I started out at 14 playing electric guitar because I wanted to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band. I wanted to get as far away from that hick bulls*** as I could.

I got a gig at Silver Dollar City playing bluegrass in 1975. And being Silver Dollar City, of course, we’re encouraged to be, you know, characters. It was me and John Kendrick and Dale Hopkins. It got to the point where we were touring the state and the Midwest and we’d be jamming and communicating all night. That was when [John and I] decided to start [The Undergrass Boys].

Nineteen seventy-seven was the last clock punch I ever did.

[The band I'm most associated with] depends on the person’s age. If it’s a young person it’s The Lowdown Fancy. If it’s a forty-something it’s Hogmolly. If it’s a fifty-something it’s The Undergrass Boys.

The original mandolin player for Hogmolly, which I played in a band with him when he was 15, Matt Maydew, played in a band with Steve [Ames] called Smokin’ Herb Green & The Rollers, so I knew both those guys. I knew Matt from being 15 years old and playing gigs with him when he was starting out playing. Anyway, I had these New Year’s picking parties. Every New Year’s Eve I’d have a big picking deal at my cabin. So one year, just out of the blue, Steve and Matt showed up at that. And we were picking and everything. The Lowdown Fancy already was those two but they hadn’t really done anything other than playing the Tipsy Turtle a few times and I think they’d had one other gig other than the Tipsy Turtle. So I just sat down–everybody else was taking a break–and Matt and Steve sat down and were doing some of the stuff they had worked up together–you know, the original Lowdown Fancy. I just picked up a bass and started playing bass behind them and throwing some harmonies in and went, “holy cow, that’s fun.” So at first the band was just the three of us, then pretty quickly they decided we needed a percussionist. So they said, well, Aaron, who was the hand drum play in Smokin’ Herb Green… I had quite a few bookings when Hogmolly broke up that were still out there and I didn’t want to tell them I wouldn’t do it. I had time booked out a year ahead of time. So I had all these gigs I had to tell, “Well, it’s a different band now.” I had about 20 or so gigs on the books with Matt Maydew, and he was with some woman who put her foot down and said, no, you’ve got to quit the band. So he quit. (…) When he quit that’s when we brought in Mike Henderson, and that kind of jumped us up into being a rock band.

Shane Abney was the one that had the idea for [Dobrogo], and I have no idea where it came from. Well, I guess he loves Gogol Bordello. And we didn’t want to actually rip them off; it would be very easy to become a Gogol Bordello cover band doing what we’re doing. We learned a couple of their tunes and I had some real gypsy stuff I’ve been playing for a long time, some instrumentals that I brought into it. And Donnie Cockrum, he’s a good songwriter. I don’t know how those guys came to be friends. And then Jeff Sowards. Really, I don’t know how the four of us came together but it was all Shane’s doing. And so we got together and every time we’d get together we’d start farting around and write a song, sometimes a couple of them. And we’re trying to do this Soviet-era Russia thing where everything’s really dark and really grim. Comically dark. (…) Every time we’d start out on a song it would start out kind of normal and then it’s just going way off the deep end into this deep, dark stuff. (…) We’ve just about got enough for a set to be able to open for somebody. The whole thing is that other than Gogol Bordello and traditional klesmer songs we don’t know where to go for material, so we were pretty much down to having to write stuff. So that’s why it has taken so long is that we’re having to write new material for the whole damn thing.

Remember the old Dolly Parton song, “9 to 5?” We turned it into a minor-key [song], working 9 to 9 in the Soviet Union. And there’s a Branson reference in there, too, about the Russian guy in Branson.

Whenever I posted that [Blackberry Winter was playing The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco] I started getting emails from friends all over the United States that were saying, ‘The Great American Music Hall? The home of the sacred Dead shows?!’ The [Grateful] Dead were the house band for a lot of years. A couple of their live albums were recorded there. Countless bootlegs from there. In their heyday, when they first started taking off and getting just nuts popular, that’s where a lot of that happened. It’s the first building constructed in San Francisco after the ’06 earthquake. It was built in 1907. It’s got these enormous, just redwood marble columns to keep the building from falling down if there was another earthquake. When we shoed up there the band had a staff. It’s like we showed up and, “here’s your two guys. They’ll take care of you.” And it was like the guys who were just ulta-hip… I mean, he’d been around the block. Those two guys, their specific job was to hang around and get us anything we wanted, and then they had a runner that would kind of go and get stuff. I told everybody, “I have a feeling that if I told that guy I wanted cocaine and hookers there would be cocaine and hookers. But it was one of those things that if you’d told that to those guys, yeah… It was very cool. And our own Wes Wilson–you know who he is–I go down into the basement and on the way to the green room and the very first damn thing I see is a Wes Wilson poster.

Another thing: Right as we were leaving the guy said–we were talking about the building itself–and he said, “You know Duke Ellington had a residency here. His office is still here; they’ve converted it into a storage room. If you wanna go see it I’ll show it to you.” And there’s a little sticker–in fact, I got a little picture of it–that says ‘Duke Ellington.’ It looked like somebody had tried to steal it at some point. He said when he had his residency here he had his own personal sink installed in the back of the room back there and nobody else was to touch it. It was back in the day whenever black people couldn’t use white people’s sinks, so, by God, he had his own that nobody else could use. It was such a treat to play in. What a historic place.

There [were] so many just crazy things [on tour]… We played the Aladdin in Portland, the Aladdin Theater. It’s an old historic movie house, and its claim to fame was that it fell on hard times at some point and became a porn theater, but it had the world record of having the longest run of the movie Deep Throat. And after I found that out I really just didn’t want to touch anything.

The worst show that we did, I’d say, was that much worse than the best show that we did. I was totally amazed at how every single time that whole outfit, no matter how tired or how bitchy and pissed off they were–you know, because just like you have your little things where people get pissed of and they last for a day and then they’re hugging on each other. Everybody got to be really super tight through the whole thing. But these are people who are super independent, they’re old–definitely old–and living by themselves, very set, and having to all of a sudden adapt to something they never even dreamed of doing in their lives. Tedi May and I are the only ones that have traveled extensively with musicians or done anything like that. Van [Colbert] has hardly stood out of his back yard, you know; he’s traveled very little. A couple of them got to see oceans for the first time. But it still amazed me that every time we did a show it was that show.

