. (Laughter.)

GC: Is Vermont a large enough venue for a musician like yourself, who has had a niche style of playing and ambitions on a worldly scale? Can it happen here?

AC: The only way people are going to hear your stuff: they either have your recordings or they see you play. Without a major recording industry in Vermont… Burlington is not L.A. or Athens.

GC: Athens is a very old Greek city.

AC: Really, if you want people here to hear you play, you have to go out and do it for them, and that’s coming back into style.

GC: What do you feel about aging as a musician? Getting old?

AC: I don’t know. I only feel old half the time. Sometimes with respect to music I feel very young.

Andy Cotton can be seen all over Burlington playing with various bands but as the Gordon Stone Trio gets busier and tours the country with more frequency, Andy will be a lot harder to find around town. Andy Cotton will make his mark on music and that is a fact. Catch him while you can at smaller local venues, because his caliber of playing is a rarity in a small city like ours. ~GC~

Max Owre is guitarist/vocalist with the band (sic) and is a former member of both Rina Bijou and Motel Brown. His guitar playing can be heard on Motel Brown’s 1996 CD Too Much Time. Max and his wife Ceara are also the proud parents of a one year old daughter named Sara Josephine.

The Good Citizen Interview with Trey Anastasio of Phish Vermont’s biggest rock star sits down with Good Citizen editor Andrew Smith for a long, rambling conversation about Vermont, the Vermont music scene and the enviable position that our piscatorial brethren find themselves in fifteen years into their career. Exclusive Good Citizen photographs by Matthew Thorsen.

PART I

On a cold winter day in early February, Phish guitarist and vocalist Trey Anastasio stopped up at the Good Citizen office high over Pure Pop Records in Burlington. Fresh from a much needed vacation in Florida with his family (which now includes his wife and two daughters), Trey sat for a photo shoot with Matthew Thorsen and then we wandered over to Coyote’s for a late lunch. I knew that Trey had not done any interviews on the last Phish tour and I was a little nervous that there might be things he wouldn’t want to talk about, subjects that he might be skittish about. However, I found Trey to be his usual, amiable self and we soon settled into a long, friendly conversation that rambled in many directions and illuminated the crossroads that Phish finds itself at approximately fifteen years into their career.

Andrew Smith: Thanks for agreeing to talk with us, Trey. We don’t see you around Burlington as much as we used to. You’re probably gone as much as you’re here…

Trey Anastasio: I don’t even notice it sometimes, but I got home last Tuesday and I realized that I left the first week of November, so yeah, I’ve been gone for a long time. It’s great to be home…it’s still as great as ever, but it’s funny, it seems to go through cycles. Like, after the Clifford Ball there were a lot of people around and I felt a little weird about it, but of course then they all went away and it got back to normal again.

AS: Yeah, there was that week between the Clifford Ball and Bread and Puppet when Burlington was just crazy with Phishheads.

TA: But it’s still the same as ever. It’s very interesting to see how much time has gone by. I mean, (Burlington is full of) people who’ve been friends of mine for so long…we’ve been playing for fifteen years now…people say that they were seeing us when they were in high school, and they’re like twenty-eight now. I was thinking about this on the way down here, and I feel like I’ve seen three very distinct generations of Vermont music now pass through. When I first got here it was the era of Pinhead, you know…

AS: Yeah, that was my first period too…bands like the Decentz…

TA: Yeah, the Decentz, the X-Rays, and uh, of course there was this burgeoning jazz scene and I fell into that…this really cool jazz scene with Paul Asbell, Dave Grippo, all those guys who were really just starting to play around town, I think, y’know around 1983. And there was that whole Sneakers scene, and we were kind of like the young band on the scene and Pinhead was the big local band. And then you had the Hollywood Indians…

AS: And Screaming Broccoli.

TA: Yeah, and they were kind of like the main bands in town. Were you around for that?

AS: Actually I missed that period. I was around for the end of Pinhead and the Decentz and then came back at the end of Broccoli and the Indians.

TA: That’s when we were, I think, part of the scene. In a weird way, we were off to the side. Both of those bands were great bands. If people have never heard those bands, there are still albums floating around, people should really check them out.

AS: Did you hear the last Butthole Surfers record?

TA: Yeah!

AS: That sounded sooo much like the Hollywood Indians…and knowing that Ethan Azarian (Indians vocalist) lives in Austin now, when I heard that single “Pepper” I said “Gibby Haynes is totally ripping off Ethan Azarian!”

TA: Yeah (laughs). And then there was this kind of lull, although there was Texas (a club on lower Church Street that is now Club Toast) and all those metal bands…which I actually loved. Like Run 21. And then there was this whole kind of rebirth after a few years.

AS: Where did Ninja Custodian fit in?

TA: Well, Ninja was kind of around with us. I didn’t really know Ethan and those guys until the end except for hanging out at the OP. But Ninja was, I dunno, late eighties. And then you had this kind of…Miss Bliss, and uh, that band…electronic kind of…

AS: The Cuts!

TA: Yeah, that’s it! I mean, we were kind of leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back, so then it seemed like there was a period when I didn’t really know anybody for a while, until I kind of started hanging out with Pistol (The Pants guitarist Pistol Stamen) and he’s always playing me these bands…

AS: Did you know Chainsaws of Babylon at all?

TA: No, Page did. He knew those guys and everything, and really liked them.

AS: Yeah, when Chin Ho! first started we used to play at Border (where Club Metronome is now) with Ninja and the Chainsaws…and then it evolved into Do It Now Foundation and Peg Tassey and that crew.

TA: Yeah, I think I kind of lost touch with the Burlington music scene for a while.

AS: Was that when you decided to move the management and the office back to Burlington?

TA: Yeah, that was something that we were really intent on for a long time. We were always telling John (Paluska) ‘you gotta move up here, you gotta move up here.’ I mean, it was strange to have our management in Boston, but we had met up with John when he was going to Amherst and we played there…yeah, I think that moving the management up here really did bring us back into it. I mean, even during that whole Hollywood Indians period I stopped going out much, and just started going to Sneakers. We lived in Winooski and we would go to Sneakers every Tuesday. It was about a half a block walk and we went every Tuesday for years. We always had the front table, right in front of the Sneakers jazz band.

AS: Who was in the jazz band?

TA: There were three horns…James (Harvey), Grippo, and Joey Somerville. Yeah, those three and Paul Asbell, Bruce Sklar, Jeff Salisbury, and Clyde…

AS: Stats.

TA: Yeah. It was a seven piece. They were so good and the place was packed every Tuesday. And then that kind of disappeared.

AS: Yeah, that was a shame, because they had bluegrass one night…

TA: Yeah, we used to go for that a lot, too. Bluegrass on Wednesdays, jazz on Tuesdays.

AS: And that was such a small bar…

TA: And it would be packed every night! I remember nights when it was just incredible, Tuesday nights especially. Yeah, that was great.

AS: Now that you’re on the road so much, does your family travel with you?

TA: Yeah, sometimes. They went with us on the last tour for a while, riding on the bus.

AS: Have you gotten to the point yet of having separate buses?

TA: For one week, yeah, but I didn’t like it. It was really weird, and really expensive, too.

AS: It must be weird to be so separated from the people you’re supposed to be connecting with.

TA: Yeah, not that we don’t spend enough time together. (Laughs)

AS: So what are you up to now? You’re heading to the studio?

TA: Well, we’ve got a lot options right now…everything is still kind of up in the air…we’re talking about that right now. We’re supposed to do a new album and we’re talking to producers right now and we’ve got all these side projects going and we’re trying to figure out how to fit it all together. We’ve got another live album that we did from the last tour and we already put it together and everybody loves it and we’re trying to decide if we’re just going to put that out or dive right into the next studio album. We’ve got a lot of songs. And we just did this thing down at Bearsville where we went down for two weekends and just jammed. No songs. We filled up like ten hundred minute tapes, just jamming, and then honed it, edited it all down to just two ninety minute tapes.

AS: No songs? All instrumental?

TA: Yeah. We just set up the gear and started playing. It’s funny, I was having a conversation with one of the guys from Wide Wail at the Pavement show and he was asking me ‘so how come everytime you guys put an album out you do everything except what you do well?’ You know what I mean? And there’s some truth to that…it really struck a nerve. The thing that we’ve been working on so hard for so many years is the communication in improvising on stage, and we’ve got to this level now that it took us fifteen years to get to, and then we go into the studio and we don’t really even attempt to play that way. You know, we go into the studio and try really hard to be a band that, in a certain sense, we’re not. And that’s probably why some of the albums have sounded, like, kind of a mixed success. So, this time we decided to face that one head on, and just go in and play. We got some great stuff and now we’re trying to decide what to do with it.

AS: You already release more albums than most bands on major labels. How does Elektra feel about that?

