Something From Nothing

Neither Jere Cherryholmes nor his wife Sandy grew up playing music, but now they have a family band. “I was in a rock’n’roll band in the 1960s and Sandy was a singer and did a lot of plays,” he said. Furthermore, in Southeast Los Angeles, where the Cherryholmeses began their family/band, there was no bluegrass music in the air. “It was 100 percent Hispanic area,” Jere Cherryholmes said. “So it was all mariachi music.” But in 1999, the death of their oldest daughter Shelly set the family on an unusual journey that is putting them in the national spotlight for their music. “Back in the '80s, I got involved in the Scottish Highlander games and at the festivals where I’d compete, they’d always have Celtic music,” Cherryholmes said. “We really liked that music and started listening to an NPR station that also played bluegrass music on Saturday mornings.” Celtic music and culture had by then become so much a part of the family life that when Shelly died, they buried her in a tartan sash. Her death, however, weighed heavily on the family, which included four surviving siblings ages 6 to 15, and they couldn’t seem to escape it. Even at church, they would be inundated with well-meaning friends asking how they were getting along and generally reminding them of their loss. “We were looking to get away from the grieving, to go where nobody knows who we are,” Cherryholmes said. “On the NPR station we heard of a bluegrass festival about 70 miles from where we lived, so one Sunday we went there instead of church.” One of the performing acts that day was Jim and Jesse McReynolds, and something about the family band idea struck Jere’s imagination. “I told Sandy, 'What we need to do is get instruments and start playing that stuff around the house,’ ” he said. So he scrounged up some instruments, including a guitar that he found in the trash and repaired a broken neck. Sandy knew a little about playing the fiddle, so she’d learn parts for fiddle and mandolin, then teach them to their children. Jere would learn guitar and bass parts and pass those along, too. “We started messing around with this in the living room,” he said. “No one in the family ever had any lessons.” After two months, they had nine songs in their repertoire and went to another festival where they did some tailgate busking. “People started asking us to come and play places,” he said. “Then every time we played somewhere, we got two more people asking us to come and play.” Eventually, realizing that if they stayed in L.A. and went out on the weekends, they could only do about a dozen bluegrass festivals a year, the family agreed that Jere should take an early retirement from his job as a carpenter with the Los Angeles Unified School District so they could move East, where the real playing took place. Hitting their stride in 2003, they have traveled thousands of miles in their vintage 1960 GM 4104 bus/home. They have appeared on “The Grand Ole Opry,” The Ryman Auditorium, Ernest Tubb’s Midnight Jamboree, Nashville’s Country Music Fan Fare, Branson, Dollywood, IBMA Fan Fest and countless radio and TV shows, festivals and concert venues throughout the U.S. Now, with a Grammy nomination for its second album, Cherryholmes is not only a fixture at bluegrass and roots music festivals (it recently played at Tall Stacks in Cincinnati), it’s also started playing theaters and arts centers.

