AMBASSADOR HOTEL
DEEP THROAT
FOREVERLAND
LITTLE HOUSE
ROADKILL DAN
SLIDE PROJECTORS
KIM BAUER
THE POLYPHONIC SPREE
TEENAGE VIRGINS
STEVEN COJOCARU
MICHAEL JACKSON
DEATH OF CASSETTES
JACKASSES
UROLOGY MUSEUM
MISSING MUSIC
HERB RITTS
GUITAR HEAVEN
MORMON UNDERWEAR
BILL HANNA
JAKE RYAN
Rock's Happy Feet
Polyphonic Spree Dresses Its Music in an Unlikely Style: Unapologetically Upbeat
(The Washington Post | June 9, 2003)
By Hank Stuever
DALLAS--Three men (one of them shirtless, affectionately nicknamed Bubba) grunt and huff and lift a classical harp into the back of a U-Haul trailer, and already it feels like the truest punk rock moment I've seen in a long time.
Under a 90-degree Texas sun on a recent Saturday morning, on a speckledy-green shady street, the rest of the band -- about 20 people, since we're still missing a couple -- is smoking cigarettes, or sitting on the curb, or leafing through a copy of yet another British music magazine that has just put them on the cover. (Big headline: "It's Only Rock and Robe.")
Their road manager barks at them to start loading the rest of their instruments and gear: a French horn, a trumpet, a trombone, a fluegelhorn. Then a viola, an upright bass; an organ, a synthesizer, a Moog keyboard, a pedal steel guitar, a theremin, an electric piano. Then two guitars, then a bass guitar, flute, piccolo, bell lyra; a heavy-metal-worthy drum kit, then timpani and a set of tubular bells the size of a tall bookshelf. Tambourines galore, plus a stack of amplifiers and a set of riser platforms for a choir (almost) angelic, each of whose members gets his or her own Shure 58 microphone.
There's a gym-sock smell to it all, and I remember how much I once loved to watch rock bands load and unload.
I thought I'd lost faith in rock-and-roll.
Then I met The Polyphonic Spree.
Self-billed as a "choral symphonic pop band," The Polyphonic Spree has 23 members (14 men and nine women), all of whom live in or around Dallas. Ranging in age from 16 to 37, some of them keep full- or part-time jobs (a proofreader, a club hostess, a record store clerk or two). Many of them did time in other bands, living a rock ethic of broken-down Econoline vans and underpopulated club audiences and blown amps. Or they took up instruments in high school that precluded them from rock-and-roll. Or they spent time wishing they were in a band, yearning to sing about something good and true, only to spend their twenties collecting bruises in mosh pits or sneering at deejays.
In concert, the members of The Polyphonic Spree all wear flowing white robes, suggesting a purification has occurred.
While the musicians pound and blow and strum away, the band's leader, Tim DeLaughter, and a choir of nine jump and dance and sing about such long-forgotten song topics as the sun, and life and warmth.
There is no discernible irony or inside joke here. There is just the simple core belief in such things as Phil Spector's wall of sound or the joyful mysteries of St. Brian Wilson. At first pass, a Polyphonic Spree song sounds like unremarkable flotsam from the 1970s. But then it feels gumdroppily layered; simple, exuberant, with a slight whiff of pain and emerging recovery:
"Have a day / Celebrate / Soon, you'll find the answer . . ."
Space is an issue onstage in smaller clubs, when the band performs elbow-to-elbow and forehead to guitar arm, and offstage, too, as the band sets out for a third U.S. tour in a chartered bus modified with two dozen sleeping bunks. "You have to stand up the whole time, or lay in your bunk," says James Reimer, 29, the trombone player. (The bus rolls into Washington this week for shows at the 9:30 club tomorrow and Wednesday.)
