JONATHAN PERRY

Keeping it Clean

JONATHAN PERRY — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:16:24 GMT

David Kilgour looks to the future
David Kilgour likes to claim he’s not a very driven fellow. At least not anymore.

NEW ZEALAND INFLUENCE: The countless kids who recorded four-track pop in their bedrooms in the ’80s and ’90s owe a debt to Kilgour and the Clean.

David Kilgour, "BBC World" (mp3)

David Kilgour likes to claim he’s not a very driven fellow. At least not anymore. But his discography with the Clean, the influential New Zealand indie-pop band he’s helmed since the late ’70s, and on his own (he’s released seven solo albums) suggests otherwise.

“The Clean were actually really quite ambitious,” Kilgour, now 46, told me over the phone from a tour stop in San Francisco. “I’m not nearly as ambitious now. I’m certainly not touring America to try and break my career here and sell millions of records. Every time I put a record out, I really wonder if anyone’s gonna put the next one out. So I’m just surprised that I’m still here as a middle-aged man, doing this.”

Not only is Kilgour still performing, as he’s done regularly since he went solo in ’91, but following a 10-year hiatus the Clean reconvened in 2000 after the Dunedin Arts Council persuaded the band to perform at a festival celebrating the history of New Zealand music. They were without a label until Merge lent them $1000 to finish the album that became 2002’s Getaway.

By last fall, however, Kilgour was back at his solo career, with a new touring band, the Heavy Eights (they played T.T. the Bear’s Place in November), in support of a new release, The Far Now (Merge). It’s a sublimely textured work that shows no sign of decline. Although the disc, like most of Kilgour’s previous releases, slipped under the commercial radar here in the US, it was one of 2007’s unheralded gems. And now the guitarist/songwriter, who founded the Clean with his brother, drummer/singer Hamish Kilgour, and bassist Robert Scott in their home town of Dunedin, is talking about recording a new Clean album. “With the Clean, we tend to get together and extemporize on the spot. In the old days, we used to bring in finished songs. Now we just seem to have this chemistry as musicians and as old friends. It’s hard to get that with musicians and with bands.”

Listening to the Clean’s seminal 2003 double-disc compilation, Anthology (Merge), makes clear the connection between the open-chorded, reverb-drenched approach that has come to define the “New Zealand Sound” and the American underground pop sounds of Yo La Tengo, Luna, and Small Factory, to name three. Whether they knew it or not, countless kids who holed up in their bedrooms playing homemade pop songs into a four-track machine during the ’80s and ’90s owe a debt to the Clean.

Cover story

JONATHAN PERRY — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 16:05:15 GMT

The amazing art of ‘Mingering Mike’
To any true vinyl obsessive, a rare musical artifact — and the story behind it — is often as compelling as the sound in its grooves.

CAN YOU JUDGE AN ALBUM BY ITS COVER?: You could if it was a Mingering Mike production

Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career Of An Imaginary Soul Superstar | Dori Hadar | Princeton Architectural Press | 192 pages | $24.95

To any true vinyl obsessive, a rare musical artifact — and the story behind it — is often as compelling as the sound in its grooves. The Beatles’ quickly withdrawn “Butcher Cover” is a far more interesting, and valuable, find than the version on the American release of Yesterday and Today.

In the case of the ’70s soul artist named “Mingering Mike” Stevens — whose album covers have come to be regarded as prized pieces of folk art, and who is the subject of the new book Mingering Mike — there exists little actual audio at all. Here was a mastermind behind some 50 albums, as many singles, and 35 record labels — but almost nothing that could have been played on a stereo system.

Still, albums can connect with people in more ways than one. And sometimes the sound an LP produces is just one of those ways. Shared obsession is another. That’s what connects Mingering Mike, who had vanished for decades, with a private detective from DC. Dori Hadar found Mingering Mike, and his journey led to a poignant book by this first-time author.

It all began on a cold December morning in 2003. Hadar, a criminal investigator by day and a DJ by night, was wading through bins of old LPs at a DC flea market. As a long-time crate digger addicted to the thrill of the hunt and the buzz of discovery, he had amassed tons of rare titles over the years. “For me, it’s all about finding the weirdest record,” he says now over the phone from DC.

