Practical Guidance
Early Nineties Power Trio Roosevelt Gets It Together For Another Round
originally published December 13, 2006
Pattiy Torno
Roosevelt
From 1990 until a friendly split in 1993, bassist John Crain, drummer Ballard Lesemann and guitarist Daniel Pruitt were Roosevelt, an Athens band that made music that would've sounded completely natural dubbed onto a mixtape right alongside the likes of Dinosaur Jr., the Minutemen and the Meat Puppets. The music combined slight elements of blues-influenced classic rock with more overt melodic indie-rock and punk energy.
A simple combination of the words "Roosevelt" and "reunion show," thrown together in conversations over the past several weeks, is enough to light up the eyes of any number of people involved in the Athens music scene of a decade-and-a-half ago. The band's music is one of the stronger pieces of evidence scene grumps have when talking about "back in the day," and a good example of the guitar-hero stuff that filled out the downtown sound before the Elephant 6 and Kindercore evolutions of the late-'90s.
A few vinyl and CD releases and appearances on compilations were the only hard evidence of the group's existence until Roosevelt reunited for a one-off show in late September, 2001, celebrating the release of the "best of" CD 1990–1993.
Pruitt is currently living in Savannah, and Crain and Lesemann now live in Charleston, SC; Crain released the solo album Unsolicited earlier this year, and Lesemann is the music editor of the Charleston City Paper - he had a fondly remembered run in the same position for several years at Flagpole during his time in Athens - and the two play together in several Carolina bar bands. On the occasion of a reunion show at the 40 Watt Club, only the band's second in Athens in more than 13 years, Flagpole called up Lesemann to chat about the band's history and (potential) future.
- Flagpole
- What got the three of you back to playing Roosevelt songs again?
- Ballard Lesemann
- Well, there was that reunion show back in 2001, a couple of weeks after 9/11, and we had a great time discovering that a lot of the music actually sounded just like it did back in '93, but just a little better. It really was a case of just picking up where we left off. So we played that show, and that was a blast.
- That's where it was, and this time around, I think it was the proximity. John Crain has lived in Charleston for seven or eight years. I got back a year and a half back. We started recording and playing around for fun in a couple of bands. He's a really fun bass player to play with, we're right on the same page. With Daniel in Savannah just a few hours down the road, we'd actually been getting together socially. You know, it's funny getting together with guys that you were a starving musician with when you were practically dropping out of college. You get to the grown-up stage, and you see that some things have changed, some haven't.
- Flagpole
- Do you find the songs hold up? Have you changed them at all?
- Ballard Lesemann
- Barely changed. We've made a few adjustments, partly because we've listened back and gone, "Oh no, what were we thinking this ending is terrible!" You know, unfortunately, partly because we're just technically unable to play what we did up back in '91, '92, '93. Particularly on the guitar and bass parts. It sounds like we were on trucker speed back then, just hauling ass like the Meat Puppets or something.
- Playing it nowadays, especially after Daniel hasn't played in an electric-guitar-rock-band setting for some time, we decided to rearrange it a little. But I'd say 90 percent of it is exactly the same, and it didn't fit in with anything in Athens then, and it certainly doesn't fit in with anything here in Charleston now. So it may be kind of comical to hear!
- Flagpole
- And you've been working on some new songs as well. Were they written by the three of you, or bringing Daniel in on songs you and John had been playing?
- Ballard Lesemann
- There's a little bit of that, yeah. We've got one or two brand-new songs that John wrote, and we're already talking to [Athens engineer] Andy Baker about doing a new record, re-recording stuff that we never properly recorded back in the day, and also some brand-new stuff. Just out of fun, nothing serious - we're not going to reunite and tour or anything like that. But it's easier to do nowadays, not just with money and experience, because you don't have to beg a label to help you out and rip you off. But the show in Athens is going to be mainly "the hits," if you can even call 'em that, and some new songs, and maybe a surprise cover or two to get a chuckle out of some old friends.
- Flagpole
- A lot of writing from the time sticks you in the company of bands like Hayride and the Jack-O-Nuts.
- Ballard Lesemann
- Most of 'em are all on that Fuel compilation CD we put out. Pattiy Torno, Chris Purcell and I tried to come up with a real indie label [Self Rising Records]. It fell apart after a year or two, none of us really knew what we were doing, but we were able to compile and document some of the better heavy-sounding bands at the time. Thorny Hold. Five Eight was still kinda fairly new. Jack-O-Nuts. An earlier version of Hayride.
