No borders bluegrass

When Tim O’Brien went solo after the dissolution of his popular bluegrass band Hot Rize, his path was not entirely clear. The West Virginian had established himself as a talented mandolin and fiddle player, singer and songwriter, but a short stint on a major label in Nashville didn’t work out. In hindsight, it’s easy to see how his various skills would help him forge a diverse and satisfying path, but it didn’t come without challenges.

“I’ve just got that classic attention deficit syndrome. Traditional music, there’s so many angles, and there’s a community — the community’s all around, and I guess I’m susceptible to my environment and different things as I come upon them,” O’Brien says. “I see no reason to wall myself off. As a consequence, I say yes to a lot of projects. I learn a lot. It gets a little scattered sometimes, but mostly I like it. I like the smorgasbord part of it.”

O’Brien and guitarist Bryan Sutton play together in Louisville on Saturday, though this duo show comes on the heels of a recent run of Hot Rize reunion shows, where Sutton joined the surviving founders.

“We did one this time last year for the same length of time, about 10 days,” O’Brien says about the Hot Rize tour. “It’s just kind of a check-up, we see how we’re all doing … It’s a family reunion.”

Would doing it for more than 10 days make it less special? “Yeah, I think so … We broke up in 1990, but we never really went away; we just wanted to move on to something else. It’s still kind of the same thing. I’m mostly into pursuing different things, but when I do get the jones to play traditional bluegrass, it makes sense to do it with these guys. It’s where I made my mark in that game; it’s so formative, it’s definitely where I come from.”

Even more like a family reunion is his new project, due next year. O’Brien and his immediate family members — his sister Mollie, her guitarist husband Rich Moore and their children — are recording an album of songs by Roger Miller. “We have a set … mostly fairly obscure ones. It’s very exciting working with the family there. They rose to the occasion.”

So far, no major problems or rivalries have emerged. Or maybe Dad, 57, just hasn’t realized it yet. “I don’t know. I’m sure there is. There’s insecurities and kind of wondering why we’re doing this. Mollie and I are the ones who have been on the stage and traveled the world. I think they kind of wonder if they want to get into that or not. Everybody’s got their own slant, the music that they’re listening to. I mean, there’s a lot of common ground — Gillian Welch, Tom Waits — that’s one reason why we chose the Roger Miller bag, because it’s quirky enough that everybody can get into it. It unifies it, in a good way.”

The multi-faceted stringman has another session booked with British guitar god Mark Knopfler, who asked O’Brien to play in his band last year.

“That should be great. He’s a master songwriter and musician, and he has a beautiful studio in London, so I’m looking forward to working there.”

O’Brien thrives on the collaborations, even if it has been challenging at times for his family. He follows his desires, buoyed by playing to audiences that appreciate timeless music. Though the music industry encourages repetition of proven formulas, O’Brien finds that “really hard and boring after a while … I really admire somebody that can do that. Del McCoury, for instance, I really admire because he doesn’t change his music hardly ever; he mostly does the same show, he makes new records, but he mostly does the same show, and his fans love it. And he seems to love it. I get a little restless. I just couldn’t do that. So I go back and forth. Sometimes it gets a little too smooth, and I go and mess it up.”

Tim O’Brien & Bryan Sutton
Saturday, Oct. 29
Clifton Center
2117 Payne St.
www.timobrien.net
$21-$23; 8 p.m.

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

Local dead

Author David Martin Stack walks through his Brooklyn streets with a dark secret — he’s actually a Louisville native. The music obsessive gives love to his hometown in his new YA novel, “The Pretty Dead,” which features zombies, rockers and other local favorites.



LEO: Louisvillians love to know where we went to high school. So, tell us!

David Martin Stack: “The Pretty Dead” is set in an evil high school where the cool kids are literally cool … to the touch — they’re dead! I’m a proud graduate of St. X, which is why I named the fictional school after our rivals Trinity. Just to be clear — this book is a work of fiction. The real Trinity High School is not a hot bed of the undead … as far as I know.

LEO: Who were your favorite local bands when you were growing up?