That was one of the biggest treats was just to get to spend that much time with [Marideth Sisco of Blackberry Winter]. I’ve known her for 30 years and I’ve played in a band with her… in fact, we did several gigs at [Nathan P.] Murphy’s when it first opened. I haven’t gotten to spend much time with her since then. In fact, when I left my first bird job in California, when she found out I was going out there she said, ‘You are gonna take pictures, right?’ because she was a photojournalist. I said, ‘I don’t have a damn camera.’ The next time I saw her she handed me an old Pentax Spotmatic and about a dozen rolls of film. She said, ‘You shoot. Shoot away. Shoot it all up. Send it all back if you can’t afford the development. I’ll take care of the development.’ But she made sure that I had the camera to shoot that experience, which kind of started me off.”

I’ve got probably five thousand or so slides of all the bird studies I’ve done all over the world. A whole bunch of them are bird-in-hand shots. I did a lot of banding and I’ve kept a photographic record of every bird species that I handled. A lot of times I’m working by myself so I set the camera to closest focus and get it right for distance so that there’s a picture of the bird in full frame with my hand coming up out of the corner.

The whole thing about city living as opposed to wilderness living is that in the city you’re bombarded by stimuli constantly to the point that you have to shut down. You have to be able to ignore stuff. You have to shut all that crap and noise that… you don’t even notice it now, because it’s part of your world. But if you were as tuned and as open as you were after spending a couple of months in the wilderness, to where you are totally in tune with that world, and you come into this you can’t hardly stand it for a few days. That’s been my experience.

I actually did a couple of days of consulting work with the international bird watching center of Ehlat, Israel. They were setting up a bird banding program and wanted an American bander to come and review their data collection stuff. So I went and banded with them for a couple of days. They paid my ticket. And I thought, ‘While I’m here…’ So I stayed a month.

Anywhere you go, people figure out how to exploit the resources there. There are people who are living in the most inhospitable of places and still fishing and doing things. It’s not just a hardiness but an ingeniousness to apply themselves to exploit what little resources are there. You see that in all the cultures that live in extreme environments. I mean, the Inuit, some of the things they did with what they had to work with… it’s amazing. The fact that you could take a seal and make a coat out of it that was better than any Gore-Tex parka you could make today, you know? All of the extreme environments get inventive, because if there’s anything that’s living or growing whatsoever there’s a resource there that you can exploit and make yourself stay alive.

Don’t use Bear Grylls. I don’t know if you know about him, but my standard line is, if you go out into the wilderness and you follow Bear Grylls’s example you will die. He’s not about knowledge; he’s a testosterone fest. (…) Trying to see him do a fire it was evident that he had never done them.

Now, Survivor Man is one that he actually shows you stuff. It’s not exciting, but it’s him filming all of it by himself. And he wastes a lot of time. He could spend more time on the actual techniques for my money. But at least he does that. He studied under the guy that helped me start my skills, John McPherson. He was the guy.

They approached me for [Dual Survival on Discovery Channel]. What they do is when the put something together like that they comb the Internet and they find anybody that’s got a school or anything where you can do a Google search and find it. This is the third [show] I’ve gotten contacted about. The first one was in the UK, and she actually called me. Actually, two of them called me. The one in the UK I ended up not doing it because it was another reality thing. The History Channel, not long after Dual Survival got started, one of their people called me up and she was telling me about, “We’re looking for people with different backgrounds, very different backgrounds, but they’re going to have to work together in survival scenarios. And I was like, Well, that’s kind of already been done!”

People all the time keep telling me, ‘You need to write a book’ and this and… The one thing that I’ve thought about doing is a plant book of this region, of everything I know about the local plants. Not just the uses and all that stuff, but the historical context and how they got here. Pick a handful of plants and put all of the stuff in there about them.

So much of the stuff we consider edible is only here because the Europeans brought them here–because they’re edible.

Turning 30 is a birthday many people face with dread. For starters, the “I was young and stupid” excuse becomes only half valid, meaning it’s time to leave certain parts of one’s life behind and, hopefully, enter a new phase, a transition that can be either graceful or horrid. In its 30th year of existence Springfield Regional Opera is undergoing a reinvention, one led by a new regime (led by Conductor Amy Muchnick, Managing Director Derek Munson and a board of directors led by Les Brown, Jr.) and a new approach, one aimed at reaching out to a broader SGF audience. For the last few months SRO has been taking baby steps in its new era, putting on smaller events such as holiday concerts and jazz arias to satiate its audience while it prepares for The Big Show, the attention-grabbing event that will put SRO 2.0 on full display. The Big Show, aka Giacomo Puccini‘s classic opera La Bohéme as directed by Jeff Carney and conducted by Amy Muchnick, is finally here, with opening night coming this Friday night at 7:30 at Gillioz Theatre and again Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. So just how different will SRO 2.0 be from the opera you think you know? Let’s take a look at some commonly held myths and what they’re doing to bust them:

MYTH: Opera is just people standing around and singing. Not very interesting.

How they busted it: The new approach is called lyric theatre, and the opera is taking it very seriously–so seriously, in fact, that its new website address is SROLyricTheatre.org. As the phrase suggests, lyric theatre is about both singing and acting, so how is it different from your typical musical? It’s a fine line, but think of it this way: If you’re sitting on the fence between lyric theatre and musical, with one leg over each side, it comes down to which side you lean toward: singing or acting. Musicals lean toward acting, lyric theatre leans toward singing. Carney, La Bohéme‘s director and himself a trained opera singer, says this is a common trend in modern opera. He says there are between 25 and 30 opera companies operating in America today, whereas he estimates there are more than 100 lyric theatre companies currently in operation.

MYTH: Opera can’t be truly appreciated unless you speak Italian.

How they busted it: This myth is even less true than you might think. Though many famous operas were written in Italian, there are, in fact, contemporary operas written in English as well. When it works on the classics, though, Carney says SRO Lyric Theatre will have translations on projection screens behind the performers so you can follow along with what the characters are saying without taking your eyes away from the stage.