TA: They don’t mind. I mean, they minded for a while, because they couldn’t figure out what to do with us, I think. At this point, we’re at the end of our contract, and they’ve kind of grown to accept that all of our albums seem to sell the same amount. I think they’ve stopped expecting the big one, you know? I think they don’t really expect a platinum record from us, which is to our advantage.

AS: There’s a lot of talk about how much Elektra has changed since Sylvia Rhone took over.

TA: Yeah, it’s changed a lot. I really like her; she’s great. Yet at the same time, it’s still a big major label you know, so they look at things one way. That’s why there are so many great bands that never get signed because they’re looking for one thing, the hit single, you know? And that’s it. And the only other way you’re going to get in there is if you have such a big following that they can’t ignore you. It’s too bad, because it kind of rules out a whole area of talent, you know? If your talent is writing incredible music that’s better in the studio but it isn’t really radio friendly, then forget it.

AS: Yeah, someone from a major label listened to the Big Heavy World Pop Pie CD and said ‘there’s a lot of really great songs on here, but I don’t hear a ‘Tubthumper.’

TA: (Laughs) Yeah, that’s it. I mean, it is so weird that Elektra signed Ween. That was out of character for a major. They also signed They Might Be Giants, but they probably thought that they could have a hit.

AS: But Ween had a hit…I mean you couldn’t get away from ‘Push the Little Daisies’ for a while.

TA: Yeah! I love Ween. Ween is white soul.

AS: Wasn’t there a Burlington connection to Ween somehow?

TA: Yeah, Ween…that guy Mickey, who’s one of Ween, called me up about a year ago and said “We’re moving to Burlington!” They called Paluska and stuff, and they were coming up. I think one of the guys has a sister who lives here or something. But then they never did. But, I mean, how did they get signed you know? Weird, you know. That’s a funny one you know. I mean, what about the Pants? Why can’t they get a label?

AS: Yeah, I don’t think it’s based on how much talent you have…it seems like so much of it is just timing and luck.

TA: There are really restrictive boundaries. I mean, Phish, we kind of got lucky. Back when we were playing in Burlington, we just had our own little scene going on. We were so focused on playing live, that was our thing. It’s harder for bands that are focused on radio, I mean, if you don’t do the live thing, how are you ever going to get anyone to hear it? If you can’t get a label to sign you and you’re not focused on the live thing.

AS: You’ve got to be willing to tour…

TA: Yeah, we were so ready to do that. We were sleeping on floors for eight years, you know? Nobody had any commitments or anything, and all four of us wanted to do the same thing. Get out of here, get in the van. A lot of bands have a problem with that…you know, half the band might want to go and half might want to hang around and not do it.

AS: And you’ve got to be willing to starve.

TA: Definitely, and sleep on floors. Sometimes I think its just a matter of luck that you find people with the same shared vision.

AS: Yeah, Chin Ho! is on its thirteenth lineup now.

TA: (Laughs) Yeah, so many of my friends have that problem.

AS: Hey, what’s up with Ninja Custodian anyway? I heard they finally called it quits.

TA: They broke up. I just saw them when we were in LA. I think Hamdi went to Florida. He’s into bugs.

AS: Oh yeah, I remember a Ninja show with ants on an overhead projector and they had them crawling all over their bodies while they played.

TA: Yeah, they were into bugs.

AS: So I read that you’re headed for the studio?

TA: Yeah, we might even do it alone. You know, take DA88′s and go hide out in a farmhouse somewhere. That’s kind of the decision right now. It’s a funny situation…our albums always bomb, you know? But in the end, it’s been the greatest thing that could have ever happened to us. It’s a funny thing, you know?

AS: That you haven’t had a hit?

TA: Yeah, that we haven’t had a big album. It becomes more clear, as time goes on, we’re kind of thankful, because there are all these pressures after you’ve had one that I don’t even want to think about. I mean, I don’t want to think about any of that crap. I mean, I don’t even talk to the record company.

AS: I guess people really expected this huge Phish explosion after Jerry Garcia died. You did move into bigger rooms but you kept it under control.

TA: Yeah, I didn’t really expect it because every tour has been just a little bigger. It’s been very steady and just a little bigger every tour for thirteen years. But it has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s absurd to think that every deadhead, the people who were really into the dead, would just switch to Phish and not be completely disappointed…just hate it, you know? If you’re that into a band, how could some other band just fill that void? I don’t think that it did… I mean, there are a lot of lifestyle similarities, and that is something that we’ve really had to deal with. Like how are we going to deal with the people who just come to the lot and have no intention of going to the show. That’s what happened. That’s what we have now that we didn’t have before…this whole group of people who show up but don’t go to the shows. The people that just hang out and live the life of going from show to show. For a while there was almost this weird backlash from it…you know. I always thought that was a cool thing that people could do that…but that’s not why I liked the (Grateful) Dead; I didn’t care about that and I never went on tour or anything. But I would see them any time I could, and I loved them because they played like a band and I’ve never seen another band play like they did. That was a huge influence on us. I mean, never in an arena…except maybe Zappa. He was amazing. But when the Dead were playing well, still to this day, nobody has played like that. It was like African music, you know? The sum was way bigger than the parts. But anyway, regardless of what goes on in the lot, the people in the show are there to see Phish. When we go on stage, it seems like everyone’s pretty excited out there. I know that I am.

AS: Oh yeah, the energy at a Phish show is almost indescribable.

TA: Oh, I love it.

AS: The European tours, where you get to play smaller rooms…do you still get the same energy from the crowds?

TA: Oh yeah…I never really noticed less or more energy from a bigger crowd of people. I don’t think that the number of people really improves the energy. I mean, I have between a sold out crowd and a half empty room…in any room. I saw Edgar Winter at Hunts…back to back with Johnny Winter; it was like Edgar for two nights and then Johnny for two nights. This was like 1984…and I’m not sure who had the more energetic crowd, but Johnny I think broke the all-time beer record at Hunts. They ran out of beer both nights. Everybody had like a beer in each hand and everybody was bouncing off the walls. Sometimes you get less energy in a bigger room because it dissipates, you know? Unless you can really get it going. Those club shows in Europe I really loved. That show that we put on the album…that club was tiny. Everybody was all packed in and they were right in your face.

AS: There were a lot of Americans at those shows…

TA: Absolutely. No question. Depending on where you went, from night to night. In Berlin…there were a lot of Germans. And it was a completely different…like they listened through the set and they didn’t clap until it was over…it was wild…we played completely different music because of that crowd. The audience was so quiet and listening so intently that we started playing quieter and quieter and began to rely on the more intimate songs to sort of build the intensity in the room. I remember, we did this set that peaked with “Swept Away” which is on our Billy Breathes album. It’s this little acoustic thing and it was a very quiet moment, but the energy was incredible and it dawned on me that, you know what I mean, you get pulled along by…

AS: The mood?

TA: Yeah, and that’s kind of what you end up playing. And that’s such a big part of our road, vibing with the audience every night.

AS: I know when I’m on stage I’m always watching the audience and if they’re not having a good time, I’m not having a good time.

TA: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, if you’re up there and playing and they’re just standing there…But look at GG Allin. He may have been the greatest live performer of all time and he was up there trying to piss people off.

AS: He really broke that wall…

TA: Yeah, and that’s a totally different road…he did it for a whole different reason…but everybody can’t be GG Allin.

AS: That’s probably a good thing…

TA: Yeah, we’d all be dead. But it’s interesting for me to think…like just how different it is…every country is different and the music sounds different as a result.

AS: What’s the next live show that you’re thinking about releasing as an album?

TA: Actually it’s one night from the last tour…we just kind of sequenced it together while we were out on the road from the soundboard tape and everybody really liked it. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now. We just have to decide what we want to do. There’s producers we’ve been talking to about doing an album..that’s an option…we’re just trying to fight the feeling that we get everytime we do an album…this general feeling that ‘Okay, Phish has gotten to this level, and they’re going to make an album and this is gonna be the one.’

AS: That’s a lot of pressure…

TA: Yeah, and our internal pressure is to go the other way, you know…in a funny way…I mean, if it was a big album that was artistic, you know, then fine. Good. But I think the music industry is changing. Like OK Computer (by Radiohead) is the big album this year but it didn’t sell that much. It wasn’t a big selling record. Like Aerosmith’s new record is considered to be a huge bomb and it sold maybe two million copies…that’s a completely different world. And a band like Radiohead is from a completely different world, too.

AS: God yeah. When you listen to modern rock radio…it’s all over the place…it’s “Smack My Bitch Up” one minute and the Wallflowers the next. It’s so schizophrenic. Which might be good because everything should fit…

TA: Right. It’s a weird period for American music.

AS: Yeah, the electronica thing that’s so huge in Europe just didn’t happen here like they said it would.

