Lessons Learned

Back From Tour, Elf Power's Jaunt Lacked High Drama - That's Not Very Rock And Roll!

originally published October 25, 2006

Elf Power's tour from South to Midwest to Northeast and back down the coast to Athens contained no arrests, no fistfights, no groupies, not even minor vehicular mishaps. No high drama whatsoever! How un-rock-and-roll is that? Flagpole managed to get hold of bandmembers Derek Almstead (bass), Andrew Rieger (vocals and guitar) and Jimmy Hughes (guitar) - at various times over the past week to talk about how things went on their recent travels, and despite a tape recorder malfunction and the drinking of several screwdrivers, the overall impression of the tour was one of professionalism, of having figured out how to make something work without taking quite all the romance out of it.

For one thing, there were a few near celebrity encounters. Clyde Stubblefield, who drummed for James Brown, plays every Monday night at the King Club in Madison, WI, where Elf Power played on a Sunday night. Rieger mentions that they also played Blueberry Hill, in St. Louis, where Chuck Berry gigs once a month. Berry didn't show, but infamous scenester Beatle Bob, “local legendary icon, danced like a mad fiend through [the] set yelling out compliments between songs like 'top of the pops!' 'outstanding!' and 'exemplary!'” says Rieger.

Almstead adds, “Supposedly Kevin Bacon had been filming a movie that week in Columbia, SC, so he had come into Art Bar a few nights that week and they were talking about it like 'Kevin Bacon might show up tonight!' But he didn't.” So that was out as a possibility for major excitement for those of us who live vicariously through the exploits of musicians on the road.

Facial hair was experimented with in small degree. “Josh [Lott, the band's drummer] grew a hilarious mustache,” says Almstead, trying to recall the technical term for the specific iteration (it appears to have been a variation on the Fu Manchu). “I was against it at first because I thought it would give us a 10 percent drop in our merchandise sales, but somewhere along the line, we realized that it had increased our merchandise sales.” As to whether the next tour would feature all bandmembers sporting upper lip growths, Almstead responds, “I think there might be a law of diminishing returns.”

So is the band - cellist Heather McIntosh and multi-instrumentalist Laura Carter were also along for the ride - touring in its own customized bus these days, since Warner Bros., through its newly acquired Rykodisc label, released Elf Power's new album Back to the Web? Not unless you understand “bus” to mean “nice rental van.” And the band still plays a lot of less fancy venues, from a sports bar in a strip mall in Charleston patronized by regulars who did their best to ignore the music to Vamp's, in Toledo, OH, which Rieger describes as “an insanely huge three-story dilapidated Masonic lodge. The first floor was a crazy hip hop dance party. We played in a ballroom on the second floor. The third floor was goth dance night, and these grizzled veterans of the Toledo goth scene looked stuck in a time warp circa 1986. The promoter took me through a secret hatch onto the roof to pay me as it poured down rain. I was scared his goons were gonna hurl me over the side!”

These experiences were more than balanced, according to Rieger, by New York's Union Hall having a full bocce court on-premises; Richmond, VA's Hyperlink Cafe being packed and not being some kind of Internet craze venue; and, in Asheville, NC, “a random assortment of freaks going nuts at the show, led by a kid dressed in a Peter Pan outfit, maniacally writhing like a possessed beast.”

What's the craziest they got? It might've been eating breakfast at the dinner hour every day for about a week, until they got grossed out by it. Or it might have been beer pong in Portland, ME, for which Rieger possesses a certain degree of skill, according to Hughes: “I sat there for a while just watching Andrew taunt the other pong players, but the beautiful thing was, the taunts weren't just threats. Andrew and his teammate were quite triumphant. I was impressed.”

It's no myth that shows in other cities tend to start earlier than in Athens, especially on weeknights, and that Almstead has “specific tour crowd psychological rules. One is that if you give a person a chair, they will sit in it, and that can be an audience killer. It's always weird to go to clubs where they have a bunch of tables and chairs set up in front of the stage and you're a rock band. And then the rooms where you go and play an art space or gallery or something like that and all the lights are focused on the whole audience and there's no delineation between what's the show and what's not the show as far the lighting is concerned. People tend to wallflower out away from the light.”

It's a good idea for everyone to have a role on the tour as well as in the band, whether it be driving the van, doing sound, loading up or whatnot. The best advice for those on tour, according to the band, is “Hide your drugs.” No, that was a joke. The real best advice, according to Almstead, is to find something to do in the van, like navigating or playing video games, even if you've planned your tour out to where your trips are no longer than four or five hours driving between shows. Otherwise, he says, “you get into this really weird state of mind where you're sleeping all day, then you wake up and you're kind of dazed and you get to the sound check and then you eat.”

In some ways, this self-imposition of structure, which can exist with improvisation and goofiness, is indicative of the whole tone of the band and its members, as well as good life advice in a way. If you're lucky enough not to have a regular kind of job with structure built into it, you could end up degenerating into nothing but a couch potato; a little potato-ness isn't bad from time to time, but what you really want is something to keep you on track so your output doesn't suffer. This is the real lesson: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and probably a pound of drama, too.

Hillary Brown