Still Running: BR5-49 outlast the bastards.

Hillbilly Deluxe

BR5-49 retool the show

By Greg Cahill

It was like having a really great ’58 Ford Fairlane that had a tired engine but is a really old car that you want to save,” says singer and guitarist Chuck Mead, describing the restoration of the alt-country band BR5-49. “We overhauled it with a new Mustang engine, and it runs great now!”

Following the departure last year of founding member and co-lead vocalist Gary Bennett and longtime bassist Smilin’ Jay McDowell, Mead and the remaining members of this highly regarded act set out to “retool” BR5-49 (the name is taken from a phone number in a Junior Samples Hee Haw sketch). Bennett’s loss could have spelled doom: he founded the band a decade ago while working at Robert’s Western Wear, a clothing store and bar located in Nashville’s old-town district on lower Broadway. And it was Bennett who set the standard for the band’s virtuosity and irreverent songwriting.

At the height of Music City’s 1990s’ big-hat parade–one that saw Nashville usurped by Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and other pop acts–BR5-49 became the first retro-country band to gain national attention and a major label contract, releasing their eponymous debut in 1996. The band quickly became known for its impressive instrumental chops, what music critic Mark Deming once dubbed “grits and high spirits,” and a penchant for penning songs about such quirky pop-culture artifacts as 1950s pinup girl Bettie Page (immortalized in BR5-49’s homage “Bettie Bettie”).

A Grammy nomination followed, Playboy dubbed them “Nashville’s hippest band” and BR5-49 opened tours for Bob Dylan, the Black Crowes and other stars.

“After the guys quit, we didn’t know what to do,” says Mead. “We just thought we’d go back to playing on lower Broadway.”

And that’s what they did–for a while.

In the clubs, Mead and the other surviving band members encountered a loose-knit network of young alt-country players known as the Hillbilly All-Stars. Mead soon started feeling energized about playing again and decided to climb under the hood, so to speak, to rebuild his old band. He recruited All Stars vocalist and guitarist Chris Scruggs–whose grandfathers were the legendary Earl Scruggs and Louisiana Hayride performer Tex Dickerson, and whose parents were the famed Nashville musician Gary Scruggs and maverick singer-songwriter Gail Davies–as well as bassist Geoff Firebaugh, a veteran of several Pacific Northwest punk bands.

The revamped lineup hit the road last year for tours of the United States and Europe before entering the studio to capture the band’s newfound magic on record. “We had no record deal,” says Mead. “We had no schedule to meet. We paid for the studio out of our own pockets. We simply wanted to get in there and make our songs sound like we’d always wanted them to sound, and we wanted to have fun doing it. The only expectations we had to live up to were our own.”

The resulting work, Tangled in the Pines, proves that BR5-49 can still crank out twangy, beer-soaked, honky-tonk anthems. The new material, like the swampy blues-drenched “Run a Mile,” which Mead describes as “straight-up creepy hillbilly music,” and the juke-joint reverie “When I Come Home,” stack up with the best the band has forged in the past.

“We dug deep for this record,” says Mead. “And putting all the songs together unwittingly ended up being kind of a story. In a sense, it tells a tale about guys trying to ‘make it’ and their journey through themselves and their world. It’s a record about chasing away–and in some cases trying to outrun–your demons, and then coming back for more. It’s a story about us.

“It just goes to show you what you can do when you decide to outlast the bastards.”

BR5-49 perform Sunday, April 18, at the Mystic Theatre, 21 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys open the show. 8pm. $15. 707.765.2121.

Spin Du Jour

Phil Kline, Zippo Songs: Airs of War and Lunacy (Cantaloupe)

The similarities between the Vietnam War and the mess in Iraq are striking. So this incendiary work by avant-garde composer Phil Kline (a member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars) is uncanny in its simple brilliance. On this new CD, Kline pairs “Three Rumsfeld Songs” (with text culled from a worldwide e-mail that mocked the skewed logic heard at those surreal press briefings given by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) with “Seven Zippo Songs,” which contain lyrics drawn from the inscriptions U.S. troops serving in Vietnam scratched on their Zippo lighters–lighters that were sometimes used to torch the thatched roofs of rural huts. The latter is a stirring series of themes on going to hell, getting bummed, getting high, getting horny, getting bored, dying and finding God. The disc concludes with an eerie rewriting of the Doors’ 1967 Oedipal epic “The End,” included in its original form on the Apocalypse Now soundtrack. Life imitating art imitating art . . .

