Crying At The Music Festival - with Josiah & the Bonnevilles

 

Crying At The Music Festival

There’s just something about the Sunday sets at a multi-day summer music festival. 

For my previous years of regular Bonnaroo attendance (that have now faded into memory), the Sunday sets were punctuated by sun & exhaustion, by endorphins & endurance, by wildness & weariness, by the intense anticipation of sleeping in your own bed after showering in your own bathroom, contrasted with the emotional exhilaration of parting with the aura & aroma, feeling all the fading festival vibes for another year. 

Thus, under these conditions, the Sunday set can send the sensitive fan (like me) into fits of fierce reverie, often moistened, if not utterly soaked, by tears. Take Mavis Staples singing for Pops Staples on Fathers’ Day back in the 00s at a steamy Sunday tent show, singing for her recently released from this world father, me thinking of my Daddy, who I would only have a little bit longer. Or what about Allison Krauss & Robert Plant, on their first tour together, mixing their new folk blues with Led Zeppelin classics, while I just fell to pieces. Or there was Okkervil River in 2009, a band that I then barely knew, but they pierced my soul while we wailed “Unless It’s Kicks,” as I celebrated the last day of my first festival as a sober person. 

In 2019, Brandi Carlile gave an impassioned rap about what Father’s Day might mean to a family with two moms. I had only recently fallen fully into 2018’s heart-wrenching tear-drenching totality of a record “By The Way, I Forgive You,” & this show leveled me. I caught a second Brandi on a Sunday that same festival season at Moon River in Chattanooga. Then there was Wilco closing Moon River on Sunday with “California Stars” in 2021, one of our early post-Covid festivals. Yes, we were ready to sing along, all up in our feels, & our feels are having the feels. I think the prevailing “never miss a Sunday show” sentiment comes from Dead tour initially, but for me it is about the Sunday at a summer festie, when I am dragging & dirty, weepy & filled with wonder. 

This year I attended some of Sunday at the Green River Festival, under the cloud of a tornado watch. 24 hours earlier, our Saturday was interrupted by a torrential gullywasher of biblical rainfall. As we walked back to “shelter in your car” per the festival’s instructions, our shoes & clothes were soaked & what once was a grassy parking lot was a sloshy pond. I wish I had the spirit of the young child I saw playing in the mud, but instead, I was more consumed by frustration & anxiety, even as I tried to keep a good attitude nonetheless. Yet months of anticipation getting washed away was far from ideal. Will we even be allowed back? So that stinking “I’m never going to another music festival again” thinking might have creeped in beneath the surface.

While finishing our quesadillas at a restaurant in the nearby town of Greenfield, we got the notifications on the festival’s social media feeds. The weather has passed. The venue is reopening. The show must go on. We were jazzed, glad we hadn’t already found our seats at the nearby movie theater, that was our next-best option. Before long, we would be digging Bonny Light Horseman, Willi Carlisle, Mdou Moctar, & others. The rest of Saturday was exhilarating, & around the start of Fleet Foxes, we made our way to our car & the hour-plus drive back to my brother’s place nearby. 

I hate to admit that we are those older men who constantly check the weather radar on our phones. This only intensifies to a kind of mind sickness during a music festival with weather issues. Over the last couple decades of regular festival attendance, we have been too hot, too cold, too windy, too dry, & like the start of Saturday, too soaked to the bone. At least a couple of weather delays turned into cancellations. Some festivals never return. The fairgrounds at Green River had a small museum that boasted of this festival’s history, dating all the way back to 1986, & the many weather near-catastrophes they survived, including an ice storm, the one year they thought a fall festival might be fun. 

All that context to say that I did consider skipping Sunday when we learned the forecast & the threat of tornadoes. My brother was only in for Saturday, & after a short stint at this solo Sunday, I would begin the long drive back to Tennessee, to see a friend three hours south, to finish the journey on Monday. After some trepidation, I devoured the pancakes my brother prepared, packed my bags late Sunday morning, & headed back to Greenfield. I am so glad that I did! 

During the entrancing vibes of Dobet Gnahore’s set, I noticed the family nearby. Lots of people were swaying with the Ivory Coast singer to the infectious Afropop, us included. My eyes fixed on the father, or was it the grandfather, dancing with his adult son, or grandson, or maybe they were just friends. The young man is blind & smiling ear to ear. Their tenderness & grooviness instantly broke me. Trying not to cry was futile. It was joyful seeing them so into it, not unlike the first time I encountered deaf fans at a Dead show bonding with the sign language interpreter. Already all-up-in-my-feelings, I left Dobet to check out trans singer Izzy Heltai at another one of the side stages. This amazing set was no less emotional for me. Already floating in a cloud of music’s raw humanity & cosmic vulnerability, I finally made my way toward the main stage for my first time seeing Josiah & the Bonnevilles, the primary reason why I had purchased the Sunday ticket.

Josiah Leming’s lyrically honest & acoustically hazy East Tennessee folk unpacked me the first moment I heard it. At the time that I was first inspired by his infectious & immediate singing, I wasn’t aware that he was a recent TikTok sensation, also a 30-something bartender & Amazon warehouse worker & former American Idol performer with a few failed commercial music careers already under the bridge. I was this-past-Sunday-old when I realized that for this solo acoustic performer, there was no backing band called “the Bonnevilles,” but that we fans are the Bonnevilles. As Josiah began to narrate his entire life story in between songs, which included simmering covers of Chappel Roan & Elle King that had hundreds singing along, he increasingly held my heart in the palm of his hand.

Then, Josiah started telling us about his mother. He said her favorite song was “Fix You” by Coldplay, & that he always wanted to do for us Bonnevilles, what that song did for his mother. As someone who had screamed & cried along to that song on my soggy work commute back in the 00s, I found this comment all too relatable. Then, he relayed how he had lost her to cancer some time ago & missed her every day. This immediately sent me to thoughts about my late father, who I lost ten years ago this past May.  

Already mesmerized & in the palm of this performance, Josiah introduced his version of “Ghost,” a song attributed to Justin Bieber. The chorus summarizes grief so succinctly & gets locomotion from his haunting harmonica wails at the breaks, I am buckets & buckets of the tears that were mere moist mist back at the blind man dancing with his dad. I have listened to this track so many times since Sunday, to hear these words again: 

That if I can't be close to you

I'll settle for the ghost of you

I miss you more than life

And if you can't be next to me

Your memory is ecstasy

I miss you more than life

This kind of long-term grief for a loved-one like a Dad is not a bad thing. This grief is good, & this song unspooled yet more of it into cascading tears to soak this festival field like Saturday’s downpour.