What he stumbled on that day was a bizarre treasure trove. The first LP in the stack was The Mingering Mike Show — Live from the Howard Theater, and it was just one of dozens with the Mingering Mike moniker. Hand-drawn and colored, these LP covers depicted an assortment of African-American artists besides Mike: “Audio Andre,” “Joseph War,” “The Big D,” “Rambling Ralph.” To Hadar’s further bafflement, the LPs themselves were made of cardboard, with hand-drawn and painted grooves circling an array of homemade labels he’d never heard of: Tip of the Hat, Mother Goose, Hypnotic, Sex, and, yes, Fake Records.

Life is a cabaret

JONATHAN PERRY — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 15:29:49 GMT

The Dolls, the Rudds, d’Elf, and more shake it up this fall
The Dresden Dolls have been crazy busy since the release, earlier this year, of Yes, Virginia (Roadrunner), and their autumn itinerary ensures they’ll be applying the pancake make-up well into winter.

ONION PEELERS: A DVD shoot, a run at ART, and lots of touring are on the Dresden Dolls’ fall dance card.

The DRESDEN DOLLS, the Boston duo of singer/pianist Amanda Palmer and drummer Brian Viglione, have been crazy busy since the release, earlier this year, of Yes, Virginia (Roadrunner), and their autumn itinerary ensures they’ll be applying the pancake make-up well into winter. The Dolls’ current tours of Japan, Australia, and New Zealand carry into October, and they’re scheduled to swing stateside for a three-week tour in late October (no Boston dates are planned) with the Australian outfit the Red Paintings. Then it’s back to Europe for a two-day concert DVD shoot at the renovated London Roundhouse November 3 and 4 before returning home.

“Two days later, we start intensive rehearsals with ART [American Repertory Theatre] for The Onion Cellar,” Palmer says via e-mail en route to the Monsters of Spex Festival in Cologne, Germany. Although she calls The Onion Cellar a working title, lots of onions and the peeling of them, will indeed be involved. She describes it as “a workshop fictional cabaret that will run for 40 shows in December and January [December 9–January 13 at Zero Arrow Theatre]. The band will be on stage for the entire show, and the whole thing promises to be quite the bizarre spectacle.”

The Dolls have also managed to make a video with Panic! At the Disco, salvaging what Palmer calls “a just-kill-me-now fucking tour debacle. Though the tour was a relative disaster and their fan base didn’t exactly ‘get’ us, as they say in the biz, we loved the boys, and the two bands made a video to our song, ‘Backstabber,’ that features the Dresden Dolls and Panic! At the Disco trying to off each other in clever ways. It’s hilarious.”

Live a Little, the sixth full-length from the PERNICE BROTHERS, is due October 3 on the band’s Ashmont Records. Look for a fall/winter tour. ABERDEEN CITY hit the road this month for two months with Electric Six to celebrate the Dovecoat/Red Ink re-release of The Freezing Atlantic. They play the Middle East downstairs September 19.

The RUDDS aim for a late fall release of their follow-up to last year’s self-released Get the Femuline Hang On. The garage-soul outfit’s third album, tentatively titled Shakoo, is again being produced by frontman John Powhida and former Papas Fritas/current Rudds member Tony Goddess at the latter’s Bang-A-Sound studio in Gloucester. Word from Powhida is that the new material will include “rap, jazz standardesque tear-jerkers, rockabilly, soul rave-ups, jazz fusion, disco, hard rock.”

Stop the world

JONATHAN PERRY — Wed, 17 May 2006 23:07:05 GMT

Apollo Sunshine try to play their music without losing their heads
To say Apollo Sunshine have skyrocketed to success would be stretching the temptation to equate the Berklee-bred band’s hard-earned accolades with some sort of stratospheric journey.

WORLD BEATERS: "We're playing with Matisyahu, and we think, 'Great, that'll be a sweet show!' But the reality is that the minute we get off stage we've got to get in the van and drive to the next night's show in Chicago."