DS: I have a long list of local favorites. It runs from Sunspring, Ennui and Bush League all the way through to Squirrel Bait and Slint, the Palace Brothers, Crain, Rodan, Gastr Del Sol, and King Kong. I can honestly say these are still among my all-time favorite bands. In “The Pretty Dead,” every chapter is titled after and includes a quote from a song by some of my favorite all-time bands. There are lots of Louisville bands included.

LEO: Do you plan to write more Louisville-centric books?

DS: I should think so. Of all the books I’ve written, my two Louisville-centric books seem to get the most attention. My picture book “Good Morning Captain,” inspired by the Slint song, took off after it was featured on Pitchfork. New York magazine called it “The world’s most terrifying children’s book.” Louisville, it seems, is my good luck charm. I’ve actually just started writing a book set in Sligo, just outside Louisville. Hopefully the good luck extends just past the Louisville Metro area.

“The Pretty Dead” is available locally at Carmichael’s and ear X-tacy. It is also available as a 99-cent ebook on iTunes and Kindle. Proceeds benefit children’s literacy. Go to www.posterband.com for more info.

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

Waxing on Gonzo

The second annual Gonzo Fest will include musical performances from some great locals as well as some notable touring bands, including The Whigs, Fresh Millions and David Wax Museum. The latter, a Boston-based group receiving acclaim for their third album, Everything Is Saved, answered a few questions.

LEO: Are you a Hunter Thompson fan?

Greg Glassman: We’re very curious and excited about being a part of Gonzo Fest. We appreciate anyone who has a distinct, original and humorous take on the follies of mankind, and Hunter S. Thompson surely embodied this.

LEO: You’re Americana, folk, Mexican-American, indie rock ... who are you, anyway? Is Calexico threatened by you?

GG: I believe the most common press label being applied these days is “Mexo-Americana,” and that’s fine with us. Like most musicians, we have too many influences to name, but given the instrumentation, chord and rhythm structures, and harmony vocals, “Mexo-Americana” distills us down to a style that someone new to our music can relate to. We are all big fans of Calexico, and they are near the top of the list for bands we would love to tour with. We met some of them at the Green River Festival a few summers ago and enjoyed showing them the son jarocho instruments we play.

LEO: You made the NPR Listeners’ Poll list of the best music of 2011 so far. Who’s on your version of that list?

GG: In no particular order, we’ve been spinning new records from these bands lately: Yellowbirds, In One Wind, tUnE-yArDs, Gillian Welch, Cuddle Magic, Jessica Lea Mayfield.

LEO: You have some birds on your merchandising. Have you heard the phrase “Put a bird on it” yet?

GG: (laughs) Honestly, no, we hadn’t heard that, but that makes sense. Who doesn’t like birds? Our connection with birds comes from a traditional son jarocho song we play called “El Pajaro Carpintero,” or “Carpenter Bird.” A friend of the band is an amazing woodblock print artist and has hand-carved many images for us, including the cover of our first album.

LEO: Why should the good, hard-working people of Louisville be excited about you? (Don’t feel obligated to mention My Morning Jacket or bourbon.)

GG: Well, we’re good, hard-working people, too, so we’ll have that in common to start. We’ve never played Louisville before, so we’d love to show your town a good time, and vice-versa. If nothing else, come see Suz beat the hell out of a donkey jawbone.

David Wax Museum plays Saturday at 5 p.m. at the Monkey Wrench. For more info, go to www.davidwaxmuseum.com.

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

The Tea Total Package

Hillbilly Tea expands to meet customer demands



The best type of success is doing something unlikely and making it work, against the odds and what most might call common sense. One example would be Hillbilly Tea, the downtown eatery and gourmet tea specialist that opened last year.

When tea business veteran Karter Louis and his partner, Arpi Lengyel, decided to open the cozy spot for a lunch-only crowd, the hidden gem, located on a side street near the KFC Yum Center, immediately outgrew its initial design.