I was still crying two songs later when Josiah ripped into “Another Day At The Factory” for his Dad, the opening track to his 2023 album “Endurance.” I actually knew the words to this one & started singing along & dancing & waving my arms, as we do. I think to myself at some point during this track, that Josiah is staring directly at me. He is singing this song for me, burrowing into the depths of my being, open heart surgery on the sabbath with everything broken yet good about me, suddenly exposed for the entire world to see. A perpetual rail-rider, I have had performers offer a wink or twinkle a smile at my old-dude dance moves before. But this is different. His eyes stay fixed on me for the entire song, & it’s a little freaky

After the track concludes, he stops the show & starts talking directly to me. He instructs the security guy in the pit to pass me a guitar pick. “You made me cry so hard so many times,” I shouted back. Then I noticed a camera on me. I guess my weepy-feelie-face is on the jumbotron now. 

The surreal shock to my system from all this is short, but still lingers like an incurable & inscrutable fever dream, several days later as I type this. Because this, yes this, this is why I drive almost 2000 miles round trip just for a show. Just this is why, as a recovering addict, live music is the full-blown religious feeling & replacement addiction that I just can’t shake, even as I hold the guitar pick in my hand. 

I relay the story to a dear friend who immediately describes the exchange that I just had with Josiah as sacramental. I make a post to the socials “Ain’t no cry like the Sunday afternoon festival set sad song ugly cry,” & at least one friend gets it, as he tracks back to another Bonnaroo Sunday moment, that time with Lionel Ritchie & Kenny Rogers. 

I literally crave the redemptive & purgative power "the sad music ugly cries" provide. But these can’t be too precious or predicted or staged but must surprise you & knock you over like a wave. I keep coming back at risk of getting caught in the kind of stormy weather that makes me question human existence itself, & I keep coming back in hope of being swept away by a storm of emotion that makes me savor the tragic beauty of all human experience. 

Josiah & the Bonnevilles

Sunday 230-330pm

Port Royal - new song 

In Dreams - new song

Story of the 6 Dollar Check

Stolen Love

Any Time or Place

Good Luck Babe - Chappell Roan cover

JERSEY GIANT - Elle King cover

Ghost - Justin Bieber cover

Just one break - with Mon Rovia

Another day at the factory 

Holy Place

Blood Moon

Basic Channels

We Were Singing Hosanna: Taking Vows & Having Visions with the Decemberists in 2024

 

The Decemberists
The Pageant
St. Louis
May 17, 2024
Not just five stars, not just ten stars, but all the stars, and all the galaxies too. Utterly incredible show.

The Decemberists are a band I have always loved, but a band where I have never completely taken the plunge from the admiring place of being a casual fan, even one desiring to be a serious fan and not yet a superfan.  

There are reasons for the prickly and primal attraction to them, as well as the reticence or hesitance to flying with them to wild mystical heights, then falling harder into the hollow of their mortal truths. I guess I am a more-than-casual Decemberists fan (having paid to see them enough) and who wants to be a more serious Decemberists fan but sees that might require some sacrifice and commitment. With them, I admit that there’s this mythopoetic learning curve and a deep listening requirement. I have dabbled and even dabbled deeply, if that’s a thing, but maybe now’s the time to circle back, study the catalog, and beckon the vows needed to fully imbibe their vision. 

I have followed them at least since the 00’s, when I discovered Hazards of Love as it was released in 2009, just a few weeks before getting sober. I remember telling a friend that the album sounds better when I’m high. The friend says every album is better high, and now I say the listening experience has to offer the surreal portal on its own, without the frills and thrills that kill for an addict like me. Hazards of a lush learning sober love from simple drunk lust. This reflection will periodically loop back to the mind-altering aspect of their music, for sure. 

Sometimes, I cannot believe the Decemberists are from Portland or are an American band. Discovering the Decemberists reminded me of discovering British freak folk like Pentangle, Steeleye Span, or Richard Thompsons, on someone else’s vinyl back in the 1990s. If the Decemberists aren’t from Albion proper, they are at least from Narnia or some other enchanted land of our magical imaginations. Even though one podcaster implied that being from Portland means essentially the same thing for indie-rock hipsters, their sound suggests something even more. 

Some say Hazards of Love was a concept album but me this is a concept band, for they are the curly crunchy floral core within cottage-core, the hand-me-down, home-made, an analog vintage as concurrently authentic as pretentious as that cursive font on the t-shirt we just bought. Keep in mind that pretentious here is part of the authenticity, not an adversary to it. Or as one podcaster put it: this also means that a four-syllable word is always better than a two-syllable word, and big words do not even have to be used correctly. In that sense, Decemberists lyrics are both arcane and postmodern, both archeological as in a tactile archive found in an abandoned castle and totally disposable as in pop-cultural rapid-fire gibberish. 

Taking the fandom pledge here feels risky to a fault for traversing some aesthetic fault-lines, like rewatching Star Wars movies alone or finally getting around to reading Tolkien or Joyce or even more realistically, let’s say, finally reading the literary series written by the band’s singer and songwriter Colin Meloy. Are you sure? I mean, they said, you can microdose or abstain, are you sure you want the heroic dose? 

It’s like I am walking that woodland trail with a rock in my pocket, that I am certain will transmute into a precious gem, but it hasn’t quite yet, because I have not walked deeper into the bramble and the dark, not yet. Maybe that arbor-to-feral metaphor spilled simply from the cosmic music fan, after witnessing the live debut of “Don’t Go To The Woods,” from the forthcoming album--As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again--out June 14. 

The way I inhale albums and attend shows today is reaching a religious period, a forever sonic catechism. This is a band so worthy of that reception and attention. The Decemberists take a bold move this spring to tour just ahead of an album that isn’t out yet, but from the tracks that are “officially out” to the two debuts we heard on a Friday in Missouri, I can say my anticipation will surely build in the days that remain before the full set drops. 

The speech-of-sorts that Colin Meloy inserted into “Burial Ground” was spicy and stopped my heart for a moment. Something like (paraphrasing here): I see you singing along. Singing along is part of this show whether we like it or not. But don’t let the catchy chorus fool you. This song is about death. This song is about our future home. We are all going to the dirt when we die. Now I just can’t shake that chorus that shudders in the back of my brain as I type, sucking gratitude from last night’s music memories, sucking brain fuel from caffeine and channeling into this laptop keyboard on a Saturday afternoon in a St. Louis coffeehouse. We woke up another day on this side of the dirt.

Several years after he wrote it in the build-up of 2016, Colin Meloy singing “Severed” so few days before another presidential election, ripped sanity from its thin scaffold as the theater-sized venue shook with acerbic hooks. This catchy music always reveals a darkness, a morbid joy if that makes sense. Meloy has said of this song: “The character in the song, the first-person character, is a demagogue, absolutely, so it was an exploration of, ‘What is demagoguery, and where does it come from?’ as we were seeing this very public figure express these kind of insane and incredible sentiments in public.” Simultaneously terrible and beautiful. 

I sennsed similar erosions of collective sanity and serenity but also defiant cynical jubilation from “16 Military Wives.” Okay, so is this how it is. The world is completely trash in the political-warfare side of things, and here is this brilliant poet to make an indie-pop masterpiece about it. Okay, I need this in my mental coping with this crazed world. 