TA: Yeah, I never thought it would. I think people…well, I don’t really go for that type of music…it’s a personal thing with me. I like drummers. I think the worst thing that Stevie Wonder ever did was stop playing the drums on his albums. Think about it, he used to play drums on all his albums… “Superstition…” All that stuff. And he was the best drummer. Then he got a drum machine and from that point on…I mean, can you name one song of his after that?

AS: Well, I can’t name one that I like…

TA: (Laughs) I can’t name one song, good or bad…

AS: “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”

TA: (Laughs again.)

AS: You’ve never used the same producer twice have you?

TA: No…but we almost did this time because we really liked working with Steve Lillywhite, he was great. But it didn’t work out…so we’ve got to figure that out.

AS: Do you find that now you’ve reached this level that people really want to work with you?

TA: Not really. (Laughs) One guy does, and I like him a lot, and it might be who we work with. It’s weird. And it gets weirder and weirder…on a certain level we’re getting bigger and bigger and yet most people have no idea who we are. Maybe having a big selling album right now could be the worst thing that could happen to us. If nothing else it feels really good to have gotten to this level and be completely under the radar. We’re so totally under the radar. I mean, you know who we are because you’re from Burlington and other people do, sort of…I love it…I can walk down the street and nobody knows me. It’s really great, it’s a great situation.

AS: And having a hit single would ruin that…and a video…

TA: In a certain way…right…having a hit brings a lot or pressure that you don’t anticipate. For everyone involved. When you raise that bar, if you go below that there’s a vibe around you that you’re failing. A lot of my friends in bands, I’ve known people along the way, and you’re always fighting that. It’s such a relief to have everyone’s expectations of us be so incredibly low. I mean, if we sold a half a million records I think everyone would be shocked. And it’s great! I mean you shouldn’t care one way or another what anyone thinks, but it’s hard…you know, if every time you call your manager or do an interview there’s this aura of failure. I wouldn’t want to have that kind of pressure. Like the Terrance Trent D’Arby story…his first record sold twenty-two million copies and then his second only sold two million and it ruined him and now the guy is doing nothing. And he’s a really talented guy. Everyone thought he was going to be the next James Brown or something. It’s because two million seemed like a failure. If he’d only sold a half a million on this first record and then two million on his second everybody would have been high-fiving him!

AS: Like the Hootie problem…

TA: Oh yeah, Hootie…forget it, you’re never gonna recover from that. When your first album sells nine million copies…it’s so fleeting and then you spend the rest of your career trying to chase that dream. I think if you’re thinking about music on those terms, to me, like how can we sell more copies…it’s gonna sound like shit. Everybody can hear it. Everybody can hear the intent in music. The intent has to be pure or it’s not going to move anybody. If everyone is looking for a hit….it’s weird…I know people who think that the Beatles ruined music for everyone, and I can see why. They were the first band that was so incredibly talented, inhumanly talented that they could write, arrange, sing, perform all their own music. And there was no band before that that was capable of that. Before that bands all had outside songwriters, arrangers, producers. And then the Beatles come along and here’s four guys who can write incredible hit songs, one right after another, sing incredibly well, arrange with the help of George Martin…and ever since then…nobody can do that. People kind of got the feeling that, oh you’re supposed to do that yourself…

AS: I always thought the phrase “singer-songwriter” was weird because I thought “Well, who isn’t a singer-songwriter?” And then you look back and before the late sixties-early seventies nobody wrote their own songs!

TA: Nobody wrote their own songs before the Beatles! Nobody did all that! And they were a hit machine. But not many bands can make it happen for more than one album…in that world of hits. This is the thing, to me, if you want to join that world, you’re pretty damned bound for failure…I’m trying to think of other bands who have made it happen over and over again…

AS: Not many…R.E.M. did it for a long time, U2…

TA: Yeah, even U2…they’re chasing their own tail now, and that’s it, you end up chasing your own tail, but to me…well, I just spent the whole morning on a conference call with Page about this…this is my whole theory…to me, if you never get on the treadmill and just play music that you like playing…somehow…but how do you pay for it? That’s the problem. But if you can…in the long-term…

AS: But it seems like you guys have come as close as anybody I can think of, in terms of doing what you want to do…or at least making it look like you’re doing what you want to do.

TA: Right, but see we’ve been lucky because we have a live following and that pays the bills.

AS: And then you have to stay on the road.

TA: Yeah, but that we learned about a few years ago. We really know how long we can go now. The shows have to be good and we’ve learned exactly how long we can go without getting burned out. We did a couple of tours a few years ago that were too long and by the end everyone was ready to kill each other and we’re not going to do that again. So we’re actually playing a little less…by the time you get on the road it keeps the intensity level up.

AS: You guys have a pretty good schedule…it seems like you do a summer tour, a fall tour and then you record in the spring.

TA: Is that right? Yeah, I guess it is kind of that way…but lately we’ve been going to Europe, too. I just love playing live. Right now, I’m dying to play some shows. We have a summer tour scheduled after we record. And then we’re doing another show in Maine (August 14-16).

AS: So now that the contract with Elektra is almost up…Fishman said a few years ago that he thought that you could do it all yourselves now and that you might not need that big machine anymore…

TA: That’s a good question, and I think that’s why we haven’t been able to make a decision about the whole thing. I think. There are a lot of options open. I mean, we could just do mail-order, but it seems that you want to be in the record stores. The further away we get from the whole rat race of the record industry the happier everyone is. So, we’re always talking about how we can do that, but there’s always another side to it. For instance, we just did this thing down at Bearsville where we just jammed, and we ended up with this really cool…we could just cut it down to sixty minutes and have a really cool record…ambient, kind of like nothing you’ve ever heard before, all improvisations edited together. And we could put out an album like that, and we could do this live thing. You just have to be true to yourself and do what you want to do. ~GC~

There’s Plenty More. Look for Part Two of The Good Citizen Interview with Trey Anastasio in Good Citizen #8…due out on May 6, 1998.

Burlington’s most sought-after bass player Stacy Starkweather gets Option Anxiety and Patricia Braine tells the tale.

Stacy Starkweather’s name has been popping up in a lot of places recently, and for good reason. The release of his first CD as Option Anxiety, Every November, on Granville, Vermont’s Shiretown Records, has brought long overdue attention to Starkweather’s fluent, fluid playing and tasteful lines. He’s the quiet giant and a founding member of The Disciples who wrote and produced their first album; the same guy who helped bring audiences to their feet – with a warm roar – during the ’94 Discover Jazz Festival’s Guitar Summit; the major player doing monumental duets in Amsterdam with Jamie Masefield; he’s a teacher whose students are already professional musicians and schedule their lessons in between their world tours! A true example of a “musician’s musician,” Starkweather is famous for his work with Jazz Mandolin Project, Michael Ray & the Cosmic Krewe, and, of course, Option Anxiety.

Starkweather receives accolades from the press but also is a rarity in the praise he garners from his fellow musicians. James Harvey, who has played with Phish and Belizbeha, opines “Stacy has skills, taste, a great attitude, a sense of humor, and – I just wish I could play with him more often.”

It was exactly one year ago, on a gray, wet November day when Starkweather turned on the lights in his living room, and played me his forthcoming album, which would see release in June of this year.

“Want some tea?”

“Hmm, thanks. Lemon zinger, please.”

“November is a reflective month,” Starkweather muses. “At least it is for me. That’s when I re-examine the year.” He pauses. “I’ve been that way ever since I was 13.”

Starkweather’s from California, and November’s probably the month we risk losing him to warm climate.

“I don’t like winter. I’m addicted to anything warm,” he explains. “However, I’ve concluded, after being here for 13 years, that it’s the Vermont winters – the changes in the season, really – which make it the perfect place for original music to happen. There’s no other place like it. After looking all around the country and traveling abroad, Vermont is a great place to live. It has a great music scene and it’s just a perfect place to create music.”

“Anyway so, here I was with a November deadline to complete the album and I wasn’t coming up with anything I liked,” he continues. “I basically had all this stuff collected from over the years to go in and record. But one of my oldest friends, Peter Apfelbaum of the Heiroglyphics, released an album of his new music that moved me so much, I said, ‘I can do better then what I’ve done.’ So, I started over again. I couldn’t send, what I was going to put out, to someone like Peter with any sense of pride.”

Lucky for us, this personal challenge resulted in an enormous piece of musical art, highlighting Dave Ellis on trumpet and flugelhorn, Dave Grippo on alto saxophone, James Harvey on trombone and piano, and Gabe Jarrett on drums.

Starkweather’s living room has this warm glow, even without a fireplace in sight. The chair’s comfortable, and as we ease down into it the hauntingly familiar and soulful originality of his phrasing unfolds. We feel a deep reflection of our own experiences with “Equal Opportunity,” “Rush Hour,” “Remembering,” “Dark Things,” “Call Back” and, of course, “Every November.” You know, it’s always an easy ride into Starkweather’s space. This time, it’s on the mainstream jazz track.