“Since we opened, week one, we reached capacity. We got pretty popular pretty fast — that, we did not anticipate,” says Louis, a Louisville native who also has worked on other restaurant concepts in larger cities. “A lot of our customers are not necessarily just people downtown … We took off really fast, but then it died down a little bit. Comments from people were like, ‘Oh, we didn’t think we could get in.’ We don’t want to convey that to people.

“I think if you own a large restaurant, people perceive a wait as OK. But when they see everything when they walk in the door, it’s a bit more daunting. We knew immediately that we wanted to expand, let guests come who wanted to experience the concept.”

But Hillbilly Tea had a second issue to resolve, as well.

“The No. 1 thing that some of our customers requested when we asked ‘What can we do to improve?’ was ‘Get alcohol,’” Louis laughs. “The size that we were before, we could not get a liquor license because we were too small. Certainly, growing does help us with that.”

Louis initially wanted to open a small, low-pressure spot that would pay tribute to tea first, and also to his roots, with what he describes as “good, wholesome food.”

“For me, tea has become a way of life, and I’ve put a lot into it, in terms of my career, and it resonates with me, certainly, and it’s amazing that I come home to Louisville and I say, ‘OK, I’ve done all these fancy tea places; this is my expression of tea … is it stupid?’” Louis says. “‘Or do people really get it?’”

After spending 20-something years in bigger cities, Louis wanted to return to Louisville, but says, “I still needed to have something to do for a livelihood. I told (partner Lengyel) that we would open up downtown, that we would be a lunch place open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and we would be off on weekends. Now we open up at 8 o’clock in the morning, and we close at 9 p.m. — as soon as we get alcohol, we’ll close beyond that — and we’re open seven days a week, so it’s clearly not that. But it’s OK, it’s a good thing.”

Now expanding to the second floor, Hillbilly Tea soon hopes to introduce a liquor program that will include tea-infused vodkas, boutique wines, bourbon and a few local beers.

They also plan to incorporate another regional treasure. “We’re very excited about moonshine. There’s only two companies in the United States that are approved to sell moonshine; one of them is a company called Moonshine, from Tennessee. We’ll probably do some infusing with the moonshine, as well.”

For this, patrons can thank the heavy drinkers of Louisville, as well as downtown’s conventioneers. “I feel like a lot of people think we don’t want to serve alcohol, but that wasn’t the deal,” Louis says. “It was just that we didn’t plan on it; we just thought we’d be open for lunch. Last fall was when we started opening for dinner, and all those convention people would come and we’d have tables of six and eight convention people … they would say, ‘Where’s the alcohol?’ and get up and leave. That was very painful,” Louis says with a bittersweet chuckle.

“Instantly, I begged our landlord to let us go upstairs, and that took a long time. That space has never been used for anything other than storage in 80 years. There was a lot of infrastructure stuff that had to go on here. I think people thought it was going to be a matter of just coming upstairs and painting,” he laughs, “but it actually was a lot of work.”

Now the time has come for Louis’ little tea retreat to become a Louisville nightlife fixture.

“It’s been a blast. I didn’t really know what to expect, coming home to Louisville … They say you don’t make it till you make it at home. The success of Hillbilly Tea is the cherry on top of all the things that I’ve done.”

photo by Ron Jasin

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

Fox and the Sound

The Pacific Northwest-based folk rock band Fleet Foxes emerged, seemingly overnight, in 2008 and quickly became one of the most popular and acclaimed new bands in years. Their second album, Helplessness Blues, was released by Sub Pop in May. LEO phoned leader Robin Pecknold at 2:30 p.m., as he was just waking up in Raleigh, N.C., after a long night of driving.

LEO: Are you comfortable sleeping on the road, in the bus?

Robin Pecknold: It’s OK … I’m not sure that I would just hire a bus just to drive me around, not playing shows.

LEO: What else do you do to entertain yourself and your bandmates on the road?

RP: We have bikes we take on tour. Skye (Skjelset) especially likes to get his out and ride around — he likes to see a city that way. I like record shopping.

LEO: Have you seen a lot of stores closing around the country the past couple of years?