- And then there was Fuel number two, Refuel, with Harvey Milk, Slumberjack and The Martians. A lot of stuff that wasn't your jingly-jangly, Rickenbacker, Dreams So Real and R.E.M. wannabe kind of stuff. It was the other side, the nastier, pre-grunge side of things. Even the Fuzzy Sprouts were heavier back then…. We never really fit in because we had this heavier, kind of prog-rocky sound, and a lot of the other bands at the time were super sloppy, but we were all kind of on the same page in terms of playing loud, aggressive stuff. Didn't fit in with the Panic scene that was coming up, didn't fit in with the wake of the R.E.M. stuff - which I'm sure R.E.M. hated, with bands trying to sound like them, dress like them, sing like them and even set up their gear like them.
- Flagpole
- A number of musicians who are still in town talk about early-'90s Athens as a golden era. Do you think that's just natural nostalgia that develops for any era, or was there something special going on?
- Ballard Lesemann
- Well, sure, kids who are playing right now, 15 years from now will consider the mid-2000s the best time. It just depends on the timing and what you were experiencing while you were there. It never ends, that's one of the things that kept me in Athens so long. There was a really rich diversity and concentration of stuff in a really small area.
- People take it for granted, sure. I mean, this was all pre-E6, pre-Kindercore. At the time, we were the starving misfits working at the Taco Stand and the Grit and DePalma's, just like those kids did afterwards after our time was up, the only difference was we didn't dress like Haight-Ashbury rejects playing tubas, or in Kindercore's case, dressed like the Brady kids playing '60s pop… the amazing thing when I got there in '88 as an 18-year-old was to play bass and drums totally green, not knowing what we were doing, and I'm sure the same thing happens every day. There were a bunch of bands who may not have been technically proficient, but they had these huge ideas and carried them through with the power of personality. Time Toy, the Squalls, for instance. That was the fire, that's what made you want to try your own thing.
- Flagpole
- So you moved to town when you were 18, and that's the perpetual age freshman at UGA are. This year's freshman class was born the same time you started playing music. What can Roosevelt offer audiences so far removed from the time?
- Ballard Lesemann
- Yeah, thanks a lot, man. You know, the last couple years I was in Athens, I was becoming one of those barflies I used to make fun of. You know, the guy whose bandmate works at one bar and roommate works at the other, so he never has to pay for drinks; everybody knows everybody down on Washington Street, and it's very easy to start griping like an old coot, but it's not healthy.
- What is healthy is to keep playing and continue to be creative and collaborate, just like the Elephant 6 guys, the Olivia people, who were in it for the right reason, which is to be creative and expressive. Sift through the cliquish bullshit and small-town soap opera crap. But there were fewer places to play and hang out back then, so just by default it was a tight scene. Now with so many choices, it seems like pulling teeth to get people to see a show.
- So I guess what we can offer is a glimpse into the dark past of Athens. I dunno. We're not taking it seriously. I think it'll maybe be fun.
- Flagpole
- Everyone I've talked to, from club owners to record store folks to musicians from the time, seems really excited about the show and has nothing but enthusiasm for the band. Roosevelt seems to be very highly remembered.
- Ballard Lesemann
- That's very nice to hear. I think that's because John and Daniel were very genuine and had a dry sense of humor, the farthest thing from any kind of glammy, self-important rock star thing. We were the antithesis of that, I think. But also, the two of them are playing some pretty impressive rock and roll. You know, we practiced three times over the weekend and I was just sitting back there watching them, forgetting what I was doing because I was going, "Damn, I forgot how tough this stuff is," and they were pulling it off. They never took themselves seriously, but they took the music seriously. That kind of genuine vibe was always there.
WHO: Roosevelt, The Shut-Ups, Down With the Woo
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Friday, Dec. 15
HOW MUCH: $5
Bigger Music, Smaller Name
M Coast Gets Down With The New Sound
originally published December 13, 2006
It’s a rare thing for a band to successfully radically rework both its vision and sound. A few have done it, sure, but generally speaking, those bands had the graciousness of a generous audience that grew with the band. Usually, by the time a band has released several records, it either possesses a sense of entitlement that prevents it from branching out or has worked itself into a creative rut that excludes new possibilities.
