It's Almost Spring

Dear Friends,

Just a Sunday morning Vox Voronet note to share with you on this cloudy Ohio morning.. Feels like spring but isn’t there a saying about how the crocuses have to be covered with snow three times before spring? I think mine have been covered at least once, maybe twice (I hope it’s twice!) On the peacock farm the birds are happy with the quiet morning; glancing out the north window I can see a robin, a wren, a chickadee, a cardinal and there’s plenty more... The chickens are out in their yard... The faraway trees are gray, the fields still a muted and dull green and gold..

Friday night we headed to Pittsburgh in two cars to play Club Café with The Guest List at the gracious invitation of Pittsburgh’s The Long Knives, who have helped us play good venues in Pennsylvania.

Car Loading: 30 minutes, included recreational piano playing, looking for a bottle of guitar polish that was right in front of my face, and starting download of last practice’s audio files.

Car (Toyota station wagon): FULL. Room for two people. Sorta.

After many trips in and out of house: two curious housecats still inside house: check.

Drinks: FULL HEAVY PULP orange juice, water, black coffee.

Food consumed: Cheese sticks, Ritz crackers with Laughing Cow Creamy Swiss, granola bars, pistachio nuts.

Roads: Dark and winter weird. Route 5, 80, 76, 79, 279, 579.

Pittsburgh: strangely close (Less than 2 hours from Portage County), land of dark hills and rivers and bridges and concrete twisted galactically to support singing steel and more wildly curved concrete. Massive buildings rising gladly in darkness with bold lines of light and a million windows of offices and homes and unsleeping life.

The Long Knives: Open string chords, strong E minors, the inviting A7sus4, reassuring solid G and C chords, throbbing bass lines, steady pounding drums, psychiatric rock, crescendos, observation changes the outcome of any experiment. WJ (singer for The Long Knives) sick but sounding good and soldiering on with drink and meds. Will (bassist for The Long Knives): “Doesn’t one cancel the other out? I bought a humidifier, and I bought a dehumidifier.”

Club Café: Oddly elegant bar with kind staff, great sound guy and small cozy table area with nice stage and a black backdrop covered with a million tiny blue and purple lights. Interesting troweled walls and ceiling painted silver to look like metal.

The Guest List: great energetic punk/indie rock. Singer Aaron Hopelyss had bricks or cell phones in every pocket and did beautifully timed leaps off of speakers. On one song bassist Mikey Sykx did some incredibly gritty and delicious bass lines. Aaron said we were an amazing and fabulous crowd. I thought we were spirited, yet sedentary. Or maybe just I was.

The show: we had a great time. I always change my guitar strings before a show, and for some reason the guitar felt so smooth and easy to play. We are naturally getting very tight on some of our songs. That feels good, too. The sound guy did a nice job on the mix and that really makes the show for the band. Some folks asked for a CD and that’s always great. I’d like to put a tracking device on each one to see where it goes.

Have I mentioned Scott seemingly knows P-Burgh like the back his hand - we had fun pre-show driving up and down Carson Street looking for Inn Termission (the next place we play in Pittsburgh) and I said, “Somewhere in Pittsburgh the legendary Kris Kasperowski is having a drink and yelling at somebody about an obscure band”; I was drinking coffee, looking at papers, eating my favorite cough drops and we were listening to Medeski, Martin and Wood, Smashing Pumpkins and Zhopa Mira while getting lost on the desolate cranes, trains, and mad dark river southern end of Carson Street… We pointed the car north again, this time intently looking for Inn Termission – it has a faded green and red awning but there is literally NO WAY to find this place, as the letters are unlit and very faded – finally I found it. It’s well worth it – a small bar area and then a cavernous interesting back room for music that looks like a Bavarian inn. There’s even a giant unoccupied wasp nest dangling from the ceiling. We play there Friday, March 25th!

On the way home, I was feeling strong and vowing I wouldn’t go to sleep like I always do.. – I was sure I could stay up – 579 north – 79 north – 76 west Zzzzz. That was the end of it, like someone had suddenly shot me with a tranquilizer gun. Darn. Felt good, though.

Over The Rhine, Kent Stage 12/4/2010

Part of playing music is watching and listening to other people play music. Even if I know the music I don't think too much about what the hands on stage are doing.. Just more listening and watching, something melding together in the sight and sound, seeing the musicians react to certain parts of the music..