MYTH: Arts organizations in Springfield don’t believe in working closely together.

How they busted it: This production of La Bohéme is something of a breakthrough in that regard, as SRO Lyric Theatre is teaming up with Springfield Symphony, Springfield Ballet and The Boys’ Choir of Springfield for the show. While the hands-off approach among SGF arts groups toward one another has been the norm for a long time, Carney says you can expect that to continue to change for two reasons. First, it’s wise from a cost-sharing standpoint. Second, he says donors and city-run organizations like to see the cooperative atmosphere. And if there are two things classical arts need today it’s lower bills and some city and donor love.

MYTH: SGF isn’t a city with opera talent.

How they busted it: If the cast of La Bohéme doesn’t convince you with four of its central characters embodied by SGFers (Carol Chaplin, Chris Thompson and international performers Michael Spyres and Tara Stafford as the lovers Rodolfo and Mimi), you might keep an eye on the local pipeline for more in the future. Every year the organization sponsors four singers (and, beginning this year, one accompanying pianist) and takes them under its wing for a year of training before presenting them in the annual Café des Artistes showcase at Creamery Arts Center. This year’s coming-out party for new local opera up-and-comers happens April 22.

MYTH: No one makes new top-level operas anymore.

How they busted it: Winter’s Bone: The Opera, anyone? It could happen. There are lots of present-day composers looking for an outlet to make new works, Carney says, and SRO Lyric Theatre is looking into commissioning a new opera for its use later this year. If an SGF organization is going to have an opera made for it, why not go the extra step and have that opera surround a story with a local theme or a story with a local author? How about both? Opera writing didn’t die with Puccini, after all; it just had a rough transition into the next phase of its life. It’s about time to change that.

This feels like it should have all been easier. The man sitting on the other end of the table should be on the road somewhere, touring behind his latest album released on Bloodshot Records, catching accolades from the likes of National Public Radio like butterflies in a net on a spring Saturday. This has all been in his lap to a degree before, there for the taking, the inevitable waiting to happen. But Jessel Harry spurned it all, moved back to Springfield earlier this year and waits tables at Flame Steakhouse downtown while he reloads his band, The Western Paradise, and starts again.

While it doesn’t seem like it yet, this is a story of triumph.

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I always imagined the man who wrote a song as dark and unsettlingly tense as “Oh Mabel” would be a standoffish sort with a loner’s stare and terse responses. It fit the song, anyway. Anyone who wrote from the perspective of the American male-domination stereotype run amok to the point of spousal abuse had to be at least a little pissed off at the world, right? Having first heard the song in 2007 on The Western Paradise’s EP Industry, I carried that notion with me ever since. Instead I’m greeted three years later by a soft-spoken man, gentle in nature and unusually candid for a first meeting. He fingers a worn copy of Carl Jung‘s Man and His Symbols–his recreational reading at the moment–as he speaks, often looking down.

“I’ve come so close in my mind at times to thinking that this is all absurd,” Jessel says. There is no irony or woe-is-me attitude in his voice when he says it; it’s a statement of fact. You could hear a comment such as that from any number of musicians, often young men and women who dreamed of stardom and couldn’t handle playing to the bar staff at the tour stop in Peoria. Jessel is 45. He has played in bands in Springfield off and on for 18 years. He hit his stride in SGF’s music world with Monkey Engine, an alternative rock group he sang for in the mid-’90s. Back then it all came relatively easy: Jessel’s only duty in the group was to sing, so he says it didn’t interest him much musically, but the band routinely pulled 300-plus people for local shows. Little work, lots of attention:

It wasn’t enough. Monkey Engine split in 1995 after a three-year run and a restless Jessel hit the road, traveling to wherever felt good: Florida, Colorado, Georgia. Along the way he started thinking about doing music again, only this time writing all of his own material, words and music. He eventually came to New York City, a Mecca for songwriters and wannabes, writing new material and playing it every day on the subway, as well as at gigs at clubs in the city. In six months he had 17 new songs, all his own. There was almost enough money to make a living playing music–almost. For a year and a half Jessel plied his trade, recording along the way. He even landed recording sessions with producer Eric Ambel, who has worked with The Cropdusters locally and is best known for working with acts such as Steve Earle and The Bottle Rockets. Four of those songs were released among the six on Industry; the other four remain unreleased to this day.

Even with the buzz building around Jessel, he decided to leave New York and move back to Springfield. “Almost” making a living at music couldn’t last, and the enormous expense of recording with Ambel only made things harder. He also wanted a band to play his songs in, but it would be a while yet before he could muster the courage to put his music in others’ hands. Would the songs be good enough? Would someone else get them?

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Jessel didn’t have a lot of experience with people “getting” him. He was born to a biracial family on the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean. His father, a singer himself, gave Jessel the music bug at a young age, and he claims it was the only thing that kept him sane through his school years. He didn’t interact much with other kids socially, and as one of maybe 20 black kids in his high school the sense of belonging so many teenagers hope for just never came. “Very little made sense to me but music,” he says. What’s worse, Jessel lacked the tools to bridge those social gaps around him. It took him years to understand why. Jessel had clinical depression. But when your family’s motto is “any problem can be solved by working harder,” where do you go to seek help? Simple: you don’t. Jessel spent his formative years wrestling with the depression, a fight he often lost. He says he went long stretches of time–weeks, even months–without any kind of social contact. After high school Jessel enrolled at a conservatory in Shenandoah, West Virginia, seeking to learn more about music, to take the one thing he felt he understood and make it his craft. But the pleasure he got from making music was at odds with what he found coming from behind the podium. “I had some teachers who, after work, couldn’t wait to get away from music,” Jessel says. He couldn’t relate. Disillusioned, Jessel flunked out of conservatory after just one year.

At 19 he joined the Army, hoping the mental discipline it instilled would help him beat his illness. For a while it worked; he made it work. A quiet, artistic man in the most rigorous and un-artistic of circumstances, Jessel suppressed his very nature to adjust to military life. It also meant he completely stopped playing music. But for once Jessel found peace within his mind; for all its trials, military life was liberatingly repetitive. He was put to work as a cook in a field artillery battalion, getting two days off for every twelve on. From 1986 to ’89 he was stationed in Germany, finally getting his discharge just as the Berlin Wall fell.