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By the time he found a record company to release his latest batch of songs, Frank Black had a full double-CD package. Consequently, "Fast Man Raider Man" is bursting with a stellar line-up of guest artists, many of them a surprising credit on an alternative record that skews toward country. "Recording half of the album in one night after a gig was memorable fun," he said in a phone interview from the road, maybe Georgia. "It was cool to be standing at the microphone and if I look a little to my right, there's Levon Helm (of the Band), and if I look a little to my right, there's Ian McLagan (Faces, Small Faces). "It's great to be able to play music with a lot of legendary people like that." In addition to the Helm and McLagan, the guest list on "Fast Man Raider Man" includes Bobby Bare Jr., Memphis guitar icon Steve Cropper (who invented those great licks on "Dock of the Bay" and played in the original Blues Brothers), Jack Clement, Al Kooper, Jim Keltner, Buddy Miller, Tom Petersson (Cheap Trick), Simon Kirke (Free), Spooner Oldham and P.F. Sloan, among others. Given such a stellar line-up of guest artists, it could have been daunting to put together a road band to re-create the magic. "I couldn't ask Steve Cropper or Spooner Oldham to go on the road with me," he said. "Those guys play with legends and other gigs to go to." So he called on his old friends — guitarist Duane Jarvis, bassist Eric Drew Feldman, and drummer Billy Block — to create the "classic rock combo." "Who needs Steve Cropper when I've got Duane Jarvis," he said. As Black Francis, Boston-bred Black (born Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV) was one of the architects of modern rock as frontman of the Pixies, whose "loud-quiet-loud" dynamics, primal-scream intensity and free-ranging compositional style exerted a huge influence on alternative music. With "Fast Man Raider Man," he was attempting a sort of "Black on Blonde" approach to recording, referring to Dylan's classic "Blonde on Blonde," to assemble a cast of players and let the magic happen. "Half of it is prepared, half is serendipity," he said. "Some of the songs had been written the night before in the hotel room." Given the abundance of material, Black let other assemble the package itself. "If you give the job of sequencing to me, the songs are going to be in alphabetical order," he said. "I've done it. "That's where you get into overly precious territory. There's a Japanese philosophy of 'wabi-sabi,' where you strive to achieve perfect, then mar it. "I, too, feel the need to be disrespectful to my own work.

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It's all about word of mouth. "I call myself the most famous guy you never heard of," said singer/songwriter Paul Thorn. "The first time I played the Southgate House, I don't know how many years ago, I opened for Junior Brown," he said. "Then I opened for somebody else, then somebody else. Now when I come back, I'm not opening anymore and every time, the numbers keep going up. "If you go to a place once or twice a year and do a good show, people will keep coming back." Thorn has earned his reputation as storytelling singer/songwriter, many of his songs coming from his own colorful experiences. The son of an evangelist, he began performing in churches in and around his hometown of Tupelo, Miss. (also Elvis' hometown) at the age of 3. "My first paying gig was at a revival with my father when everybody came around and put money in my tambourine," he said. "After the service, there was a little girl, also about three years old, who I had a crush on. "I stuffed the money I got all down in my pockets. After the service we sat around the back of the church and I bought her a Coke with the money I'd earned. That was my first paying gig, and I guess my first date." The transition to singer/songwriter was a long, gradual one, he said, but he learned more about performing from the preachers he knew than anyone else. "Being a preacher is also being an entertainer," he said. "You have to be able to hold a crowd's attention. You read a little scripture, tell a little joke. It has served me well." His musical aspirations, however, were interrupted for a while when Thorn pursued a boxing career, which culminated in a nationally-televised bout with Roberto Duran in 1988. After that, he played guitar in a Tupelo pizza joint at night while he worked in a furniture factory during the day. Word-of-mouth served him well there, too, and record company executives started dropping in on him, perhaps hoping to find the next Elvis. "I was never allowed to go to concerts as a kid," he said. "So the first concert I ever went to was one where I opened for Sting."

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Lullabies, it would seem, aren’t just for babies.

Some of Sally Ellyson’s fondest childhood memories, however, are the lullabies that her parents sang to her.

So as an adult, and at the encouragement of her own son, she enlisted the help of a friend in the music business to help her create a tape of those special songs to hand out to her friends with babies of their own.

Everyone was so moved by the sweetness of her voice that they encouraged her to pursue a career - or at least a hobby - of singing, and she dutifully promised that she would.

Her son, however, wouldn’t let those promises go unfulfilled and hounded her to look for some venues in which to sing. Finally, one day she picked up a two-week old Village Voice and answered an ad looking for a female vocalist. A trio of songwriters č Dan Meese, Gary Maurer and Steve Curtis č had been working on a batch of songs but none of them had the vocal skills they were looking for. They had placed the ad in the Voice, had received about 200 demo tapes from singers, none of them what they were looking for, and the ad had expired when Ellyson called Messe, who told her to send in a demo.