“Most mainstream jazz has a form,” explains Starkweather. “The melody is the form. There’s the verse and the chorus, and the repeat of the verse. Then it has the section where everyone solos over the form. Most jazz albums are either mainstream in that they really are form oriented and the players play over the form. Or they are really free, and they play whatever they want.

“I wanted to do both.” He continues: “There are a couple of pieces of music I wrote that could only be approached by letting the players do what they wanted to do. The reason the album is a jazzy album is because I found the people I wanted to play with – who could express what I wanted to express – and that’s the way it came out. I would have been happy to write a folk album, if that’s what had been required.”

Vermont bassists have to be diverse to survive. Starkweather took advantage of the situation and he has refined his talents by mastering many genres and becoming highly skilled as the background player, singer, bassist for 25 years, rather then the front man. When I interviewed him two years ago, he was expressing interest in mastering the jazz realm on Gordon Stone’s album Touch and Go. He did it then as a player. He has clearly mastered it on Every November, this time, not only as a player, but as composer and band leader.

“Over half the album is free improvisation, which scares a certain number of people and attracts a certain number of people,” he points out, “the other – not quite half of the album – is very melodic oriented. And that scares off the improvisational people.”

The remarkable result is a beautifully diverse listen for the jazz enthusiast, or anyone who just likes excellent and uncommercial music.

Every November is tenderly erotic and sad at moments, yet awakening; stretching us out to the cliff’s edge. Gradually, losing our fear we glide over what becomes a gentle slope. We drift into a bizarre and beautiful, avant-garde cavern where if we let-go and breathe deeply, we sense the history of it. Mix this with images of a soulful, Vermont, November day, with a cold rain pouring, dancing and sliding along the window pane. Sunset comes early. Night is darker without stars. In the morning, we stare at frosted leaves bursting; whirling across the ground. We’re safe in the comfort of his warm chair the whole time.

“I enjoyed the session and the album,” Harvey notes. “Stacy’s a good leader. He took the best people and let them create. It’s basically a live album with a band that only played one or two shows before going into the studio.”

This impresses me.

“That’s what happens, when you put major players together in a room,” Starkweather assures me. “That’s basically what I did. It’s essentially a live album. I purposely just wanted to let people play; keep it really simple and not fool around.”

“The recording of it was a joy,” he sights. “We recorded it in less then 20 hours. There were a couple of little, tiny notes I had to fix. But, essentially, that’s five guys, playing in a room, with some microphones set up. It’s exactly what I wanted. The whole thing was recorded, mixed and mastered in less than 40 hours.”

For a first solo album, one might expect Starkweather doing all the solos and pushing a bunch of buttons, whistles and bells.

“What you hear on the record, I was only one fifth of” Starkweather tells me. “The music, when it finally came, came easily – in its own way. Then, James wrote out the charts for the musicians, and did some wonderful arranging and rearranging for me. The five individuals are the sound and the way that it is. That final piece has my name on it. But it’s a band album. The little melodies were my ideas. But what happened after that is 100% a band effort. And that’s what everybody listens for. Because they want to hear everybody play. Not somebody just reading music. They want to hear what they’re really going to play.”

Many agree: Stacy Starkweather is one of the finest musicians in the country.

“You could call Stacy the ultimate bass player for any musician,” exclaims Steve Blair, “in that he can cover the whole spectrum of musical possibilities. He’s got a great, positive attitude about what he’s doing, and he never seems to run out of a spontaneous flow of ideas.”

Stacey’s credentials include work with Vermont’s biggest names: Trey Anastasio of Phish and Bad Hat, Tammy Fletcher of the Disciples and Jamie Masefield of The Jazz Mandolin Project.

For example: Michael Ray & the Cosmic Krewe says “Stacy is a huge and natural talent… the best on the planet.”

Gordon Stone states knowingly, “Stacy transcends bass playing as we know it! Sometimes I’ve looked around when he played with my trio and wondered, ‘where’s the bass player?’ But there was Stacy playin’ the bass and taking it beyond.”

How does a person become such an extraordinary musician?

At home, Stacy plays guitar “all the time.” You can hear from his bass solos how well this exercise has paid off over the years. Now, watch his warm smile on-stage, eyes on the lead, focused and ears tuned. Starkweather’s playing is consistently on. He builds a strong, steady, quality sound – a secure base, if you will; not just in one genre, but with a wide variety of fabulous players. And, one truly amazing fact is: until recently, he could not read music, at all and is only in the beginning stages of that learning process.

“One of the great things about Stacy,” says guitarist Paul Asbell of the popular Unknown Blues Band, “is, as a listener, he is truly passionate about music. Therefore, as a player, he really gives his all to whatever style of music he’s playing.”

In terms of style, where is he going on future solo projects?

“I think the only idea for a follow-up would be duets with certain individuals.” He smiles and puts on a tape he calls Bake-o-Bass.

In one hour, improvising only, Starkweather and fellow bassist, Colorado based Edwin Flurwitz, formerly of Shockra, laid down a huge sound trip guaranteed to delight and amaze.

“Being a duo you really have to breathe together. We’re simply having fun feeding off of each other!” He smiles. “And it’s done. We don’t even have to go into the studio.”

The room gets brighter, and you see his path.

“Musicians have to have a different attitude about life then normal people, in terms of how you judge success in your life and how you judge failure and how you judge progress.”

“If, as a musician, you see the normal boundaries of what is successful and what is not, you become hopelessly frustrated and probably never pursue it as a lifelong thing.”

Why?

“Because, it’s not about whether you’re going to retire or have a nice house, or two cars in the garage,” Starkweather continues. “It’s about personally satisfying your own musical goals which don’t make any sense to anybody but you.”

The way I see it, every November he’ll reflect and begin his yearly renewal. Undoubtedly, he’ll meet the challenge and another great project will appear. Ultimately, Starkweather’s integrity, personality, and musicianship will remain key to his abundance and success. ~GC~

Patricia Braine has written and promoted for world class bassists such as Stanley Clarke of Miles Davis and Chick Corea fame, Eric Hoh of Freefall and Jamie Faunt of Chick Corea & Jamie Faunt’s Home Bass.

Aimée Petrin talks to the Seth Yacovone Blues Band about the blues, their new album, life on the road and why they do what they do. And she doesn’t tell you how old he is until the last paragraph.

They may be singing the blues, but this band is having a ball while doing so.

Regardless of which member of the Seth Yacovone Blues Band you ask, the reason this foursome plays and works so hard is an unwavering fondness for fun. And good music.

It’s all fun and games…until someone brings up Yacovone’s age. That subject is getting old.

“It’s really a drag,” opines harp man Luke Boggess when the topic inevitably arises. In an attempt to clear the air early on, both Boggess and Yacovone offer what they must wish would be the definitive answer that finally puts this issue to bed.

With frustration fueling his response, Yacovone, who otherwise has a smile and joke ready at every turn, launches into “Just as you’re not great as soon as you hit 36, you don’t suck until you’re 24.” With resignation, he closes the subject, adding “It just matters that the music is good!”

(Lest we forget that Robert Johnson, the king of the Delta Blues, was dead and buried by the ripe old age of 28?)

On the one hand, the band admits the age thing has helped garner publicity. With band profiles popping up in everything from regional newspapers (both locally and wherever the band tours) to one of the state’s more prestigious publications – Vermont Magazine – it’s difficult to discount the role it plays in the sensation. In fact you can hardly get past the headline before the fascination with Yacovone’s age rears its ugly head.

The focus on Yacovone’s age has left some without a true appreciation for the talent behind the hoopla, especially in these parts. Or at the very least an obstacle, which must be overcome to get over the age and to the music.

If anyone has issues with this affable bunch’s notoriety, they should take it up with ring leader Lee Diamond – the driving force behind the Seth Yacovone Blues Band’s fame. And this firecracker can handle it. As proprietor of the area’s only commercial band rehearsal space – The Kennel – Diamond is making music a full-time career. Yet, it seems a slap in the face that having a hard working manager up front should be a detriment.

It took one show at Nectar’s and Diamond was hooked. A few phone calls later and Yacovone bashfully asked Diamond to be the band’s manager. She’s been wheeling and dealing on the band’s behalf ever since.

With barely a year and a half behind the current line-up, Yacovone, who has one of those minds you don’t want to come up against in any game of Trivial Pursuit, effortlessly ticks off that fateful week in July: the 13th, a gig at the Pub & Brewery with only a handful of rehearsals behind them; the 16th, opening for fellow rising teen sensation Derek Trucks; the 19th and 20th, the first weekend show at Nectar’s; the 26th at Stratton’s Red Fox Inn, the 27th, warming the stage for the Ian Moore Band; the 28th, celebrating the earth at the Middletown Springs Solar Fest,; the 29th, cutting a demo at Joe Egan’s studio in Hinesburg; and rounding it all up on the 30th with a show supporting Koko Taylor.

