12B - The M igan Daily - Weekend4c. Magazine - Thursday, J3 ary 27, 2000
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0 The Michigan Daily - - Jekend, etc. Mag
Acollege bad worth a thousand words struggles for identity
Great Big Sea of folk arrives soon
AUTOMOBILE
Continued from Page 38
In those ventures, one person typical-
ly wrote each song by working alone,
Kune said.
The collaborative spirit follows
Automobile to its live performances.
"It's playing live where we get the
chemistry between all of us," Baldwin
said. One of the group's favorite
shows happened at 1999's Octoberfest
in Lansing, where they shared a stage
with Marcy Playground. As a result of
the performance, Automobile was
selected to be on a live compilation of
the event produced by Lansing station
92.1 FM, "the Edge."
As with most of the band's jobs,
Automobile stumbled into the offer to
play Octoberfest when its organizer
happened to hear them playing while
walking by a coffee shop. Other
opportunities came from the group's
tenacity in calling clubs or from trad-
ing jobs with other local bands.
Not all the band's concerts go as
smoothly as the Octoberfest event,
however. During a show a year and a
half ago at the U.S.A. Cafe in East
Lansing, the band had to set up their
equipment right next to the tables and
had their start time pushed back.
"They started kicking out our friends
during the set," Kunc said, because
they were under 21 and it was after 9
p.m.
"It was like playing a Steak 'n'
Shake with a cover charge," Buell
said of the U.S.A. Cafe job. Once the
group's friends were thrown out, very
few people interested in the band
remained in the audience. In spite of
the band's pride in a great set, at the
end of the performance they were
greeted by a silence in which "you
could hear a spoon drop," Buell said.
In Ann Arbor, Automobile has per-
formed at the Halfway Inn, East Quad
Music Festival and the League
Underground. Now that they have
penetrated the music scenes of Flint
and East Lansing, the bandmates are
working more on getting jobs in Ann
Arbor. "As far as Ann Arbor goes, we
haven't played everywhere we need to
play," Buell said.
Automobile is holding off on
scheduling any performances at the
Blind Pig for the time being. Part of
the reason lies in the fact that the
band would prefer not to put in time
on Tuesday night so as to move up to
Wednesday night, and so on. "Unless
you can get a good foothold at the
Blind Pig, you can't get a good show
time," Buell said.
The band also wants to wait to book
Courtes} of Automrotde
Automobile had to follow a tangled road before settling on its current five-member lineup (and name).
larger clubs such as the Blind Pig in
order to finish its album. That way the
group could leave listeners with a
sample of their music. Without an
album "you take 10 steps forward,
and then by the time you play again
you've taken nine steps back because
no one remembers you," Kunc said.
Automobile started recording its
first album a year ago. The bandmates
plan for the as-yet-unnamed album to
include 10 songs, nine of which are
finished. "There are a lot of literary
references in all the songs, except for
the cranky political ranting ones,"
Toms said.
This recording experience worked
out very differently from previous
sessions in which the band members
have been involved. Typically, new
bands pay high rates per hour for time
in a recording studio, so the members
don't get a chance to do everything
they want to-do. Instead, the album's
producer and engineer Greg
VanNewkirk offered Automobile
unlimited time in his backyard studio.
"We're kind of his pet project,"
Baldwin said. "It's the best thing that
could have happened to us for record-
ing purposes."
During that first studio session, the
band laid down five tracks, following
their habit of time pressure from pre-
vious recordings. After listening to
them again at VanNewkirk's sugges-
tion, they decided not to use any of
them. Now the bandmates work on
each song for an extended period of
time. "A lot of times in the studio, we
listen to the same song over and over
and over," Toms said. "We get a really
refined sense of our own music."
"We're able to make the album at
our pace, which makes the music real-
ly heartfelt," Baldwin agreed. "We
joke about how long it's taking, but I
think it's going to be reflected in the
maturity of the music." The band-
mates hope to finish off the album,
their first priority, in the next couple
of months.
As for the future, the members of
Automobile aren't looking much fur-
ther ahead than their next perfor-
mance, scheduled for Feb. I at East
Lansing's Small Planet. After ponder-
ing the question of where they next
want to go with their music,
Automobile's musicians unanimously
decided on "Des Moines, Iowa," since
they really have no prediction of what
will happen. "It's a critical point for
the band right now," Buell said. "All
of us are staring down the barrels of
the work world."