“I didn’t have a demo,” she said. “I was just trying to keep my promise that I’d do something to pursue singing.”

What she did have, however, was the tape of lullabies, but she only had one copy. So she took it over to Messe’s house and had him dub it.

Messe, who not having heard her sing wasn’t exactly thrilled about adding to the collection and probably wouldn’t even have listened to her tape. But he when he dubbed it, he left his copy in the tape machine, and a few days later accidentally pressed play and was amazed at what he heard.

“I couldn’t believe that voice existed,” he said. “We all sort of felt like it was ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ like the exact right person showed up at the exact right time to get us home.”

“I think their songs had a similar essence as the lullaby tape,” Ellyson said. “We draw from the same well.

“I don’t feel comfortable singing over the top,” she said, “but their songs are deep and strong, have sentiments. I sing in a way that feels like I’m holding them gently.”

Although they weren’t really making an album to become a band, they became one anyway, and seven years and three albums later, Hem has developed a large and loyal audience, playing with Elvis Costello, Beth Orton and Wilco, among others, and playing prestigious venues such as Jazz at Lincoln Center.

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Of course, I'm mad about Kasey. But I really like her dad, BIll Chabmers, too. He knows how to play a tasty lick. We got to shake howdy with him after the show when Kasey was at the Southgate House and he was really cool.

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I dug up this column from Oct. 25, 2002 to show a friend, so thought I'd go ahead and post it here.

Sometimes it seems that we’re doing little more than running in place - always on the move, always involved, but apparently accomplishing little, waiting for something to happen.

A friend was trying to get me to help her make some sense of it recently over a tall sip of suds, and I remembered a passage from a book by Joseph Campbell, the late expert on mythology, in which he describes how rituals are sometimes designed to lull us into a higher state of awareness. He wrote, specifically, about primitive festivals lasting several days, a frenzy of dance and drum that would end in a sacrifice, sometimes a human sacrifice.

Campbell says that a ritual is the acting out of a myth. We can see it in some of our own religious practices, though our ceremonies rarely last more than a couple of hours and hardly ever involve human sacrifice - although taking marriage vows involves self-sacrifice for the sake of the union.

Consider how taking communion symbolically re-enacts Christ’s last meal to provoke a meditation on his resurrection. If we’re lucky and in the moment, we might achieve a moment of enlightenment.

Indeed, there’s a deep and enduring relationship between ritual and spiritual awakening, and it’s hard to imagine having a moment of the latter without the former.

“Ritual” is, etymologically-speaking, embedded in “spiritual.” “Spiritual” comes from the Latin noun “spiritus,” or ‘breath.” “Ritual” comes from the Latin “ritus,” which means the same thing, a ceremony. Both words share the comes from the Greek for “to fit,” which is also the root word for “arithmetic.”

(Oddly enough, tracing it further back to the proto-Indo-European word “arete,” which means “virtue” or “qualilty,” we can also see the root emerge in our words “art” and “right.” Words are wondrous things, aren”t they?)

Consider how much of our lives are spent in routine activities, things we can do with our eyes closed and our minds on other things. If you’re like me, you can play the tape of the first hour of this morning and not be able to distinguish it from every other morning of your life. It sounds boring - and it is - but either in spite of the boredom or because of it, I get some of my best ideas in the most mundane situations, while showering or exercising, for instance.

A great novel on this topic is “Something Happened,” by Joseph Heller, his first book after the classic “Catch 22.” For several hundred pages, nothing happens, and the only thing keeping us interested is the promise of the title and the beautiful way Heller describes the fears, jealousies and joys of the narrator’s life.

And so, I tried to assure my friend, that perhaps by leading lives of quiet, mind-numbing routine, we’re simply preparing ourselves for some great spiritual awakening, but we won’t know what that is unless we tend to the grind of maintaining a home and a family and a job and a church and a body and a car and so on.