I remember in the early 1990s seeing mention of a band called "Over The Rhine" in print.. I vaguely understood they were from Ohio, and were a husband and wife team.. I was fading from the dying world of thrash/hardcore/speed metal at the time and transitioning back into rock of the late 60s and early 70s.. So I never checked them out..

Fast forward to a dark, unfriendly winter night in late 2009.. I really needed to see something good, get a grain of hope.. I had this OTR ticket that I'd bought on impulse.. It was cold as heel outside, a bleak, barren night, the kind where you sit on your good intentions and do nothing, but I innately understood that the future was out in the icy wind far away and I needed to go to it.

The Kent Stage: old downtown movie theater near Kent State converted into music venue. I was in row K, midway back, right side.. They had Nashville's Kenny Hutson (guitar) and Mickey Grimm on that tour, and though I didn't know the song catalogue, it didn't matter. Right from the start of the show they pulled every member of the audience in and played every song like it was the last thing they would ever do. I'll always remember singer Karen Berquist's huge grin under the bright lights. Kenny Hutson blew me away by picking up any one of 5 different stringed instruments throughout the night and being awesome at all of them. Watching someone like Kenny lets you suddenly understand without words what an artist truly is. When you are a master, everything you do is intentional, and every note is magic. It was a pure energy show.

What I remember most about that night is how much they gave, and gave, and gave. The whole band seemed genuinely thrilled. I could feel it filling my bones.

I left that 2009 show with a real spring in my step. Since then I've collected several of their albums and I've let them drip into my brain at work. It's a 20 year+ catalogue, and I don't have good perspective on the changes that have occurred in the music and direction. But I'm having fun learning about it.

Saw OTR again in 2010 with friends Scott and Kate. This time we got closer seats. It was a little different. Karen spoke of her mother in a nursing home. She seemed tighter and sadder on stage, at one point reading a poem by Bukowski. The show was less carefree. It spoke of modern concerns, of middle-aged children taking care of elderly parents and single mothers raising difficult teen-agers. Karen played "Ohio" alone on the piano with no one else on stage. The talk between the songs seemed a bit strained and the show seemed short. It was still good, and Scott and I walked out into a fantastic 11 pm Kent snowstorm of soft, huge flakes.

So what's it all mean? What is Over The Rhine to me? Real people. Real lives and real struggles. A band that has never succumbed to mainstream success. Real musicians. I'm fascinated that both Linford and Karen play piano. I mean, they just sit down and play it.

“On earlier records, I was unintentionally playing it a bit safe at times,” she says. “I had all this stuff bottled up and I was afraid that if I let it out, even musically, I’d be laughed at or, God forbid, misunderstood. Now, I’m more lost in it. More drunk on it. Far more out of control about it. Messy, juicy and tangled up.”

-- Karen Berquist, overtherhine.com

I feel like they are people I can understand. The music is earthy. It's folk, it's rock, it's jazz, it's blues. The midwest flavor is comforting to me.

Listening to their earlier albums reminds me of going through REM's early works, the carefree youth and energy. Fascinating.

“Believe me, we don’t want to waste anybody’s time,” elaborates Detweiler. “When we stop believing we’re doing our best work, we’re done. Every song has to be good, every record has to be great, every concert has to have some spiritual significance—something that we can’t quantify, something bigger than all of us.”

-- Linford Detweiler
from overtherhine.com

Weekend Full of Good Music: Part 1

Forget the band - I'm a fan first. I was pumped for the Nervous Jerks/Tay-Sachs/Zhopa Mira show at U-Pie.. University Pizzeria in Youngstown like a northern pioneer outpost with campfire out front and those faces looking up at you, the wander down the long entrance and the big dark red music room in back with exotic girls bright as birds and wanting to be seen.

Ordinarily when seeing shows alone I show up right on time, nervously pacing about, checking my watch.. And several hours later am sleeping in the corner waiting for someone to pick up a piece of wood and make some ^%&#**ing music with it... This time all of us but Matt went down to U-Pie around 10:30 pm or so.. I was sure we'd missed the Jerks and that everything was destroyed.. But right when we got there they'd just started suiting up and getting ready. Perfect timing for us - Chris Wetzl - logistical genius.

