Bachelors Of Art Reunite At Jam Room Music Festival

With all the attention Jay Matheson has been getting around town this month leading up to his Jam Room Music Festival, the fact that he’s playing a reunion set with Bachelors of Art (Also known later in their lifespan simply as BOA) has almost been an afterthought or aside. For anyone who was active in Columbia’s music scene in the 80′s, however, this is an event of major proportions and reason enough to show up on Saturday afternoon.

The only previous reunion since the group quit playing twenty years ago was at 2007′s Rockafellas Reunion gig, where they performed to a full house like they’d never stopped.

“It’s hard to remember 2007 now, I was apprehensive for that show, for coming back from being gone so long,” BOA’s lead singer Robin Wilson Hall says. “I wondered what it would be like, and it turned out to be a great night.” She isn’t as nervous this time around, she claims.

“I’m such a perfectionist usually but even though the nerves are still there I’m not as worried about whether or not it will be just right,” Wilson Hall says. “The older you get, we’re just appreciative of being able to go out there and do it again, and it’s fun to hear Tom (Alewine, BOA guitarist) and it’s fun to be back in Columbia.”

In addition to Alewine, the one constant member of BOA’s various lineups, Blake Liles will again fill the drummer’s seat as he did in 2007.

For most BOA fans, Robin Wilson’s voice was the signature of the band, but she wasn’t even the group’s original lead singer.

“I was in another band before BOA and Rick Griffith (drummer for local rockabilly legends the 88′s) told me they were looking for a new singer, so I went and auditioned with Tom,” She remembers. “A lot of the early songs we did were written for their previous singer, we didn’t start writing together for a while because they had all these songs already written but it evolved from there with Tom writing a lot of the material.” It took the addition of Matheson on bass to solidify the group’s sound, she says.

“With Jay, it became a real hard rocking band,” She says. “We were looking for a new bass player and Tom mentioned Jay—I said ‘oh, no, he’s too hard rock for us.’ Jay joined up and really helped define the band’s sound from that point on.” For Robin, there was really only one goal from the start, musically.

“I wanted to be Peter Murphy, singing as low and as dark as I could,” she says.

The band ended up as a Gothic rock powerhouse, along the lines of Sisters of Mercy but with Wilson’s pipes setting them apart from the rest of the region’s more popular acts. She remembers how hard it was back then to even find the kind of music they were into.

“It’s so different now, when you have such easy access to discover different kinds of music,” She says. “We had to find out on our own, WUSC was the only real way to get in touch with what was considered ‘alternative’ back then, before that became just another marketing term.”

Speaking of marketing, Wilson Hall found some treasures recently from the band’s heyday in an unlikely place—her garage.

“I found a bunch of BOA bumper stickers in a box in my garage,” She says. “My mom gave me a box of my stuff she found when she moved, and there was all this band stuff in it.”

Having done the ‘band stuff’ with both BOA and her Atlanta-based band Skirt for many years, Wilson Hall is realistic about this week’s show and its place in her current life.

“It is not just physically but emotionally hard to go back and sing these songs,” She says. “Once you leave that lifestyle of being in a band, riding in a van with three or four others for long distances and not much money, you know better—but while you’re involved in it, you’re blind.” Even though she wouldn’t do it long term again, Wilson Hall says she’s looking forward to Saturday’s set at the Jam Room Music Festival with a mixture of excitement and nerves.

“I have been coming back and forth to Columbia for practice but can’t be at all of them, so I used our CD to rehearse here at home,” says the current Atlanta resident. “I started crying at one point when I was singing along to the CD and wondered ‘how am I going to get through forty-five minutes of this?’”

She’ll do it with the support and presence of another packed audience of fans, new and old.

(photos and video in this post are from the 2007 Rockafellas Reunion show at 5 Points Pub)

The Jam Room Festival is a free concert on Main Street in Columbia, SC on Saturday October 13^th. BOA takes the stage at around 4:30 p.m.

 

 

 

 

Video of the Week: FatRat Da Czar for President?