It’s a predictable lane for literary author nerds to appreciate literary songwriters, but Colin Meloy fulfills this vocation in such consistently mind-blowing iterations, that it gives me pause to simply breathe the same air as him in this room, to just get to sit at the feet of this wild witness to this world in all its horror and hope. As in awe as I am of his lyrical daring, he also feels oddly familiar, dressed as he is like so many of my academic colleagues. A podcaster said this too: they look normal, if on the eccentric weirdo side of normal. 

Staring at Colin Meloy this time, in his button-down smart-casual shirt, fitted slacks, and low-rise Doc Martens, I thought: he just doesn’t look like my colleague, he is my colleague, he is every itinerary English professor ever. He has a leather satchel. Inside the leather satchel, he has a leather-bound journal. In that journal, he writes these very lyrics that I am tripping-out about, he writes them with a fancy pen with refillable ink. You might think he drives a Subaru or a Prius, but I say it’s a beat-up old Volvo or VW that runs on biodiesel and has a standard shift. 

Let me try to arrive at my conclusion which is collusion with the spiritual realm: releasing a 20-minute prog-rock experiment about Joan of Arc as a “single” for an upcoming full-length album is an absolutely over-the-top move of inner confidence. It’s “beyond beyond,” as my mother likes to say. 
Meloy says of “Joan in the Garden”: “I got into a Joan of Arc kick after reading Lydia Yuknavitch’s beautifully batshit novel ‘The Book of Joan.’ I wanted to make my own version of Joan — but the song that came was as much about the creative process as it was about the actual woman, about angelic visitation and creative visitation and the hallucinogenic quality of both.” Wait what? I listened to the song maybe twice when it dropped, was awed by its audacity, but did the dabble thing and moved on.

Now they are playing this for an encore. No more “hits.” No more singalongs. You could slip out early, but I don’t advise it. It’s like eating an edible, doing shrooms, getting on the DMT rocketship whether you want to or not. It’s like church and first communion and sensory deprivation and sensory overload and wait did I just read that Mike Mills from R.E.M. sings backup on the studio version? Sacred psychedelic songcraft! If you listen closely, we are singing hosanna, hosanna yeah! 

Yes, I am that guy pulling up the lyrics on my phone to fully grok this while they rock this. What about that final furious stretch, it just wrecks me:
She is daughter and son
The imperium undone
All the autocrats are laid
To waste
To waste
Oh holy whore androgyne
Come and sunder the stop signs
Break it all so we can build again
Bring on duke or dauphin
Blood will flow like a fountain
As it ever was, so it will be again
Will be again

Not only is the music utterly mind-boggling and face-melting in serious degrees, the story line is everything I have loved about the likes of William Blake and Allen Ginsberg and Jesus themselves and all the better messiahs and avatars of non-coercive religious teaching, pure revolutionary and anti-authoritarian spirituality. 

This is the kind of song I imagine stoner-nerds in the late 70s and early 80s listening to over and again in some black light basement, blasted outta their bloody mind-bodies, writing term papers on it to impress their ex-hippy English teachers. I might have gone on Reddit after midnight and after the show, just to read the reactions from the venn diagram of Reddit-nerds and Decemberists fans from when this masterpiece dropped. 

I am just going to finish this ramble, not because I am done spinning glory about how badass the Decemberists are right now, but because we have to drive back to Tennessee. So my last move rather than an ending is a to-be-continued, but not before I paste some of the best comments as seen from Reddit, because they are just that good, just about “Joan in the Garden”:

-Love it when indie bands do long-ass songs that are just three or four normal songs in a trench coat. 
-Colin: “we do have some space left on the vinyl and I did just watch Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii…”
-Okay now, just what in the Pink Floyd Mars Volta is going on here?!
-This song is so good I’m about to make it my whole personality for the next few months
-This is some serious blue balls. Just when it feels like it should explode into the heaviest thing they've ever done, there's several minutes of outer space noise, followed by "Breaking The Law" by Judas Priest.
-I heard the water dispenser humming at work and thought it was part of the song.
-It’s absolutely a must hear live. I’m about to follow them on tour. I almost died when they played it.
-Anybody else experience an effect like the music expanded?  It was like my head opened, and the speakers were floating in the room?  I wasn't on anything, and I was able to duplicate it. 

-Andrew/Sunfrog

To Hell With Symbols: Ethan and Maya Hawke and the Christ-Haunted Cinema of a Flannery O'Connor Biopic

In between two Adeem the Artist music sets in East Nashville on a steamy spring Thursday, we crossed the river and town at peak traffic to Hillsboro Village, to our beloved art house theater The Belcourt, to see Wildcat, the new Flannery O’Connor biopic directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter Maya Hawke, as the enigmatic southern gothic fiction writer, who gave us the idea of the south as more Christ-haunted than Christ-centered. Deep down, I sensed I needed this film for its confrontation with my mystic doubt and my region’s irresistible authenticity and demented hypocrisy. 

I have always appreciated the reputation of Flannery O’Connor without having spent enough time with her, even with me as a professed and professional literary fiend. For some reason, I kept her at a distance, and unlike with Faulkner, I had not been required to take a deeper dive for my literary education. 

This film is a needed gateway, opening still raw wounds and windows of wonder that shimmer with southern reality and freaky surreality. Keeping Flannery O’Connor at any distance ended for me in a movie theater on Thursday. 

Peer and admirer and fellow Catholic, Thomas Merton shared upon her passing: “Her South was deeper than mine, crazier than Kentucky, but wild with no other madness than the crafty paranoia that is all over the place . . . . Only madder, craftier, hung up in wilder and more absurd legends, more inventive of more outrageous lies!”

Right as we were leaving Grimey’s New and Preloved, to get into the car, my spouse showed me the Nashville Scene, which seems to have panned the creatively ambitious film. But I love a good 20th century period piece, love a good biopic, with addicted musicians and/or literary geniuses, especially, preferred. If it involves tortured writers banging out mystery on old-school typewriters, more of this please. The film just drips in its saturated colors and period costumes, all vintage arthouse vibes and then some. O’Connor can be weird to a fault, unfailingly fallen and dark, but also fiercely funny. I was unprepared and hungry for her dark, biting, and bitter humor. 

Just the backstory of how Maya, the daughter, actor, and singer (about to release an album, too) discovered Flannery O’Connor in 10th grade English class and gave her father, Ethan, O’Connor’s prayer journal and studied Flannery with her father and asked him to make this movie for her to star in, that backstory was enough to draw me in. I am someone who already absolutely loved the elder Hawke’s directing in the music biopic Blaze and acting in recent feats of cinematic provocation such as First Reformed and The Good Lord Bird. If there is anyone working in Hollywood who shares some of my preoccupations with outlaw country music and revolutionary spirituality, also dealing with themes of human failure and liberation, it’s probably Ethan Hawke.  

