The Wyco Low Riders Save My Blog (Or Is That My Heart?)

It's not all Don Lipovac's fault, but he's the most obvious culprit.  After all, his name was evoked twice Saturday night, by both Johnny Hamil (speaking for Mr. Marco's V7) and Jason Beers (speaking for the Brannock Device).  The King of Polka in Wyandotte County, internationally reknowned accordianist and bandleader Don Lipovac, genuinely inspired these two sons of the Dot, and their dedications were heartfelt.  With some slight irony, in each case, the music that followed might well seem designed to scare off any Don Lipovac fans who may have wandered into the house.

But I don't think it would actually.  It might well scare off most people who think they like cutting edge, avant garde indie rock (a style which seems more rigidly codified than the most traditional folk music) because such folks aren't used to having every presumption they ever owned about music overturned with such frenzied glee.  And glee is the word for that mad delight shining off of Johnny Hamil's face as he percolates feedback off of his nearly horizontal upright bass, and glee is what I sense behind that sly smile when stoic madman Jason Beers lets such things slip, for instance during dueling basses with Hamil on an Iron Maiden cover.  Yes, that sentence makes sense.

These folks are ornery, and ornery means playful, and that's at least one thing they have in common with Mr. Lipovac.  If I remember one thing from a Don Lipovac show, it's that it's the definition of fun.  The other thing both Mr. Marco's V7 and the Brannock Device have in common with the Don Lipovac Band is extraordinary musicianship.  Marco Pascolini is in both bands, and if he's not the finest evil genius on guitar in the Twin Cities (yeah, those of us who claim the Dot can say that), he deserves the chance to fight for his title.  Not taking notes Saturday night, I can't tell you a thing Pascolini did beyond surprise me with sounds I didn't think could possibly fit with everything else going on at the same time but, in fact, seemed to be part of the glue--or the electro magnetic field--that held things together.

I mean, a universe separates Mr. Marco's Arthur C. Clarke drunk on blotter lounge music--which can turn toward some kind of manic Turkish jam whenever it feels like it--from the Gang of Four circa Entertainment meets X doing its Ornette Coleman set vibe of the Brannock Device.  But that universe has folds, you know, and to be at a show with the two together puts a listener in Warp Drive.  All of it makes sense.

It makes sense that--during the Mr. Marco's set--Jason Beers takes the stage playing saw between Kyle Dahlquist and Mike Stover (both playing theramin) for an earnest cover of "Bali Hai."  And it makes sense that 14 bass players take the stage at once, including a woman better known for her fiddle (Betse Ellis) and another known for her voice (Elaine McMilian), and do a cover of "Boris the Spider" with KC's premier rock and roll showman Cody Wyoming. It makes sense that twice as many people as are on stage are watching this nearly all bass player band, the Wyco Low Riders, at 2:00 in the morning.  And it makes sense that one of the city's finest drummers, Kent Burnham, is willing to lend this molar drilling exercise his unabashed, supple and explosive, support.

It makes sense because this collaboration of over two dozen of Kansas City's finest musicians is born out of a great deal of love and mutual respect for the music and each other.  It's also born out of both the desire to have fun and the guts to risk making a fool out of one's self in the process.  It's born out of what it means to realize what it means to Be Here Now, as the good book says, and appreciate those around you.  I can't help but think those are sentiments close to the heart of what makes truly experimental music enduring.  That which challenges us the most, may even make us cringe, also asks us to stay present and in dialogue with the moment (and hopefully those around us).

I don't know.  That's what it told me Saturday night (Sunday morning).  It told me 5 years into my blog I might try writing a blog, not use the thing as simply a warehouse for writing that has no home.  I'm so dissatisfied with the state of music writing anywhere and everywhere right now, I need to vent, I need to experiment, I need to talk back.  Why not use this space, at least for now?  And why not not worry about whether what I'm writing is ready for the world?  I need to Occupy the whirlwind of activity around me in a more aggressive and present way, for my own mental health if nothing else.  For my sense that I can do that, I thank Jason and Johnny and all the shamalama shamen and shawomen who took the stage Saturday night.  Thanks to you, I'm ready to play.

Toni and Clarence, Someplace Tropical

for Omar

From the moment I heard cancer took my great friend Toni Gentry, on the heels of learning my rock and roll hero Clarence Clemons died, I had a mental image of the two, someplace tropical, with umbrellas on their drinks. Not that either one of them was an umbrella-glass type, but both had a sense of occasion. It’s a huge understatement to say they were both known for their sense of style.