So the Nervous Jerks rip into it, minus Dan Frankland (who had a last minute work committment), and it's amazing - somehow between Devon using a fuzz pedal and Mat's superior guitar skills they fill up Dan's absence as best they can. Mat does a thousand things with only 4 fingers and it seems like more sound than possible sails out of his amp. He never even looks at the guitar neck, he knows right where he is. He stares menacingly at Sarge and Devon and then everything serious dissolves into smiles and laughter. Sarge is always an inspiration on drums, lost in the music, eyes closed, with the perfect fills and timing. Devon is solid as hell on bass - Chris just commented how he liked her work - a real strong presence, the root notes, the fifths. Keep in mind I've been literally dousing my ears all day long in Spader, Under the Rainbow and Gettin It Done at work for weeks - so all of a sudden I'm hearing all those tunes blaze into light and sound right in front of me. Awesome. There's nothing like hearing the opening chords of a song like "Double Nothing" - definitely guaranteed to make you smile.

I knew nothing about the band Tay-Sachs except someone named Baker wouldn't be around for awhile so this was their last show.. The Nervous Jerks broke their equipment down and a wild band of younger guys were suddenly jumping around with a mad grinning guitarist who looked like Ethan Hawke's younger brother. Suffice to say their songs were short and brutal - Scott complimented that they were "concise". They did a song about Limp Bizkit, or maybe it was a cover - that lasted exactly one second or maybe two beats. Hilarious. Quite a following, too, with the singer disappearing into the crowd to scream.

I'd been burning to see Zhopa Mira - a newer Y-Town band - someone threw a red hot piece of metal at the ground and it burst up and became a delicious thrashing band with a singer who almost speaks the words casually, yet they hang like fire in the rain. The tracks on their facebook page smoke with slamming, panicked drums and bass and frenetic, absolute universe-bending guitar mixed with Christina Porcase's casual, understated vocals that call to mind San Francisco's Rykarda Parasol in a psycho-delic speed thrashtrip. They did not disappoint - wild, flanged-out tones screamed out from the stage. I don't know how to describe the perfect amalgamation of distorted bluesy licks in a song like "Beastly Savagely" with the searing smolder of the low string drone calling you into the feeling perfectly. If you want to see the next brilliant burning star soar out of Youngstown, just listen to "Crowns" at http://www.facebook.com/pages/ZHOPA-MIRA/111322515553415. Something incredible is happening.

- Kohler

Spaces

This female artist, someone little known, hard working, struggling to create a market, had written on her Facebook artist page that she was feeling low. The reaction to this admission was immediate, and varied. Fans of her work expressed emotions from concern to muted outrage. Her fellow artists were kinder, and a discussion sprang up: should an artist disclose anything personal, or should they stay hidden behind the work?

I was playing a piece for recital next month at piano today, and my teacher, deliberately tactful, suggested I play for others before playing in front of a crowd. She asked how I felt onstage. "I feel nothing," I said. "You feel numb," she said. I said: "I feel tense beforehand and I yawn and stretch 500 million times and I'm waiting and waiting and waiting for the feeling to change into anything else. Then onstage you see nothing but lights, you're blinded and they're physically hot." Suddenly I thought of the last show, because it's still in me, like the place is in my stomach cavity, the mottled floor, the banged up walls, the snakes of cords, the gray stage carpet, the stacks of speakers. The show is over and I've been wandering it for days in my stomach. Place is empty, what does it mean. Where is that couple that was laying together in that booth. Is anything real here. "You feel numb," She said. I said, "It's just lights, you can't see the crowd. The sound is way in front of you, it's disembodied, you hear someone singing, filling the room out there and you wonder who that is and it's you. Everyone is far away, no one wants to get too close. It's lonely."

I can't stop thinking of this guy's face. I can see it now, that sad Indian. He sat at a table with his little entourage, all bands always have them. The siblings, the exotic girlfriends with careful auras of love. He seemed glum when he got there. You knew his name started with a J. He was just like that. He had that patient, resigned deep well soul of Jamie. The front bedroom blues of the youngest son. His hair was perfect. Other bands played and he sat, melancholy, hardly speaking. He looked at the floor, or the table. His girlfriend fiddled with a camera and sat in his lap once but his smile flickered through like a small bird. His business was waiting. He drank water or clear pop. He was down. He was down when he got there. His face hung in my stomach. His eyes said so much of the hopeless emptiness. Disconnected. Not on time, time all gone. Not knowing where you are. Warm buildings, bright lights, but not a soul. Here is the road, here is Market 1000 miles wide stretching south like the Road To Heaven. Zabel. Here is Mill Creek Park. Here is Dirk Quinn, wailing with his band. Here is Cedars, here is November Loop, playing the chords, playing the chords, patient, getting you to where you are. Here are the walls of my stomach black and wet. Here are the empty freeways, brightly lit. Here is his face, printed on a coin, the head in profile, the graceful nose, the jaw slightly set, the eye like one who knows his land is gone and his people vanquished.