Since then, the band has groomed an impressive resume. Shows at the Paradise Theatre in Boston, Allston’s Harper’s Ferry, the Metro in Saratoga Springs, the famed Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton and Burlington’s own Discover Jazz Festival are just a few of the gigs that have kept the band busy.

With comparisons to the greats, the Seth Yacovone Blues Band has enjoyed references to such distinguished predecessors as Albert Collins, Muddy Waters, B.B. King and the Allman Brothers.

Drummer Adam “The Hand” Kay, who, despite his percussive role in the band, keeps a relatively low and quiet profile, likens the band’s sound to “tradition with a twist.”

The twist comes from such varied influences from those aforementioned greats to Frank Zappa and George Clinton. The result is a sound Yacovone refers to as “soul music.”

Whether it is “Zappa singing about saving boogers or Robert Johnson screaming in 1936″ it all makes its way into the songwriting of Yacovone, who has been writing and playing since he was nine, when he got that now legendary guitar for Christmas. Yacovone, the foursome’s primary composer, gives up a few credits on the band’s all-originals debut CD, Bobfred’s Bathtub Minstrel, to Boggess.

So, why did a white boy hailing from the foothills of the Green Mountains beg his parents for a guitar so that he could start playing the blues?

“It’s the music that grabbed out and bit me,” explains Yacovone of his passion. Specifically, it was the swan song of the Band and its film The Last Waltz, which included an awe inspiring performance by Muddy Waters, that sealed Yacovone’s fate. “With so much power and emotion behind it you can’t help but be like, “Holy shit!”

“It so naturally fit my brain,” the Wolcott native adds.

“Blues was something I was always interested in – it’s what got me started on bass,” says Tom Coggio of the rhythm section. “Seeing the Dave Brubeck Quartet will do that to an aspiring musician, even when a music teacher tells you “your hands will never be big enough.”

“It hits you in the gut,” Boggess says.

Enjoying a commercial renaissance of sorts, the blues can be found in a bevy of mainstream advertisements. Even with this renewed appreciation for the genre, Yacovone is happy to see that the blues has not gone the same way as country, coming up watered down and vacuous. “There isn’t a Garth Brooks of the blues who sells 40 million albums, ” he adds.

“My biggest hatred of modern music is the lack of tradition,” asserts the staunchly independent spirit who chose home schooling over more orthodox academia (and who was writing for Good Citizen from his home when he was only fifteen.) “They all sound like last year’s big hit,” continues Yacovone with obvious disdain.

Yacovone feels that, with few exceptions, since the early 70s groups have not kept an ear to the roots of music when plowing new musical ground. The disclaimer lies in those contemporary bands he favors like the Black Crowes, Lenny Kravitz and Phish. Phish invited the Seth Yacovone Blues Band to appear at last summer’s Clifford Ball in Plattsburgh. “They listen to old music and you can hear it,” he observes.

This is not to say that Yacovone and the band do not have their own favorites on the local scene. Although most undirected questions hang in the air as each band member patiently, or one could say shyly, waits for another to speak up, this inquiry brings about a chorus of voices. Sandra Wright, the Disciples, Belizbeha and Big Joe Burrell all make the big list before each member adds a few reflecting more individualistic tastes.

Surprisingly, with so many bands seeking super-stardom, the Seth Yacovone Blues Band looks to a simpler future. One in which they can pay the bills and play the music without worrying about any of that other “bullshit,” with each CD funding the next.

“Success is doing something we haven’t done before,” asserts Yacovone, whether that be a new transition, an improvised, yet seamless jam or other risky maneuvers on stage. “I like weirdness, mistakes and inconsistencies because it’s natural.”

As natural as an 18-year-old from the hills of Vermont leading a blues band in search of good times and good music. ~GC~

Aimée Petrin is a free-lance personality with a background in music, theater and film.

Max Owre interviews John Morris of Waitsfield’s Mad Mountain Tavern.

One of the missions of Good Citizen is to support the people who support our Vermont music community. The underappreciated people who make it all happen: club owners, bar tenders, club bookers, bouncers, sound people. We’re looking for the people who make their own music scene happen and for six years a new scene has been developing in the Mad River Valley, thanks to the efforts of John Morris and his ever popular venue, The Mad Mountain Tavern.

I have had the good fortune of playing at the Mad Mountain Tavern (hereafter refereed to as the MMT) on many occasions. Every time, I have been amazed at the large, receptive crowds that pack the rustic club. There is always a contagious festive atmosphere that is shared by everyone including the band and the staff. Both in the winter, when the ski industry boosts the local population, and during the “off season,” the vibe is real and tangible. Recently, John Morris, the man behind this phenomena, agreed to sit with me and discuss his club and the music scene in the valley.

John grew up on the New Jersey shore and dabbled in accounting and bass playing before he found himself surveying in the Mad River Valley and, in the fall of 1991, purchasing a local bar called Mooselips and beginning to change the face of music in the community. John has helped a lot of Vermont bands make a living with their music and we wanted to thank him and introduce him to you. Maybe you’ll like him and go say “Hey” and check out the tavern the next time you’re in the valley.

So in his and my own words…

Good Citizen: Do you think your experience with music is influencing you as a bar owner and how you book bands right now?

John Morris: Yeah, I think so. I don’t listen to bands just like, ‘I hope that they play a song that I like.’ I see what kind of talent is there, and not just talent; but how well they play together. So I listen closely before I let bands in the club, even from the start.

GC: How did you end up in Waitsfield? Is this a mountain connection?

JM: I was actually doing accounting work when I moved up here. I was looking for something else to do along the way…going to school part time at Johnson, and doing the book work, and kinda looking around. I was living in Stowe – ski bumming there… going between Smuggler’s Notch and Stowe. Then I bailed out on the accounting and took a land survey job and discovered the valley through the business. I drank here when it used to be Mooselips, a redneck dive scene. If you came in with your girlfriend they wanted to beat you up. And couple years down the road, the place ended up going under. So I knew the area and I knew the building.

GC: … and you knew accounting…

JM: Accounting, yes. Very important.

GC: It is all making sense. What year was that?

JM: We opened in 1992.

GC: So we are working on a six year anniversary here, that’s great.

JM: Coming up to it.

GC: Congratulations.

JM: Thanks, man.

GC: I’m gonna cry.

JM: We’re still here. I am going to cry if we are still here in ten years.

GC: Tell me a little bit about what your format for music is in general. How many nights a week?

JM: We do weekends, mostly through the year. We skip a little time during the mud season and a couple of nights during stick season (colloquial for fall), but pretty much year round we do music Friday and Saturday nights. In the winter we add Thursday nights and Saturday afternoons. We’re into mostly original stuff with covers thrown in, more than cover bands with originals thrown in.

GC: This is a deviation from a philosophy that I encountered a few years ago. I know you’ve always had original bands, but at one point was there a predominance of cover bands?

JM: Yeah. I’d say maybe not a predominance but 50/50, maybe 60/40. You know blues, R&B, cover bands and some cheese rock. It was more a matter of feeling out what we could get in here and what worked. It was wanting to hear five different bands playing the same three sets of music. There are some bars that every weekend it’s a cover band- no matter what, and they all play the same songs as the band before. We really didn’t want that but we had to see what the local crowd would listen to (and not listen to) and if we could get away with doing more original or creative stuff than in a typical ski bar. Most ski town bars are like… “Mustang Sally,” “Louie Louie,” “Tequila…”

GC: “Low Rider.”

JM: Yeah, “Low Rider,” there you go.

GC: Can you pick one thing in the music that your clientele looks for? Is it danceability? Is it “party music”? What is it, that no matter what the season, will work here?

JM: The stuff that is not too hard and is more rhythmic. Stuff that leans towards dancing music, but not “dance music”. Funky, Jazzy, Reggae, Ska, Island sounds stuff. The R&B thing works well but not as well as you would think. Usually R&B will get people on their feet, but I don’t think that works around here.

GC: It’s hard to find good original R&B as opposed to good cover R&B. There is some out there but…

JM: Yeah. Even the original R&B, when you hear it, most of the time, sounds like a cover tune anyway. R&B and blues, unless you’re really a master, you can only take so far before it sounds like a lot of other people.

GC: “Mustang Sally” all over again.

JM: Right. In your own way- In a different key or something. We like the bands that work a lot on their original stuff. But its not just that it’s original- it’s gotta be tight, and it has to have the talent behind it with good energy- not just standing around like, “ho hum, we’re playing another song,” that doesn’t get people going too much. Our local crowd now is pretty particular. It’s surprising, but they come in and they don’t want to hear a cover band anymore. That’s a big part of why we’ve gotten away from it. I’m pretty close with my locals, and they’ll walk over and hiss at me, tell me- “I’m leaving,” and leave.