The band often finds itself playing the kind of clubs where audiences on any other night stand in the unhappy pose of cynical, oversold, over-hip consumers; that slouchy, hands-in-pockets crowd with the medicated disinterest of a post-punk affliction. These are the very bars in which I'd grown older and jaded, and slowly lost my way in the secondhand smoke. (Example: On a drizzly night this winter, we'd gone to see the band of the moment -- a new-new wave trio from New York -- and the lead singer tore at her shirt and bra and poured liquor all over her face and chest, and I thought, eh. Her songs were all about stress, aggression, hurt, horniness. Except for some requisite shoving around, nobody danced. Nobody smiled.)
A Polyphonic Spree show has a strange, revivifying affect on this kind of crowd, unleashing a wild happiness, turning professional slackers into human superballs and leaving rock critics reaching for comparisons to Up With People, or the "I'd like to teach the world to sing" Coke commercials, or sly references (because of the overall visual effect of the matching robes, and because these are wild-eyed Texans) to Kool-Aid and David Koresh.
Since its debut at a Dallas nightclub almost three years ago, The Polyphonic Spree has eluded almost any attempt to describe it, deride it, or, most of all, make it fit anyone's idea of what a rock band does or should do. Perhaps the right word is simply "more."
When there's 23 of you -- plus a road manager, plus a Bubba -- more is better.
"The more it goes on, the more experiences people are having at our shows; it's pretty fantastic. I think there's an enormous amount of power being unfolded with The Polyphonic Spree, which was not exactly my plan," says Spree leader DeLaughter in a gentle, urban Texas twang. "I can feel it happening now, that people at the shows are viewing and taking part in a celebration -- I don't know of what; it's still kind of evolving. It's not the same kind of energy you get when you're playing with a four-piece band. You're getting it from 23 people, all directions. Something's happening on a sonic level that I'd never felt before."
More is a whole lot more. More is a symphony, an amassing of everything, a lot of puffy clouds in limitless blue skies. More is like some kind of Jesus-Christ-Superstar-Magical-Mystery Association selling tickets to the loudest church-basement production of "Godspell" starring Todd Rundgren that you ever saw. (A "Godspell" without the preaching or the clown crucifixion. Something so rockin', so out-there, that the parish council immediately fires the youth pastor the next morning, on rumors that half the cast was high.)
"Sunshine seas of bunnies and butterflies," effused a critic from PopMatters, a music Web site, after The Polyphonic Spree played Portland, Ore., in April. The band has liked the sunshine-bunnies-butterflies description better than any other they've read so far, maybe because of Portland's affinity for rain and remorse.
"[A] church choir of a never-never land where the congregation has blue hair, digs psychedelic rock and sings at the top of their lungs without embarrassment," said the Austin Chronicle, writing up the band's performance in a local record store a year ago during the citywide South by Southwest music festival. A confluence of visiting music journalists briefly abandoned the drone of electro-clash and minimalist blues-rock to climb aboard the Spree's happiness train, writing favorable reviews of its performances and debut album, "The Beginning Stages of . . . The Polyphonic Spree." John Lamonica, 23, a recent recruit to the Spree's choir section, set aside his obligations (another band, work, whatever) for the white-robe way. "Man, when I first saw them, I couldn't believe it," he says. "I didn't believe it could be done. I was in utter amazement."
David Bowie invited the band to perform at the Meltdown Festival in England in 2002, and so warm was the reception that the Spree has gone overseas two more times for concert tours, TV appearances and a performance at London's Royal Festival Hall (where they blew out the power and played on acoustically).
A single, "Hanging Around," broke onto British pop charts. They were featured in Vanity Fair; they performed at the Coachella Valley Music Festival in the California desert and appeared in April on the "Jimmy Kimmel Live" show on ABC. Recently, the band signed a bigger American recording contract with Hollywood Records; a second album is coming early next year.
DeLaughter, 37, first envisioned the Spree concept at what might have been the lowest point of his life, three years ago.
He'd also lost faith, a bit, in rock-and-roll. He had been in a band called Tripping Daisy for eight years, and there was some moderate success: a few albums and a briefly heard alternative hit in 1995 called "I Got a Girl." The band dissolved in 1999, after guitarist Wes Berggren died of a drug overdose.
A "pretty depressed" DeLaughter, married with three children, retreated from the music scene. He helped open a record shop in Dallas with his friend Chris Penn.