Life as a veteran was a strange experience at a strange time for Jessel. Serving in a divided nation during the last gasps of the Cold War had changed his outlook forever. When Jessel returned to the States he says he picked up works by historian and anti-war advocate Howard Zinn and started reading. At the moment the rest of America believed in freedom–or Freedom, as it were–the most, Jessel believed in it the least. “Freedom was just a tagline,” he says. He saw it all as a power struggle for land ownership; acquisition was king, both in global politics and in the day-to-day lives of individuals. Veteran life also gave Jessel back something he had lost: his depression. Without the structure and discipline of military life Jessel returned to the quiet, solitary existence he had known before, which only fed fuel to his changing worldview. Jessel found the need to express again. He went back to music. “I can’t imagine writing music without depression,” Jessel says. “It makes you look at the world around you harder.”

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The time after the Army marked Jessel’s first move to Springfield. Back then he came here to attend Baptist Bible College in the early ’90s, again lasting about a year. It would be the first of three moves to Springfield, and while it didn’t give him a college degree his time here gave him Monkey Engine and his emergence as a performer. “When I hear people say negative things about the (music) scene here it bugs me,” Jessel says. “You’ve gotta go to someplace where the scene is gargantuan.”

Scenes don’t get more gargantuan than New York, but Jessel moved back to Springfield in 2003 and formed a band around the new material he had been writing. He recruited bassist George Perkins and drummer Ritchie Allen to form The Western Paradise, a group that encapsulated not only his political visions but his belief that what America held up as its own social and societal ideals were in decay. The music was a portrait of a country at a dangerous intersection, written from the perspective of the car with no brakes. “I feel like there’s an old model in America that doesn’t work,” Jessel says. “We’re at a crossroads, and we can’t continue with the existing model.”

In 2006, The Western Paradise was featured on National Public Radio, XM Radio‘s “The Radar Report” and was the subject of articles various magazines, including one I wrote in the now-defunct Springfield rag GO Magazine. All of these hailed the band at the time as one to expect big things from in the near future. Then Jessel’s connections at Bloodshot Records in Chicago, a label home to the likes of Ryan Adams, The Old 97s and, more recently, Ha Ha Tonka, came calling. The label was talking about a deal, but wanted to see how the band did with shows outside of Springfield. Moving to Chicago, Jessel thought, would help the band’s development while strengthening the ties with Bloodshot since they would be in the record company’s home town. When the woman Jessel was seeing at the time told him she was moving up there as well, it made the choice easy. Why not?, he thought to himself. It would still be in the Midwest, where he felt most comfortable, and, as he put it, “it was almost affordable.” But when he brought the idea to Perkins and Allen they chose to stay in Springfield rather than uproot their families. Jessel rolled the dice anyway, packed up and moved north. “I was always so linear about it that I couldn’t apply that I had players who had children,” he says. He took a job at a restaurant at the Art Institute of Chicago and playing solo gigs while looking for new musicians for the band. For a while Jessel was able to fill the openings, but eventually he started flying Perkins and Allen up to Chicago to play shows with him. In 2007 Jessel planned to release the remaining long-shelved material from the Eric Ambel sessions side-by-side with new material recorded with the band in a double album. Everything was lining up to lead to the band’s big breakthrough. A big CD release party was even scheduled at The Outland later that year. Only it wasn’t ready. At least Jessel wasn’t.

Teetering on the brink of realizing one’s dream is a strange time to have an epiphany, but it was Jessel’s time nonetheless. His frustration had been building for a while. The financial strain of keeping the band afloat–flying his bandmates up, rehearsal space, finding shows to play–was too much to sustain, even with the traction and following the group was gaining. He could continue in Chicago as a solo performer, but there he found himself painted into a corner. Jessel says he found himself playing to rooms of people who sat and contemplated his music rather than feel it. The joy and affirmation he felt making music seemed lost on his audience. It was his conservatory experience all over again, only the professors were now his concert crowds. Working harder and pushing through wouldn’t solve either problem. He was at an impasse, and he had to make a change. With his dreams within reach, Jessel tore it all down.

“I felt like I had the material to put out a two-record thing, but I just decided I couldn’t go on with [Perkins and Allen],” Jessel says. “We’d been gigging together for eight or nine years, but finally I talked to them and just said, ‘I think I’ve just gotta start all over.’”

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Jessel Harry sat at the other end of the table from me for almost four hours; Tyler Gray, perhaps, for one of those. But Gray is as relevant to this story as anyone other than Jessel could be.

Starting over for Jessel meant just that: square one. He had shelved a double album of material, partly produced by a man people sit up and pay attention to. He had let go of the musicians he had collaborated with for almost a decade, struggling again to find replacements who fit. The Bloodshot offer was left hanging. The show schedule ground nearly to a halt, taken up by an occasional solo gig. Life away from music took over in Chicago, and even that was a strain on Jessel’s money and energy. “In Chicago I might travel 45 minutes to see an indie film or an hour to my favorite bar,” he says. Musically and socially, it was unsustainable. Jessel moved back to Springfield this past February, to pick up the pieces and, hopefully, try again.

He took the serving job with Flame Steakhouse, moving into an apartment right above the restaurant. Suddenly everything was back at his fingertips: work, home, nightlife, hobbies. No long commutes or other fuss. Jessel doesn’t even own a car now. Soon after moving back an old friend, Ryan Flores, suggested Jessel check out a young man Flores was teaching guitar to–Tyler Gray. Flores thought Gray might be a good fit for the new band. Gray used to play and sing for the skate punk group No Control, but after leaving that band he took up folk music and dove into learning guitar better. Jessel teamed up with Gray to play acoustic sets at Art Walks and it immediately clicked. He had his first collaborator. After that the duo would scout and audition players using their acoustic setup as a base. “I knew what the songs were really about because I learned them acoustically,” Gray says, and by auditioning people in the same environment he and Jessel see who got Jessel’s songs and who didn’t. In three months Jessel had his new lineup, adding William Fortney of jazz group The Euphio Question on guitar, Nick Zeller on bass and Tommy Oerding of Highland Fall and Liz Moriondo‘s backing band on drums. All of them are around half Jessel’s age, and while the members seem to defer to Jessel with regard to playing his songs (Gray: “I know Jessel doesn’t want too many cooks in the kitchen.”), it seems to be more out of respect for the material than from any inadvertent father-figure vibe that could arise. For his part, Jessel seems to quell any such possibility anyway, opening himself up not only to having others play his songs but to collaborate and influence the material, too. “I know Will and Tyler will be writing some good stuff,” Jessel says.