The biographical themes of the film seem to dance around Flannery’s singular commitment to her craft, her loving but difficult relationships with others, such as her mother as portrayed by Laura Linney and the poet Robert Lowell portrayed by Philip Ettinger, her lifelong struggle with disease, which resulted in her passing at 39, and finally, with her at times unlikely and yet totally devout and unrelenting Christian faith. I found the biographical portions of the film both believable and intoxicating and fell hard in love with Flannery for the ferocity of her comebacks and asides. Decades before online meme culture, she was a font for epigrams and one-liners, such as “I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.” 

So a Flannery O’Connor biopic was the biopic I desperately needed -- yet didn’t know that I needed.

 But the Hawkes in their shared creative ambitions didn’t stop there. They pulled something ever more meaningful, mysterious, and miraculous, by weaving in and out of Flannery’s short fiction with subtle ease, with a nod to famous short stories, including: “Good Country People,” “Revelation,” “Parker’s Back,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The not-so-nice review in the Scene seemed to take issue with these, but to me, the Hawkes did this perfectly, with Maya and Laura Linney also starring in all the visionary vignettes. They were simply mesmerizing in embodying the southern gothic aesthetic to a tee. It’s hard to imagine this film not finding its way on to countless syllabi for a Flannery O’Connor revival in English departments, where her flower may have faded, for I feel the Hawkes have made Flannery O’Connor more accessible, profoundly relatable and attractive, and certainly more teachable.  

But for all the stunning art and biography of Wildcat, I was not prepared for how it devastated and delighted me spiritually. I remember precisely the portion of the movie when I started bawling, and I pretty much wanted to weep for the rest of the film. Keep in mind, my love of art, literature, and music are predicated on their way of breaking me in my egoic shell, or even worse my everyday mundane complacency, and religion, when it has worked for me, provides the same therapeutic triggers of subversion and transformation.  

As Christ-haunted and church-saturated as our region remains, I go through long stretches of late, as deeply disconnected, if not outwardly defiant, of the patriarchal and patriotic threads within Christendom, all this after a period as a called and installed rural preacher, that ended ever-so abruptly during the George Floyd uprising of 2020. My current spiritual practices when communal are mostly live music, 12-step recovery meetings, or occasional attendance with Unitarian Universalists. Other times, my spirituality is mostly solitary and deeply nature-based (which in all honesty was true before and after my recent sojourns in the chapels of Tennessee). I sometimes prefer out-and-out rejection of church doctrine to any kind of integration of multiple beliefs and practices into a holy hybrid. 

And here I remain in Tennessee. I am not sure my own born-again experience and subsequent theological career in the “professional prayer trade,” could have happened the way it did, were I not an adopted southerner. But the last four years of personal deconstruction, concurrent with the rise in religious nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-queer hate doctrine, have left me feeling allergic to religion in the same way I am allergic to alcohol. The late queer and southern actor Leslie Jordan said he was baptized 14 times but never felt more shame than in a church pew. I hear that! 

All this to say, even as I was clearly compelled to see this film, I did not go seeking a confrontation with Christ or the cross or the sacrament of communion. But that is what happened.  

The scene that floored me as with a Pauline or pentecostal experience takes place at a dinner party. As an intellectual exercise, as guests pontificate on the metaphor and symbolism of the eucharist, Flannery interjects, her voice shaking, “Well, if it is a symbol, to hell with it.” 

Maybe it is just a story, maybe it is just a myth, maybe the accumulated hypocrisy and violence of centuries of authoritarian Jesus-conscripts undeniably undermine the utterly weird cannibalistic blood rite of holy communion, that we once called a love feast, but suddenly, shockingly, the cinematic wild apologetics of a gothic, proto-feminist novelist at a dinner party, are neither crude nor conservative, nor silly nor superstitious, because for some possibly illogical and insane reasons completely outside me, I still think she might be right, and that this meal might foreshadow all human liberation, and whereas I have at times taken that food weekly, or monthly, or even daily, I feel the words of invitation echo in my bones after a very long lapse, and I am suddenly hungry for holy food, even with a belly full of the communion of fresh theater popcorn and fountain coca cola. 

If it is a symbol, to hell with it. If it is the body and blood of God’s self, do you have any, or where can I get some?

The Hawkes fuse that scene with another quote from O’Connor about who or what God might be. This is the longer version that I have found from her non-fiction writing. O’ Connor says: 
“I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child's faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

Religious seeking when practiced with childlike wonder can be an adventure. Open-mindedness, without contempt before investigation, can produce delicious discoveries, even fruits. But my yo-yo, see-saw-like conversions and reversions, confessions and obsessions, sometimes these all feel like so much mental masturbation and existential exhaustion. I honestly understand the idea of “spiritual but not religious” more than I ever have, but I also crave community. Frankly, I prefer curiosity to certainty, but not fakery and falsity in any form. Mere symbols or metaphors? Screw that! 

Did the Hawkes provide only a sacred trace, a primordial memory of that which preoccupied me during a different phase? Or maybe that shot of hot tears at Flannery’s flippant testimony was only a fanciful feeling of a faith more forgotten than doubted? As I watched them both being interviewed by a bishop, neither came across as orthodox or devout, and I realize from recent experience, that I probably just need to flow and roll with this, whatever this is.  

Leaving this rambling reflection for now, I close on this: Flannery O’Connor is a staggering and mesmerizing female saint of the 20th century, who lived out a calling, also a profound weirdo outsider/suspicious insider version of her subversive faith. Others that share that space for me include Dorothy Soelle, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil. Today, I might also include someone contemporary in this lineage, someone like Sophie Strand. Regardless I am grateful, deeply so, to Ethan and Maya Hawke, for such a disturbing and gorgeous exercise in devotional cinema that brought me, for two, tear-soaked hours, in contact with the haunted, creative, and deliciously divine, however you might name or un-name that thing that some call God. 

From Shame to Celebration at the Adeem "Anniversary" Release Celebrations!

 

Yes, since February 2022, I have been seeking the full-immersion country-rock baptism in the plurality of pronouns that is the Church of Trash multiverse of an unapologetic Adeem the Artist friendship & superfandom. 

Yesterday morning I woke up with a line from Carolina to start the day.
“She fired red hot buckshot.” 
Driving to Nashville to get injected with some of that!

Some part of the insane sanity of this neurodivergent spark-seeker comes chasing the communal fire, that cauldron love & joy & rebellion at the left wing of folk & country, & with Adeem’s incomparable contributions, a life committed to doing this thing: 

“build a machine
That can convert shame into celebration”

We are driving to Nashville to discard the shame & join the celebration. 