GC: Locals are obviously very important here. I mean, I’ve played gigs in the summer here and it’s a packed house in the summertime. Obviously locals are a large part of your clientele.

JM: Yeah, year round they definitely keep us going. During the ski season they’re not a very big percentage overall, but they’re definitely here for us year round, they keep us afloat. So, what they say has a lot of weight.

GC: What is your philosophy towards music and the ski area?

JM: I think we go against the grain as far as the norm in the ski industry. As far as the styles we’ve been talking about- originals and non-originals. The kind of music you hear is the duo playing CSN, Simon and Garfunkel, Van Morrison, and you know every song, and they kinda cut away at it.

GC: What’s your relationship with the ski areas like? Do you run promotions with them? Or do you do your own kinda thing?

JM: We ended up working more and more with the ski areas. Sugarbush not because of me, but because they started enjoying themselves here and came to do things. I really had it in mind that when we opened up a business we would do it on our own merits, and not do it because we were in bed with the ski area. Which was kinda of naive actually. If I was in with them sooner, I probably would have been better off sooner. We get along pretty good; in general. There are things they do that I’m not into, but we keep that aside. Mad River Glen I’m closer to. That’s where my heart is. I do things for Mad River more, because I like Mad River. It’s smaller… It’s backwoods ‘take it as it comes’ skiing. The people there are pretty hardcore about it. It’s Co-op owned right now and we’re trying to finish buying the mountain. There are still a few hundred shares needing to be sold to seal the deal… I do the bluegrass festival up there every summer as benefit for the co-op.

GC: How do you directly reach out to the vacationing crowds? How do you bring people in here?

JM: We do some postering up on the mountain. There are not too many places to do that. We mostly rely on word of mouth. We’re friends with a lot of mountain employees. There are definitely people up there recommending the tavern when folks ask where to go. I believe in the word of mouth approach, I think it’s worked really well for me up to now, and it keeps getting better to tell you the truth. You can read a hundred posters, but when somebody who’s a local grabs you and says, “if you’re going out tonight go to the tavern,” that is what you’re going to do.

GC: The same probably holds true for vacationing people who have been up here on repeat visits who say, “If you’re going up to Sugarbush, go to the MMT.”

JM: Yeah, there are people in Boston we know that run into other people wearing Tavern t-shirts, and there’s a big thing over the crazy time they had at the tavern last winter. So it definitely helps. We’ve gotten a few write-ups in some of the big ski magazines, where if they walk about Sugarbush, they talk about us. That certainly helps a lot. I think it helps more than any dollars you can spend. I think one thing that helps us a lot is the local cable. We have a nice action color commercial, that goes to every condo and home in the Valley. It doesn’t say anything about the place, it shows people skiing like madmen (its all local footage), and then flashes up our name and says where we are.

GC: Do you like skiing? You will love the MMT…What is the competition like around here? Do you vie for the crowd?

JM: I’m glad there is more than one music venue in town and I wish there were more people around to support the three of us. One of the reasons I came to the valley was because of the music scene that was happening here. There were two clubs that were geared towards ripping off tourists… they were pretty much tourist trap oriented. I thought coming in here and doing something to treat everybody good everyday, and then do the music on top of it would be a good formula, and it worked well. So one club, the Blue Tooth is open from Thanksgiving until Easter, and Gallaghers is open year around, but they don’t do a lot in the off season, and both those clubs are geared primarily towards cover bands, so it leaves me with my own niche.

GC: Do you tend to bring in a more youthful crowd?

JM: I think we have a really wide age range for customers. I’d say our customer base runs from this fine young girl in front of us at nine months old (the author’s daughter Sara), to parents of the college kids that are in town skiing. I think our median age is probably in the thirty year range.

GC: Do you have any ideas in particular to bring Burlingtonians down?

JM: We pretty much disregard them as city folk, so we’re not really interested. No, it’s hard to drag out the Burlington crowd, because there’s so much going on in town all the time. We do list our bands in all the local free publications. Any radio station or print that will give you free publicity- we’re in there with the listings. So if somebody is following a band, they know that they are going to be at the tavern, and usually the bands announce where they are going to be a couple of weeks down the road. If the bands have a crowd that follows them, that helps out. I think a lot of people know we’re here. We do a little advertising on the radio but we don’t go overboard with it unless it’s a special event.

GC: Do you look for bands that do well in Burlington? Does that sway your feelings on how you think they are going to do here, or is it purely a music thing?

JM: I usually hear about the band in the first place because they are doing well in Burlington. But if I go there and the place is packed, but I think that the band sucks, I probably still wouldn’t hire them.

GC: How about regional acts. I know that Sunday River in Maine has a fairly solid roster of regional bands that come through the area. Does this happen here?

JM: We haven’t done anything for regional bands up to now. Part of it is the size of my room would make ticket prices kind of expensive. Also, the way the room is split up, I could probably sell a couple hundred tickets to a show but then everybody in the place couldn’t get to see the stage. There’s a couple of ways to expand the room that I haven’t gotten to yet. When we can fit a few more people in here and they can actually see the stage, we’ll be doing some bigger acts.

GC: Have you ever made it with a full grown donkey?

JM: You know, that question kept me up at night.

GC: In a hot sweat?

JM: In a hot sweat. What I will say, is that it was consensual and the donkey was an adult.

GC: OK. I thank you for your candor. Who are some of the successful bands that have played here?

JM: Right now (sic) is doing well.

GC: Kudos, kudos.

JM: Can you believe that? Thanks for that twenty spot. Viperhouse, of course. Seth Yacavone is going strong and really smoothing out the act. Motel Brown definitely. We have a reggae band that’s coming up from Connecticut a few times called You and I, that’s really strong, straight forward reggae. We like Currently Nameless a lot. Sandra Wright. Pure Pressure has been going strong forever, they are a good standby, no matter what. So a pretty good range.

GC: What does the future hold for you? I could see this place being a viable music spot. Some bands that come to mind are like Strangefolk and Moon Boot Lover and bands that are on that level regionally.

JM: I talked to Strangefolk and Moon Boot Lover actually, both of them in the past. It has been a scheduling thing. I think if we convinced the locals to pay the money when they showed up, like on a Thursday night or something. It’s a fine balance between people that come here and have a beer or two and dinner five nights a week, and then it’s twelve dollars to get in the night of a show. How do you handle that? We have expansion in mind but we have some other things to take care of first. We will have some bigger acts in here, it’s just a matter of getting ourselves geared up for it.

GC: I think we’ve pretty much covered everything. I will say from my own perspective; every night that I have played here. And I have played here a bunch of times with both Motel Brown and (sic), I find it always seems like it is a special night, especially during the winter. It seems like it is a festive night because when people are saying, “we only have one night to be out this weekend” it really rubs off on the bands. I was wondering if you feel that magic.

JM: I had the picture in my head when I opened the bar. I knew a lot of places I had been to in ski towns and how tourists were treated and how the general public was treated, and it wasn’t very well. We set out from the start trying not to be like that. I know from people who have come in and talked to me, who are tourists I’ve never met before, they come and tell me the vibes here are better than anyplace they have ever been while vacationing. I feel it, but to have customers come up to me and tell me that, especially when I have never seen them before, really tells me that that’s what is happening.

GC: Well, I feel the vibe as well. Best of luck to you in the future, I think you’re doing a fantastic job. I’ll take my twenty back now.

JM: Thank you Max.

The MMT provides a great place for musicians to play in front of people who will take their word of mouth with them when they spread out as far as the marketing power of Vermont skiing can bring them in from. It is truly a unique place, with an exciting mix of people. As Bob Bushnell from Motel Brown says, “where else can you play under a moose and to a bass.” So, next time you are skiing stop by and enjoy the nightlife in the valley. John Morris and company are doing their best to make the valley’s entertainment surprisingly vibrant. ~GC~

Max Owre was a founding member of the Burlington band Rina Bijou and now writes and plays in the alternative groove band called (sic).

Former Natives sit down at the Good Citizen office and map out the path from Burlington’s Little Sister to today’s Merrie Amsterburg.

By Andrew Smith

Boston-based singer-songwriter Merrie Amsterberg and her husband Peter Linton stopped in at the Good Citizen office late on a Friday afternoon to wait out the Jill Sobule soundcheck over at the Metronome. Jill was running late, and as the “opening act,” Merrie and Peter had some time to kill. We’d only met once, a half dozen years before, but we easily started chatting about the Burlington music scene and its long and checkered past. The couple was warm and friendly, open and forthright about their successes and failures, high hopes and frustrations. 1997 has been a great year for Merrie and Peter, as Mer-rie’s first solo album, the wonderful Season of Rain (Q-Division Records) has found national distribution and high praise from major media like CMJ and Billboard Magazine. But let’s go back a few years. Okay, let’s go back a whole bunch of years.