The band’s comeback show in September at The High Life Live Martini Lounge was all about learning the songs already there, the Industry-era material and a few others, and about finding the meeting point among the players’ diverse styles. Now the next step is writing and releasing an album of new songs, written with the help of the new members, as soon as possible. Jessel says the group has plans to work with Danny Maple at Wired Woods Studio and even has a working title for the next album, a line from the Sonic Youth song “Small Flowers Crack Concrete” and the title of one of Jessel’s solo records, though it will be a while before you see Death Poems to the Living Gods of America on store shelves.

There’s no telling if Jessel can or will regain the momentum of the past. He could have stayed the course and been a major-label artist by now, fulfilling his goal of making a living from his music, the only real goal he has ever set for his passion. But he knows staying the course might not have worked out according to plan, either. “Less than ten percent of groups that get signed put out a second album” Jessel says. “I put out four on my own.” His hunger to find success on the road is still there, now matched by the guys playing beside and behind him. He has learned through therapy to corral an illness that hid him from the world, found a day-to-day life that suits him and found a new avenue to make music he believes in. At this point, he says he’s not concerned with posterity, though posterity manages to find him anyway. Jessel received a letter a while back from a fan, someone who bought one of his solo records back in the New York subway days and who tracked Jessel down and wrote him, years later, to tell him he still listened to and enjoyed it. This is the sort of thing Jessel says matters most to him now, that sustains him even when it all seems absurd. Enjoyment. “I’d like to make people move and dance more,” he says. “Rock ‘n’ roll is a mating ritual. But it’s not about getting laid; it’s about not fearing sexuality.” He looks down for a moment, hands clasped and away from his book of Jung, and chuckles to himself. “It’s a really expensive way to meet women.”

There was a time when Jim Wirt was the young musician fighting for recognition, the guy rolling the dice and moving away from Springfield to take a shot at making it in rock ‘n’ roll. That was in the early ’80s, when his band Fools Face was all the rage in SGF and getting signed to a major record label and put on the radio was the big goal. Twenty-five years later all of that has changed; Fools Face split up less than a year after its move to Los Angeles, record labels are on shaky ground and Wirt, together with wife Claire, Tony Barille and Randy Chase, are out to put the power back in bands’ hands with the launch of Crushtone Music.

Crushtone has many facets within the name, operating as a production company, music label, management company and more. Once a band chooses to work with Crushtone and vice versa–a process typically handled by Claire Wirt–Crushtone can produce and record its album and help it get tours booked, either through Crushtone or, more probably, through trusted partners in the field. With any facet, the goal is to keep the band in control of what happens to it, not big business. “These kids will say, ‘ I want a deal.’ I say, ‘Why do you want that? Why do you want to sign your rights away?’” Claire says.

A Place for Jim to Stay

Crushtone’s biggest focus right now is in recording unsigned bands, and according to Claire the approach is straightforward: Make simple records, and make them fast. Most of the albums the label makes are 10-day projects, she says, allowing bands to have finished albums in their hands as soon as possible while retaining all of the rights to it. It’s a whirlwind process and 16-hour days aren’t uncommon for Jim. “The first question I always ask on the phone is, ‘Is there a place where Jim can stay?’” Claire says. From the moment Jim gets into the studio, he says, there is no time for bands to argue with him about details. “You’re in desperation mode the first night,” Jim says. “Then the next night is the same thing.”

For Jim, Crushtone is a breath of fresh air in his career. After producing the likes of Incubus, Fiona Apple, Hoobastank and Jack’s Mannequin, Claire says Jim went two years without getting a producing job from a major label. “I said to Jim, ‘You know, nobody’s gonna work harder for you than you,’ so we cut out the middleman,” Claire says. 

Anafair, one of the artists currently working with Crushtone Music.

Now Jim flies back and forth between Los Angeles, New York and Cleveland (where one of Crushtone’s financial backers, Randy Chase, lives), with additional trips to and from various recording studios to work with bands. Jim says his hope is to pick eight to 10 bands from among those he works with for Crushtone to be more involved in developing and booking. Some of those artists, such as Cleveland’s Anafair and Cincinnati natives The Flight Station, are already in place. To be a Crushtone artist Jim says a band has to put in the work to build and maintain an audience within its own market, since Crushtone’s promotion begins regionally and then works outward. “They need to be able to draw four hundred kids in their own market or it doesn’t work for us,” Jim says. “None of us can afford to do this kind of stuff for nothing. They’ve gotta do it for themselves.”

The Wirts are working in areas where bands have potential to extend their reach regionally, such as Cleveland, Chicago, New Jersey and possibly Detroit in the near future. Jim says you won’t find L.A. on that list anytime soon. He still calls L.A. home (Claire has been spending most of her time in Springfield while their daughter goes to school), and he sees a huge contrast in patience and interest in bands between the Midwest and West Coast. In his opinion, the famous Sunset Strip that launched bands during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s is dead. “They don’t listen out here,” he says. “Everybody’s here [in L.A.] to be a star. Crustone wouldn’t work in L.A. Bands can’t break in L.A.”

The New Direction?

If the idea of treating the artist as more than a product doesn’t exactly sound like The Revolution it’s probably because the same thing has been done before–ironically, in the days of Jim and Claire Wirt’s youth, when both record labels and radio were run with less corporate approaches. Claire Wirt knows the idea well; her father, Al Wyman, worked for Capitol Records for many years. In her opinion, the music business has lost its integrity, and Crushtone is at the leading edge of entities trying to restore it. “Jim and I don’t make money like we used to, but we feel a lot better,” she says. Have the owners of Crushtone found the record industry’s next direction by bringing it back to its past? It will be years before there is a definitive answer. But getting back their way of making a living while giving young bands their own chance to roll the dice in music is ensuring their own futures, and perhaps those of others.