Heaven, hell, sex, joy, theology, laughter, 
earworm choruses for years, 
fanzines & tarot cards in Asheville, 
devil-adjacent arms-flying fiddle-music, 
self-deprecating humor, 
political jabs at the hypocrisy of “all sides” 
without adopting either side 
except the side of human autonomy & dignity & justice, 
self-conscious social-media interventions, 
meditations, & confessions, 
irreverent chaplaincy for the deconstructed mystics 
for whom live music in independent venues 
is the last remaining chapel to express 
that vital pulsating energy that some folks call the holy spirit.  

Adeem The Artist
Anniversary Album Release Celebrations
Day One - 5-9-2024

Grimey’s In Store & Signing - Solo Acoustic

Setlist:
Night Sweats 
One Night Stand 
Nightmare 
Socialite Blues 
Middle of a Heart

--

The Basement East - Full Band 
WSG Flamy Grant & Brandi Augustus
The Band:
Mark Connor - bass
Asher Coker Miller - Drums
Seth Hopper - fiddle 
Butch Walker - face-melting lead guitar on select songs!
Andrea Kukuly Uriarte - guest vocals

Setlist:

There We Are
Nancy
Part & Parcel

One Night Stand
Nightmare
Fervent for the Hunger
Wounded Astronaut 
FM Radio (Dar Williams cover)
Carry You Down 

Socialite Blues 
Rotation 
Plot of Land
Night Sweats 
White Mule, Black Man
Tiger Prince of Knoxville 
Painkillers & Magic
Dirt Bike (with Andrea Kukuly Uriarte)
Jesus Christ Likes Fast Cars 
Middle of a Heart
Going To Hell

River Shook & the Apocalyptic Self-Care of Honest Lyrics & Live Music

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers
Nicolette & the Nobodies
Club Cafe, Pittsburgh
May 4, 2024

“I write songs, so I don’t kill myself.” - River Shook 
(as said to Jason Earle on the Marinade podcast in 2023)

Damn, friends, if we can just be here and think about, this kind of honesty! 

Let’s be clear about why we make and crave and need and love all the wickedly unfiltered art as self-care and survival. We write (or paint or sculpt or scream), so we don’t die, if this is not the punk rock apocalyptic poetics of authentic self-love!
 
Maybe sometimes people think of “self-care” as some kind of passive pampering, but for the neurodivergent poet-types who remain engaged with the realities of an at-times radically uncaring world, self-care is legit holistic resistance. That kind of delicious defiance is what I encounter with River Shook and fellow travelers in the DIY and independent edges of our current folk music revival. 

River Shook and their band “Sarah Shook and the Disarmers” are touring to support a phenomenal new record, and they play a fierce outlaw fusion that fits well with its many siblings in the currently crushing glory of our alt-country renaissance. Yet when inhaled as its own vulnerable voice, this music shakes our collective core with its singular vision, as we simply are overwhelmed and appreciative of face-melted and soul-saturated sonic fumes. 

While without apology a part of the wildly flowering alt-country scene, this is also a rock band, and seeing this five-piece live, this is a rock show. Shades of cowpunk, garage, and shimmering subtle distortion move us to our inner parts with an honest, in-yer-face full force delivery of dueling guitars and steel guitar, with drums and bass anchoring the North Carolina twang in a pure rock revelry. This is music that lights a lineage to the bastard future where the descendants of Uncle Tupelo and Bikini Kill also go to therapy and put down the fire-water that fueled the earliest Sarah Shook tracks. 

River Shook and band blazed through more than 20 songs in less than 90 minutes, and as with so many shows, I wasn’t ready for it to end. As a professed introvert, River banters so briefly, compared to some artists whose between-song comic stories are longer than the songs. So I took it to heart that they told us the backstory on one of my top bangers from the new album. River mentions walking regularly as part of their daily coping (as is also true for me), and I was thrilled to learn that the origin of the song “Stone Door” come from one of my favorite hikes among many amazing hikes in my home of rural middle Tennessee.   

It’s like I can feel all of River Shook’s influences unfolding on the barroom floor like the grail, like the eternal analog and card-catalog made of human spit and grit. But then I read in an interview how River readily rejected the standard-operating “influences” plug that so pleases music writers, saying simply of the people they are sometimes compared to: “I honestly haven’t recognized any of them.” 

After the Pittsburgh show, I am telling the Disarmers merch-person and Nicolette Hoang, the Vietnamese-Canadian lead singer of the opening band Nicolette & the Nobodies, how both acts brought some of that early cowpunk energy, that the much younger me adored in Lone Justice, and they all collectively admit they have never listened to Lone Justice or Maria McKee. But Nicolette and her shredding lead guitarist Ian Bain said they would listen to Lone Justice when driving to the next show. I really hope they do. 

From the meticulously-framed design of their brand-new album cover, Nicolette and the Nobodies intentionally invoke 1970s country and artists like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. Their set brought all those respectfully vintage vibes in their originals, but then even moreso, in their cover of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” that conjured both the versions by Aretha Franklin and the Flying Burrito Brothers in perfect measure.  

Of all the joys and pleasures of seriously following multiple artists in a burgeoning subculture, sometimes you get to see such stunningly talented folks in a relatively tiny venue. I think of course of the OG Basement in Nashville, where I have been attending shows on-and-off for 20 years. 

So stepping into the Club Cafe in Pittsburgh, I am immediately wowed and going “what-the-what" by how intimate a show this is going to be. Only wanting the best for these artists, only wanting others to experience what you get to experience, the effort to travel to gigs is rewarded by seeing something so strong, that you can maybe one day say, you saw it when. But just being into this moment, you are seeing fiercely-called artists willing to drive long distances and leaving absolutely everything on the stage. 

With Anniversary, Adeem The Artist Adds More Challenging & Authentic Anthems To Their Already Compelling Country-Folk Catalog

 

Anniversary. 12 tracks. By Adeem The Artist. Four Quarters/Thirty Tigers. Out everywhere on 5/3/2024.

On the first Friday in May 2024, the skilled and spicy Knoxville songwriter known as Adeem The Artist brings us Anniversary, their follow-up album to the break-out sensation White Trash Revelry. 

Produced by the multi-talented Butch Walker (who has worked with Taylor Swift, Frank Turner, Green Day, Fall Out Boy, and Pink), the record wraps a plurality of plaintively honest stories in addictive hooks at the intersection of country, rock, and folk. The rowdy full-band set includes several of Adeem's peers, including Jessye DeSilva on keys, Aaron Lee Tasjan on guitar, and Katie Pruitt on background vocals, among others. 

A catchy contrast to Adeem’s stripped-down live solo shows, Anniversary is all bold reach, with a bare and broken heart to balance bristling hooks, where they remain a complicated queer voice in a bustling and bursting Americana scene. Time and again, Adeem’s politics and pansexuality will push the most ostensibly inclusive festival-undercard to face lavender frills and lyrical thrills that reside far past comfy categories in scuffed boots and brown Carhartts.  

