Dash Rip Rock: Dixie Fried Rock and A Bottle of Jack Daniels at Every Gig

Photos from the Internet

This is the seventh part of a series of articles or interviews that have been published before in magazines that no longer exist. This one was originally in Oculus Magazine, Aug/Sep 1997; an update follows.

Dash Rip Rock: Dixie Fried Rock and A Bottle of Jack Daniels at Every Gig











Southern rock has come a long way in the past few decades, progressing through the influence of a lot of brothers: Burnettes, Everlys, Allmans, Van Zandts (aka Lynyrd Skynyrd), Slater and Doobie. Okay, the last two maybe pushing it, but the point is that southern rock as a form is constantly in flux and is currently circling back to its rockabilly roots.

Over the last decade, bands like the Stray Cats provided the listening public with the equivalent of Pat Boone doing “Tutti Frutti.” Recently, however, what is emerging from the underground is a rockabilly hybrid with large doses of punk and DIY sensibilities. In other words, it kicks butt.

In this vein, out of New Orleans comes Dash Rip Rock, a power trio if ever there was one. The band’s present incarnation includes founding members Bill Davis on guitar and most vocals and Hoaky Hickel on bass and “Jack Daniels” (as Davis explained, “It’s in [Hoakey’s] contract that he has a bottle at every gig.” The new kid is Kyle Melancon, on drums.

Davis often says, “We’re faster than [Reverend] Horton Heat, we’re wilder than the Cramps, and we’re better lookin’ than Southern Culture on the Skids.” These details are irrelevant, because while those other bands also have the talent, they don’t necessarily have the flexibility of musical styles.

Witness their latest release, Dash Rip Rock’s Gold Record (Naked Language). The band manages to flex their musical muscles over 15 numbers (plus one hidden cut, based on “Stairway to Heaven”) without contradicting themselves – a rare feat, indeed. After a rave-up cover of the instrumental “Rawhide,” they knock the listener down with a tale of rock’n’roll casualty/suicide, “Johnny Ace” (a much different and less romanticized take than Paul Simon’s “The Late, Great Johnny Ace,” which David contents he’s never heard). Other original songs on the CD contain a fine mix of pop sensibilities (“Isn’t That Enough”), a downright bizarre tale of love (“Liquor Store”) and a rockin’ social commentary about their home town of New Orleans (“DMZ”). In a number of odes written throughout their dozen years, Dash Rip Rock describe their love/hate relationships with the town in which they live. “We go to shows and meet all these people who moved away, and they love hearing these songs,” says Davis.


They also do quite a few covers, or should I say interpretations. Their latest collection includes two Hank Williams numbers: a Cajun version of “Jambalaya” and a speedy “I Saw the Light.” “No one,” Davis declares with a laugh, “expects us to play it that fast.”

Yes, Dash Rip Rock is very comfortable with covers. “When we played in Maine,” Davis adds, “they didn’t want to hear any originals, so we did every cover we knew. About 70 of them.” He continues: “In the small towns, the people are there to socialize, have a beer and dance, and we can play as sloppy as we want. The big city audiences are there to see the band. We are more careful about how we play.”











He emphasized this point by describing the band’s last gig at Brownies, one of their favorite New York venues (in which I was in attendance). “We knew there would be a lot of press there, so we went out to play well.” He continues, “Sometimes when we play we just go out there and let it all out.” Davis also remarked that either way, the band enjoys what they’re doing. They proved that by playing over two hours of rowdy fun. Despite the promoting for more “punk rock” by the opening band that night, The Cash Registers, Dash Rip Rock played a balanced set, mixing punk, pop, rockabilly, country and the kitchen sink.

Lots of stage antics go into a Dash Rip Rock set, and the fun never stops. Someone from the audience is picked to play tambourine, and Hickel shares his bottle of Jack (“unless he wants to get drunk.”). Though not “choreographed,” the act contains certain bits that have been standard for a while. Case in point: Melancon’s striptease during “Let’s Go Smoke Some Pot,” which is done to the tune of “At the Hop,” one of those mocking songs that gets accept ed by mockers and mockees alike. It may also become their breakthrough song on college radio.

Dash Rip Rock’s roots are all over their music. Hell, Davis’s been to Graceland more than two dozen times (“every time we pass through Memphis”). But they also exhibit other influences that expand their vision and increase their talents and showmanship, way beyond the levels achieved by most other bands.

