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[Cellars]
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Different strokes
Bleu’s hooky rock and the Darlings’ country
BY BRETT MILANO

When he hit the road for a promotional tour last month, local rocker Bleu was really cooking. First he cooked some butternut squash soup with a black-bean-and-roasted-corn salad. Then it was chicken with a parsley-cilantro-pumpkinseed pesto. These dinners are Bleu’s unusual way of currying favor with industry folks — he serves a home-cooked meal before playing a few tunes. "Cooking is a hobby of mine," he explains over the phone from Los Angeles. "I did one dinner for promoters and one for film and TV people. It’s a great way to relax — a low-pressure, fun thing that’s still really creative. And the chicks dig it."

Except maybe for the low-pressure part, the same can be said of his music, which likewise involves the creative blending of exotic ingredients. A Rumble winner in 2001 and a local favorite for the past two years, Bleu is at once a guitarslinging classic rocker and a modern, cut-and-paste rocker. The good news about his major-label debut, Redhead (Aware/Columbia), is that it doesn’t tone down his eclecticism: the front of the disc is heavy with big Cheap Trick moments, and toward the end he dabbles in loops and synths, with a few hints of grandiose, Phil Spector pop dropped along the way. Holding it together are songs that trace the arc of a relationship, from post-break-up to a new start — a classic pop theme if there ever was one.

Like his previous indie release, Headroom (from which a few tracks are repeated), Redhead is largely an album that Bleu created by himself in the studio. He played a bit of everything including drums, and he brought in various players to flesh it out. "There were a lot of crazy effects and production tricks on Headroom, and I tried to scale that back and go for something more timeless. A lot of it was still done with Ducky Carlisle [local producer, of Susan Tedeschi fame] at his studio, where we did the last record. To some degree I’m always nervous in the studio, and I’m happier in a more homy environment. We did some mixing at the big, expensive studios — there was one place with a goddamn Jacuzzi and an arcade room, and I’m thinking, ‘Do we really need to be here?’ We mixed seven songs there and wound up using two."

After a long dry spell for local major signings, Bleu’s album — along with the forthcoming Damone and Cave-In releases on RCA — suggests that things are heating up again. But Bleu’s agreement shows how sophisticated the major-label process has gotten. His album is already out in the stores, but it won’t see official release until the spring. The version on sale now is on Aware, a semi-indie label quietly associated with CBS/Sony. Bleu won’t actually sign with CBS until March, at which time the album will be reissued with a couple of bonus tracks that he’s now recording. Meanwhile the label folks get to decide whether to pitch it as a modern-rock or an adult-contemporary album.

"To be honest, I don’t think they’ve figured it out yet," he admits. "They’re waiting for the last minute to see if something decides it for them. I’m hoping people don’t think it’s too eclectic, but someone like Pink has gotten away with being diverse, if I may bring up another color-named artist."

Midway through the disc there’s another prime example of how tricky things have gotten in the major-label world. On "You Know, I Know, You Know," the singer takes stock of his mixed feelings after leaving his girlfriend behind, and he notes, "My friends tell me I’m doing all right, but that don’t mean dick." Set to a yearning chorus, Bleu’s use of the phrase sounds frank rather than crude. That line, however, almost kept the song off the album. And the word "shit" on another tune had to be obscured.

"If you’re on a big label, you have to make two different versions of your album for the chain stores. They won’t even take the parental-advisory stickers. They’ll only accept edited records. And we’d made the choice that we wouldn’t do two versions. It turns out that you can only say ‘dick’ if you’re not referring to the penis. You can call somebody a dickhead, but you can’t say, ‘That person has a small dick.’ That’s always been a goal of mine — to work those common, everyday phrases into songs. Especially if there’s going to be some emotional wallop to it, I try to have it come across in a conversational way. There are definitely a lot of personal songs on the record — not to dwell too much on that, but it was something I was going through."