–G.C.

From the April 7-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

President Nixon, Now More Than Ever: M.O.B. aims to throw the crook out.

M.O.B. Rule

Benji Nichols rounds up musicians to help oust Bush

By Sara Bir

Some mornings you wake up and just want to go right back to sleep. Radios often don’t make it any easier. News of suicide bombings, arctic drilling, global warming and Patriot Act-ing can slither into your brain so quickly that ducking under the covers and hiding from everything feels like the most reasonable option. Ah, there’s nothing like greeting a sunny, new I-hate-our-president day.

One morning, Petaluma-based music producer and musician Benji Nichols decided to do something about it. “I usually have the clock radio set to KPFA–except that it makes you want to slit your wrists,” he says. “And I just realized that I couldn’t take listening to the same old shit day after day. . . and I got frustrated, because I feel like I’m doing work for other people, but I’m not doing anything creative for the people I know–artists, musicians. So I was thinking in the shower and I came up with this stupid acronym of the M.O.B., which is Musicians to Oust Bush. But I kind of ran with it. I realized that if I didn’t do something, I’d go crazy.”

Nichols’ idea led him to gather songs for a compilation CD, which he plans to put out himself and send to contributing bands, who will hopefully disperse their M.O.B. CDs to local media outlets. “I’m taking anybody who will donate a track that’s kind of decent and to the point,” Nichols says. Currently, he has donations from artists across the country, including Jamaican-born singer-songwriter Owen Plant from Boston; Sacramento underground cult figure Anton Barbeau; and upstate New York-based Americana-tinged rockers the Mammals.

With tracks like Pierce Woodward’s “Leave No Millionaire Behind” and Adras Jones’ perfectly titled “Hold Your Nose and Vote,” M.O.B. is so far staying right on target. Some of the contributors are folks Nichols knew previously, but others, such as Barbeau, sort of came out of the blue.

When it’s all said and done, the compilations will feature 13 or 14 tracks, not all of which are musical. Utah Phillips donated two characteristically anarchistic commentaries, and Nichols would welcome more (recent San Francisco mayoral candidate Matt Gonzales is on Nichols’ wish list).

Proactivity is great and all, but the one obvious question here is what, exactly, Nichols hopes to accomplish with M.O.B. “There’s other groups like Bands against Bush and Punkvoter, people like that who have giant websites and want to raise money for the cause–whatever ‘the cause’ is,” he says. “I really wanted to do something that wasn’t based around money or printing T-shirts. And I also was thinking that instead of giving money to all these other groups that I support occasionally, I’d just do something myself.”

Nichols is accepting M.O.B. submissions until May 1. Amazingly enough, he hasn’t received any tracks from North Bay musicians yet. “So far I’ve gotten a lot of good material, but I’d love to tap into the hip-hop scene–even ranchero bands. I do want some more representation from this area.”

Having grown up in the Midwest and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Nichols recognizes that in many parts of the country (read: not Northern California) there’s still a stigma attached to releasing music with an obvious left-leaning political agenda. “There’s definitely a bubble here,” he says. “Whereas in reality, my parents won’t even talk to me about [M.O.B.] anymore. But that was part of my ambition for doing this. I really wanted to put something down that wasn’t outwardly too radical–the main point is that these people are all across the spectrum, and what they have to say is the same thing.

“You don’t have to be on the street, you don’t have to be knocking on doors, but you do need to realize that what’s going on is really serious. A lot of the people contributing are really young, and we’re the people who are realizing that we’re the ones who are getting screwed.”

For more information about M.O.B., visit www.benjinichols.com.

From the April 7-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by Fredrik Arff

Threesome: Trio Mediaeval sing words of the angel.

Going Medieval

Sacred CDs hit the racks

By Greg Cahill

Jesus freak Mel Gibson, director of The Passion of the Christ, isn’t the only artist tapping into the religious fervor of the Easter season, though he is probably the most hyped. A veritable basketful of new classical CDs is on the racks. But it is a trio of polyphonic vocal discs that are the standouts.

