The Hippodrome

For some time now, Calabash Music, an online vendor of international music and a former employer of yours truly, has been shopping around its micro-financing platform for musicians that don’t have the funds to cut a record themselves. Now, Calabash is in the final round of an Ideablob contest that could give them the funding needed to get the idea off the ground. The idea, “Tune Your World,” from Calabash’s page:

Every artist has the same problem of obtaining capital for their next recording. Tune Your World provides the solution of applying micro-financing to the music industry. Our groundbreaking approach is the creation of peer-to-peer micro-financing of new music projects - enabling fans to deliver start-up capital to aspiring musicians from developing countries. Tune Your World operates on a people-to-people model. Musicians obtain funding for new recordings directly from their fans without giving up ownership or control. Our mission is to revitalize the music industry in places where the music industry has never worked very well.

While I did indeed work for Calabash, my opinions on this idea stand separately from my personal relationship with the company. Micro-financing has worked all over the world in many different industries, and while some sites like Sellaband have tried to bring it to western audiences, Calabash is the first company to implement it in places where the mainstream music industry has failed the most. With a business model that makes sense for the consumer and the artist, I encourage you to visit Calabash’s Ideablob page and vote to help them achieve their goal.

Rooftops are a math rock trio heavily influenced by recent Chicago visionaries like Pele and Don Caballero. The band is about to hit the road with The Americas, a Santa Rosa duo that are also looking to make their mark on the west coast. Bellingham, Washington, is the band’s home, and it isn’t a scene to scoff at either; beneath the home town heroes of Death Cab for Cutie lie hearty labels like Estrus Records that have churned out more than a few regional legends.

While Rooftops only have a few demos of recent work available, the band’s chops and groove tactics make them stand out from the crowd. “Robuts” is a rough recording from last year, but it still shows them playing solid instrumentals reminiscent of some of David Longstreth’s earlier music.

Audio: Robuts

(This is a continuation of a multi-part post. For part one, click here.)

Mississippi is a glorious state. If it wasn’t so hot (it was about 95 and humid today in Clarksdale), I’d love to live here for a while. We’ve been dressing fairly low profile and keeping the camera as discreet as possible, but even when they recognize we’re Northern tourists, people are still impeccably friendly and hospitable.

We left New Orleans last Thursday after a refreshing walk on the much hipper Frenchmen street, away from the girls (reluctantly) gone wild over on Bourbon. Local roads took us through the still much destroyed lower ninth ward, hit hardest by Katrina. We made our way up the gulf coast, hugging the shore as much as possible and eventually ending up in Gulfport.

There we visited an austere naval base where my grandfather was once stationed, and a b-b-q joint that was reduced to its foundations, blown away and abandoned. A picture on the wall of Daddy’s Little Kitchen, our replacement lunch locale, showed the building up to the roof in water. Even in the once affluent city of Biloxi, the only significant signs of industry were the massive casinos that rose like mountains off the man made beaches.

Depressed enough with the ravaging of Katrina, we skipped Mobile and headed instead to the sleepy town of Hattiesburg. We finally realized we had no idea what we were doing, and entered our second independent bookstore of the trip in search of a Mississippi guide. I managed to insinuate a “we’re from Boston” in the exchange with the cashier, and within twenty minutes, we had heard the life stories of the bookstore’s owners, the cashier (Diane) and her husband. We diligently wrote down every independent bookstore in Mississippi, and then borrowed Diane’s umbrella, enabling us to visit a local farmer’s market in the sunny rain.

At the market, I talked to a teen selling her photographs. She looked me square in the eye and explained that they “were an attempt to capture the essence of Mississippi.” Dropping another “we’re from Boston, sorry if we look lost” at a soap stand warranted a friendly “oh! I used to be stationed at Fort Devens!” and some friendly banter about the weather. Remarking on the weather is always a good idea.