NOW:
Bill Davis is currently the only original member of the bad, though DRR is still recording. Their latest album, Country Girlfriend, on Abitian Records, was released in 2008. The current line-up is Bill Davis as singer/guitarist, Patrick Johnson on bass guitar, and Eric Padua on drums

Discography
Country Girlfriend (2008)
Hee Haw Hell (2007)
Recyclone (2005)
Live From The Bottom Of The Hill (limited release, 2003)
Sonic Boom (2003)
Ned, Fred and Dickhead (limited release, 2001)
Hits and Giggles (2000)
Paydirt (1998)
Dash Rip Rock's Gold Record (1996)
Testosterone (Australian-only release, 1995)
Get You Some of Me (1995)
Tiger Town (1993)
Boiled Alive (1991)
Not of This World (1990)
Ace of Clubs (1989)
Dash Rip Rock (1987)

www.dashriprock.net

Margo Hennebach: Have You Ever Heard an Angel?

All images from the Internet

This is the fifth part of a series of articles or interviews that have been published before in magazines that no longer exist. This one was originally published in Oculus Magazine, January/February 1995; an update follows.

Have you Ever Heard an Angel?

Mad Agnes: Margo Hennebach, Mark Saunders, Adrienne Jones

It was sunny when I traveled up to Cold Springs, New York. Woodstock II was happening just across the Hudson. The first Woodstock was a celebration of both rock and folk music. Since the second was only rock (if you want to call that rock), I went to the folk. I interviewed Margo Hennebach.


We sat on her porch having salad culled from her own garden and talked about her recent self-titled album, released on the 1-800-PRIME-CD label. As the interview officially started, Margo picked up her guitar and quietly strummed away (when not running off for the ringing phone). Playing music for relaxation is nothing new for her: she possesses a Masters in Music Therapy from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in England.

Margo Hennebach, 1994
Music was an early love for Margo, a native of Queens, New York. She is an accomplished pianist, guitarist, and vocalist, who has performed publicly since the age of seven. Classically trained, her attraction to the folk genre began while studying at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, where she became involved in a folk music club. “They were way into Celtic music,” she recalled. After moving to England for two years, she became further familiar with traditional songs by joining in the national pastime of hanging out in pubs. “I think I’ve always known how to sing it, I just didn’t realize it.”

Michaelean, 1996
Bringing her training to the traditional sounds brought further appreciation of its appeal: “It’s sort of wailing, and sort of crying and singing all at the same time. It’s interesting inflections with the voice that sometimes reaches high in the chest voice, sometimes in the head voice. Melodically, it seems very ornamented sometimes, but other times it seems very simple and pure. I also like harmonically moving in the modal areas. We might be going from a D chord to a C chord and back again. And I like the drive. I like the rhythm.”

Possessing an eclectic music background that includes classical, opera, Mariachi, and Tex-Mex, Margo is not tied down to one style of folk, which is evident in her CD. The songs are folk-based, but clearly there are outside influences evident in her work. “We’re still using this term ‘folk music,’ even though we’ve already pushed the envelope of what that actually means.” When asked if the category should be widened to include World Music, as it has at many folk festivals, Margo contemplates, “Sometimes, as songwriters, we like to call it contemporary acoustic music. I don’t think too much about what to call it; I just make it.” And make it she does. Her CD is an assortment of stories of life – some hers, some others.

Big Love, 1998
A somewhat introspective, bittersweet look at life, the collection contains some potential breakthrough pieces, such as “Have You Ever Seen an Angel,” thoughtfully about he loss of someone close, or “Winter Snows,” which examines a relationship from intimacy to break-up. “I like to say that there are not more happy love songs out there because when someone is happy and in love, they’re not in their boudoir writing songs,” Margo says with a big smile. “We just want to be happy when we’re happy. We don’t want to think about ‘what is the process of being happy?’ We just want to jump into someone’s arms. Whereas when we’ve broken up with someone, when we’ve lost someone close to us in our lives, that’s when it’s easier for us to contemplate. That’s a place that I find a lot of my material.”

Comfort and Joy
The recording is overall very emotional. Stepping into the Western corner of folk, one song that stands out is “Fool’s Gold Paradise.” I tell Margo how touched I was by the lines, “I am grateful for you hands/I love them so/You know they understand/The sounding of my soul.” Actually, nearly all the songs stand out, which is quite impressive. I query Margo about her songwriting processes: “I’m not a facile writer,” she confesses. “So, to start to try to write some of those things that mean so much to me is like transforming this thing into words. Sometimes it doesn’t seem possible.” And just what makes a song a complete entity? “Bob Dylan sets a poem to music and sometimes the music is almost a little incidental to the words that he’s trying to say. For me, there needs to be like a marriage of the music and the words, otherwise I lose interest. Later in life I discovered that a song is a perfect art form: just to try to bring that sort of otherworldliness of the music to something very practical that has the kind of limitations of it that language has. The songs that I know that are what I consider perfect, I think that’s just incredible.”