At Toni’s Kansas memorial service (her second, the first held in her now-home, Arlington, Virginia), a friend talked about the first time Toni walked into her shop, “wearing thigh-high leather boots.” Many, many things expressed my own memories of Toni at this service—we were colleagues in my school writing center, and her teacher’s reminiscences of her intensity in the school setting, an intensity that made every moment matter, brought back cascading memories. Her sisters’ memories of her going Mama Bear on those who crossed them reminded me of the ways Toni used to look after me, and her friend Eric Melin’s memory of the way she could make your jaw drop by saying exactly what she thought, that was uncomfortably (and hilariously) familiar. But those boots….if she wasn’t wearing those boots the day I first saw her walk in the Writing Center, then she should have been. Like Clarence blowing the door off its hinges in that mythical bar meeting with Bruce, that first image of her crossing the room takes on epic dimensions for me, and if she wasn’t dressed all in suede with thigh high boots, I’ll never know because that’s all I can see right now.

Just as Clarence’s style would have meant much less without the distinct sound and call of that horn, Toni backed her style with unique substance. Its outlines were in every story told at yesterday’s memorial service. It was even in the look and feel of the service, a yard full of friends and family against a rich wooded backdrop—some drinking beer, some holding each other, all laughing between the tears.

We had to laugh, you see, because Toni was one of the world’s great laughers. That’s the way I hear her right now, talking about “boi-oi-oi-yeez” [boys] or whatever subject amused her at that moment, her voice staccatoed by that laugh that was perpetually trying to come out. Sometimes, she just let it go, and, hand to mouth, her whole body rocked with delight. One of Toni’s favorite phrases was “great fun” because she looked for it everywhere she went and generally found it.
This meant she found “great fun” in and for others as well. Unlike many charismatic and creative people I know, Toni’s sense of occasion was always about who she was with. When you were drawn into her orbit, you realized you’d found your own groove. I don't know how else to describe it.

My finest memories of Toni were “great fun,” but they were quiet ones. I once called her on a long afternoon I was reviewing 3 shows back-to-back at Kansas City’s one-time great blues club, the Grand Emporium. I was worried about her. She was going through a divorce but still living in her married home, and I figured she needed a friend. [We were “pals.” I don’t know how else to put it. Buddies, pals, shoulder-to-shoulder-through-the-rough-times friends.]

Anyway, so she tells me she’s making this casserole [for dinner I’m presuming], and I tell her that I guess she wouldn’t be interested in keeping me company at the club. In half an hour, she’s there, and we’re out in the parking lot eating her casserole. I ask her how she’s doing and she says, “I’m ba-ha-had! I’m cooking casseroles and driving around with them in my back seat.”

Then came one of those body rocking laughs, for both of us. There’s a little eternity in that afternoon in that parking lot crying-laughing and trying not to drop that casserole. Most of my memories of her somehow fold into that one.

You know how with some friends you are the driver and with some you are the passenger? I always see myself as the passenger with Toni, but we’re busy going nowhere special in no hurry because the best part’s that time in the car.

So, I heard my story reflected and refracted through the stories of others who spoke during her service and others who I talked to in that celebration I didn’t want to leave. Though I knew almost no one at the service when I arrived (the time and space that defined our relationship being a specific in-between station in her life), I knew of them because she always talked of her loved ones. And they knew of me. And I felt like I was among friends, potentially close friends because we all knew and somewhat understood and definitely benefitted from the integrity of one of the most creative and beautiful people any of us will ever be lucky enough to know.

The theme that came up again and again—regarding her sisters and regarding her two sons, Tariq and Malik, especially—was the way she gave them all permission to be who they were, to be different as they wanted to be and to recognize that difference as something special. This gal from north of Topeka did that for everyone she knew. She certainly did that for me. She taught me a lot about who I could be. A lot of what’s best about who I am, I owe to her.

Aside from worrying about all their loved ones being so sad, Toni and Clarence no doubt have this common mission to talk about in this tropical place where they walk the beach, drinking something extravagant and silly, maybe simply for its na-ai-ame, with their little umbrellas. They both took us closer to free. They both left us trusting we’d carry forward their work.

I promise, Toni, to keep chasing that “great fun” and do everything I can to make the world worthy of your gifts. Pass the word to C. Thanks for getting us started.

Open Hearts, Lost and Found

I wrote this several months ago for a special issue of Rock & Rap Confidential that never saw the light. It's not about Clarence Clemons, directly, but since he's on my mind right now, and since it's actually about all of the soulful music that didn't make it onto Darkness on the Edge of Town, it does stand as an indirect tribute to what Clarence brings to the larger story. If only it were as beautiful as a single note of a single solo.