A couple hours north, we hit the Elite Restaurant in Jackson, the state capital. The next morning at breakfast (which I slept through), my dad told me of a big family proudly reading off a U.S.A. Today every state Obama has won so far. Exploring the downtown in the morning showed another sleepy town, and in a downtown park parched by the heat, this church mural projected itself across the square… super southern Gothic:

West to Vicksburg brought us to the beautiful, 16 mile National Park that showed us the locales of one of the most important civil war battles. The conflicting inner narratives in the visitor’s center and tour were fascinating; the hokey 50s movie that we watched kept calling both sides “valiant” and “indisputably heroic.” My favorite of the 1300 statues was the Kansas memorial. The circles symbolize the union before, during, and after the war:

North to Greenville (via a national wild life refuge where I did indeed come within 20 feet of a wild alligator) created some inner disputes. Greenville was the poorest place I’ve ever visited… a waterfront casino has helped generate enough crime to board up most of the downtown, pushing commerce to the chains on the strip. Junior’s Juke Joint, an excellent delta blues resource, suggests several places in the neighborhood and urges people not to be afraid of the roving pimps and drug dealers that haunt the best places downtown.

We made a good faith effort to find some music, but nothing seemed to be going on. We ate at the now famous Doe’s Eat Place, sitting right in the kitchen between a man explaining to his son the ways the devil can get you, and a party of high school grads, arms tentatively around their girlfriends. A rove around town the next morning demystified some of the previous night’s uncertainties:

Now we’re in Clarksdale, soaking in the crossroads and visiting a few blues places tonight. The ways that music and culture influence eachother down here raise alot of interesting prompts, but that’s for a more detailed examination. I’m going try to take a video of Robert Belfour at Red’s Place tonight, and will have all the details in a few days… assuming an alligator doesn’t get me first.

Armed with my laptop, a camera, a tape recorder, and my trusted pops, I have embarked this week on a southern road trip. We’re in New Orleans now, driving to Mobile tomorrow, then all through Mississippi (on country roads) for four days, then ending up in Memphis. We’ve sketched some vague locales we’d like to visit (some blues joints and road food places), but the rest is unplanned. Wherever I can find some internet, I’ll give a report on anything interesting I find.

I haven’t idealized this trip as some vague appropriation of what the “south” is, but rather as an attempt to see a part of the country I’ve never seen. Naturally, undiscovered music will be a primary concern, and I’ll hopefully be able to write some longer pieces about what I find. Even just today in the city, it’s been weird (though unsurprising) to see what seat blues, jazz, and zydeco have taken in the hands of tourism. Bourbon street is a depressing mess of the seediest strip clubs mixed with tired performers doing half-hearted renditions of funk and soul standards. There are still some authentic places and performers here, but I think times have changed, hard.

Sorry I didn’t get any cool field recordings from some mind blowing two fingered blues guitarist on the street, but there’s still alot of ground to cover. A few photos from today’s wanderings, graveyards, garden districting, and street car riding (click for full size):

“To get to authenticity,” Meredith Monk said, “you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.” A group of Monk’s most unknown protégés, Lurch and Holler, make music so imminently sincere that it’s hard to do anything but just sit down and listen.

Liz Downing and Michael Willis, the folks behind the moniker, are from Baltimore and make music together on weekends. Since 1985, their songs, or “confessionals at the family picnic” as Downing likes to call them, are unpretentious, carefully written, and full of lyrical provocations, challenges, and stories.

Downing tells me that Hank Williams was a drinking buddy of her granddaddy’s, and I believe it. Clearly, this is a family with a rich performance history. Lurch and Holler started out as a performance art group called Lambs Eat Ivy, touring around, playing short musical plays with sets and costumes.

“A couple of our more successful plays were ‘Dance the Flaming Tongues of Carpet’ and Dream Bardo,’” Downing says. “’Tongues of Carpet’ was a reenactment of a faith healing that took place at my family’s motel, the Heart of Dixie, in AL. ‘Dream Bardo’ was of a librarian who fell off her ladder, broke her neck and went through the 49 days after death as instructed by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.’”

None of these eccentric themes seem lost in Lurch and Holler’s music. Their uncanny brand of songwriting seems unfounded at first, but a closer look at the storytelling and songwriting shows their experience. Distribution seems like a nonissue for the band, as Downing’s art teacher chops show on each beautifully handmade release. “At this point,” she says, “we would like to give our music to as many people as would have it.”

It was hard to only put up three songs from this prolific all-American band, but if the music gods are real, then Lurch and Holler will hit it big. This is Edith Piaf doing American cabaret, Joanna Newsom without a harp, or Anne Sexton confessing her most twisted daydreams.

Audio: Companion If You Please
Audio: Vertical Stripes
Audio: Walt Whitman’s Letter to Lincoln