One of those songs is covered on the CD, the lilting “Caledonia,” by Doug MacLean, which she recorded before hearing the original version. “I had heard Rod MacDonald perform it. I got some of the words sort of different from the original. I guess that is sort of the process. I float it a little more (than Doug); I make it a little more ethereal.

Live at UH, 2002
The whole process of folk music is based on an oral tradition, so many versions of the songs abound. Margo appreciates that. “In classical music…you would not think of altering a note. ‘This is how Mozart wrote it, this is how you play it.’ In the folk tradition…it’s only natural that things would get changed, like my version of ‘Caledonia.’ Some of the words are different because I learned that through the folk tradition, through someone else doing their rendition. Meanwhile, people are learning my rendition and that’s making them spin off other ways of singing it. You don’t know if that is getting further and further way from Dougie’s song, or in a way maybe it’s closer because it means that we all have a personal relationship with it. I find that really exciting. A different artist is going to make you see something a little different than others.”

Magic Hour, 2003
Margo has a personal philosophy about other performers’ and writers’ songs: “As an artist, I’ll never want to cover a tune the way I’ve heard it done. I’m too rebellious by nature. The only reason why I’d wanna cover it is that I can lend something else to it; I can really involve myself in it. Even if that means doing ‘Oh, Suzanna’ and sticking in a little whistling part.”

“Oh, Suzanna” is a reference to a performance by Madwomen in the Attic a few weeks before this interview at Maxwells, in her old neighborhood of Hoboken, New Jersey. Madwoman in the Attic is a trio consisting of Margo and two other Connecticut-based folkers, Diane Chodkowski and Adrienne Jones, who use the group to try out songs and to just have fun with folk “oldies” and newer covers (e.g., by Richard Schindel).

Who's Mad Agnes?, 2005 DVD
With a solo album out, appearances on numerous compilation albums, and a new album due out early next year, Margo is happy to see folk music spread its wings. “The Hoboken people are now working on our second batch of tapes, albums and demos. The stakes are a little higher, so there’s a lot more attention and care. And I think the music is getting better and better all the time. I would love to see there be a movement, and it’s happening. Music is taking place all over, with people in their own backyards making music, opening up their homes and are bringing people in to have home concerts; sort of taking control of the music a little more. People are deciding, ‘Well, we don’t need to go to a club to make music. We’re just gonna do it ourselves.’ And eventually a community is formed and created around that. Then a coffeehouse exists and that moves perhaps to a theater. It keeps getting bigger and bigger as more and more people get drawn to it. I’m amazed at all these places I can go to, and people will hear music. They won’t know who I am, they won’t know any of the performers who come through, but they learn to trust that people come to their towns and make music for them. I think there’s going to be a maturity in the music that I already hear happening now. And I think that’s going to keep happening.”

Revenants, 2006
After our lunch and talk, Margo gives me a tour of an ancient cemetery and then directs me to the train. On the walk back, it starts to pour. Reassuringly, I was just as drenched as those at Woodstock II, except for me, it was in the name of folk. A good tradition.

* * *

Now:
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen Margo play. In fact, I’ve had the pleasure to see all three members of her present trio, Mad Agnes, play in one form or another, but always with Margo as the center. Margo (vocals, piano, synth, guitars, bass) I’ve seen a few times solo, in Madwoman in the Attic with Adrienne Jones (vocals, guitars, bass), as mentioned above at Maxwells, and with her husband Mark Saunders (vocals, acoustic, electric and National steel guitars, mandolin, bass) at Fast Folk and the Sidewalk Café. I’m looking forward to seeing the Mad Agnes, who mixes folk and humor into a good-natured show.


DISCOGRAPHY
MAD AGNES
Revenants (2006-7)
Who's Mad Agnes? DVD (2005)
Magic Hour (2003)
Live at UH (2002)

HENNEBACH & SAUNDERS
Comfort & Joy (2000) PrimeCD
Big Love (1998) PrimeCD

MARGO HENNEBACH
Michaelean (1996) PrimeCD
Margo Hennebach (1994) PrimeCD

ADRIENNE JONES
There Is No Rose (2002)
Voice In The Mirror (2002)
Talking River (1999)
All My Days & Nights (1995)

Links
www.madagnes.com

The Professor and Maryanne

Professor and Maryanne, Fast Folk (1996)
FFotos © Robert Barry Francos

This is the second part of a series of articles or interviews that have been published before in magazines that no longer exist. This one was originally published in Oculus Magazine, August 1996; an update follows.