Yes, listening to the The Promise and flipping through the notebook and supplementary materials available in The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story says a lot about the smart choices Bruce Springsteen made in 1978 to cut some space of his own with those drums and those guitars. Songs like “Outside Looking In” reveal their synthesis of Buddy Holly and the Animals whereas Darkness still sounds like nothing else, not even much of the Americana punk it helped inspire. And the comparisons show the possibilities carved away for the original album’s hard focus. Thematically, the “lost” material shows the universes that lie between, say, “Racing in the Street” and “Candy’s Room” on the first disc, and, on the second, the necessities and dangers involved in proving it all night.

But I came into this with a certain faith that this was more than outtakes for comparison; I believed that this was a 2010 album. That faith was forcefully rewarded the first time I reached the closing scenes—“Breakaway” with the gorgeous “sha la las,” swelling horns and piano lending dignity to one desperate reach and miss after another. And then “The Promise’s” organ and strings and those overdubbed vocals on the “Thunder Road” refrain, capturing just how and why, “every day it just gets harder to live this dream I’m believing in.” That line, like all the rest here, have an added poignancy today, all the promise of “pullin’ outa here to win” ending in questions of just what’s been risked and what’s been lost. The sweetening of these arrangements may well be, as Bruce’s liner notes insist, “what I would’ve done to them at the time and no more,” but he didn’t do it then, and he has done it now, purposefully, to my ears.

Virtually all of this music is opulent in its production in a way that may call to mind 1975’s Born to Run but sounds to me like the man who made 2009’s Working on a Dream. From the first time I heard it, “Someday (We’ll Be Together)” particularly insisted this perspective with its richly layered pop arrangement and female backing vocals. But, in a more particular way, the middle guitar solo, doubled by piano (perhaps glock) and dressed in strings brings to mind the soundtrack-like grandeur of a song like “Outlaw Pete”—Ennio Morricone meets Phil Spector. And I don’t care when those lyrics were written, “I awake from a dream…Tonight, we’re on our own” sounds like Darkness revisited after 30 years of promises kept, sure, but also promises broken.

That song begins with the sound of “your voice…calling through the mist” which is a line echoed in the one largely new lyric on the album, “Save My Love.” That song begins, “Now there’s something coming through the air/That softly reminds me” and later adds, “Over river and highway/Your voice comes clear and true.” Unlike the despairing late night drivers of “State Trooper,” “Open All Night” and “Radio Nowhere,” this character hears something so tenuous it tears him apart even as it gives him hope. He knows he has his own voice, too, and that’s part of an exchange, so while he listens he asks the listener to “dial me in close.”

Perhaps, as much as anything, what I hear is the 61-year-old Springsteen consulting with the 29-year-old rocker in the same way he consulted with Buddy Holly, Elvis and Hank Williams at the time most of these songs were originally written. “Save Your Love” has an unassuming brevity reminiscent of The River B-Side “Be True” (and more than a minor thematic connection), but it defines commitment in much more delicate and sophisticated terms, as a sense of not just integrity but direction and need, well aware of the perils and distances that come between tonight and tomorrow.

The case that Darkness On the Edge of Town speaks today as urgently as it did in 1978 doesn’t need to be made here, but the way “Save My Love” starts up on the song "Darkness’s" hill with that same guy, older and maybe wiser but still waiting to be easily found, resurrects the ideas of Darkness as ongoing work.

Thematically, the closest song to “The Promised Land” on these two new CDs is “Someday (We’ll Be Together)” and unlike the lonely determination of the original album, this deliverance clearly depends upon community. In fact, by revisiting all these love songs and those little things our babies do—magical, fumbling and cruel—Springsteen’s uncovered new layers of questions at the center of a great album. On the single, he pledges, “if we open up our hearts, love won’t forsake us,” but that’s clearly an approach not a formula. The open hearts on these 2 new CDs make mistakes, and they get recklessly used, confused, broken, and discarded. These appropriately-named “Lost Sessions,” then, focus on missing pieces to clarify the complexity of that terrain we still gotta live every day.

So Right

Me Like Bees and Reasons to Believe

So, every once in a great while, a band comes along with a call so hard and urgent that I find I have to write a response, even when I’m speechless. Me Like Bees has been calling hard a while now... And for a late 70s generation punk fan who finds himself listening to R&B and norteno as much as anything these days, the inspiration comes from a somewhat surprising source--four guys who started playing together in Joplin, Missouri; three high school football players from Kansas City, and the fourth, the drummer, a California kid whose dad used to gig with members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band.