There was no divination or life-changing experience behind all this, no lightning bolts or burning shrubs. It was Penn who nudged DeLaughter back onstage, booking him to open solo for another band at a nightclub without telling him until it was a done deal. DeLaughter had always wanted to invite a large number of people to perform with him, something along the lines of a rock symphony. "I only had about two weeks to get a show together, and for a long time I'd had this idea in my head, like I could almost hear it. I wanted to add all these instruments together and just see what it would sound like," DeLaughter says.
In a friend's living room, he was able to gather 13 musicians and work out some of his new songs. He just wanted to see what it sounded like when that many musicians were playing together, combining classical instruments with rock moves.
What happened next brought tears to his eyes. "The sound of it . . ." he recalls, trailing off. The "multi-sonic extravaganza" was born. He was a boy again, listening to 45s of the Association or the Fifth Dimension, or listening to scratched-up Walt Disney "Storybook" records.
The Polyphonic Spree debuted with those original 13 players, and almost immediately people started asking him if he needed help, or more singers. Things progressed in this way, word spread, and it got easier to find someone who, for example, happened to know a harp player who could improvise.
"The mystery is how or what brought everyone together," DeLaughter says. "I have no idea. Each of them will have their own reasons why, their own agendas for joining the band. There's not like some common idea or mission. When we're home and not touring, we don't all hang out together. But it seems pretty obvious that when we're playing together, we're enjoying ourselves."
As fun as it is, "I can't think of a worse way to try to support my family," DeLaughter says. (His wife, Julie Doyle, sings in the choir. Their children are coming along for part of the trip. Penn, 32, is the band's road manager and "robemaster.") As with past trips, the current tour could lose some $20,000, Penn expects, given the cost of transporting a band so large and paying members a small per-diem fee to stick around. The financial picture improves in England, because of the Spree's popularity and promoters who shoulder more expenses.
DeLaughter and the Spree have inspired a following, but without the intense and over-devoted ethos of a Phishy jam band craze. At the band's annual Christmas concerts in Dallas, the Spree has shared the bill with onstage hairdressing, zoo animals and a troupe of tap-dancing grandmas who usually tour the nursing home circuit. Hipsters abound, in Goodwill nerd-couture and horn-rimmed glasses, but hipness has no truck here. It's the first indie rock show where aging Gen-X'ers felt like they should bring their toddlers, or their mothers.
If it felt too '70s throwback or too Deadhead, it wouldn't work. The charm is intact even when the Spree try to tell a joke as a song, such as when it covers "Ride, Captain, Ride," by Blues Image or "Time," by the Alan Parsons Project. There's a strange sense of peer pressure being exerted, pressuring you only to be happy, to sing, to clap your hands. This is no small feat in the 21st century, and for all its harkening back to another era, it feels new.
The Polyphonic Spree band members get into two passenger vans and set out for their gig on this night at the venerable Stubb's Bar-B-Q compound in Austin, a three-hour drive south, pulling the U-Haul behind one van. (The sleeper bus is used only for long hauls lasting days or weeks.)
The vans merge onto freeway loop after freeway loop, sailing along ramps of mesmerizingly bland asphalt in the shapes of flower petals.
Here is the Texas of small-time legend and rock bands that almost never become famous, which is not the Texas of movies and lore but rather the chaotic, traffic-clogged Texas of offramp Whataburgers, the Fireworks Supercenter, the Czech Stop filling station that sells kolaches. It's the kind of Texas where, if you play in a band, you live on the Lower Greenville side of Dallas or the east side of Austin, and while away un-air-conditioned evenings drinking beer in the back yard on rusted patio chairs, under a string of Christmas lights. If there is religion to speak of in The Polyphonic Spree, it's the spirituality of do-it-yourself, spread the love, lend me a dollar, make a record.
Some of the Spree are veterans of other bands. "All my bands pretty much sucked," says Logan Keese, 21, who plays trumpet and fluegelhorn in the Spree. "I lived in San Antonio, and there is no scene and nowhere to play." His last band was called For Bob Vila. Other Spreesters were in bands with names like El Gato, 25 Percent Toby, My Space Coaster, or UFOFU.