While words like queer, nonbinary, and pansexual can sometimes feel like they got crammed into the artist’s bio like boxes to check for us allies with rainbow stickers on their laptops, Adeem’s genius is far past cookie-cutter Pride marketing. And with each new album, we have such tender refrains that talk about what that “nonbinary country singer” tag actually means in terms of specific songs. From the sweetly homoerotic single “One Night Stand” to the neurodivergent kink of “Nancy” to the confessional therapy of “Wounded Astronaut,” the careful listener easily learns that there are no adequate boxes or cubby-holes for Adeem at all, but a wild and honest and occasionally hilarious odyssey through myriad complexities of intimacy and joy in human and romantic relations. 

For the serious fan who has studied their bio, meditated on their lyrics, or checked out Adeem’s extensive “pre-Adeem” back catalog on their Bandcamp, we know that Adeem The Artist is a profoundly theological writer exploring both existential and eternal themes in four-minute packets of profundity and sacrilegious hymnody. Sometimes, that pairs as an almost-parody with the churchy obsession of the afterlife, such as with earlier earworms “Going to Heaven” and “Going to Hell.” Occasionally, it deals in the more tragic and gothic aspects of southern religion, as with “Baptized in Well Spirits” or “Heritage of Arrogance.” 

In the dedication section of the Anniversary liner notes, Adeem writes: “I want to thank the Unseen Magic that in my youth I named ‘God’ for sustaining me and filling my heart with gratitude and sorrow in equal measure so that I remain steadfast in my commitment to pleasure & justice.”  

On this new set, “Nightmare” tickles my theological itch with a prickly take-down of contemporary Christianity, with its internal predilection for abusive pastors and external obsession with right-wing politics. But after listening to the holy hooks and rapturous refrains of “Nightmare” multiple times, it leaves the listener with the discomforting task of reading it multiple ways. 

Is the speaker or singer inside the faith and suddenly waking up to the hypocrisy? Or is this song also about the inclusive churches getting picketed (or worse) for being inclusive? In this stunning song, the perspectives seem to change with each stanza, but the yearning defiance remains. Left theologians and political commentators more astute and faithful than me have reminded us that “What Would Jesus Do” has long left the building for an altar call to political warfare. This song abides in the uncomfortable inversion of our summer camp sentimental memories with the fiery insistence: “Don’t do us like Jesus.” That is, don’t crucify folks! In the victim-complex olympics of the most persecuted then persecuting the also-persecuted, this prayer for actual religious freedom and true tolerance is almost too much to bear. But being such a great song, we will sit with its seeming contradictions and learn to sing along.

As we in the “cast iron fansexual” universe (yes, that is what one of our online fan groups is actually called, a nod to their 2021 burner of an album Cast Iron Pansexual) already know, Adeem acknowledges a deep debt as a songwriter to the canon of John Prine. When touring behind Revelry and opening shows for the likes of Jason Isbell and the Mountain Goats, they often included a cover of “Lake Marie.” So it was of little surprise to me at all, that one Adeem’s most anthemic and addictive of the new tracks is “Plot of Land,” which really feels l ike a 21st century update of “Spanish Pipe Dream,” with shades of “Paradise” too. While staggering real estate prices make this back-to-the-earth dream unfortunately as unlikely in reality as “Run This Town” was for politics on the last album, Adeem’s unwavering and often utopian topic choices continue to embed their work in a hopeful (despite ourselves) south and often the rural south, even when certain forces would seek to chase us all away.

Thus the haunted closing track--“White Mule, Black Man”--mixes song and spoken word, connecting the Knoxville legend of the “white mule curse” of the late 19th century, with the murder of Maurice Mays and the Knoxville race riots of 1919. This song is not unlike “The Money Grows On Trees” (about the rural weed wars of the 1990s) which closes out the recent Willi Carlisle set, and I would love to see more of these deep takes on our complicated history find their way into the contemporary folk and country canon. These are not anthems, but they are not “skip tracks” either. They are semi-spoken stories that will stick with you for a considerable amount of time. 

Fans of raw, unfiltered and sometimes snarky and self-deprecating Adeem, don’t let the superb production of Anniversary throw you off. This isn’t really a “pop country” album by any means, if simply for its gnarled and authentic narratives. I don’t think Adeem could “sell out” if they tried, for they are too real, for their topics like themselves are too thorny and delicate and diverse. But with the sweetness of the sounds on this polished set, all deeply anchored by Adeem’s solid lyrics and longing croons, that means that if we know what’s good, we will pull up a chair and a beverage and the good headphones or speakers and linger with this one for a while, a long and lovely while. - Andrew/Sunfrog 

My Chill Bumps Have Chill Bumps: Tyler Childers at the Bridgestone Arena

 

[Photo by Brittany Monroe]

What do I mean when I say that listening to music with intention is my spiritual practice. There’s the solo walking revelation with your favorite songs or the Friday new releases & the good headphones. Then there’s that kind of musical encounter that merges the magical & meaningful in such a mass cultural & communal way as to transform an arena into a living room & a church and a barn and the back pasture, or at least that’s the case when Kentucky’s Tyler Childers & his band the Food Stamps take over the Bridgestone Arena.

On one of the fan pages, someone juxtaposed images of Tyler at the OG Basement not that long ago, & now he is selling out the same room that the likes of arch-classics like The Who, Roger Waters, Bob Seger, U2, or The Eagles have sold out. Other country artists, as well as indie, pop, hip-hop, jam-bands, and gospel greats have filled the hockey arena too, but there’s something special & dare I say humble about this particular Appalachian singer’s sudden rise to the ranks of those that sell out arenas.

In a town like Nashville, turning the arena into a “church” of sorts isn’t any kind of stretch. Plenty of praise-&-worship tours have set down in this very room. But if you just listen closely to the far ranging lyrics of Tyler’s universe, which feels like misty mountain & crunchy creek & holler, or if you just allow the trippy videos or between song snippets wash over you, we might notice how interspiritual & multicolored & sometimes simply sexy or wild & rowdy all these tracks actually are.

It’s some psychedelic hillbilly reincarnation meets old-school Pentecostal hoedown revival, where not just the piercing lyrics pull you in with all the people singing along, but it’s also each instrument tugging at your entire body, from bass & drums to fiddle & keys, to invoke every “wow” or “hallelujah” your heart could muster. From the familiar singalong lyrics of  “Shake the Frost” or “Follow You to Virgie” or “Lady May” to the sanctified funky of “Triune God” or coke & booze fueled confessions of “Whitehouse Road,” it’s an all-encompassing sonic envelope of the real. Even the instrumental jams of “Two Coats” & “Cluck Ol’ Hen” bring you inside the fire where your true heart burns. 

How do I know that this is a spiritual practice?! Well in this case the signal is strong & the vibes visionary, like from the homey lamps & vintage television that decorate the stage, broadcasting at the frequency of love & fellowship, if not a little bad boy rebellion. The signal sucks you in, singing along. Then, your pins & needles have pins & needles. Your chill bumps have chill bumps. Your entire body is a vibrating, teary-eyed & foot-stomping mess of gratitude.