That last bit may be something that makes some sense. The football does too…in a way. Though indie is the label they’ll be given, the band is not your typical effete alterna-rock band. In fact, the first time I saw them, their blue collar, punch-to-the-gut, sensibility made me wonder how come they weren’t playing straight up metal.

But I suppose that dates me. The first time I checked them out online and found a live video of them doing Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls On Parade” I had a piece of that answer, if not the whole story. During that first show I saw, they had played Modest Mouse’s “Float On,” which lent another piece to the puzzle. Since then, I’ve heard them cover Gnarls Barkley and singer Luke Sheafer freestyle a little Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z.

I should understand as well as anyone. I’m from a town in Oklahoma not far from where this band formed, and if I’d made a band at their age, I would have been doing Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen (who was still obscure around those parts then), Public Image Ltd, and the Clash, with maybe some refrains from Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” thrown in post 1982….same difference. If I've learned anything over the years, creativity takes many forms and draws on many kinds of inspiration, often from directions that are attractive because they have nothing to do with one’s roots. And, first and foremost, a band is a band to break out of whatever box it may be handed.

Anyway, I fell for these guys the first time I saw them because they were both funky and heavy, and they had hooks, and they managed to convey a sense of humor without losing any of their sense of gravity. That was a show at the Coda, and the house was packed that night with people close to the stage who seemed to know every song, and a larger house that, despite not having heard a note before, was as riveted as I was.

That was five shows back (I saw my sixth tonight), and they only grow more fascinating each time out. I’ve seen them play to packed houses and empty houses. Tonight was a relatively empty house, a 7:30 set starting off an evening packed with too many bands at the end of a day of Westport pub crawling that found most people outside at that hour or catching a meal.

It didn’t affect how the band played…well, in any obvious way. Lead singer Luke Sheafer started in with the lilting verses of one of their newer songs, “Joseph Jones,” and bass player Asher Poindexter immediately began angling in on him with a full-bodied dance to match his rhythm. Drummer Tim Cote punched hard as the song built to a crescendo, and guitar player Pete Burton offered one shimmering line after another until something that started off sounding fragile, even diffident, became a powerhouse assault.

Such dynamics are typical of Me Like Bees, but the band defies any simple stylistic description. Poindexter and Burton both play their guitars in very percussive ways, calling to mind funk from James Brown to Gang of Four to whatever contemporary bands they actually nick. Cote keeps a supple rhythm but bangs the drums hard. And singer Luke Sheafer, well, he makes sure no one in the house doubts for one second his conviction or its urgency.

When the band launches into “Lazarus,” Sheafer takes breaks from the verses to mouth wordless refrains at Poindexter who wordlessly shouts back. Poindexter has this sort of body-twisting raindance stomp he employs while working his bass, while Sheafer twists, turns and widens his eyes, then shouts and cries and growls into the mic. Meanwhile, Burton peels off one great riff after another, playing the relatively stoic, mild-mannered role to the side (someone has to anchor this anarchy).

But nothing really anchors this music except for the rhythmic pulse that binds the band together. At times, Burton’s guitar seems to be starting flash fires off to the right and Poindexter’s bass throws gasoline with quick emphatic runs from the left. The entirety of the band’s sound swirls like some cosmic storm, shimmering light and tone colors beyond imagination. And Poindexter has a sly smile, and Sheafer’s beaming wildly, and the whole band looks like they’re aware yet nonchalant about the fact that they’ve, yet again, cut a space that extends from, in this case, the back of the Riot Room to Alpha Centauri.

And that’s enough…. Nevermind the resonance of these lyrics—about being the prey of capitalist sensory overload (“Iconica”) or about being a working stiff who gains nothing in particular for a job well done (“Good Machine”) or about a girlfriend with a “sweet left hook” (“She”) or about finding hope precisely when all is lost (“Doubt”). This is a band that has ample reason to mean it when Sheafer shouts, as he does on the Ep closer, “There’s a Man,” “As long as I have a choice, I’ll be raising my hand up/I’ll be begging to differ.” This is a band with something to say, many things to say.

So, I’ll be sorry when I have to miss next Friday’s Kansas City show at the Coda. But I’ll be playing them on my long drive to Chicago, and thinking about all the things I said here and what I need to say next. Because, though the afterglow I feel right now will be gone, I’ll remember what I’ve learned five times over, as I’ve gone back to one show after another wondering if they are really that good…

The answer is not simply yes. Each time it seems they’ve gotten better, or maybe I’m just better learning how to hear. Either way, I can’t bear to miss what’s next.

To see and hear for yourself-- www.melikebees.com