Mark Pirro, 32, the Spree's bass guitarist, was also in Tripping Daisy with DeLaughter. "Being on the road, being in a band with just three other guys, I've done that. So have a lot of other people. . . .
"There's a certain comfort level that I want," he says, wondering where the Spree's labor of love will take him. "I look around at what people my age are doing. I still don't have a house. I go on the road and live in this other reality, where you don't really feel like you're a part of the rest of the world."
Audrey Easley, 30, the band's flutist, studied music at North Texas and then got her master's degree in England. But you know what? There's not a lot of demand for flute. "And I wasn't sure what was going to happen then," she says. "I was basically at the point where I was going to be teaching lessons to middle-schoolers and trying to get wedding jobs."
Easley had never really played in a rock band before. She likes the life, the travel, the robe laundry.
"What about you, James," Easley asks, turning to the back seat to trombonist Reimer. "Have you ever been in a band?"
"We don't speak of it," Reimer drolly answers. "It was death metal."
"Trombone in a death metal band?"
"No, not the trombone."
So we don't speak of it.
The vans stop at a Whataburger in Hillsboro, Tex., and the band forms a long line at the register. The pedal-steel player makes a rebellious decision to dart across the frontage road to a Jack-in-the-Box.
In the afternoon, with the temperature rubbing the 100 mark, the Spree vans arrive at Stubb's in downtown Austin and unload their gear. Among the first things to come out of the U-Haul is a giant banner, hoisted above the stage on the lighting grid, with "The Polyphonic Spree" in tubular letters against a brilliant, rusty sun setting over desert rock formations (recalling patterned waterbed sheets, for some reason).
The Spree doesn't like to have too many people nosing around the sound check, mostly because band members aren't yet wearing their robes. The robes have come to identify them, unify them. DeLaughter says that nearly every reporter has asked him if he's running a cult. ("I didn't mean to, but maybe it's becoming one," he jokes.)
But there are enough of us listening to the sound check to appreciate something about The Polyphonic Spree that you don't hear much about in articles about rock-and-roll: They've practiced. They've practiced and practiced, and they take what they're doing very seriously. There are rock bands that try too hard, only to be told, by critics, that they're trying too hard. The Polyphonic Spree wants you to know that this band is trying hard.
It seems like the least you can do, in return, is just let it go.
There is the matter of telling about the show itself.
About how hot it is outside that night in Austin, and about the crowd, and about the fact that I did not think it was possible to play trumpet in the manner of Motorhead.
Or about the little boy: An hour before the show begins, DeLaughter (sans robe) and Penn meet a man who introduces them to his young son, who says he wants to grow up to play the cowbell in a rock band. DeLaughter tells the boy he just happens to have a cowbell and just happens to need a cowbell player, and that they should wait for his cue.
Dorothy LeBlanc, 45, comes up and introduces herself, and tells DeLaughter that she loved the '60s and '70s and that she first heard The Polyphonic Spree CD because her son, who is 18, had it. She drove all the way from Denham Springs, La., to see them perform, "and I have to know," she asks, "Where are you from? How did this happen? Where is it coming from?"
"We're from the sun," DeLaughter says.
Is it his long, pretty curls? His blue eyes? His calm manner? Something about DeLaughter makes people want to believe in it all.
The lights go down and the silhouettes in white robes take their places on the stage.
They sing: "You're hanging around today / You're foolin' yourself with play / You're taking it all to a future sight . . ."
Here is where I start to believe again, song after song:
"Just follow the day / Follow the day / And reach for the sun!"
Near the end of the show, the crowd passes that little kid up onto the stage, and he plays that cowbell. I let go, for once, and clap along. Rock-and-roll happens for me anew when the little boy jumps back into the crowd and gives the two-fisted universal headbanger symbol for "rock," his pinkie fingers extended somewhere up toward whatever planet The Polyphonic Spree came from.
