NO DROPKICK MURPHYS COVER: But the rootsy repertoire does have everything from female pirates to Carl Sandburg to a shape-note number. |
What comes to mind when you think of roots music? Neatly trimmed facial hair? A Stetson or two? Maybe matching outfits? Okay, now check out the men and woman of Bread and Roses. The release party back in July at the Middle East for their fine punk-spiked folk album Deep River Day (Fistolo Records) had the makings of a full-on punk-rock affair, with acoustic-guitarist Steve Fournier disappearing minutes before show time and fiddler Adam Haut suggesting later that he might take off his pants. More than these, it was the presence of Nate Puffer — cradling a mandolin in a wifebeater, his left arm sleeved in tattoos — that seemed to suggest a Dropkick Murphys cover was in the offing. But the Allston-based band — whose line-up also includes singer Morgan Coe (upright bass), Dan Pond (acoustic guitar), Dan Wilder (drums), and Whitney Weiss (banjo/acoustic guitar) — didn’t once break from their rootsy repertoire. That included a sea-shanty-styled number about a pair of female pirates, a musical take on Carl Sandburg’s poem “Grass,” and a partly reworked hymn unearthed from a shape-note songbook.
Now it’s two weeks later, and I’m sitting down with Coe, Haut, Fournier, and Puffer at the Common Ground in Allston, and wondering how they came to be hooked on these oldies. “We started out an electric band,” offers the sandy-haired, serious Coe, with only a dash of the Tom Waits-ian coot that comes out when he sings. “A lot of our stuff sounded like Gang of Four, maybe early Fugazi, nothing like we do now.” This was around 2002, when the line-up was just Coe on electric guitar and his friends Andrew Graham (bass) and Shin Matsuda (drums). The latter, a cook with an odd work schedule, had a habit of showing up late to shows. While waiting for his ass, the other two killed time with acoustic tracks like “Waltzing Matilda” and “Dump the Bosses Off Our Back.” Coe continues, “We were like, ‘Well, we’re not playing electric guitar without a drummer . . . ’ It was pretty much a desperate survival strategy.”
Matsuda and Graham eventually dropped out, and Coe, realizing the “weird country tunes” he and Graham had been doing as a “lark” worked well, began to rethink B&R’s arrangements. The drums were scrapped, a banjo player was brought on, and Coe, a long-time veteran of ska bands (the Allstonians), gave up his guitar for the upright bass. “After that, Nate, Adam, Steve — I guess you guys are the three that joined at the time that are still in. We have another drummer who joined and left, somebody left a little after that . . . after that, we sort of settled on more of a general sound.”
“As far as we’re concerned, the band started in 2004,” cracks the soft-spoken, mild-mannered Puffer, who, in a collared shirt, looks very different from the last time I saw him.
It’s an apt joke. As Coe recounts B&R’s history, I’m having trouble keeping it all straight. The thing to take from the many line-up changes is that this isn’t a band so much a chance for friends to get together and enjoy themselves. If somebody can’t make a show, the rest just go on without him/her. Ditto if somebody wants to drop out of the band altogether. Coe elaborates, “You know, there are people who give up their whole life to practice, to make the record, to go on tour, and not necessarily in a rock-star way. I mean, plenty of people on small independent labels . . . but I think generally for us that’s not the case.”
Perhaps that’s why the band didn’t bother to consult the usual to-do list for the release of Deep River Day. Coe allows that their label, Fistolo Records, may have shipped out a few discs to publications for review, but he adds, “We aren’t really worrying about it too much.” And apart from the Middle East release party, they didn’t book any club shows. They say that they’re not so keen on clubs, that they prefer to play basements and yards. “When you’re playing houses,” says Haut, “people come up and hang out. There isn’t that performer/audience line.”
“We had one show where we played really early,” adds Coe, “and everyone thought we were playing later. So people showed up after we had played already, and then we had to end the show because of noise complaints. So we had everyone come back to my yard and played there.”
The no-stress, DIY attitude the members take toward their music might be a reaction to the rigid, less-than-stimulating jobs some of them do by day. Haut works as a truck driver for Newbury Comics. “It doesn’t require a lot of investment from me. I drive a truck, I listen to the radio, and I think about all the things I’d rather think.”