The band that can find itself speaking to an entirely new audience after such a change is the rarest type. Long-running Athens pop band M Coast - formerly known as Marshmallow Coast - is an example of this breed.
Since 1996, when Andy Gonzales began releasing records under the name Marshmallow Coast, the sound of his music could generally be classified as personal stories, real or imagined, accompanied by relatively gentle music. At its best, it was intimately comforting and at its worst, it was a tad too precious. But now Gonzales and songwriting partner and bandmate Derek Almstead have finally achieved a sound that was merely hinted at over the past few records released under the name Marshmallow Coast. Rechristening the band M Coast, the two joined forces and produced the new album Say it in Slang, which serves as wonderful evidence of new shades of life.
“I feel that with Andy's tunes it's just a continuation of the direction he's (been writing for the past several records, at the root of it," says Almstead. "I guess that his songs in combination with mine shift the focus of the sound a bit. It's just bigger and more fleshed out. More diverse. And that's a conscious effort to expand the whole thing into something more democratic and universal. I wanted to do something stronger than just my stuff, something with friends that I could count on to make it better than I could do on my own. That shift into a shared responsibility made me a lot more confident and excited to put the effort into to it, like a feedback loop of momentum.”
Gonzales responds in his typical, sweetly aloof fashion, saying, “The new sound comes from me writing my typically mellow songs in [recording program] Reason, then having the luxury to see what it sounds like sped up!”
As far as the collaborative writing effort between the two goes, it’s more peer review than woodshedding. “It was Derek's idea originally," says Gonzales. "It was strange at first, cause his [solo] album was practically done, and I had to contribute largely in post production. Derek writes like more of a modern rocker, and we really had to tweak certain editing things and the song order to make it work well. I think the songs complement each other, but they definitely have a different vibe.”
Almstead concurs: “It was my idea. Sara [Kirkpatrick], Andy and I were working on Andy's record at my house and I was working on my stuff by myself. I wanted Andy to be in my band and vice-versa. We had a few practices doing my stuff with Andy, Carlton [Owens] and me, and I didn't really have a lot of confidence in myself as a lead singer. My father had just passed away, and he'd always been really supportive of the bands I was in, but also honestly critical. He'd always say after seeing one of my bands play, 'It's too much of one person's voice, it gets boring no matter how good the music is.' I always took it to heart. You can see the benefit for bands that really do that well, like the Dead or Fleetwood Mac or the Minutemen. Plus, it's counter-intuitive to the very niche-driven, one-dimensional bands that I'm not really interested by. “
The sound contained on Say it in Slang, recently released by local label Happy Happy Birthday To Me, is as informed of dreamy Stereolab/ Free Design-style guitar pop as it is dance rhythms and studio magic. This last detail is pure Almstead. When asked how the band, comprised of the aforementioned Kirkpatrick and Owens along with Gonzales, Almstead and Emily Growden, could possibly reproduce this nuanced sound in a live setting, Almstead replies, “It's somewhat difficult. When I was working on the record, I also started doing monitors at the 40 Watt and I learned and thought a lot about how different bands deal with a solution to that issue. Most of these tunes are in the 45–60 track range, which is just the casual gluttony of the studio these days. So, live we do use backing tracks to a small degree, and samples. I try not to worry about it too much. I really like a certain amount of fluidity in bands live, and that's something I think that we'll grow into as we play more. But yeah, it is a ‘producer's album.’”
Significant for the group is the change from Marshmallow Coast to simply M Coast. Almstead says the name change still raises questions. “I don't know if it was the right thing to do or not," he says. "It just seemed like we needed to mark that a change had occurred, but not completely lose the history. We thought of some completely different names and didn't like any of them.”
Gonzales, however, is much more pragmatic in his explanation. “I want to reach, say, the dishwasher at The Grit, someone who might be too embarrassed to bring a CD to work with ‘Marshmallow’ in the name."
Although the band is quite busy with jobs and life in general, the loose plan is to do some touring in the spring and summer of 2007, including a trip to South By Southwest in Austin, TX. Then it’s back to the studio.
WHO: M Coast, Folklore, Fabulous Bird
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Thursday, December 14
HOW MUCH: $6
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