If it seems as though we’re simply running a treadmill, then maybe we need to imagine ourselves in a giant hamster wheel generating enoromous amounts of energy to power something.

But so what? That’s the key, and something for each of us to decide on our own.

Our lives are like great novels and myths in that the narrative itself is not as important as the meaning we derive from it.

A version of this column originally appeared in the JournalNews, Hamilton, Ohio, on Oct. 25, 2002.

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Trying out a new thing called Scrapblog.

 

Check out the pictures from last weekend's overnight backpacking trip to Vesuvius Lake Recreation Area.

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This just in:

CHICAGO (AFP) - Fried Coke has become the latest artery-clogging hit at US state fairs, local media reports.

I guess Americans will eat anything as long as it's deep fried.

The gooey Coke-battered nuggets topped with cola syrup won the "most creative" title at the Texas state fair in Dallas last month. Since then, the deep-fried phenomenon has spread to North Carolina and Arizona.

"We've been getting calls from everywhere since we introduced it," Elizabeth Martin, a spokeswoman for the North Carolina fair, told the Dallas Morning News. "Everyone wants to know where they can get it."

Fried treats are as big of a draw at state fairs as the rides and prize-winning farm animals. Twinkies, cookies and even pickles are stuck with a stick, dipped in batter and then seared in the deep fryer.

Fried Coke's inventor, concessionaire Abel Gonzales Jr., is a creative fryer whose experiments have proven popular. Last year he sold 20,000 fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwiches, the Morning News reported. Fried Coke looks to be an even bigger hit: he sold 16,000 cups of the sticky balls in the first two weeks of the fair, which runs through Oct. 22.

Gonzales has also had more success with changing his recipe than Coca Cola did. He reworked the recipe to make the dough less cakey and more spongy so it would soak up more of the cola syrup.

"They were good before, but they are even better now," Gonzales said.

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Check out Lucid Nation's page at MySpace.com and listen to Tamra Spivey's bluesy vocals set against a solid backdrop of indie rock. Then sign up as one of  her friends and learn that she not only rocks, but has a brain and isn't afraid to tell the truth about the messed-up state of this world.

And she looks pretty hot wearing nothing but a bass!

1) Who taught you how to play guitar?

I started out when riot grrrl was in full swing and the emphasis was not on perfecting technique, it was on honest self expression. Now that to me was like the blues, my other love. I prefered the progressions of blues to the simpler riot grrrl style playing. So I got some tab books about the blues and I learned power chords, a few simple open chords, and the blues scale on the fret board. I did have a few bass lessons from a great bassist named Margaret Maldonado from the band Girl Jesus. Some of what I learned from her about how to hold my fingers and the evenness of scales helped me out on guitar, too.

2) What was your first public performance?

It was the first Lucid Nation show, at a cinderblock garage club called Cell 63 in a barrio of Los Angeles where I grew up. We opened for Tummyache and Crown for Athena, two bands composed of high school girls who ruled the Los Angeles riot grrrl scene at the time. I loved those bands, the lyrics and playing were so bright and sincere. We got a standing ovation even though when we did our last song and our drummer got out front to sing she accidently switched off her mic and stopped the show till we figured out what went wrong!

3) What would your dream job be if you couldn't be a performer?

I'd wrangle Bengal cats and Arabian horses on a solar ranch somewhere green but not too rainy.

4) Who do you most want to jam or write with?

Kim Gordon. Patti Smith. I've already played with the two drummers I wanted to play with most: Ken Schalk and Patty Schemel. Woah, they both start with Sch, I never noticed that before! We've been trying to hook up with Jack Endino to record, that would be a blast.

5) Do you write songs looking in the mirror or out the window?

Looking out the window. Since I do alot of freestyle improvisation I also write songs looking at the band, helps me get those cues right, and cue them. I find song writing is a constant process, so I'm always scribbling notes for lyrics, even when I'm doing mundane things like washing dishes.

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