Forget about Obama and Romney, on November 6th you now have another choice–Columbia, SC hip-hop guru FatRat Da Czar will be releasing his latest album Da Cold War 3 on election day. Go ahead and vote Republican or Democrat, but remember to pick up a copy of FatRat’s new joint to smoke in the car on the way home from the polls. For more on this development, I give you Fat Rat himself:

Columbia’s Nashville Connection

CherryCase

With last week’s ‘farewell show’ from local indie-pop band CherryCase, the trickle of musicians leaving Columbia, SC for Nashville, TN has become if not a flood, a definite trend. In addition to Jake Etheridge and Taylor Desseyn of CherryCase, the young yet very talented Haley Dreis is also relocating this summer; she’ll be teaching violin and pursuing her music full-time. Last year, another accomplished local songwriter, Hannah Miller, made the move.

Haley Dreis (photo by Clayton Bozard)

They join a cast of Columbia and South Carolina expatriates already established in Music City to varying degrees. Taylor Bray, who played in several area bands during his tenure in Columbia, is working in the studio business there, while Charleston singer and songwriter Amber Caparas has been there a year or so as well. Camden native Patrick Davis is a well-entrenched presence in Nashville with hit song credits by Pat Green and Jason Michael Carroll (“Where I’m From”) and cuts from Darius Rucker and others, while Christian songwriter Laura Story (“Mighty To Save,” “Blessings”) has also been there for a while. Reach way back into SC music history and you’ll find artists such as Rob Crosby, who had several hits as an artist and still works as a writer, and Mark W. Winchester, onetime bassist for Columbia’s Rockabilly 88 who has played with Emmylou Harris and the Brian Setzer Orchestra in addition to a few indie releases on his own.

Patrick Davis

A few local artists leaving for the greener avenues of Music City doesn’t make an entertainment brain-drain, of course, and the opportunities available in a music town like Nashville will always draw the really serious players no matter what South Carolina audiences do. For the rest, there are plenty of ways to make music and stay right here in Columbia, or Charleston. The list of well-known acts staying put may someday start to outstrip the ones jumping ship, even. Chaz Bundick and Toro Y Moi started the indie-rock buzz going, and Coma Cinema is keeping pace. Down in Charleston, the guys in A Fragile Tomorrow actually moved INTO South Carolina from up north to increase their music-making opportunities. Danielle Howle continues to tour internationally from her Awendaw, SC home base, and last time I checked even Darius Rucker still lived in Charleston, not Nashville.
Here’s hoping that even our now expatriate artists at least come back often to visit and play the occasional gig here in South Carolina, and if they ever want to come back home, they’re welcome to any time.

My Memories of Hootie & The Blowfish

Okay, since I spent yesterday listing all the bands whose legacies matter more to the local Columbia, SC music scene than Hootie & the Blowfish, today I’ll fall headfirst into nostalgia and tell some personal stories about Hootie, from my own perspective as someone who was there from the start and enjoyed every minute of it.

Upon arrival at the University of South Carolina in 1985, one of the first people I ran into was my former high school classmate Darius Rucker, who lived one dorm away from me in the infamous Towers/Honeycombs. We had only one class together at USC, for the show choir Carolina Alive, and it was there that he invited me (and the rest of the choir) to hear him sing on Friday nights at Pappy’s, a local burger joint across South Main Street from the Towers. Darius had joined up with a guy in his dorm, Mark Bryan, to form an acoustic duo playing cover songs, and they drew a crowd from the start, it seemed. I remember them playing songs such as “Homeward Bound” from Simon & Garfunkel, “Family Tradition” from Hank Williams, Jr., and more recent stuff like Violent Femmes and R.E.M. Mark threw in at least one original tune even then, “Summer Girl,” which may have been a holdover from his own high school band back home in Maryland.

Hootie gig in Pappy's, 1986

By 1986, Mark and Darius had recruited a drummer from their dorm and a bassist and the original version of Hootie was born. I remember vividly being at a Carolina Alive party at the director, Richard Conant’s house where a bunch of us were sitting around the living room listening to Darius trying to come up with a name for the band. Two of the choir’s members, Donald and Ervin, came in the front door together about that time–each of them had nicknames based on their appearance; Donald was the puffy-cheeked “Blowfish”, Earvin’s large glasses had earned him the tag “Hootie”. Upon seeing them, Darius himself called out, “Hey, it’s Hootie and the Blowfish!” Hitting his own forehead, he said, “That would make a great band name!” The rest, as they say, is history.