To say Apollo Sunshine have skyrocketed to success would be stretching the temptation to equate the Berklee-bred band’s hard-earned accolades with some sort of stratospheric journey. But as befits their name, 2006’s winner as Best Local Act (who also placed second in this year’s Best Local Album category, and took home Best New Band honors in 2004) have certainly taken off beyond the club confines of Cambridge. We sat down with three of Sunshine’s four members — Jesse Gallagher, Sam Cohen, and Jeremy Black (newbie guitarist Sean Aylward didn’t make our pre-show dinnertime chat at the Middle East) to talk about their move out of the city (to the tiny rural Western Massachusetts town of Leverett) and their road-tested reputation as one of the most engaging live acts on, well, the planet. Here’s some of what they had to say.

JONATHAN PERRY: You guys have been busy. It seems as if you’re always playing shows.
JESSE GALLAGHER: Yeah, and unless you stop, you can’t really work on new shit. Before we made Apollo Sunshine we finally said, “We have to get off the road.” When we toured on our first record (2003’s Katonah), we got to a point where we realized the life span of the record was done and we needed some new stuff. You get depressed, and you’re waiting for new songs to come, but you don’t know what direction they’ll go in.

JP: Was moving to Leverett part of that need to retreat, take stock, and begin writing again?
SAM COHEN: Yeah, that was the first place any of us had lived in two years. Prior to that, we’d just been touring and living out of the van, so that probably contributed to a feeling of, “Where is my mind, where is my body?” So yeah, that was part of the whole process.

B.C. Camplight

JONATHAN PERRY — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:19:30 GMT

HIDE, RUN AWAY | One Little Indian
Never mind the mutant squirrel standing over a necktied, headless dude laid out like road kill in a pool of blood, his black briefcase strewn next to him.

Recovery projections

JONATHAN PERRY — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:49:24 GMT

The return of a rejuvenated Mazarin
You might not be able to tell from the glazed psych-pop glimmer of We’re Already There , Mazarin’s new disc for the NYC indie I and Ear, but singer/guitarist Quentin Stoltzfus counts old-time gospel and country among his favorite and earliest influences.

You might not be able to tell from the glazed psych-pop glimmer of We’re Already There, Mazarin’s new disc for the NYC indie I and Ear, but singer/guitarist Quentin Stoltzfus counts old-time gospel and country among his favorite and earliest influences. “My mom was a gospel singer and sang in a gospel choir, and I was infused with American music at an early age,” says Stoltzfus, whose Philly band opens for the Walkmen downstairs at the Middle East this Wednesday. “My grandmother used to sing Carter Family songs to me when I was a kid, so there’s a musical legacy that was passed down. I see music as being a continuum, where you can draw direct links from people who sat on their porch in Kentucky and played banjo in the early 1900s to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan to practically everyone.”

Fair enough, especially when you consider that as a singer-songwriter Stoltzfus shares some traits with Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum, whose stream-of-consciousness narratives were often compared to the Great White Wonder. Stoltzfus likes to mix up his arrangements and shift at a moment’s notice from a minimalist setting of mostly voice and acoustic guitar (“Louise”) to effervescent indie pop (“Northeast Winter”) to a krautrocking, instrumental sketch (“Kenyan Heat Wave”) reminiscent of Can. “We’re Already There” is built on a Fender Rhodes-driven groove.

Mazarin’s last few years have been fraught with strife and “major meltdowns” mostly stemming from a financially disastrous six-month tour in support of 2001’s A Tall-Tale Storyline (spinArt). But over the phone, Stoltzfus sounds refreshed. Without going into details, he reveals that the tour was “haphazardly planned . . . we had things promised to us and we didn’t get them and just kinda got ripped off in a few places. That’s what can kill you. I love to play but I don’t love losing my shirt.”

Isaac Hayes

JONATHAN PERRY — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 15:48:40 GMT

ULTIMATE ISAAC HAYES: CAN YOU DIG IT? | Concord
Although he’s most closely identified as the proto-rapping bad-ass voice behind the iconic 1971 Shaft soundtrack (and the voice of Chef on South Park ), Hayes is an R&B titan whose role in shaping modern soul stretches back nearly as long as the music itself.