But "You Know, I Know, You Know" is telling in another way: its layered backing vocals sound more than a bit like Queen — which is not a reference point you encounter everyday. "People are afraid to bring that up. I can tell what a lot of interviewers are thinking: ‘Is he going to bite my head off if I mention Queen?’ Actually, I love them as far as solo-guitar sounds and backing vocals go. But that’s not what we were after in this particular song. Terrible as it sounds, I was thinking more of George Michael. There are a lot of nods in the production to the people I love — Mutt Lange, Jon Brion, they’re all in there. Cheap Trick is another one that people bring up. I don’t think I’m influenced by them, but I’m flattered if people make that comparison. It’s a hell of a lot better than saying, ‘That song sounds influenced by Creed, and that one reminds me of Puddle of Mudd.’ "

There’s one final parallel between Bleu’s cooking and his music: the chicks dig the latter as well, to judge from his reputation as a sex symbol. There’s no want of wide-eyed female fans up front at his shows, but that’s about the only subject he’s eager to push aside. "Forget it, I’ll never be a sex symbol. I have fun with that idea, and the fans have fun with it. But I don’t even think that teenage girls really believe that the guys in the Strokes are good-looking — dangerous, maybe. And teenage girls liking a guy like me with gigantic sideburns? That’s not gonna happen."

LOOK AT VIRTUALLY EVERY BOSTON COUNTRY ARTIST who’s ever been worth a damn and they’ve all got one thing in common. From ’60s figures like Barry Tashian and John Lincoln Wright (who started out in the Remains and the Beacon Street Union respectively) to national star Jo Dee Messina (who did her cover-band time in the area before hitting Nashville) to current twangsters like Kerri Powers and Lucky 57, they all came to country by way of rock.

So it stands to reason that the Darlings, who get my vote as the city’s best country act, should have done the most rocking in the past. Singer/guitarist Simon Ritt is a punk journeyman who played for a few years with one of his heroes, the late Johnny Thunders (his early-’80s band Two Saints play back-up on a few of the semi-bootleg Thunders live releases that have turned up lately). Singer Kelly Knapp fronted the Bristols, one of the Boston underground’s first notable all-female bands. She started slipping country songs into Bristols sets around the time she hooked up with Ritt 10 years ago.

When they first started playing, the Darlings had a novel musical mix, drawing equally from classic country (Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, Emmylou Harris) and Gram Parsons and Exile on Main Street–era Stones. This, of course, has since become the standard definition of alternative country — but having preceded the bandwagon, the Darlings remain a few steps in front of it. Their long-overdue full-length debut, New Depression (on the Florida-based Artist Friendly label), features production by Richard Price, who’s played bass for Kim Richey and Lucinda Williams. It’s very much a studio album, with fleshed-out arrangements incorporating pedal steel, fiddle, dobro, and cello, along with loads of guitar by Billy Loosigian, another long-time rocker (from the Nervous Eaters and Willie Alexander’s Boom Boom Band), who joined the Darlings a few years ago.

The result would be getting more attention if it came from a more country-associated city. Knapp’s voice was always a grabber, and it’s gotten more sultry over the years. The songs, mostly by Ritt (with a couple Knapp wrote for the Bristols), are as honest as they are hummable. Ritt’s title track is the timeliest and most resonant of the batch, about sticking together through hard economic times. But he says it’s also about his relationship with Knapp, and the fact that they’ve been inseparable for a decade without ever becoming a couple. "I’m glad of that, because if you look at the ones who have become couples, they’ve all broken up — Richard and Linda Thompson, Sonny and Cher. Not to get heavy here, but I could never imagine being so intimate with someone outside of a romantic relationship. But she’s such a warm, sincere person, and she’s got such patience when I start losing my temper. When our voices are in synch and everything sounds just right, we just start soaring. Then she goes back to her husband and I go home to my girlfriend."

With a Nashville producer and a Florida label, the Darlings seem to have a stronger following in the South than they do here — they even won a Jim Beam–sponsored band contest two years ago. "That one was pretty funny," says Knapp. "We played in the Wild Horse Saloon in Nashville, where they do all the line dancing, and came on after three bands who did the real mainstream, middle-of-the-road stuff. I think there’s a core of people in Boston that really do get it and like us. But it’s frustrating that I tell people I’m in a country band and they still look at me funny."

Their punk roots are pushed more into the background now, but Ritt says that Thunders remains an inspiration. "To me there’s an irreverence that someone like Johnny Thunders really symbolizes. I try to never glamorize his self-destructive tendencies, but I saw him as a guy walking a tightrope — some days he was a mess and sometimes he was brilliant, but he was never the same way twice. And of course, he anticipated the whole unplugged thing when he started doing his acoustic shows. So yeah, if he saw what we’re doing, I think he’d dig it."

Issue Date: January 9 - 16, 2003
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