RP: No — I mean, I feel like the ones I’m looking for are just, like, vinyl-only. I’m sure those guys get hit, but they’re also catering to a more specialized crowd. I feel like it’s the ones that try to do everything that seem like they’re not making the marks and struggling.

LEO: You have your particular focus, but you guys have also been part of a wave that’s had some popularity in the past few years.

RP: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been lucky in finding an audience. Everything’s sort of cyclical, and stuff will come in and out of favor, but it’s nice that we have found people that are into what we do.

LEO: Have you noticed any differences between living in Seattle and Portland?

RP: I think for a guy like me who is, I guess, at work on the road, Portland is a far more chill city to come home to. There’s less big companies based there, that sort of helps. They seem a little less focused on making a bunch of money. Obviously, it’s better for a city if you have a strong economy than not, but for a musician coming to Portland, it’s cheaper and people are down to hang out. They don’t have to work as hard, ’cause it’s a cheaper place to live than Seattle.

LEO: Have you seen that affecting your songwriting?

RP: I don’t know. I guess I feel like we’re more free to do … anything when I’m there. I think being in Seattle, I’d get recognized a little more often, so I’d be more hesitant to go out and do stuff. I don’t know. I feel more anonymous, but that’s a small … like, one guy a week, you know?

LEO: How have the new songs been going over live since the record came out?

RP: I think it’s good. We wrote this newer record to sort of complement the first one, in some ways — expand and, also, crystallize some of the ideas from the first one. So, it’s cool. The set feels a lot more wide-reaching now.

Fleet Foxes with Van Dyke Parks
Wednesday, Oct. 5 • Louisville Palace
625 S. Fourth St. • 583-4555
www.fleetfoxes.com
$35.50; 8 p.m.

photo by Sean Pecknold

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s political surprises

Louisville’s own Will Oldham, the only constant in the musical presentation known as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, has been performing since before LEO was just an idea in John Yarmuth’s brain. His new album, Wolfroy Comes to Town, was released on Oct. 4. This special performance introduces a new series of cultural events at the Clifton Center.

LEO: What do you like about the Clifton Center and what they plan to do there?

Will Oldham: I played a show there in the ’90s, and I think I was in a play there in the ’80s, possibly. I like that it’s in the best neighborhood in Louisville. I like that it’s a solid room that sounds good. It’s usually nice to play in a room that was designed as a theater, so there’s an inherent acoustic quality to the room — as opposed to so many of the rooms we play, where music was just added as part of the business of the place. Or, people have relied upon the eventuality of a PA making something transmittable to the ears of the audience. It’s always a treat to be in a room where there’s a relationship between what’s going on audibly from the stage and how people are meant to receive it, with or without electricity. And the Clifton Center is one of those places.

LEO: Is that why you like to play so many unconventional venues, because the sound quality can vary so much from club to club?

WO: When we travel on the road, we never travel with a sound engineer. Many clubs have great sound engineers who know what they’re doing very well, who deal with such a wide variety of music every night that they know their room better than anybody we could bring. We don’t do effects, we create our own dynamic on the stage, so we don’t need somebody who knows our set, we need somebody who knows and likes music, and knows their room and is consistent. At the same time, the variety of acoustic scenarios that we come across in the course of a tour, at times, can be jarring. So it’s good to fall back on an exterior scenario, or theatrical scenario; sometimes there’s something nice about people sitting in assigned seats, like in the Clifton Center, and sometimes it’s nice when people have the freedom to position themselves how and where they like during the course of a show.

LEO: Who’s playing in your band on this tour?

WO: (Guitarist) Emmett Kelly, who is also the Cairo Gang, he’s based in Chicago. Angel Olsen, based in Chicago, who’s singing with us and also makes records under her own name. And Ben Boye, who’s based out of Chicago as well, is playing a variety of keyed instruments — harmoniums, Hammond Rhodes, pianos. From Louisville here, (drummer) Van Campbell, (bassist) Danny Kiely and myself.

LEO: Have you worked up any surprising cover songs for this tour?

WO: Now, if I told you that …

LEO: (laughs) I knew you were going to say that.