When Peter Linton and his band Little Sister left Burling-ton in the early eighties, the city of Boston was the destination. But it was a trip to the west coast, courtesy of a Miller Beer-sponsored “Rags to Riches” contest, that sealed the fate of Little Sister. One of five finalists, Little Sister was the “east coast” winner and flown out to a showcase at the famous Palace Theatre in Los Angeles, California. The band didn’t win the contest, but MCA Records showed great interest – and it was enough to make the band – Peter and friends Russ Lawton, John Howley and Mike Rush – consider its fate. And that was enough to make John, the singer, decide that he couldn’t devote the rest of his life to the band. So, John returned to Vermont and the rest of Little Sister, back in their adopted home of Boston, went looking for a new singer. Fate twisted again, and they met Merrie Amsterburg, a recent transplant from Michigan. Peter and Merrie, uh, married. And together they all become the Natives.

Peter, a 1974 CVU grad, has had quite a few brushes with fame, and the country-flavored Natives lived through several of them. They were already house-packing regulars at local bars like Nectar’s and many bigger clubs throughout the northeast in the early nineties when they were sought out by Kiss bass player Gene Simmons, of all people, who was starting his own record label, the ill-fated Simmons Records. Peter and Merrie laugh heartily when they describe the Simmons label’s logo, a silver money bag with a dollar sign on it, but surely the experience of waiting out the nine month option on their contract must have frustrated the hard-working band.

When that was done, the Natives landed in yet another contractual disaster, this time with famed producer Richard Gottehrer’s imprint Instant Records. Instant was distributed by SBK through EMI. Gottehrer, who the band met through their friends the Judybats, had many successes as a producer, including Marshall Crenshaw. But he didn’t strike gold with the Natives and they found themselves stuck in a deal with no record and no freedom either. For two years the Natives were held captive by Gottehrer, and when they were finally released in 1994, the strain had taken its toll. Early 1995 spelled the end of the Natives, and Merrie and Peter broke off on their own.

Merrie had written the majority of the Natives songs, and her maturing material made the move to working under her own name a logical one. And so as Merrie Amsterberg, Merrie signed yet another record deal with yet another producer, this time

Q-Division’s Mike Denneen, famed for his work with such break-out Boston acts as Letters to Cleo, Jennifer Trynin, Aimee Mann and Morphine. Denneen produced her album Season of Rain, and he released it last fall on his own label, and since then Merrie and Peter have been working it and working it hard. With Denneen’s Q Division in total control, and they are management, booking agent and record label, Merrie has been eased into the spotlight in a conscious effort to grow her career slowly and carefully. Already, Merrie has been the subject of glowing regional press like a Northeastern Performer cover story, and growing national accolades, like a remarkable article in industry bible Billboard Magazine and a “Jackpot” pick in CMJ. And they’re playing shows: the road is offering up gigs as far and wide as opening for Bob Mould in Boston and playing the Mountain Stage NPR radio series with the Indigo Girls way down south. Wherever the road takes them , Merrie Amsterburg and Peter Linton are on it. And with a debut album as confident and easy on the ears as Season of Rain, they’re on it for the long haul. ~GC~

Andrew Smith is a dork and he’s the editor of this magazine so he can be as much of a dork as he wants to be. So there.

Our man Chris Parizo undresses the real Craig Mitchell and stands back while Craig gets naked and photographer Matthew Thorsen takes pictures of the action. Everybody wants to watch Craig Mitchell. And for good reason. He’s a great singer, he’s a great disc jockey, he’s a great actor, he’s a great writer. Hell, the man is great. Even the straight guys at Good Citizen are into Craig Mitchell.

ALSO: The complete Matthew Thorsen photo shoot exclusively online at Big Heavy World

Craig Mitchell stands on stage at a packed Club Metronome and gazes out towards the audience. His band for the evening is a collection of local musicians who were asked at the last minute to back Craig up for an impromptu jam to end a Saturday night DysFunkShun show. Unrehearsed but willing and able, the band is on fire.

“Alright,” yells Craig to the audience. “Give me another!”

Someone yells back: “Morris Day!”

“You got it!” he replies.

Instantly, the band crashes into a cover of a classic by the Morris Day fronted eighties band The Time. Craig doesn’t miss a beat as he glides into the lyrics of “Jungle Love.” The audience explodes, knowing that none of what they are witnessing has been rehearsed… it was spontaneous and it was electrifying. And in the center of it all was the master of ceremonies, grinning from ear to ear as he scanned the sea of dancing bodies. At that very moment, Craig Mitchell was on top of the world.

It would be unfair to label Craig as just a singer. Over the years he has established himself as a singer, a song writer, a dancer, a dj, an actor and a poet, succeeding at all that he attempts. His techno nights at 135 Pearl have gained the attention of the rave crowd, while his Saturday night “Retronome” show at Club Metronome always delivers classic dance hits of the eighties and nineties. He is the frontman for the funk/dance band Orange Factory and co-owns and operates Orange Factory Studios, a recording studio located on College Street. He has also starred in his own “One Man Show,” a theatrical event that gave him the opportunity to express his ideas on modern social issues.

Oh yeah, he also is heavily obsessed with Mark “Marky Mark” Wahlberg… so heavily obsessed that he once attacked a girl at a Marky Mark concert… but I’ll get to that later.

Craig grew up Saginaw, a small suburb outside of Detroit, Michigan with his family. Craig has met his father only once. He tenderly refers to his hometown as the “armpit of America,” a cess pool of what has become middle America; Saginaw was a racially divided area that reeked of gang violence and hate crimes.

“There was a designated black area and there was a designated white area, and no one went where they weren’t suppose to go,” Craig recalls. “You pretty much did the same things every night. You either went bowling, went to movies, hung out at the mall or stood outside the 7-eleven all night long. There really wasn’t much else to do. You had to find something to do.” Craig did eventually find something to do with his free time: he made music.

“When I was a kid I used to dj without realizing what I was doing. I would make these mix tapes… kind of like my own radio show. I would mix songs with interviews of some musician, like Michael Jackson or Prince. I would mix an interview with Prince over a song and pretend that I was the DJ, and make my own commercials.” One of these was a commercial for Sprite Soda. He wrote a commercial jingle and alternated between saying slogans like “drink Sprite” and burping into the microphone.

So what are the odds of one of these tapes appearing as a Craig Mitchell b-side? “Uh… I really don’t know where they are. My mom might have them.”

Craig’s mother was a strong influence on Craig’s music career. She surrounded him with music and encouraged Craig to perform.

“I had all these toy instruments lying around the house when I was a kid. I had a toy drum set that I used to bang on and a toy piano. I just kept screwing around, banging away and shit.”

He began writing complete songs by the age of eleven. At the age of sixteen, one of his songs was published and performed by a professional recording artist. He had begun making demo tapes of his songs and sending them to record labels. An artist by the name of Kathy Cox, who was signed to Rainbow Records, heard his tape and fell in love with a song titled “Forever Doesn’t Seem So Long” and with Craig’s permission, she recorded it and released it. However, she of course would have to make a few artistic changes.

“When the record was released I invited all my friends and family over to listen to it for the first time, I hadn’t even heard it yet. So we got a record player and played the song.” Everyone gathered at the Mitchell house, listened to the first recording of a Craig Mitchell composition. When the song began, everyone’s mouth dropped. The tender slow-pop love ballad had somehow morphed itself into a country two-step ditty.

“They ruined my song, man!” he says today with a laugh. “I received $500 dollars for royalties and that was about it.”

In high school, Craig was the center of attention when it came to music. He would put together shows at his school and call local acts to perform. They would get up on stage and play cover songs, with Craig doing impressions. “I used to get up there and do a mean Tina Turner, I’d put on a wig and dance around. I had people come up to me on the street and say: `hey, you’re the guy who did Tina Turner the other night!’ That was who I was known as.”

He had a rather difficult time blending in with his surroundings. He was “never `black’ enough to fit in with the brothers” so Craig decided to go on his own route and he adopted the appearance of a famous musician who, to him, was God.

“I went to a Prince concert with my grandmother. My grandmother was a huge fan, going around the house singing all his songs. He was `the man’ to me at the time, the baddest motherfucker I had ever seen. But before I saw him in concert I hated him. I didn’t get it. So I saw the show, and here was this little dude running around half-naked, stroking his guitar, spraying the audience with water… it was insane, so from then on I was like: `This guy is crazy! This guy is down!’”

A few weeks later, Craig could be seen walking around his high school in a pair of leather pants with his ass hanging out a hole in the back, and he grew out his hair and got it permed: “Man, I was the bomb!” he says with a laugh.

