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New Orleans
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Sunday, 22 January 2006 07:18 |
Stavin' Chain
Ruf Records
By John Sinclair
One of the great untold stories about modern-day New Orleans is the city's magnetic attraction for a small legion of artists and intellectuals desperate to escape the ever-shrinking cultural reality of these United States who have have fled south to find a place they can live and work in an environment where music and art are still revered by the populace.
Scratch the surface of the Crescent City's immensely fertile artistic community and you'll find writers and poets and musicians and composers from wherever you might think of, all happily masking as local residents and finding their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of turn-of-the-century New Orleans.
It doesn't take long to immerse oneself in the deep slow pace of everyday life and its inescapable reverence for good music, good food, and good fellowship. Soon one encounters an incredible procession of kindred spirits of every description, natives and emigres alike, all eager to share their understanding of the peculiar ways of the city and the particular secrets each has uncovered.
And gradually, through this process, whatever you may bring with you is irreversibly transformed into something else altogether. Whatever its origins, wherever it came from and however it got here, New Orleans will take it and put it in the pot and make it part of its own delectable multi-cultural concoction. There's no getting around it, and truth be told, this is exactly why people come here to stay.
Grayson Capps came to New Orleans from a little Alabama town to study theatre at Tulane University. He brought his guitar with him and ended up fronting a band called the House Levelers, one of the first acts to appear on Tipitina's Records. When the Levelers split up in the early 90s, Grayson fell in with guitarist John Lawrence, a Connecticut native who'd also come to study at Tulane but withdrew to pursue a particularly intense course of personal musical development.
Capps and Lawrence took up residence in a pair of rustic shacks perched on the Mississippi River batteur and dedicated countless uninterrupted hours to creating their own musical language out of the materials of their experience and the elements around them. Soon they were performing as a duo in Jackson Square and the streets of the French Quarter, playing the country blues and a handful of haunting blues-like tunes of their own devise.
Now they needed a band to flesh out their musical vision and engaged the first in a continuing series of rhythm sections to help them realize the concept they had begun to call Stavin' Chain, a name out of local folklore immortalized by Jelly Roll Morton in his song "Winin' Boy" (or "Windin' Boy") as, well, a guy with a real big dick who knew how to use it to the immense benefit of his sexual partners.
Stavin' Chain had an immediate impact on the New Orleans music scene, playing well-received gigs at Tipitina's, Howlin' Wolf, House of Blues and other local venues and landing a major feature in OffBeat magazine in the fall of 1994.
"I think we're just starting to hit our sound," Capps told Keith Spera. "It incorporates the blues sound, but it's also got an edge. I like the rawness and the balls of the blues. A lot of blues guys ride on their guitar playing, and the lyrics are just there to have lyrics. I want something simple, a darker, rootsier thing with no limitations. We're not saying we're a blues band. We're just a band, and we're coming up with the shit we come up with."
For five years now Grayson Capps and John Lawrence have kept coming up with more great stuff--like the music you hear on this album. It's instantly apparent that they've torn their songs out of their own experience and given them a voice which is completely their own. Grayson tells a hell of a story, and John Lawrence is always right there with him with his dobro and slide guitar, sometimes contributing the melodies and forever bringing the real natural feeling of the dedicated bluesman to their music.
Finally discovered and signed for recording by Thomas Ruf during the 1998 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Stavin' Chain has enjoyed the extremely sympathetic assistance of Ruf Records stablemate John Mooney as producer of this album. Mooney studied music with seminal Delta bluesman Son House in Rochester, New York before embarking on a long and fruitful career as a guitarist, singer, composer, recording artist and riveting stage performer who has become an almost legendary figure in his adopted home town of New Orleans, and he brings the full benefit of his experience to the realization of this project.
Some of the pungent original material presented here--"Poison," "Train," "Get Back Up" and "Bloodshot Annie"--dates to an earlier Stavin' Chain session with organist Dave Tarantolo, bassist Anthony Hardesty and drummer Michael Voelker. The rest of the program was recorded with bassist Jeff Sarli, drummer George Recife, Tarantolo, and percussionist Michael Skinkus. Mooney himself makes an appearance on "Monkey Business" and takes a gorgeous solo on the eerie Lawrence-Capps composition "Bible." The whole thing was mixed by A-list producer/engineer Rob Fraboni, and it sounds just as good as it should.
So here's Stavin' Chain, ladies and gentlemen, a well-seasoned ensemble with a sound and a feeling all its own, equal parts backwoods blues and Crescent City atmospherics, ready to take its long-anticipated place in the hearts and minds of music-lovers all over the world like it's done in New Orleans.
I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot more from Grayson Capps and John Lawrence as their musical odyssey continues to unfold, and this CD should find a permanent home in your collection for many years to come.
--New Orleans
January 19, 1999
(c) 1999, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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