These songs are part of your story & your very soul & everyone around you tonight seems to feel the same.

The Layabouts - from the Detroit archives

 

listen to the Layabouts' 1985 album No Masters -

https://soundcloud.com/teacherontheradio/sets/the-layabouts-no-masters

listen to the Layabouts' 2000 album Workers of the World Relax -

https://soundcloud.com/teacherontheradio/sets/the-layabouts-workers-of-the-world

THE LAYABOUTS 
Article originally published in Babyfish (lost its momma) #2, Autumn 1988, long out of print.
After many breakups and reunions, Detroit’s Layabouts played what looks like (could it be?) their final finale, this past summer at the Anarchist Gathering in Toronto. 
[Editor's note: the Layabouts would continue to get back together and break up countless times over the coming decades. The last time I saw them as a full band was at a Fifth Estate 50th anniversary show in Detroit in 2015.] 
In early September [1988], Sunfrog interviewed Layabouts Ralph & Alan Franklin. What follows here is part history and reflection -- and a Babyfist tribute to one of the greatest Detroit bands ever. . . . 
Welcome to Detroit’s Corridor, the concrete domain of the “world’s laziest band” -- the Layabouts. For something like eight years, this group has provided “world beat” boogie and anarchist politics for the thriving radical community that lives in this neighborhood.
It was not always a huge dance party of popularity for this bunch practicing their “principled laziness.” The Layabouts began as a basement cover band, thrashing through songs by the Beatles, Sex Pistols, Clash, David Bowie, and the Tom Robinson Band. The two folks who remained a constant part of the Layabouts through many lineup changes were brothers, Alan and Ralph Franklin. They now laugh about the early basement days, jamming with Stephen Goodfellow, almost proud of how bad they were. The early shows were more of the same.
“‘Anarchy in the UK’ used to be our evening closer and usually by the end of the evening, we and everybody we were playing for were so drunk that it was literal anarchy. If there are any taped versions of that song around, they should be hidden away forever,” Alan recalls.
The Layabouts had their beginnings in a barrage of “loud and not particularly good thrashing rock.”
As the Layabouts were starting up in the early 1980s, Alan and Ralph were part of a group of people in the community who started up the Grinning Duck Club. The Duck Club was an alternative art space where homespun music, theater, and politics could flourish. Ralph remembers the Duck Club as an “explicitly anti-authoritarian” space where “for all its ups and downs and hard times and people arguing, it said, for the community, ‘You can do all this stuff. You don’t need experts. You don’t need stars.’”
The Duck Club was the site of many satirical and political theater pieces, a weekend conference on the nuclear crisis, and shows by bands such Layabouts, DOA, Private Angst, The Sun Messengers, and The Buzzards. As the Duck Club closed, it spun off into other spaces such as the Freezer Theater and the Uncooperative. The Uncooperative was run by Private Angst and the Layabouts and shared by the Fifth Estate. 
Over the next few years, the Layabouts began to write many of their own songs, some which showed up on the 1986 album No Masters and were in the band’s set all the way up to their last show at the 1988 Anarchist Gathering in Toronto. The oldest of these songs is “Governments Lie,” which started as an instrumental derived from a funk riff the band heard on the funk radio station that Stephen was listening to at the time. 
The lyrics were written around the fall of 1982, when Israel invaded Beirut--which inspired the line, “With Reagan and Begin at Sabra and Shatilla/the State is God and the State is a killer.”  
Alan also remembers other lyrical inspirations.
“‘Fuckalot’ as you can imagine was written after fucking. It was when my partner and I had been going through some strains, and the strains had been having an affect on our sex life. So finally, we got it straightened out, and we made love. I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t we do this all the time?’”
“I’m Tired” was written during a “flurry of creativity” where the first four verses were quite a whine about the misery of everyday life and the last long verse was an angry rant. The rant at the end was inspired by listening to Crass. While Alan found the words of the Crass songs “largely unintelligible,” “the anger really fired me up.”

“I think a lot of people can identify with the complaints in the earlier verses, because a lot of people feel that about their lives. They feel, ‘I’m sick of everything. Even the things that are supposed to give me pleasure, I’m sick of.’ But I think a lot of people feel that without realizing why they feel it. The last verse was an attempt to make connections between why people feel that in their lives and what’s happening to the world around them--this incredible devastation of the world on every level. And the kinds of anxiety and despair it provides in people’s everyday lives. One of the things that always impressed me about the Fifth Estate and Anarchist Print Co-op in years past was that the people who were involved in those projects were heavily influenced by a group of European theoreticians who called themselves the Situationists. One of their big things was the critique of everyday life. They were really down leftism that only saw issues like imperialism and exploitation and didn’t deal with the boredom and frustration of people’s daily lives. I guess for me, a sub-title for ‘I’m Tired’ is ‘The Critique of Everyday Life’--trying to make a linkage between why the world is in such a mess and why our lives are in such a mess.”
Words like the ones for “I’m Tired” represented a certain period of lyric writing for Alan. “One of the things that I tried to do then that I try not to do so much now, is when I wrote songs then, I usually tried to include a complete critique of the modern world. The problem with that is songs ended up very wordy.”
Ralph stressed that while some people in the band would come forth with a lyrical or musical idea to start the songwriting process, writing a Layabouts song was always a collective and collaborative process. Songs rarely ended up the way that they began. And Ralph feels strongly that what made the Layabouts good was the diversity in the band, which allowed for always changing music.
The song “7 Minutes” evolved from an end of a practice jam, like many of the Layabouts’ songs.
Whether the issue [was] how to do songs or what gigs to play, if any one member had a strong objection to doing something, it was not done.  This aspect of the collective process meant that things were not “all roses.”
The band was once offered a chance to play at the annual Unity In The Community festival on Detroit’s southwest side, a big event in the Latino community. There was one stipulation in the offer and that was that the band not play “Fuckalot” for that [particular] show. After a long discussion, the band decided not to engage  in self-censorship and they never did the show.
One of the most memorable Layabout shows was when they played in the street before the October 4th, 1987 rally to: “Stop U.S. Intervention in Central America & End Apartheid in Southern Africa.” We got down in the street to the sound of freedom’s beat like never before.  It was an incredible high, but the Layabouts show that day was laden with controversy. 
The band was originally scheduled to play at the post-march rally, but because of their anarchist bent were moved to the pre-march rally. They were told not to “make any unauthorized speeches,” but as Ralph remembers, “We said ‘fuck it’ and we did make an unauthorized speech. And they (the march organizers) were very upset about it.” The ‘speech’ came during the song “Governments Lie.” The band referred to the city government officials who voted for the trash incinerator. “These people are going to lie to you.” The politicians are going to say they support freedom in South Africa while the companies and banks involved in building and financing the world’s largest trash incinerator also finance apartheid. Governments Lie. And I’m not talking about some of them. I mean every single one of them. 
But there is hope yet.
The Layabouts represent the hope coming from this community. They represent countless benefits to stop the incinerator, fight against slumlords, support nuclear disarmament, create anarchy, and celebrate community in the [Cxxx] Corridor. Those benefits at the Survival Gatherings, Dallys in the Alley, and the Michigan Peace March Festival are among the band’s favorite shows.
The band in its members represents the hope of breaking down barriers of race, age, gender, and background. The last incarnation of the Layabouts ranged in age from 19 to 40 plus. The band has represented Latin, African, and European heritage--a diversity which carries over into the Layabouts sound.
The Layabouts are the hope that unlike the prevailing idea that success as a band is defined by profits and major label exposure, a band can be immensely popular while engaging in intentional resistance to commercial principles. These “Lazy”-bouts never wanted the band to become “a job.”
They were always fortunate to have friends like Greg Gordon (of Private Angst) who worked in the studio where the band recorded their self-made anti-authoritarian classic No Masters. And friends who put up the bucks to make the album a reality.
Now, after all these years, it seems the Layabouts as a band are over. But the words, songs, and endless hours of sweat-soaked frantic dancing will always be with us. Alan says it was always 50% audience anyhow, so those of us who were the audience must carry on: Resist apartheid, war, and the cops--and keep fucking......
We can be sure that the people who sang those songs will continue in their lives to do the same. - Sunfrog
Detroit, Babyfish #2, Autumn 1988