“Everyone was freaky in my town though,” he continues. “Gang culture was huge, everywhere you looked there were gangs. So you used to have these brothers out on the street corners dressed in woman’s clothing, just to piss off the rival gangs. It was like: `So here I am in a dress, and I’ll still beat your ass. This is me dressed like a girl, and I dare you to come and kick my ass.’ So I kind of blended right in.”

When you live in a suburban area like Saginaw, Michigan, blending in is a good thing. You try to act like everyone else and not stand out in any way. If you were different, it should never be discussed. It was better to keep a secret, then to admit a “flaw.” Craig, at the time, had a secret… he was gay.

“Homosexuality was just something that you didn’t talk about in my town. You kept it hidden. No one wanted to be different. So there was no gay community in Saginaw. I wasn’t exposed to it when I was a kid. I had never heard of `Gay Pride’ or a gay parade. There was this one guy on the corner who was a fashion designer, and he was the only person on my block who was `out’. So I convinced my mother that he used to be gay, but now he’s not because he found the Lord and blah, blah, blah. So I used to hang with this guy because I was interested in figuring out what the whole gay thing was, I wanted to know… and he hit on me. He tried to kiss me and I was like `NO!’ I just bailed. It scared the shit out of me. So I just left.”

However, this did not mean that Craig didn’t experiment.

“I remember after basketball practice, the team would be in the locker room and we would, ya know, fool around. We didn’t view it as anything homosexual, it was like just screwing around. So we would do that and then go out and pick on gays. It was strange.

I had a lot of friends who were in gangs, that was another way of experimenting sexually. Like, you would have to `perform’ on someone in the gang and then let them kick the shit out of you, it was a part of initiation.”

Craig knew back then, whether he would admit to himself or not, that he was gay. However, Saginaw wasn’t exactly the place to “come out of the closet,” so he continued having girlfriends and waited for the opportunity to come where he could finally open up… and he found it in Vermont.

In 1989, Craig packed up his things and left for school at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. Craig been promised a minority scholarship from his high school guidance counselor. Upon his arrival, Craig realized he was in a completely different environment.

“My first reaction was shock! I mean, this place was crazy. There was a white dude with dreadlocks here! Burlington had more excitement, more culture, more diversity, this place had more to offer then Saginaw ever did. It was the complete opposite of Michigan.

“My family has only been here once. For graduation, this motorcade of Cadillacs pulled into town. My whole entire family showed up. They stayed in their hotel rooms the entire weekend and only came out for the graduation ceremonies. I took my Aunt out once to go shopping, but that was pretty much it. After graduation was done, they went straight back to their hotel rooms. They were pretty freaked out [by Vermont].”

Craig felt that he could finally be himself and be accepted in Burlington. He did not hide his homosexuality, he found others in the area who were the same as him and also discovered Pearl’s, which at the time was strictly a gay bar. But it wasn’t until his sophomore year that he finally told his family about his homosexuality.

“I went home for Christmas break and was so nervous, I didn’t say a thing until my last day. I wrote this letter to my mom that just said everything I needed to say, stuff like I wouldn’t call her when I got back to Vermont if she needed time to think about it. I wrapped the letter up like a Christmas present. We were sitting in the driveway, ready to go to the airport to catch my plane, and I said: `Oh wait… I forgot something!’ I ran back inside and put the present on my mom’s bed… then left.”

Fearing that his family was going to disown him, Craig boarded his plane and flew home. He had pretty much figured that he had broken his mother’s heart, but when he arrived back in Vermont his answering machine was filled with messages from his mother, “Call me! Call me!”

“She was cool with it, although a little weird about it. I mean, the whole family already knew, it was pretty obvious to them. She was always nicer to my guy friends when I was a kid then my girlfriends. She had a picture of my best friend (male) on the wall, she was overly friendly to all my guy friends and was kind of like (nonchalantly) `oh hey’ to my girlfriends. She knew all along… she was just waiting for me to say something.”

The minority scholarship that he was promised by St. Michael’s never came through, so Craig had to turn to his talents in order to make cash for college, He began to work as a disc jockey at Pearl’s.

Today, 135 Pearl is a popular dance club that has a loyal following of gay and straight patrons. Almost every night, one can expect the area’s best djs to spin their own style of techno and dance music through a great sound system, and dance under a pretty cool lightshow… this however has not always been the case.

When Craig first started spinning at 135 Pearl it was then known as Pearl’s, a gay bar that was the object of much criticism and hatred from the community. The inside was a disaster. The sound system consisted of a turntable with two crappy speakers that sounded terrible and the dance floor lighting consisted of one disco ball in the center of the room. At the time, there was no such thing as a “rave scene” and techno music was as underground as underground could get. Craig was one of the very few people in the area who were capable of spinning techno. Today, the Burlington techno scene is a lot bigger and a lot stronger then it was seven years ago. Craig credits local disc jockeys like Twist, Little Martin and Roberto for taking the music to the next level within Burlington.

The respect is mutual and Craig’s spinning skills have been lauded by many other disc jockeys.

A couple of years ago, Anne Rothwell, owner of Club Metronome, was looking to book some sort of party band for her Halloween celebration at the club. She went to Jeremy Skallar, keyboardist of the band Belizbeha, to put together some sort of fun party band that could tear the roof off of the club. Jeremy recognized the talent of Craig and asked him to help him set everything up. The two formed a cover band and named it Orange, after the color that is so commonly connected with Halloween. The show was such a success that the band decided to continue making music together. Today, the band is called Orange Factory. With the hectic schedules of the current members, Orange Factory shows are a rarity. Craig and Jeremy are joined by Robert Larow on guitar, Mark Robohm on drums (also in Belizbeha), John Hill on bass, Chad Hollister and Kether Darchuam on percussion. Recently, Craig Mitchell and Orange Factory signed a management deal with the Burlington based As One Management, who also represent such Burlington based soul/funk/pop/ groove artists like Belizbeha and Rebecca Simone. The band will release their first full length album, Naked, early next year even though the album has been recorded for over a year. Why has the album taken so long to release?

“No comment…” says Craig, “legal shit.”

What Craig doesn’t want to talk about is an ill-fated record deal with Sojo Music, a local production company now relocated to Atlanta. The company held up the release so many times that even the local press started asking questions about the album. Craig smartly brushes such negativity aside and prefers to focus on the future. Even if, to him, the album seems a part of the past.

“The album is going to be different,” he says. “I have a difficult time explaining it to people. It’s different than what people are going to expect from this dance band. It’s pretty chill, I think people are going to be pretty surprised by what they get. I think it’s great. It is going to freak out a lot of people. The only problem is that I am kind of tired of it, I have been listening to it everyday for over a year now. I’m constantly writing and recording new material, so two months after this gets released we might come out with something else.” (A recent live recording of Orange Factory was done while Craig was completely naked on stage.) “There are a couple of dance tracks on the record, one spoken word piece, but a lot of it is down tempo sort of stuff. It is a lot different than the live show, more experimental.”

(And for those of you who have been patiently waiting for the release of the CD… we are pleased to announce that Naked will be released on December 18 with a party at Club Toast. You might want to be there!)

A hot selling point for Naked was going to be the CD art. Craig invited a photographer to come to a private get together and take photos of an entire crowd of Orange Factory fans…naked. Unfortunately, when Craig bought the rights to the record back from Sojo, they did not include the photographs as part of the deal. Still, it isn’t hard to find a naked Craig Mitchell. Craig is very comfortable with his body and the entire concept of nudity. “I think that if you hang around with people that are naked, you start looking at each other as they really are. You are no longer wondering what people look like, you know. After a while you just get comfortable with it.”

When Craig talks about his life, music and his family, he glows with such delight that I thought could never be outshone, but I was wrong. Craig nearly bursts into flames when the name “Marky Mark” comes into a conversation.

“He is so fine,” he says, practically melting into his seat. “I saw him on Oprah once, and Ijust started weeping. He is just so beautiful. I swear to God that I’m not like a stalker, I just have this (sick) fascination for him.”

The recent film Boogie Nights, starring Marky Mark Wahlberg and Burt Reynolds, portrayed Wahlberg as a 70s era porn star who has a lot going for him… specifically thirteen inches.

“I really don’t know what it is… I’ve got all these pictures of him that I got off the internet. He’s just so beautiful.”

Craig’s admiration for Mark Wahlberg has lead to at least one violent situation. At a concert a couple of years back, Mark incited a mini-war between Craig and a girl in the audience.

“The show was cool, ya know, the pants were down and everything. And Mark threw a towel into the audience. This girl next to me grabs it and I’m thinking `I’m never gonna see this girl again’ so I started to whack her in the back of the head… BUT I DID IT SOFTLY!!! So some guy saw me hitting this girl and starts punching me in the back of