Although each musician has other
options, Automobile's members all
agree that their hearts are in pursuing
the band's music to its natural conclu-
sion, whatever that might be. "I
wouldn't have changed anything, the
years I've been in this band," Kunc
said. "Getting huge, that would be
fine, I'm sure, but as long as this con-
tinues, that would be great. I would
give up being a rock star to continue
this."
By Ken Barr
For the Daily
What did you do for New Year's?
Did you reunite with your high
school friends back home? Did you
drive down to Florida for the Orange
Bowl? Did you watch fireworks over
the Thames or from the Champs
Elysses?
No matter how you celebrated the
Millennium, it. is pretty tough to
compete with a New Year's party at
which 90,000 men, women and chil-
dren have gathered to appreciate,
applaud and adore you. Yet, the
Canadian band Great Big Sea
enjoyed just that - returning to their
native St. John's, Newfoundland
after a extensive tour to perform in
concert and welcome the New Year.
Surprisingly, Great Big Sea was
quite worried their homecoming
would be completely lost in the
Millennium shuffle - worried that
revelers would be more concerned
with the countdown and the cham-
pagne toasts to even notice four men
and their traditional (yet modern-
ized) Celtic-inspired music.
These fears were quickly allayed
when Great Big Sea's entrance on
stage met with the applause and
devotion of tens of thousands of
devoted fans, fans more excited to
cheer on their countrymen than to
worry about the trivialities of the
New Year.
Ann Arbor residents will have a
chance to experience the power of
Great Big Sea at Hill Auditorium this
Saturday as part of the 23rd Annual
Ann Arbor Folk Festival. The folk
festival is a major national music
event: Besides Great Big Sea, it fea-
tures Shawn Colvin (of "Sunny
Came Home" fame), Arlo Guthrie
(legendary son of the even more leg-
endary Woody Guthrie), Beth
Nielson Chapman, The Hot Club of
Cowtown, Anne Hills, Fred
Eaglesmith, and David Barrett.
Masters of ceremonies Matt
Watroba and Robert Jones will
appear on behalf of Detroit's WDET
Radio (101.9 FM). The concert,
which usually lasts between five and
six exciting hours, benefits Ann
Arbor's bastion of quality folk, blue-
grass and world music: the Ark. The
Ark, now located on Main Street at
Liberty, has been a bulwark of local
music and the arts for more than 30
years.
Fans of folk music already know
that there will be no better single dis-
play of talent on one stage than the
upcoming annual Ann Arbor Folk
Festival, but even folk neophytes
should make it a point to attend. Not
only will they recognize Grammy
Award-winning headliner Shawn
Colvin, but The Ark predicts that
Fred Eaglesmith's gritty, passionate.
songs about Everyman's struggle
will appeal to students. Eaglesmith
has worked with such class acts as
the Cowboy Junkies and been com-
pared to Neil Young, Lyle Lovett and
Tom Waits.
The music of Beth Nielson
Chapman runs the gamut from pop to
country, while Anne Hills possesses
a voice desribed as pure, luminous,
crystalline and irresistible.
Millions have unkowingly heard
David Barrett's compositions at both
the Seoul Olympics and the NCAA
Basketball Tournament, and who
wouldn't get a kick out of a band
called The Hot Club of Cowtown (a
swingin', singin' string trio with a
country flair? On second thought,
don't answer that).
Matt Watroba has been Detroit's
voice of folk music for over a decade
via his acclaimed "Folks Like Us"
radio show (Saturdays, 12-3 p.m. on
101.9 FM). Watroba points out that
folk music is inherently hard to
define, but might be classified as
predominantly acoustic "songs of the
human heart. songs that celebrate the
wonderfully ordinary things about
extraordinary human beings"
Watroba often performs at the Ark
and will be intermittently performing
while hosting the folk festival along
with his colleague Robert Jones, a
blues DJ for WDET.
Great Big Sea has a habit of utter-
ly astonishing those who do not
know what to expect. Most have
never heard four men with acoustic
instruments produce such a powerful
sound, and never before has tradi-
tional folk and Celtic music sounded
so "cool." Yet this band, whose
records go instantly platinum in
Canada, is relatively unheard of in
the United States. Those who did
know what to expect were shattered
two years ago when the band was
tied up at the U.S. border in a
Customs bureaucracy and unable to
make it to Ann Arbor as scheduled.
Now, with all their papers in order,
Great Big Sea is eager to be part of
the folk festival. The band performs
a mix of originals and modernized
folk songs and with more than 1000
Courtesy of ire Records
Great Big Sea joins FM radio darling Shawn Colvin for this weekend's Folk Festival.
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