Probably the most talked about is Soir, dit-elle (ECM New Series) by Trio Mediaeval. This follow-up to the female vocal ensemble’s critically acclaimed 2001 debut Words of the Angel blends the old and the new, the simple and the complex. This Scandinavian trio–Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fuglseth and Torunn Østrem Ossum–evoke the transformative mystery of ancient and modern religious music while shifting effortlessly from unadorned monophony and Caelian chants to haunting polyphony. On this remarkable disc, sections of 15th-century composer Leonel Power’s “Missa Alma Redemptoris Mater” are interwoven with 20th-century works by Ivan Moody, Gavin Bryars, Andrew Smith and Oleh Harkavyy.

The resulting music is both beautiful and profound. It is on a par with both the hugely popular Anonymous 4, who top Billboard‘s classical charts with their heavenly recordings of medieval chanting and polyphony, and Gothic Voices, who moved sacred vocal music into the mainstream with A Feather on the Breath of God (Hyperion), their stunning 1986 collection of hymns and sequences by 12th-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen.

After years of exploring medieval European music, Anonymous 4–Johanna Maria Rose, Susan Hellauer, Ruth Cunningham and Marsha Genensky–have tapped into this nation’s religious roots on American Angels: Songs of Hope, Redemption and Glory (Harmonia Mundi), an overview of Anglo-American sacred music that ranges from 18th-century psalmody from New England to 19th-century shape-note songs from the rural South. Some of these songs will no doubt be familiar; the text of John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” pops up twice. And many of these songs and distinctive song forms have gained exposure through such singers as Emmylou Harris and on the recent Cold Mountain soundtrack.

This is a long way, culturally, from the ancient chants and polyphony of the female quartet’s 1992 debut An English Ladymass, but the purity of their voices on these simple hymns is nothing short of baptismal.

One of the most arresting new recordings of sacred music is Nebbiu: Canti Sacri Corsica (Harmonia Mundi), the debut of medieval chants and polyphony from Tempus Fugit, a male quintet who concentrate on ancient religious songs from the Nebbiu region of Corsica. While the singing of Trio Mediaeval and Anonymous 4 has a light, ethereal quality, the bass-heavy Tempus Fugit deliver swooping glissandi that call down the Holy Spirit while grabbing your fifth chakra and delivering a Latin lesson you won’t soon forget.

One of the most powerful songs here is “Messe Vultum Tuum,” a reconstructed Roman mass from the seventh century that is based on the belief that the singers, through their breath and sound, can attain a level of purity that will result in the manifestation of the Virgin Mary’s face. Powerful stuff.

Too powerful, in fact, for the early Christian church. “Messe Vultum Tuum” was banned in the 11th century and lay dormant for a millennium until it was resurrected by ethno-musicologist Corinne Bartolini with harmonizations by Antoine Tramani, and given voice by Tempus Fugit.

Top that, Mel Gibson.

‘Epilogue’ (Oxingale)
Miró Quartet with Matt Haimovitz

The Miró are rapidly becoming one of my favorite young quartets. It is often said that the Miró are a powerhouse ensemble that play with the unified sound of a string-driven machine. There’s truth to that notion, though there is nothing machinelike in these heartfelt readings. Both works share a common bond as the last string work by a pair of great composers steeped in sorrow. The Mendelssohn String Quartet in F Minor, op. 80, is an ode to the composer’s dead sister and his last complete score before succumbing to grief within weeks of its completion. It is a staple in the quartet repertoire. The Miró draw on the boundless sadness and beauty of this piece and lend the allegro molto finale a rawness that some critics mistake for youthful indiscretion. I hope the Miró never lose that edginess.

The Schubert String Quintet in C Major, D 956, op. post. 163., is equally strong. During his final days, wracked with delirium, Schubert crafted two works as part of a song cycle he called “Schwanengesang” (literally, his swan song): the first, an unusual trio for soprano, clarinet and piano; and the second, this stunningly gorgeous quintet for string quartet plus cello. This is the Miró at their best with the talented cellist Matt Haimovitz in tow.

–G.C.

From the March 31-April 6, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.