During those first couple of years, the band’s gigs in Pappy’s were run by the same Carolina Alive member who ran sound at the choir’s shows, and he used the same USC-owned sound board and PA equipment the choir did–looking back, it’s amusing to think of the four-piece band using a 30-something channel board, only taking up about six channels of it. Since I wasn’t old enough to drink yet, I got appointed the sound guy’s assistant. My sole job, as I recall, was to guard the board during the shows and make sure nobody spilled their beer on it or threw up on it, or otherwise damaged the ‘borrowed’ board.
One particular show stands out, at least in reference to the sound board. Dr. Conant had been given an invitation to come out and hear the band but had not taken them up on it right away…well, one Friday he simply walks in the room while the band’s playing and hangs around for a while taking in the music and the crazy crowd–He looked over at the sound board, and at the guy running it who he also knew from Carolina Alive, and smiled, but nothing was ever said about it being the choir’s equipment.
Here’s a more recent clip of a song that Hootie has covered since those gigs at Pappy’s, “I Go Blind” from the Canadian band 54-40:

My favorite Carolina Alive story also involves Darius Rucker…we were down in Amelia Island, Florida to sing at a convention or some kind of meeting (we opened for B.J. Thomas) and they had put us up overnight in some condos on the beach. After we sang, the rest of the trip was devoted to partying, and by late in the evening a group of us had ended up poolside in the common area of the condo development, even though it was technically closed for the night. Darius was leading an impromptu game of Simon Says (I know, either we were all really drunk or really bored by that point…) and calling out stuff like, “Simon says stand on one foot,” etc. when he looks to the fence surrounding the pool area and says, “Simon says that’s a cop,” spotting what turned out to be a private security officer for the condo complex. After quickly putting down any incriminating cans, bottles, etc., we were then asked to leave the public area–which we did.

Mark Bryan, Hootie’s guitarist, was a DJ at the USC radio station, WUSC-FM, and he convinced me to sign up at the station my sophomore year. I’d already made the decision that Carolina Alive was taking way too much time outside of classes and quit the choir, so doing the radio station instead sounded like a good idea. I’ve said it before, but working at WUSC was my musical education and I hold Mark personally responsible for opening up that flood of musical information and pretty much setting the course of the rest of my life, at least as it pertains to music. It was at WUSC that I wrote my first piece of music journalism, an interview with Screaming Trees guitarist Gary Lee Conner published in the Fall Program Guide for 1987 or 88, I forget which. I do not have a copy of it myself at this point, but I remember it being a terrible interview punctuated by me asking him weird questions about color associations with the band’s songs and odd word associations that were probably my attempt at being ‘different’ than the average boring music journalist at the time.

I’ve seen Hootie & the Blowfish play more times and in more places than any other band over the years, mostly due to those pre-graduation shows near the USC campus but also later on in Charleston at the Music Farm, in Charlotte at Amos’, and a bunch of other venues in Columbia and elsewhere. It was at one of the Music Farm gigs, around 1990 or so, that I remember Darius Rucker offering me $30 for the red Reivers T-shirt I was wearing from their Farm gig a few weeks prior…I turned him down, and still have (and can still wear) that shirt today. At another Music Farm show, they were actually the opening act for a band they were huge fans of, The Silos.

The band’s Monday After the Masters concerts have always been a favorite for me, partly because they bring back some of the camaraderie and fun of the early cover band years. One in particular stands out, in 1998. I’d been writing reviews for the alt-country focused magazine No Depression for a year or so, and editor Peter Blackstock had accepted an invitation from Mark Bryan to attend that year’s golf tournament and concert. I offered him a couch to sleep on that night and served as his host and guide for the afternoon and evening, driving him past “Tunnelvision” and a few other local landmarks prior to the concert. After the Township we went down to the Elbow Room in 5 points, where Cravin’ Melon was playing an ‘afterparty’ that rumor had it Hootie was going to crash. Sure enough, about halfway through Cravin’s set the Hootie guys showed up, strapped on Cravin’s instruments, and proceeded to play a six-song set of cover songs to the delight of the packed house.

Here’s a great clip of the band from around that time, a 1996 performance of “Be The One” off Fairweather Johnson:

The last dozen years or so I’ve seen less and less of the band’s shows, mostly because they just haven’t played many times in the Columbia area. Today’s unveiling of the Hootie Monument in 5 Points may not ‘officially’ be a Hootie show, but with all the bands scheduled to play their own covers of Hootie’s songs, can a surprise set from the guys themselves be too far behind?