E-Mail This Article to a Friend Getting personal Spookie Daly Pride and Reverend Glasseye BY WILL SPITZ
	Related Links Spookie Daly Pride's official Web site Reverend Glasseye's official Web site Iann Robinson And Will Spitz review Spookie Daly Pride's Medicine Chest.

When I peek into the bedroom of Brendan Daly’s North End apartment, I think I grasp his band’s jaunty, jocular "Personal Ad Song," a parody of a typical personal ad: "My apartment’s disgusting/I never clean it/I’m not into dusting/It makes me sneeze." But Daly — whom everyone including his mother calls Spookie — tells me I still haven’t got the subtext. "It’s about propaganda. When somebody goes on line for a personal ad, it’s their own individual propaganda. . . . I had been reading a ton of Chomsky."

Spookie’s quartet Spookie Daly Pride balance the silly with the serious on their second and latest full-length CD, Medicine Chest (Funzalo), which reveals itself to be more than the fun-loving party record it sounds like at first. The lightheartedness of "The Bumpin’ Uglies Song" — sample lyric, sung in Spookie’s gravelly, Boston-accented growl: "Up in Alaska/Or Nebraska/As far away as Madagascar/Someone somewhere is bumpin’ uglies right now" — is tempered by the blue-eyed soul of "Hope To Hold." And even the humorous songs might have an underlying seriousness. "Sooo Delicious!!!" looks like a jab at Catholic guilt, but he says there’s a deeper theme about Americanization and globalization.

Medicine Chest’s producer, Sean Slade, has recorded many of the most notable Boston bands of the last 15 years (Dinosaur Jr. and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, for two), and he says he dug the duality of Spookie’s songwriting right off the bat. When he heard Spookie’s stripped-down vocals-and-piano demos late last summer, he thought to himself, "This guy’s almost got a Fats Waller kind of vibe" — high praise from someone who cites Waller as one of his all-time favorites. "The reason I like Waller so much is because he’s funny and serious at the same time," Slade explains. "That’s what I was trying to get with Spookie: a nice balance between the funny ha-ha and the really heart-on-your-sleeve soul-baring aspect of it."

Even though they don’t sound like a jam band, SDP often get lumped into that category because of their jam-band-like grass-roots approach and the general overuse of the term. "The jam-band thing," Spookie explains, is less of a style and more about "people who like real music played by real people who can play." SDP can play. Guitarist Pete Witham, bassist Floyd Kellogg, drummer Tommy Diehl, and Spookie, who plays a gutted piano with a keyboard inside, have honed their chops with incessant touring; they haven’t practiced since Slade made them rehearse every day for four weeks before the recording of Medicine Chest.

Writers describing SDP have cited everything from Dixieland to hip-hop, big band to European pop, soul to cabaret — all of which the band touch upon on Medicine Chest or their first album, Marshmallow Pie (Funzalo). But when it comes to songwriting, Spookie says, "A lot of times a melody just comes in my head and then I just sit down and play it. I never say, ‘I’m gonna write a cabaret song or I’m gonna write a straight-up rock-and-roll tune.’ I just let them go."

This spontaneity is typical. In January, Spookie decided to teach himself to edit video. He’s spent most of his waking hours since making hilariously absurd movies starring himself and his band mates. A spoof of ESPN’s World Series of Poker is titled "ESPN presents the World Series of Russian Roulette, Sponsored by the Christian Coalition and the NRA." He’s posted some of these videos on the band’s Web site, and the response has been such that Funzalo is planning to release a DVD collection.

Spookie, who gives his age as "27ish," made his foray into the world of music in much the same unpremeditated way. When he was growing up in Billerica, his primary interest was sports. "I never wanted to be a musician. It wasn’t my ambition by any stretch of the imagination." But after a couple of unsuccessful semesters at Fitchburg State College, he decided to take up piano. He took a few lessons but was unable to play the chords his teacher wrote out for him. "I tried to just do those and I couldn’t do it. My fingers wouldn’t work. So for like two months, I didn’t even try to play." Then one day, he wandered up to the room where his parents kept their player piano and "sat down and just started playing. It was a really strange thing. I couldn’t play anything before, and then I went away and it just processed, I guess, in my body. I started writing tunes that day."

He continued to write for the next few years, and some of his recordings caught the attention of V2, Artemis, and Epic. Unable to come to an agreement with any of them, he decided to record and release a full-length — Marshmallow Pie, which was picked up by Funzalo last March — on his own. "Things got fucked up, and now I’m blue-screening my walls with sheets. I couldn’t be happier."

And though SDP mostly fly under the radar of the media and outside the music mainstream, the band have legions of devoted fans. Medicine Chest, which was released in May, has been selling, the shows have been good, and all’s well in the land of Spook. "People tell me — and I correct them now — ‘You’re gonna get a break. I know it.’ And I used to be like, ‘Thanks,’ you know? And now it’s like, ‘I’m there. I’m doing exactly what I want to do.’ And it’s hard for me to realize that. But the fact is, I’m making records and making these stupid movies, which I love, and I’m writing all day, and that’s all I do."

ANOTHER 27ISH ECCENTRIC with an unclassifiable band is Adam Glasseye. His seven-piece group Reverend Glasseye (formerly Reverend Glasseye and His Wooden Leg) won this year’s Rumble, but he fell victim to the Rumble "curse" even before the semifinal. "My house caught fire the night of the preliminaries," he explains over beers and sandwiches at the newly renovated Linwood, the site of one of the earliest Glasseye shows. "I was being cursed for involving myself in a battle of the bands."

With a portion of their Rumble booty, Reverend Glasseye finished their new album, the follow-up to last year’s Happy End and Begin EP and their first full-length since their 2001 debut, Black River Falls. Our Lady of the Broken Spine isn’t due till November 8, but Adam already has much of another album written, and the band plan to record that one in August upon returning from their July tour. "We’re releasing this record, but we’re working on the next one. So we’re keeping something on the back burners."

In 2000, Glasseye decided he "wanted to start a kind of gospelly band. It got somewhat deranged from there, and we started moving into different realms of music. But that’s where the ‘Reverend’ comes from." Like SDP, the "deranged" Reverend Glasseye have writers running to their genre lexicons. Delta blues, ’60s burlesque, klezmer, vaudeville, and gypsy carnival rock have been cited as reference points for what amounts to dressed-up folk music. "I read about our influences," Glasseye jokes. "I don’t even know that we have a plan as to what we’re trying to make any more. We’re just trying to go for something out of the ordinary. It is our goal at some point to defy categorization all together."

Spookie Daly Pride | Beachcomber, 7 Old Cahoon Hallow Road, Wellfleet | July 23 | 508.349.6055