| When Matt Walters created the Spade Kitty
record label in 1995, it was one man's attempt to fund a creative outlet for a scattered
handful of fellow Northwestern University-based musicians. Eight years later, Spade Kitty
is still around, still a one-man operation, and still growing as a forum for local
musicians.
Particularly those with a prediliction for power
pop. Thus Spade Kitty was a logical fit for the mammoth, 20-night, nine-to-20-bands-a-day
celebration of the power pop genre, the International Pop Overthrow Festival.
Over 50 people showed up on April 21 at Nevin's Live in Evanston to check out the Spade
Kitty acts. Not a bad night for a Monday night in suburban E-town. The Spade Kitty
showcase are not among the best-known or best-traveled acts on the massive International
Pop Overthrow schedule, but they are a good fit for the festival'sgoal of spotlighting
little-knowns.
Plus, the locals on Spade Kitty have benefited from two events that might fit into David
Letterman's "brushes with greatness" feature. First, in 1997, Spade Kitty act
Post Office landed studio time with one of the elder statesmen of the power pop genre,
Chris Stamey of the db's. That event prompted Walters, who began cobbling together a few
hundred dollars to print records while working as the general manager of Northwestern's
indie-wise radio station WNUR-FM, to expand his duties in the one-man record business to
include shopping for distributors and marketing the CDs. In the process of selling a few
hundred copies of the Post Office CD--including a sold out order of 25 CDs in
Japan--Walters has also expanded the label roster to include more acts.
The second brush with greatness affected Walters' band Olde Style. The band received a
shot in the arm when the WB network picked Oak Park and River Forest High School's class
of 1992 as the subject of its highly rated reality TV show, "High School
Reunion." Walters and two other Olde Style members are '92 Oak Park high school
grads, and vocalist-bassist-harpist Tim Gittings became one of the 17 alumni in the cast
of the show. But more on that later.
The evening's most polished band may have been Larry O. Dean's latest outfit, The Me
Decade. The group was born when Dean and fellow Post Office songwriter Stephen Becker
split up to work on solo projects. Dean spent some time in San Fransisco recording a solo
album, then founded this lineup and eventually headed back to Chicago.
"Post Office was a great tandem of songwriters because on one hand you have the
British pop Steve was serving up and on the other Larry's rootsy Americana jangle, which
was a nice counterplay to it," Walters said. "What Larry felt was if you
presented his songwriting in the same format Post Office was in there would be something
missing, something lacking."
The result: Dean set his own untrained, quirky vocals in a rich brand of jangle pop with
lush violin and backing vocals, a sound reminiscent of the southern jangle of the
Judybats. Dean's lyrics are as quirky as his voice: "We were never happy/ We took it
as a fact/ That happiness was preferable/ because it's what we lacked"..."The
pursuit of perfection is a waste of time / It's like getting an erection while waiting in
line."
The evening began with Hop On Pop and Paper
Airplane Pilots, which both feature energetic power pop with a certain amount of
quirkiness. Both bands claim as an influence the odd, supershort, stylistically elastic
melodic pop of Guided by Voices. The Paper Airplane Pilots (which radio comic Steve Dahl
once named one of his favorite band names) are particularly good at writing credibly
catchy, pop songs with driving guitars and plenty of pep.
Hop on Pop, which features Walters on keyboards and Me Decade's Tim on bass, lived
up to the title of their last CD, Lo Fi Is Better than No Fi, as the less than
polished frontman Todd Leiter-Weintraub has some difficutly doing his catchy songs
justice. Several of Spade Kitty's players collaborate on more than one label act. Walters
himself plays both in Hop on Pop and Olde Style, as well as a '60s psychadelia outfit
called Red Plastic Budha, the brainchild of the bass player in both The Me Decade and Hop
On Pop.
Olde Style, a small collective of old buddies making a gleefully loose hodge podge of
homage to everything from classic rock and pop to lusty blues and lustier funk, closed out
the night. They picked up the pace a few notches from The Me Decade and gave a performance
that out-rocks their own record, Rockwell.
The WB producers, who assigned labels like "The Popular Girl" and "The
Nerd" to each cast member, dubbed Gittings "The Artist." Viewers will
remember him as the guy who invited a high school friend to the prom only to end up
helping to facilitate her engagement to a longtime boyfriend, or perhaps as the guy who
served a classmate breakfast in the nude. That sort of rock & roll brauvara (which has
been part of Gittings' charm before he was in a rock band, a fact I can vouch for as--full
disclosure--a fellow alum of Oak Park High School) has sometimes found its way into the
freewheeling fun of the Olde Style show. At one recent gig at Wise Fools the fit Gittings
showed up in a loin cloth. But on April 21 he opted for more subdued garb, sporting a
goatee and kerchief.
The band's 30 minute set, meanwhile, was more focused than they've been in some prior
gigs. They've been known to wander across the stylistic map, from a nearly note-for-note
cover of 80s pop hit "867-5309" to obviously unrehearsed originals. That loose
approach to genre is "part of our charm," in Gittings' words.
But Monday night, the band picked up the stylistic slack, zooming in on the fast and hard.
They opened with a sort of frenzied mating call ("Oh, she's long and tall! Oh, she's
got it all!") and launched on a ripping sort of modern funk number, a euphamism-laden
ode to a pistol-toting TV detective.
The WB network never ran any footage of the band, despite Gittings' insistance that the
production crews gather footage of the group when they came to Chicago to film background
interviews. But he was shown playing his harmonica and reciting his own poetry, and Olde
Style managed to capitalize on the event by playing at viewing parties at Chicago area
venues where local crowds watched the show as it aired this winter. Those gigs earned the
band enough money to fund a round of studio sessions for a CD to follow their first CD, Rockwell.
Walters, who says his top priority is playing music rather than publishing records,
expects Spade Kitty to make a little money on all three of the records he put out last
year, even as the MP3 revolution threatens to make live performance the only money-making
opportunity for indie bands. "It's tough to put out record after record when you're
not really sure if you're going to keep recovering your costs," Walters said.
"But you do it as a labor of love."
Photos provided by Dan Locke from DLL Productions -
dllproductions@hotmail.com
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