Sounds Boring, But It's Not! New Mailing List!

Dear Beloved Fans: Join our new e-mail list!

You will receive our show dates and times and other big news without ever having to go through the trouble of checking Facebook or MySpace again... Let's face it, it's a fulltime job trying to keep up with all the Facebook posts. This way you get the news you want at your convenience. We will only use this for shows and other big events (like a new CD, or a pending Jay Leno appearance, or that we've all quit our day jobs). Your e-mail will be kept private and never used for any other purpose.

To sign up (from our Facebook page), click here and scroll down a tiny bit to find "join mailing list". It's that easy!

Hint: Please leave "Street Team" box unchecked. If you check it, you unknowingly agree to become our roadie/slave for life. The rest of your days will henceforth be spent stapling our flyers to telephone poles and serving us nachos and coffee.

Concrete Steps And Stars

A few weeks ago we drove to PA for a show and listened to Electric Ladyland. Haven't heard it in years, though we listened to it all the time in high school. Such a rich album filled with big vibrant songs. "And The Gods Made Love" always reminded me of a giant toilet flushing. Somehow Scott slept in a pile of drums while the the bass drum of "Gypsy Eyes" thumped and we went up and down endless Pittsburgh brick roads that curved impossibly.

Last night Scott and I headed up to Cedars and caught November Loop. Big space songs, brilliant light streaks in darkness. Trademark NL long instrumentals that put you into a trance. The music became a beautiful tool in darkness. I agonized and despaired, I cried in the cold water rock walls of Youngstown. What are these mute buildings saying. What of this tin-ceilinged room. Age-old graffiti. The C/Asus2 progression slowly shifts to C/Amaj and everything becomes clear and good. Scott takes pictures of purple firelights in darkness and e-mails them to me, but I'm right there. Somewhere in a server they wait to be downloaded.

Pennsylvania Reflections

We just performed our second show last night, at Revolutionaries cafe in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

You never quite know how a show will go. The best time I ever had playing show, when true rock and roll lightening leaped up in me and charged my soul, was many years ago in Cuyahoga Falls. I'll never forget how we all sat around beforehand fidgeting and feeling restless, wanting to go on stage. It was maybe our fourth show or so. Something about that show, the crowd, the stage, the end of any nervousness and really wanting to open up and explode, made it happen. It wasn't something anyone knew would happen. It wasn't even thought of. It was like spending years pushing a car around with the engine off, and then suddenly one day turning the key and the engine starting. It was another level no one could imagine. There we were were playing our first song, and something was seething and swirling in me: I felt hot and crazy and there was a perfect union of really believing in the music and feeling wild spiritual elation and being totally in position, and then just screaming and letting it loose: for an instant everything stopped and then the band, the crowd, the everything responded.

The stage is a sacred place. You only go up there if you are really going to do something. The stage has power and you can feel it even with the lights off and empty. It's a launching point. It's so important. It's where you share yourself. It's where the union begins, and the crowd is everything. That first moment, dead silent in time, of getting on stage under the lights, in slow motion, just a few steps, under the hot house lights, and the first instant of looking out at the crowd and you see those faces and you've seen them all night and you look at the faces and they are impassive and they are wanting and you are looking at each other and you are seeing the vulnerabilities and then you see what is inside you, what you are going to give to them and what they will give back to you. How much do you trust them? Do you love them like your own?

The goodness of the show is really a question. The question is: as a performer, how far are you willing to open up? Everything else is nothing. The sound is never perfect, the monitor mix always skewed, the guitars are always out of tune and either to loud or tooo quiet, the cords suddenly start crackling and popping, the amps go haywire... The only thing you can really count on is the spirit in you and what you intend to give.

At Revolutionaries Cafe we were playing Freefall and I was singing and all of a sudden someone started clapping. The clapping interested me and I wondered what had impelled the man to do that. A word? Some note or chord he liked? The spirit of the piece? I didn't ask. But those folks sat right in front of my amp practically, which must have been slightly hair-raising at times. I was glad they were there and they drank in every note and word. Those upturned faces and the implicit promise.