Gummerman (second from left) and Reasoner (middle), with Taylor Steele (far left), Chris Slater (second from right) and Jesse Pierce (far right) of Cornbelt Chorus.

It’s amazing to think not even three years ago Cornbelt Chorus was exactly where local bands such as The Cropdusters are today: Playing to packed rooms onstage and on the tip of everyone’s tongue off it. No band garnered as much attention at the time as quickly as Cornbelt, and a series of serendipitous events looked like they were going to push the band’s momentum into the stratosphere. The group made connections that would lead to some financial backing in order to record a full-length album, and although they didn’t make the trip to their ideal recording studio–Tiny Telephone in San Francisco, owned by indie songwriter John Vanderslice–the dialogue opened up the chance to work with producer Scott Solter, who has worked with artists such as Death Cab for Cutie and Spoon. Recording in Springfield and sending tracks to Solter in San Francisco for mixing, the band’s presence in the local consciousness went away almost completely while life and the recording process got in the way.

Today, singer and principal songwriter Zach Reasoner is a father, guitarist Todd Gummerman is on the road regularly with his day job, as it were, and bassist Chris Slater owns downtown hookah lounge The Albatross, to say nothing of the other things absorbing the band members’ time. With the album, titled Monsters and the Color Red, ready for release, there has never been a better time to seize the moment… but is that moment already gone?

I met up with Reasoner and Gummerman at Billiards of Springfield to take in some 9-ball (turns out Gummerman is a pretty good shot) and to ask them about these topics and more. The guys were pretty relaxed after the game, and, as you’ll see, they had quite a bit to say. We begin with the simple:

Chris DeRosier: From start to finish, how long did this album take to make?

Todd Gummerman: The actual studio time was about a month. We reserved a month at Jeremy [Larson]‘s studio and we worked nights after everyone was done with work and then basically a whole month and just took our time. It was really comfortable.

Zach Reasoner: Basically it broke down to where each member had a week, or a little less than that. That’s kind of the easiest way to think about it.

TG: Then, honestly, the actual tracking… I thought it took about an extra month after that and put a bunch of that extra keyboards-

ZR: More of that sublayer [of music]. There’s quite a few songs where Todd went back and added extra synth or whatever. When you listen to it on a regular basis you may not even ever notice it as far as consciously to where you go, “oh, there’s a synth track in there,” but there’s just something about the way it feels and the way it makes the song kind of progress that we feel like it helps.

I think there’s a fine line… You want to give the listener a little something more and make it maybe a little more special than what you do live, but you don’t want to create something you can’t re-create live. As far as extra stuff we did, it’s really subtle, kind of an ambient thing. When you listen to the album you hear a guitar part, you hear a bass part, you hear a drum part, a vocal… it’s Cornbelt. It’s not like we added five other instruments that are really prevalent to where you’re like, “Whoa, I’ve never heard that in a show before!”

TG: Yeah, the important parts I can still pull off live. So a month for the band, another three or four weeks for that extra stuff and I think Scott [Solter] took maybe a month to mix it, and then the mastering. It’s gonna be a year and a half from first note to album in shrink wrap, but the actual time was about three or four months.

It’s amazing to think it’s been that long since the band was out playing regularly. Thankfully Cornbelt already had an EP out before this so fans could already put their hands on the band’s music in some way.

ZR: Yeah, the reason it’s a year and a half or two years from the first idea of recording with Jeremy started is just a lot of down time in between actually being able to do something that progressed the album. I mean, there’s a lot of dead time. It’s me having a son, [bassist] Chris [Slater] owns a lot of real estate, he has a lot of responsibilities and his own business now and Todd getting married. But actual time working on it is pretty normal, I think.

True, a few weeks in a studio is nothing new. But a year and a half out of the spotlight–I can seriously count the number of Cornbelt shows I remember on one hand in that time–is something quite unusual. Granted, the band got to work with exactly the man it wanted to in Solter, even if it meant sending tracks back and forth for mixing. But at what cost? Well, let’s get to that…

CD: So with it having been close to a year and a half… You guys had a lot of attention when you first started playing together. After a year and a half taken in the recording process, with so few shows during that time, now there’s a finished product. Do you feel like that momentum is still there?

ZR: No. I don’t feel like it’s there at all. I feel like it can be re-created, but I feel like we made some big mistakes. Not that they necessarily could’ve been avoided, but I personally feel that we really did have a decent buzz going on for the amount of work we had put into it. But I feel like that can happen again. We are definitely at a loss, because there were a lot of people that were excited, and then we just, you know… and I hate that, but like I said, it’s just kind of the life stuff. Being a father has taken a lot of time, and that’s obviously really important to me, so that really is the main reason, I would say, that there has been a delay. But I fell like the momentum can be there. Any of those people who were excited about Cornbelt, if we try to re-present ourselves there’s still that excitement there in the back of their minds.

We definitely dropped the ball, I think, with… once we got into the recording process it became really hard to try to do shows. I think [we got] really distracted. I do feel a little bit of guilt. I fell like I’ve let down some people. I think we could’ve capitalized a lot better, but now that we have a product it’s definitely gonna help. I think new songs are happening a lot faster now, so I think having fresh material for shows and being able to come out of the gate again and having sort of regrouped-

TG: And that’s really hard to do given the limited number of venues. It’s really hard to keep it going because you really want to hit different venues but there’s very few venues to hit, and the people who like to do that stuff is pretty limited, too. You really have to work hard to build a crowd, and we weren’t very good at promoting or advertising.

At least the guys are realistic. To be honest, any answer other than “no” to the question of retaining momentum would have been delusional. Not only do people have short attention spans, but in a city with so many colleges and an ever-changing business landscape they move away all the time, too. The people you played for six months ago will not necessarily be the same ones you play for today; imagine the amount of change a couple of years can bring. Todd is bringing up an interesting point here, too, though: Original-music bands in Springfield aren’t playing in as many rooms as cover bands. That’s a whole other conversation, really, but I’m curious enough about their perspective to let them go on.

