ARTS Tuesday, October 10,1989 The Michigan Daily Page 5 Made in Michigan with a big beat Local wags make rare local appearance at Pig BY BRIAN JARVINEN ARE you bored with the local club scene yet? You know, endless groups of eager undergraduates with more earnestness than skill doggedly trying to get the masses of beer- chugging, prowling trendoids to pay attention to the cool way they changed the break of "Superman" to daringly add their own verse that they have agonized over for weeks, or more creative "original" bands that play three times a month, using their status as tape recording artists to subject their fans to unfocused, drunken rehearsals for some really important out of town gig. Fortunately, there is one rela- tively new local band that refuses to play in such stagnant ways: Big Chief. This band of all-stars are vet- erans of a number of mitten-land outfits including Tom Gemp, Crossed Wire, the Necros, the Laughing Hyenas, and Born Without a Face. They are Mark Dancey and Phil Durr on guitar, Mike Danner on drums, lead and only vocalist Barry Henssler, and Matt O'Brien on bass. I recently visited their tiny practice space for a rambling chat. The band can best explain their determination to break away from the rest of the local music scene: Barry: They're playing us on DET. We've got kind of a. foothold there. We don't want to get treated like a local band. Mark: You have to be recognized by someone out of town before you will be recognized in Detroit. Barry: Just look at the Hyenas. They had to do well out of town be- fore people would pay attention to them here. Mark: And they still don't get write-ups in the Metro Times. Prose wri tes of modern women BY MARK SWARTZ 641F everything happened the way we planned it, we wouldn't recognize our lives," declares author Francine Prose in reference to "Tibetan Time," one of the stories from her recent collection Women and Children First. It is a theme that pervades all of her work. People, even those closest to us, surprise us with the things they do. Even more frequently, we surprise ourselves. The Francine Prose protagonist is often a middle-aged woman, alone and barely managing. They have long tired of things not working out in their lives, so they're trying to turn it around. "They're all looking for something. God knows what. Some sense of order, something that doesn't seem chaotic. An explanation for things," says Prose. That's what drives Ceci in "Tibetan Time" to pay 50 more dollars for just five minutes with the Lama at a Buddhist retreat outside of New York City. It makes Janet in the title story make -n appointment with an ESP re- searcher at the medical school to certify the bond she feels exists between her son Kevin and herself. Still, "Janet feels strange, as if she's involving her child in something scandalous, like some Victorian father introducing his son to the local bordello." This sense of humor - perhaps despairing, but at least far from de- tached - weaves its way into the very serious messages of the stories. "I think the stories are extremely serious. I mean them extremely seriously, but I have trouble staying interested unless it makes me laugh," says the author. By the time we reach the end of her stories, we are sure that she is not kidding around. Always, they close with a single, powerful visual image that fill us up with a sense of having read something significant. "I'm looking for something that will give you the chills. I want something that makes the end of the story feel like it's opening up. An echoing back through the story," offers Prose. "Often I just go around looking for something that will do that. I wait around until something extraordinary happens." With seven novels published that focus primarily on women's lives, Francine Prose has dispelled in her own mind any stigma about writing as a woman. "Women writers who refuse to see themselves as women writers better be careful because someone else is certainly going to call them women writers," she warns. "To say 'I don't feel like a woman' is like - this isn't an exact analogy, but - is like living in Germany be- fore the war and saying 'I don't feel Jewish.' It's about how you're per- ceived as much as how you perceive yourself. "The experience of a woman, regardless of hormones or cell construc- tion, is different than male experience. I'm not saying that a woman might not be capable of writing Moby Dick, but it doesn't seem quite as likely. A man might be capable of writing To the Lighthouse, but it doesn't seem quite as likely." Barry: But instead of like getting bummed out about that we can just go somewhere else and play. We've already done well out East and we did well in Chicago and I'm sure we'll do even better when we go back east. We like Ann Arbor. We want to play here. Mike: We just don't want to be an "Ann Arbor band." Barry: We don't want to be back- ground music for someone to get drunk to. I think we're worthwhile enough to go somewhere to see us play. Mark: There are so many bands that you can just see every month. Phil: It's just a matter of over-expo- sure... Matt: You can get a ticket for that. Plus we're fortunate that we have a lot of connections outside of town whereas a lot of people have to play here to play at all. Our goal is to put out records and that's in progress so now we want to go to Europe. Mike: We're gonna go to New York and show them how to tune their guitar. Barry: And how to comb their hair. Mike: My idea of an American tour is between here and JFK. Barry: And then Germany, Holland, Italy,.. Phil: Can we avoid France please? Mike: I want to go to France. Mark: You do? Mike: Yeah, we're Americans. Ok, so they have some major goals. The records in progress in- clude a single on Sub Pop: Barry: I got this call from them last February. The people in Mudhoney told us to send them a tape, but I never did because I figured Sub Pop gets 8,000 tapes a week from people saying put us on your label. The band wasn't even really formed. We didn't even have a band name. They just said hey we're doing this singles club thing do you want to do it and we said of course cuz they're like one of our favorite labels. So a year and a half later it's going to come out, scheduled for March '90. They also found someone to fi- nance a longer record: Barry: We've got a patron of the arts. We're sending the tape off to have it pressed. Mike: We're probably not gonna call it anything. Matt: It won't be on any label or anything. Barry: Before you know it will be gone and be worth 20 bucks. Matt: Then we're gonna stage a suicide and it will be worth even more. Ok, ok, so they are way ahead of most bands already. But what about the music: Barry: I think George Clinton is as important a contributor to music as like Iggy Pop or any of the early Detroit things. I think he is very very underrated and is kind of glossed-over by like "rock purists" or whatever. He is definitely as raw and as wild. Phil: My dream in life is to play in his band. Barry: There's lots of people that are way more popular than him. Matt: Ike James Brown. Mark: Seventies soul is totally ig- nored. Everything is like the Stooges. Bands all over the world try to sound like them. Barry: Our approach is a lot differ- ent from the Sub Pop bands. There is the affinity to volume and power... Matt: And beer. Barry: And beer but that's about it. Phil: I think we kind of exercised our speed out of us over the last six, seven years. Right now there is more of a connection to like no- wave stuff than hardcore. I'm not saying we're a no-wave band. Barry: I would say something like that would be as big an influence on us as something like Black Sabbath. Mike: They're starting to creep in don't you think? Mark: After a while you realize that a one-two thrash beat is not a powerful beat. Mike: We used to have one song in We don't know what it is either - you'd have to ask Mark's analyst. What we do know is that Big Chief are one of the few bands that understand the words sustain and power. Mmmmmm. the set to please the "punk element" but then we said fuck that. This approach can mystify the theoretically open-minded under- ground audience, as it did at a show in Flint this summer: Mark: The first two bands played speed-metal covers and they loved it. They were all moshing around. Barry: They all watched us and ap- plauded but they were really con- fused. They were like "how do we dance to this?" BIG CHIEF will perform with Austin/NYC's NICE STRONG ARM tonight at the Blind Pig at 9:30 p.m. Tickets are $4. 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