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Mr. Airplane Man |
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Features
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Tuesday, 31 January 2006 03:45 |
Mr. Airplane Man
By John Sinclair & Mark Ritsema
Raw stripped-down punk-blues played on guitar and drums by youthful duos of the Caucasian persuasion (the Soledad Brothers, White Stripes, Black Keys) have attracted considerable attention since the turn of the current century. But a two-piece band from Boston called Mr. Airplane Man has added a special twist to this neo-primitive approach -the startling sound of two young women deeply steeped in the blues idiom who are determined to make from it a music of their own.
Margaret Garrett plays nasty blues guitar, writes most of the band's songs and sings them with power and feeling. Tara McManus plays drums, a little organ, and sings back-up to Margaret's leads. They grew up together in the Boston area and formed Mr. Airplane Man in 1996 when they were living in San Francisco and listening to a lot of blues records.
When they got back to Boston they took their music straight to the streets and started playing in Harvard Square to attentive and ever-growing crowds. Soon they were adding dates at little nightspots around Cambridge and the city and beginning to elicit the praises of discerning local music writers. They put together a very rough initial recording and pressed up enough CDs to sell at their gigs and send out to a select list of alternative radio programmers.
For a time Mr. Airplane Man hooked up with the Boston-based management team of guitarist/journalist Ted Drozdowski and photographer Laurie Hoffma to venture out of home territory and explore the land where the blues began. They toured the South, sharing bills with Robert Balfour and other Fat Possum artists, and began to draw interest from record companies, but the duo ultimately decided that things were moving faster than they were prepared to go and parted ways with Ted and Laurie.
Now, a few years more deeply seasoned and still committed to making a sound profoundly their own, Mr. Airplane Man have created C mon DJ for full-scale album release by Sympathy for the Record Industry, the well-established independent label that is sure to expose the band's music to an international audience without slighting the ladies own self-willed ideas.
Meanwhile The Airplane Mans are touring with a vengeance, not just in the U.S. but in Europe as well, introducing their winning approach to a legion of new fans and continuing to grow and develop their distinctive sound in action. Dutch guitarist/composer/singer and music journalist Mark Ritsema caught up with Mr. Airplane Man in Rotterdam for their late-February appearance at Rotown and files this report:
Mr. Airplane Man might have picked the coldest week of winter to do a club tour of Holland. Margaret Garrett is suffering from a nasty fit of flu and tries to kill it off with cocktails of whiskey, tea and honey. Sobbing, shivering and still in her stage outfit of miniskirt and net stockings after the show, she looks like a drowning (guitar) heroine. Sitting next to her, drummer Tara McManus looks healthy and energetic. We know winters from back home in Boston, she points out.
No signs of influenza had been visible earlier on the Rotown stage, where the band cranked out a feverish set of hypnotic blues and damp garage rock, with mean Hubert Sumlin-like licks from Margaret's vintage guitars and Tara mugging the floor-tom no-tomorrow style in classic blues stomps like I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline). But there were also the more melancholy songs from C mon DJ, spotlighting Margaret's sad and haunting melodies with Tara letting up on her drumming and using one hand to add some keyboard patterns.
Rotterdam quickly heats up and falls in love with Mr. Airplane Man, and right after the show we had the following conversation:
Before I ever heard your music, your band-name immediately struck me. You re named after a great but obscure Howlin Wolf song. It would have been different if you d called yourselves The Little Red Roosters or Smokestack Lightning.
You know the song? Tara says. That's cool, because most people don t.
We just love that song, Margaret enthuses. We re obsessed with that particular kind of Howlin Wolf tune where he uses those repetitive, one-chord structures.
There's also the irony of two male references in the name.
We never thought of that when we took the name, Tara confesses. Our mothers pointed it out to us.
And they weren t too happy about it, Margaret adds, being old-school feminists: I marched for Women's Lib when you were in my belly, and you are going to be called like that? Thankfully things are different now. We are more allowed these days to be who we are, so we don t particularly relate to the concept of women into women's music. There's a whole movement like that.
I think it's okay that we re women and that there's girls out there for whom that might be an inspiring thing. When I was a young girl there weren t many female role models around. But I never thought about it in the first place. In my mind I sing like Jeffrey Lee Pierce or Howlin Wolf, but it just doesn t come out that way, reminding me again that I am a woman.
Your bio says you ve been friends from early youth and grew up together in Boston. Were you already interested in blues music at that time?
No, Tara says. We were into Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. We were 12 and Margaret had a record player in her bedroom. We d eat spaghetti and just go wild over Mingus.
Then Tara turned me on to punk, Margaret laughs.
We regularly turned each other on to different things, Tara elaborates. In 1996 we were living in San Francisco. We practiced a lot and completely got turned on to blues records on the Fat Possum label: T-Model Ford, R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough. They were big influences on us and on the way we wanted to sound.
In Boston in the 90s, Margaret says, we used to go and see Mark Sandman play all the time with Morphine, but more than that with his other band, The Hypnosonics. They were really great. Later on I got to know him personally and had so-called guitar lessons from him. But mostly we just got stoned and talked a lot.
His big advice to me was that I should travel. I was writing songs in my room, but I was never able to find people to connect with. Still I was obsessed with getting a band together. He said, Don t worry about that now and just go travel. By that time Tara was living in Arizona, and it made a lot of sense to go see her. That's where the plans for our band came together. We ve worked with other musicians, but the two of us just have the best chemistry.
You also played as street musicians in Boston?
Yeah, you could make like $25 or $30 a day each, Tara says, and once or twice a week we played in a club. We just used to play all the time. It was really fun.
Hard work, Margaret remembers, but it was fun.
Playing in the street must be hard indeed. Didn t you get all these people requesting songs by The Eagles or The Knack or worse?
Tara: We did well. The first year we played in Harvard Square for all kinds of kinda cool people. But then major stores bought out Harvard Square and the whole crowd turned so square. It became like playing at Disney World or something.
Your latest record, C mon DJ, has an overall melancholy touch and contains some beautifully sad songs like Don t Know Why and Sun Going Down (originally by the Dutch 60s band The Outsiders). Songs about longing. Does that have to do with all the touring you do lately?
No, I ve been longing all my life, Margaret laughs. That's a feeling I have on and off the road. I bet Tara feels even more longing with her boyfriend at home.
C mon DJ is our third album, and we didn t want to do another one full of one-chord blues songs. The reason we wanted to work with Greg Cartwright as a producer is that we both are big fans of his band, The Reigning Sound their first album in particular, Break Up Break Down, which is a total break-up record. I played it over and over, so it became a big influence on my own songwriting.
But we also used to see The Lyres, Tara says, standing in the front row every time they played in Boston. They re so amazing, I was just obsessed with them. But I didn t know at that time that they did a lot of songs by The Outsiders. They have that feeling too &just so sad.
The most beautiful songs, Margaret says. Rips you apart.
Finally, what will the future bring for Mr. Airplane Man?
No idea, Tara shrugs. We ve never been very conscious about what we do.
I think our goal is to get from moment to moment, Margaret concludes. Not worrying about the future. Just stay present.
May 9, 2004
Detroit/Rotterdam/Holland MI
(c) 2004, 2006 John Sinclair & Mark Ritsema. All Rights Reserved.
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