ZR: I have seen quite a few people come from Springfield or who were raised around here that I felt were incredibly talented as musicians and sort of nothing ever came out of it and they move on, and that sucks. [Cornbelt drummer] Taylor [Steele]‘s dad always said… he used to live in Seattle, I guess, and he said, you know when Seattle blew up and had its moment and there was just a massive explosion of music and the whole artist scene, not just music, but everything really blew up from that. Taylor’s dad said Springfield feels like Seattle did right before it blew up, right before it flourished, and I feel like that’s been the case for a while but there’s some kind of a dampering effect… We want to be able to give [people] the original stuff and keep that going, but it’s hard in this town, because there are also so many other people that want cover bands or that want something like, you know, Seether.

TG: We’re not about the money, but at our age, to be playing every show that we play, it’s like… we need to be making some money, because we’re adults, you know? The scary thing, and, I think, the hard thing, is to be jumping around at venues. We’re scared we’re not gonna make any money, so it’s a big jump to just be like, okay, let’s go play at these four places that we’ve never played at, because we might not make any money.

There’s such a thing as playing for the fun of it, too, but I get the feeling Todd is talking about compensation for time here. He is the rare musician in town who makes a living playing music, so his time does have a value attached to it, in a way.

I think this whole development thing has been totally crucial, totally vital to what we want to be and what we want to sound like, because if we would have kept that momentum going, we would have played at every venue all the time. It would have been oversaturated without the quality we knew we were capable of. We kind of held back a little bit and said, “look, we need to spend some time on this material, even the stuff we’ve been playing out a bunch.” It’s going to be super obvious, almost comical, if you listen to the EP and then the new album. And not a bad comical; it’s more like we obviously sat down and said, “Let’s listen to this song and let’s really pay attention to it and get it right. What’s it trying to do?” And obviously, a lot of them just wanted to be slower. We really did work on our sound and on developing as a band. I think it was totally worth it.

ZR: I think the point is that we really wanted to raise the bar for ourselves and for the music.

TG: The original Cornbelt, I mean back in the beginning… the raw talent was there. That’s the reason why it worked so well. But after that initial thing we knew we needed to mature as a band. We can make this smarter and deeper. We can make better music. We just needed to take the time to do that.

ZR: I feel like in some ways this album might be the most ambitious thing we’ll ever do artistically. From here on, it’ll be more–and who knows if my opinion will change–but I feel like from here on we’ll be more free to just create music that’s fun… Every member of our band are the types of guys that the music we obsess about… We’re all listening to bands like Radiohead, bands that just, if you’re a music guy, every time a new album comes out it just challenges the f*** out of your brain. We’ll sit there and chew on that s*** for, like, a year. Deep down, I think we all really want to be in one of those bands like that. I’m never going to compare ourselves to Radiohead, but I think our ambitions were really high for this first album. It was like, let’s challenge people’s ears, or let’s try to, anyway, and let’s also create something that’s fun to listen to and draw a big crowd, but let’s put a lot of thought into it. I have no idea if that’ll translate to the general public having interest in it, or if it will be pleasant for them or not. I honestly am completely baffled whether that will happen or not. I hope that lots of people will like it, obviously.

I’m feeling really happy that we got that out of our system. Not that it was a bad thing to get out of our system; I think it’s a great thing to get out of our system, and I’m really excited about the album. I think it sounds incredible. But it was also very intense in a way, and I can see our next album being, like I said, something really upbeat and fun, stuff you really can’t help but tap your feet and dance.

TG: The new stuff is way poppier.

Ambition is good, though they seem to be aware of the risks involved with that. I think Andre 3000 nailed it on “Hey Ya” when, after spending the first half of the song talking about how modern living seems more and more at odds with monogamy in relationships, he gives up and says, “Y’all don’t wanna hear me. You just wanna dance.” High-mindedness is a minefield. Sometimes people do just want to dance. Serving both masters is hard to do, especially at once. Let’s reel this back in, though.

CD: When will the new album actually be in your hands?

ZR: We’re just waiting on artwork at this point. We’re probably two to three weeks from the artwork being done, and then by the time we get it pressed… I guess, realistically, like two or three months. Hopefully two.

CD: So when it’s done and it’s in people’s hands, what’s the plan for the band then?

ZR: I think at this point the plan is to number one try to capitalize on some of that local momentum we were talking about earlier and play enough locally that we can keep people plugged in and make it feel like we’re not a bunch of a**holes just off in a studio somewhere and not giving a f*** about them, because we do care about them. I think other than that really just try and use the Internet. I really want to capitalize on getting some local reviews and, if we get good reviews, building some momentum off of that. I feel like this album… It sounds so crazy for just some guy sitting in Billiards in Springfield, Missouri to be saying, but I feel like it deserves a certain amount of buzz in music scenes across the Internet. I feel like, at least with certain crowds–and maybe that’s a very specific, small percentage–I think it will generate a certain amount of buzz. I feel like we made an album. I don’t feel like we made a CD with two or three good songs and then seven filler songs. I feel like we made a great album from start to finish.

Zach is walking a very fine line here. I’ve sat down with him enough times to know Cornbelt is his baby more than anyone else in the band–it’s his music finessed and fleshed out with the help of the others–and he believes whole-heartedly in his bandmates and in the finished product. To say that his band’s music “deserves a certain amount of buzz” will come across to some as arrogant, but the truth is if Cornbelt wasn’t his band he would probably be saying the same thing, just about someone else’s music. Todd wants to pick up the thread regarding the “we made an album” part, though.

TG: All of the guys in the band really appreciate that. None of us really have exactly the same tastes. We don’t listen to the same stuff. We have a common dozen or so bands, and that’s it, and then the rest we’re off in our own directions. But we wanted to make a complete album. I think for most of us, it’s probably single digits, at least in my head, of complete albums that I like.

ZR: To me, at this point, I’ve heard the songs so many times, and it’s obviously different when you’re listening to yourself, and so I think what I’m about to say is really great: I think there’s probably only three songs I would delete. Here I am, after listening to this album more times than any album I’ve ever listened to, and I would still only delete three songs. I think that’s pretty solid.