WO: Well, you asked the question, “Do you have any surprises?”

LEO: You could’ve said “yes” or “no.”

WO: Right. I have no idea what a surprise would be or wouldn’t be for anybody. So, what’s up with Mayor Fischer not talking about Bonnie “Prince” Billy?

LEO: (laughs) That’s a great question.

WO: Yeah, it is a great question! Now he’s moved on to the Sherman Minton Bridge thing and talking to Barack Obama — there are more important tasks at hand.

LEO: I don’t know. I think it’s a city law that you have to endorse My Morning Jacket.

WO: (laughs) Yeah, I think that’s true. Does that mean I’m breaking a law?

LEO: Would you ever run for office here?

WO: I don’t think my past and personal life would stand up to the scrutiny of a campaign. Not in this life.

LEO: Is there anything else you’d like to cover for this article?

WO: I figure that making something readable in hopes that advertising can still get sold at a premium is up to you. So, when you feel that you’ve got the material to jump off the page … I’m happy.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy with The Phantom Family Halo
Sunday, Oct. 9
Clifton Center
2117 Payne St.
dragcity.com/artists/bonnie-prince-billy
$16 adv., $18 DOS;
7:30 p.m.

photo by Dirk Knibee

c. 2011 LEO Weekly

The LEO interview: Van Dyke Parks

Van Dyke Parks is a living legend, especially to record collector nerds. His work is vast and ever-surprising, ranging from his work with peak-era Beach Boys to Joanna Newsom today. He makes a very rare live appearance in Louisville tomorrow, opening for a group that idolizes him, Fleet Foxes. His label, Bananastan, recently released Arrangements, Vol. 1, featuring 15 of his most fun arrangements for himself and other artists.



LEO: Bananastan is a fun word, especially for a record label. What's the origin?

Van Dyke Parks: The word derives from a movie, The Hot Rock, with Robert Redford. My wife used it for her shop name in the flea market of Paris. I thought it sounded totally tropically topical, well-geared to my cogs of industry.

LEO: Do you think pop music and more experimental, baroque, composer-style music will ever coexist happily? Or will the public never accept such genre-hopping on the pop charts?

VP: Such definitions will be eclipsed in time, as was "hep," "groovy," and "far out". The public is pushing musicians ahead of the curve, with world beat sensations genre-hopping die hard pop stars.

LEO: Are there any artists today that you're aware of who make the type of music you hear in your head, or that you've become most known for?

VP: My favorite singer/songwriter is Paolo Conte. Unfortunately, I don't speak his language, But he typifies the kind of artists I like, who bring new elements together to shock and awe. Fleet Foxes has such maverick abandon.

LEO: Song Cycle has become one of the records honored with a 33 1/3 book devoted to it, and likely one of the least-known of the records in that series. Does it feel even more special to be in that position?

VP: Print publicity is all well and good. Yet, I agree with Oscar Wilde, who observed, "Criticism is the highest form of autobiography." Frank Zappa — of whose Mothers I was a player — put it this way: "Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."

LEO: You're touring now with a young band who are inspired by the work you've done since the early '60s, and you have a new compilation out now which highlights some of your earliest work. Do you ever feel like your professional life exists simultaneously in the '60's and in the present?

VP: I'm totally moved to be invited by a group so inspired. They mean so much to so many because of their courage and talented explorations. If anything from the '60s is worth saving, it's courage in the arts. There's a jungle of fundamentalism out there, waiting to be tamed by kind hearts.

LEO: Do you think music, and all of its possibilities, was more fun 45 years ago than it is today? Are musicians today lazier, or less inspired?

VP: My windshield is bigger than my rear view mirror. It was fun being a brunette ... now that there is snow on the roof, a fire rages within.

LEO: What are you working on next?

VP: This month, it's Skrillex, Paddy Malone and Ry Cooder, and an arrangement for Kimbra's debt on Warner Brothers. It's widescreen, at 360 degrees.

Fleet Foxes with Van Dyke Parks
Wednesday, October 5
Palace
http://bananastan.com/
$35, 8 p.m.