Wordban'd Creates Collages of Language & Noise - from the Detroit archives

While aspiring young scribes forming poetry bands has become a fashion trend in recent years, few -- if any -- have created a more astute and lyrically passionate fusion of words and music than Mick Vranich and Wordban’d.

Vranich, a Detroit poet poet, musician, and social activist, has been creating his brand of dissident discourse since 1964. During the 1980s, he published two volumes of verse, Radnik Pisar and Boxer’s Break. The notion of poetry as music has always figured into his work.

Wordban’d is most easily understood as an ensemble driven by equal parts spoken word and hybrid rock-n-roll, which creates collages of language and noise. Beyond the primacy of the words, their musical credentials are viscerally evident. Detroit poet George Tysh observes: “Although not in the blues tradition, the band’s music owes much to those roots. In fact, Vranich lays down his poetry vocals like a postmodern John Lee Hooker, talking over two electric basses and percussion and wiring a guitar commentary in counterpoint to his own language.” 

Since Vranich and conga player Bill Gross formed Wordban’d in 1988, they’ve traveled frequently to New York and Chicago on self-produced tours while donating innumerable hours to benefit gigs, raising precious bucks for a host of ecological and indigenous organizations. In 1993 alone, they have organized four benefit concerts ffor imprisoned indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. 

Complementing Vranich’s vocals and guitar playing with dissonant grit, Dean Western wields his bass as a “conduit” of clamor--he is a metaphysician of funk. Western is a veteran of the bands Private Angst, Kuru, Sublime, and Junk Face, just to name a few. 

Gross rounds out Wordban’d and provides much of its depth. As a percussionist, he’s worked the musical gamut, from bluesy bar bands to the world-beat-boogie of the Layabouts. With congas, as opposed to a full drum kit, he provides a luminous versatility which feeds the tribal quality of Vranich’s writing.

The band’s rooted connections to the Corridor neighborhood of Detroit enhances their sonic tremor. “We’ve found when we take this out of town,” explains Western, “that it really does sound like Detroit.” 

Wordban’d negotiates an earthy and eclectic thread of rock-n-roll poetics, political advocacy, and primal mysticism. They regularly lead listeners to discover “what connects your voice to your heart.” (“Facing the Altar”)

With Wordban’d, Vranich is city poet as jazzy MC, owing more to the MC5 than MC Hammer. Vranich hones an urban verisimilitude. 

“They say some music can create a smell.” Wordban’d does. Wordban’d’s brand of performance poetry as music is a peculiar Motown incense, something like sage and sweetgrass momentarily suppressing the incinerator’s stink. Wordban’d uses this aroma in reconstructing rock-n-roll as shamanic ritual. Or as Vranich puts it in his song-poem “Move on the Machine”: “They sing all night/a circle of voices/around the drum.”

Wordban’d breaks down the space between performance and life to discover what breathes through their “Cloak of Skin.” What resounds long after the music stops is their credo, which amounts to a clarion charge: “Don’t kill everything so soon.” Amen. - Andy “Sunfrog” Smith, in Detroit’s Metro Times, 1993 (?)

--

Listen here:

Stream Teacher On The Radio | Listen to Mick Vranich & Wordban'd - Cloak of Skin playlist online for free on SoundCloud

Cassette recording from my personal collection. 

Shared for archival, educational, & entertainment purposes only.

Ripped from original 31-year-old cassette to Audacity via a Nakamichi tape deck & a Behringer desktop mixer & RCA-to-USB converter.

Mick Vranich (1946-2010) - Voice & Guitar

Bill Gross - Congas

Dean Western - Bass

Charles Smith - Fretless Bass

Recorded & mixed at Woodshed Studios, Detroit

Engineer - Tim Pak

Cover painting - Sherry Hendrick (RIP) 

In Detroit, an international center of poetry where powerful verse is so often heard in the context of idiosyncratic musical accompaniment, Mick Vranich has long been a leading light. His verse is hard, lean, beautifully musical and, always, precisely registered. 

With the formation of WORDBAN’D, Mick has taken his verse another step further. The musical settings he has fashioned with his own muscular yet sensitive guitar, Bill Gross’s soulfully exact conga drums, and the dual bass team presently featured in the ensemble, fill in another-dimension behind the poems, re-placing his verse for us back where it came from -- the music pulsing through his blood, nerves, & flesh, which has always been echoed in the lines & syntax of his poems. 

Now it’s all right here in our ears -- in our own music & bone -- the perfect complete wedding of form & content. Mick Vranich is the bomb.  -John Sinclair, New Orleans, September 27, 1992 

That’s no Rust Belt Buzzsaw. That’s no A-bomb your Mama. That’s Mick Vranich tearing out of Detroit. Laying down the truth like a poem. That drone in the back is WORDBAN’D, like Motown in reverse. 

-Bob Holman

The sacred fires burn in the makeshift altars in that huge backyard where the tribes gather, in the land of the Tombstone Sky, where the Big D connects with the sweatlodges of Norther California. The elders have given their blessings. Our hearts were at once and instantly connected and rooted in the oral tradition. A tradition we are familiar with through the chicano(a) poets. Mick has been a huge inspiration and influence on our work. He is our mentor, a veterano who taught us not to fear but respect the silence between the thunder and the lightning. Cloak of Skin represents a beautiful triumph and continuum of the word! His voice will not allow us to forget the things Mother Earth has taught us. We love this warrior, indeed you will too. To all our relations y que viva la raza. . . .Ho!

-Richard Montoya, Culture Clash, October 5, 1992