Musicians Like Me

Rock guitarist, songwriter, and old school style showman Izzy Zaidman cast a big shadow at tonight's show at The Vault in Farmington, Missouri. I caught up with him after the wildly impressive double set of his eponymous 5-piece band, Izzy and the Catastrophics.

FM: Tell me please about your circle, the circle you form with your band onstage before the show. Chaos and creativity are happening in there, what else?

IZ: Biorhythms, we get on the same frequency. It's a scientific fact about electric impulses: in the circle we're touching, focusing. It's easier to “play tiger” to play better as a group. All the stuff I can't “tell” them as bandleader, the technical stuff of music, e.g., please don't fuck up the chorus. The circle I find helps the whole.

FM: Do you think about us in there, the audience?

IZ: Not directly. We take three deep breaths, we achieve harmonious energy; there's a pep talk, we fill up the space with positive spirit. I specifically make it not daunting, a light ritual.

FM: You have the musicians take turns calling the set. Why is it important to you that the show never be the same?

IZ:   The way I look at it, we're magicians, shamans. It has to come from the room: the smell, the height of the ceiling, the quality of the sound system, the audience, their demographics, the age differences. Whether they're drunk on a Saturday night and ready to rock, or it's a coffee shop where people don't know you. For that reason I want the band to have a large repertoire, that can be turned up, turned down. Show qua creative ritual, molded to fit the moment.

FM: What did you feel about us, tonight, here in Farmington, Missouri?

IZ: We've been talking about this place—The Vault—how it's not a bar; there's a real bohemian vibe in here. We're struck, age-wise, by the mix, how open-minded the audience is. Funny, the Midwest is kind of hit or miss: awesome surrounded by shit. This place is an oasis, cool, bohemian—it's not that common. There are others, like Saybrook, Illinois, for instance: it's an amazing town, their taste in music is deeply informed.

I want to be able to pull off a show even for those who don't know the music: but I have to say,  it's great when they do.

FM: Did you dumb it down for us, here in Farmington?

IZ: There was no need to dumb it down. I know this is isn't in your questions, but I mentioned it on stage. It was like 80% certain that I was going to have to cancel this stint of the tour—my sax and bass player bailed, canceled at the last minute. When I told Tim Smith he said, no way. He pulled out all the stops, put me in touch with musicians he knew. We persevered.

FM: Sounds like Tim shored you up in a big way.

IZ: Yes, he wasn't the only one, but he was one of the biggest proponents of continuing the tour. He looks at things not so much as a club owner but from the perspective of the fans, how disappointed they'd feel if we didn't make it. So the group you saw tonight came together. Musicians like me.

FM: Izzy, I don't mean to flatter, but clearly you are a man of abundant talent, you could do anything you wanted to do, so I have to ask: why music? Why this music?

IZ: I've been playing guitar a really long time, since I was 13. My dad's a guitar player. He teaches finger style at The New School. He's into early Ragtime, Bluegrass, Mississippi Delta blues. I dug all that too, and Chuck Berry, then metal and punk. I've been through many musical metamorphoses: honky-tonk, gypsy influences. I played with Wayne Hancock.

FM: Sorry, he hasn't played The Vault yet; should I know him?

IZ: Yes! Roots singer/songwriter. Legit, old school country. I was so proud of myself, a New Yorker going to Texas, getting that gig. When I left Austin, it was to start a band, a band where I can play all of it, all the music I love to play. I couldn't really see myself playing only one thing that was straight ahead down the line.

Obviously this band is an extension of me, my creative energy, the original rock 'n roll songs I've written that we perform. But the truth is, that we haven't stopped touring in three years, 200 to 250 gigs a year. It's all sculpted...by The Vault, the gigs in Texas, or Belgium. One song, I might play it before audiences 40 times before it's finished. I think of the process I'm involved in, and I haven't expressed this thought to anyone before, as the collective creator.

FM: The collective creator! Izzy, that's great. I know exactly what you mean; I feel that way about Written Word, Spoken Word, that it gives voice to others. I'm the one who writes it, but there's more to it than that—how it's shaped, what questions it seeks to answer.

Your performance style is wholehearted, the way you sing out, how the notes extend to the outer limits. Whole-bodied too—animated, alive! But I can't help noticing how you talk with your hands while you sing. Not your head, not your butt, or your crotch, but your hands. How did that evolve? Is it a tick of ethnicity? Is it to enhance communication, a kind of sign language with your audience?

IZ: I'll try and break it down for you. I'm half Jewish, a quarter Italian, and a quarter Irish, so, yeah, the Jewish-Italian three quarters could account for it. But I'm not thinking hands any more than any other part of my body when I'm acting out my original tunes.

I come from Washington Heights; it's a Dominican neighborhood now, mostly known for George Carlin, Christopher Walken, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Tiny Tim and--

FM: --Izzy Zaidman.

IZ: Yeah, thanks. In terms of others I'm mimicking: Carl Perkins, the way he moves, hip, bopping; also Bad Brains, they're my favorite band. And Chuck Berry, Django Reinhardt, Fats Waller.

FM: Speaking of Fats, my next question is...

IZ: Yes...?

FM: Who's your "Lulu?"

IZ: Hah! I don't have a Lulu. Or maybe I have a few Lulus stashed away.