TG: From my standpoint, I’m employed full-time in another band. I play in Candy Coburn‘s band. It’s a great group and it’s a great job. The rest of the guys have normal jobs around town. Ideally, it would be nice to have some support, from a label or something, to go on some small runs and some small tours. But it takes money, because obviously you’re leaving your job for that section of time. Right now, currently, I mean, it would be tough, but we could leave for maybe three shows before we would have to be back. It’s hard to get a whole lot done in just three or four days on the road.

ZR: And it’s also kind of like, what’s the payoff? How much is it really increasing our chances of success? I think one thing we realize is the chances of Cornbelt Chorus taking off and becoming something and being able to make a career out of this are pretty slim. Really our plan as far as the future, more than anything, is to try to generate interest with labels that can provide tour support. But here’s where we don’t have nearly as good a chance as other talented bands is that we can’t afford to go around and survive off ramen noodles and live in some s***ty van and be away from home a lot. We all have responsibilities here. I’m not going to leave my son to lose money on the road. I can’t. It’s not an option.

The payoff, to a band that can, as Zach puts it, “survive off ramen noodles and live in some s***ty van and be away from home a lot,” is to play in front of new faces and–again, what playing music is theoretically about–to have fun. It’s also an antidote to the “playing the same venues all the time” issue Todd brought up earlier. If it comes down to taking food off a child’s plate or straining one’s relationship or job status to do it, though, it’s not that simple.

The industry is changing so much, so we have that going for us, but labels still to some extent like to see that you’ve played “X” amount of shows and have “X” amount of fans already. It’s not like they’re just looking at the music. For us to be able to make a career out of this thing and be able to go forward, we’re going to have to have a label or something come alongside us and say, “here’s some financial support. Here’s the ability to go out and tour.” Because we can’t do it like most bands can do it. We’ll keep making albums as long as we’ve got free time. It might take us two years to make every single album, but we’ll keep making albums.

TG: Yeah, I think that’s the ultimate goal. We would like to make a living off of Cornbelt, but we’re not planning or betting on it. The ultimate goal is just the music, because we love it.

Yes! Love! Fun! The truth emerges. I can’t help but wonder, though, especially with it coming up…

CD: What about something like South By Southwest, where you can submit music and do it yourself?

ZR: Yeah, stuff like that I want to capitalize on. I think that’s the plan. What can we do on the Internet ourselves? Where can we submit? I think the thing that’s great about this Merge Records thing that’s happening is that we’re creating a really great sort of press packet for them. Once that package is done, we’ll be able to send that not only to other labels but like Later [with Jools Holland, a music-oriented talk show on the BBC]. Jools Holland has great taste, but they’re not necessarily bands that have arrived. They’re up-and-comers. But things like that, it’s like, who knows if they would ever care, but maybe someone out there likes Cornbelt.

There’s really no telling how many doors an association with a label such as Merge Records can open. It could be 20; it could be none. Solter has worked closely with Merge–home of artists such as The Arcade Fire and Spoon–before, so Zach is hoping Solter shows the album to someone at the label and they take an interest on his recommendation.

TG: From our point of view, we’ve got more momentum than ever. Now that we have an album we can actually push ourselves. We’re a lot more confident with our sound and more mature.

CD: This actually touches on something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few months, the difference between EPs and full-length albums. Let me ask you this: If you had it to do over again, would you have done the EP or would you have held out and gone straight to the full-length?

ZR: I think there are a lot of reasons why that would have been worth it, but it’s just so hard to do. When you’re fresh and you’re new, not only are other people really excited about your music but you’re really excited about your music and the potential of the whole project.

TG: I think I’d still do it.

ZR: I think I’d still do it, too. The recording of an EP is really good, but in some ways I almost feel embarrassed by it now, but I think that’s mainly because of knowing where the songs have come to and where our band has progressed and the hard work we did and being able to hear the album and the full potential of all those songs. But when that EP came out I was really excited about it and I loved it, and I think other people loved it too. It does show that freshness of the band. It’s kind of exciting to see things a little underdeveloped, I guess, is what I’m saying. I think the one thing I would change is the amount of time between when the EP came out and now the album. But I don’t think it’s a mistake for a band unless you have enough songs for a full-length, and then it’s like why not record the full-length. But, I mean, our first show we played seven songs because we knew seven songs.

I think one of the things that is supporting Cornbelt is that Todd and I are now working on a children’s album.

Huh?!

TG: This is part of the thing that says we’re not betting on Cornbelt to pay our bills.

ZR: Here’s the thing. We’re not gonna sell out Cornbelt. We’re not gonna change Cornbelt’s sound in a way to sells records. We’re not gonna do that. We’re gonna keep challenging ourselves, keep raising the bar all that s*** we’ve already said that are just generic terms…

Some surprising self-directed cynicism. Perhaps not unfounded, though; those are all cliches to a degree.

We’re gonna keep doing that with Cornbelt and keep the artistic value intact. But we want to find ways to support being artistic. It’s just another idea. I mean, after having a son, it just came out of being in the car on the way to my mom’s and he’d be like, “Daddy, sing!” I’m like, “what do you want me to sing about?” and he’d say “an elephant!” Or he was obsessed with sharks for a while and so I made up a song about sharks one time. But these songs just start coming out really naturally because I was doing it for Hudson, but all these people started hearing about them and I started singing them for them and they’re like, “you really need to record these.”

TG: We’re not making cheesy kids’ songs. We’re making, like, Cornbelt kids’ songs. We still want it to be cool music.

ZR: They’re just catchy melodies that are presented in sort of an indie, fun way. At some point I realized most parents today are my age, and what are we listening to? So I’m really stoked on that project right now, because for one it’s really satisfying because I’m a parent and being able to play a part in kids’ lives is f***ing incredible. I would almost prefer that to the Cornbelt thing. But from a business perspective and from a money perspective it’s just through-the-roof more promising than something like Cornbelt. What I love about that is Cornbelt can always be about challenging ourselves to make the best album we can, and hopefully we can make money off this other thing to support that thing, you know what I mean?

CD: So how far along are you guys with that?

ZR: We’ve got two songs finished and recorded and we’re got seven songs now that are written. And they’re all really fun! Even as an adult. Everybody I’ve played them for is like, “Dude, I would listen to this!”