Professor and Maryanne

Fairy Tale, 1993
A wet and dreary spring evening, and I’m in the Luna Lounge, on the Lower East Side. The duo of The Professor and Maryanne are sandwiched in time between their soundcheck and an interview with Videowave, a local access cable show.

Y’see, I’m a fan of the group, who have just released their second recording, Lead Us Not Into Penn Station. Their music is generally ballads, in a modern jazzy folk vein, but they mix in a wide swath of rock’n’roll, blues, waltz, and sheer magic. And lyrically, the songs are usually quite intelligent, without being cryptic. Tending to be in story form, the tunes tell of flea circuses, fairy tales, and abundance of humorous (and fruity) deaths (more on this later), and all forms of love. In fact, some of the strangest written love songs I’ve heard in a long time.

Lead Us Not Into Penn Station, 1996
But first, some background. Okay, so obviously the group got their name from that ‘60s television show. The Professor, Ken Rockwood, however, really was a professor – of computer science. He must have been a blast to have in front of the classroom, as his easygoing, funny banter implies. Now he plays the guitar and sings. The Maryanne half is misleading however, as she is really Danielle Brancaccio (isn’t that a great name?), and ex-beautician from Staten Island. She also sings, with an easy, distinctive voice and style that can be both incredibly vulnerable and sexy.

Having met in a bar in Staten Island (when questioned on the validity of this point, they insist it is true), Ken and Danielle quickly formed a friendship and were soon imbedded in a pop band called Pet the Poodle. “We weren’t very good,” admits Ken. Danielle adds, “Yeah, it was pretty bad,” to which Ken chimes in, “But it was a long time ago.”

Professor and Maryanne, 2001
Well, they’re obviously improved, having been signed by Hoboken’s Bar/None Records after their fourth gig (Ken admits, “It was a stroke of luck, maybe”). They released either first collection, Fairy Tale, in 1993. Though rough in spots, there were obviously indications of things to come. Some songs remain in the group’s live show, such as “Thief,” “The Only Cool Place in Town,” and the amazing title cut. Ken explains that, “Fairy Tale took a long time to record. It was a first record and we felt a bit of pressure. It came out the way it did and we like it, but the second one was much more relaxing, so we enjoy it more. We had fun making it, and it came out better in some ways.” Danielle further explained the process that led to the ease of Lead Us: “We were off for that whole year [between recordings] and then performed 20 gigs a month before we made the record, so we were ready to do it, whereas the first record we were new at it.”

Runaway Favorite, 2003
Along with songs of love (my favorite by far is “Willow,” the opening cut of Lead Us), one of the aforementioned consistent themes that run throughout their songs, is death. The imagery varies from the subject (“Luck,” “The Only Cool Place in Town”) to passing comments (“Cadillac”), whether ludicrous, perky or wistful. Ken, who writes most of the songs, said, “I don’t quite know how that happens. I think it’s more of a Mickey Spillane kind of death; you know, dirty detective sort of death, where death isn’t really death. But I have a slew of more death songs for the next record. Literally, many more death songs!” As a sidebar, Danielle responded with a witty query: “What death songs?”

Every Day, 2008
Finally, it’s time for the show. Danielle, dressed in overalls, sings her songs emphatically, making you want to be there for her to sing “Good Morning.” Ken, in his suspenders and guitar, sings his songs with an enjoyable touch of cynicism (especially the death songs), makes humorous comments between songs in a steam of consciousness was, even quoting vintage Bugs Bunny lines (“If my friend Rocky was here…”). Danielle doesn’t say much and enjoys the banter along with the audience, occasionally making sly comments. She declares, “I’m kind of quiet anyway. I don’t have much to say. Sometimes I get a little gumption. If he’s in a certain mood where he talks a lot, I just let him go.” Ken admits, “I usually talk a lot.”

NOW:
Tin Heart, 2008
I happy to report that The Professor and Maryanne are still performing around town, at places like the Rockwood Music Hall, in Manhattan on Allen Street. They are also still producing recordings, such as their latest, Tin Heart.

www.professorandmaryann.com
www.myspace.com/professorandmaryannmusic