FM: I know you're a writer of short stories, that you're interested in literature, so I'm particularly curious about the name you chose for your band Izzy and The Catastrophics, particularly its grammar. You took an adjective, one with multiple meanings, and morphed it into a noun.

IZ: It's intended in the planetary sense—hurricanes, tsunamis; all hugely chaotic, possibly damaging forces of nature. Except for their potentially negative consequences for humans and animals they're not necessarily a bad thing for the Earth, though certainly not happy and friendly events.

It has also in part to do with my internal philosophy, the wisdom in ripping things apart to shake things up.

FM: And you feel your original music is the most efficacious way for you to do that?

IZ: I enjoy it. It comes from somewhere before the age of reason. There are these genetic patterns. So yes, this volcano's gonna erupt.

Stëvë: Most Assuredly Sucking, But Not Up, Never Up

 

The hot ticket in Farmingtion, Missouri this past Sunday night was for Stëvë, a debut performance of a much anticipated show that at long last had its world premiere at The Vault. Funny and invigorating, Stëvë, performed by Doe Run stand-up comic Steve Hull, was an unforgettable moment-by-moment meditation on popular notions of failure and, obversely, suckcess. The multi-media experience was a hair-raising aesthetic event, the kind I hope to see much more of in Southeastern, Missouri: kamikaze artists intelligently depicting the unvarnished truth about the futures prescribed for them by prosperous, fat men like George Lucas, who in Stëvë parlance “has ruined the lives of most children in America” with the 3D version of Star Wars, Episode One. “It sucks!”

Photo by Corey Warner

In titling his show, as well as for purposes of his professional and public persona, 21-year-old Steve Hull chooses to dot his e's; more precisely he deploys the umlaut, a diacritical mark used on top of vowels to announce an unusual pronunciation, a partial assimilation of a sound to a succeeding sound. And Steve uses two umlauts: this emphatic doubling and repetition are themselves further markers of his remarkable and fearless pronouncements. In designing his own name Stëvë has concocted a particularly apt title, especially for a show where doubling and repetition are structured in for effect, reinforcing and strengthening the idea that his is a show in large part about the creative/destructive process of forming one's identity in a society insistent upon one's succeeding above all, in the total absence of morality. “You want a moral to take with you,” he tells us, “drink motor oil!”

Photo by Corey Warner

Stëvë  foregrounds failure in his onstage speech and acts: the unlikely excuses, the unusual apologies, the strategic self-deprecation: “I can't make balloon animals; I'm sorry if you thought I could;” or  “If I fall on the floor and start crying, just take a magic marker and start drawing on my face;” or “I feel I'm doing a good job because no one has told me that this sucks!” And the deeds follow the words. It's true, he cannot fabricate the cheesy animal balloon he's offered us; calling the elongated balloon a snake doesn't conjure one. But loosening his tie to do so, he can and does swallow the 2-foot long balloon, sucking it down his gullet as if to say: You want me to be a clown in the Empire of America? I'll EAT the balloon before I make myself a clown for you!

Photo by Denny Henke

Failure doesn't look like failure at all in Stëvë; or rather, flop sweat becomes a kind of perfume connoting, well...dignity, pride, decency, for lack of better words. It's a beautiful, brave and heroic show: he doesn't flinch in embodying just how perniciously and fluidly America is crushing its children, forcing them to think horribly corrosive unspoken thoughts like the one Stëvë enacts before us: If petroleum products are to be valued above all human, plant and animal life, maybe I should drink some motor oil.

Painter and sculptor John DeBold verifying the sealed bottle of motor oil. Photo by Corey Warner

 [We've had several suicides of young men in the area recently; one some weeks ago was a high school friend of Steve's. I do think the show, to its great credit, is in part a response to those those very real and permanent losses in the ranks.]

Photo by Tim Smith

Part burlesque, Stëvë strips for us. First he tosses aside his cowboy hat and double-breasted Civil War cavalry shirt to reveal a standard-issue white short-sleeved business shirt tied by an orange tie; then he wrestles those off only to reveal an identical shirt, this time with black tie. “Black tie's better than orange,” he tells us, informing us that there are layers to his presentation: scratch beneath the surface, and then scratch again: we'll be rewarded for our efforts by an even more pleasing visual effect.  

Animals, especially disturbing cat videos, are central to the storytelling: Satanic cats for adoption, erotic squirrels trapped in his car. “Just drive until it falls out,” he advises. He lets out random screams, squealing howls that could be animal cries, coyotes on steroids, wildly blurring the line between human and nonhuman. Ever attuned to the diminution of the range of real “choices” available to most people, he plays a tiny harmonica, “which is better than a tiny violin,” he judges. Extending the musical moment, Stëvë raps for us about Amish life, “we're going to party like it's 1699.” He takes pictures of the audience, he makes a phone call from stage to a friend in the first row: “I'm sorry; I'm not really funny.” He frequently promotes his merchandise, which is all false merch—bacon air fresheners, for example—forged autographs, and the like. Sometimes he goes silent, lets the air between stage and audience die down to a standstill, and then shouts at us to “make some noise!” And some of us do.

Photo by Corey Warner

Stëvë's final and stirring words at the historic show held at The Vault on April 29, 2012 were: “You''ll have to pay me to leave.”