Kid at heart

This benefit comp's for orphans

by Brett Milano

It says something nice about Boston that many of the best local compilation albums also happen to be benefits. Such recent releases as Safe and Sound, Soon/Anon, Boston Emissions, and Pipeline used their respective worthy causes (reproductive rights, AIDS research, women's shelters, and WMBR) as jumping-off points to get a bunch of top-drawer bands on the same disc.

Add to that list Kids at Heart (due April 29 on Crane Mountain; there'll be a record-release benefit May 1 at the Middle East), an 18-band compilation put together by Seth Freeman (singer/guitarist of the band Little John) to benefit the local string of orphanages, New England Home for Little Wanderers. Unlike most of the above comps, Kids at Heart doesn't include any songs dealing explicitly with the cause. But it does stake its own territory by presenting all the bands in an unplugged setting (though with occasional electric guitars and basses -- "It's the MTV definition of unplugged," Freeman admits). Mostly pop, the bands include a chunk of the Q Division in-crowd (Gravel Pit, Expanding Man, the Gravy, Poundcake), a few local headliners (Dambuilders, Talking to Animals, Gigolo Aunts, Vision Thing, Jack Drag), one out-of-towner (Jonny Polansky), and one incognito star (Mark Sandman, though in a supporting role with Jimmy Ryan as the Pale Brothers).

Most of the bands booked studio time instead of donating leftover tracks (the Dambuilders' acoustic mix of "Drive-By Kiss," from an import EP, is the only previously released track), so the result is relatively low on duds (though if anything could make me like Angry Salad, it's not going to be the cutesy-poo "Milkshake Song"). Expanding Man's "Disappear" is a nice surprise, showing a melodic side that usually gets hidden by their electric bluster. Gigolo Aunts' "Hey Lucky" pairs rockabilly verses with Squeeze-like choruses. Little John's "Full Moon Midnight" is between-the-eyes catchy; Talking to Animals' "Centipede" is positively sultry. The best track is Jules Verdone's "When I Snap Out of This," a haunting tune written from the depth of an unspecified crisis ("I'll call everybody back and I'll explain . . . God knows I won't be proud of how I've acted"). With an intimate vocal to match its lyric, this is lump-in-throat stuff.

Freeman learned about the shelters through Aaron Belyea, who designed the disc and appears with his band Stepladder. As Freeman explains during a break at his day job at Carberry's bakery in Cambridge, this provided a constructive way for him to fulfill his longtime ambition of putting a local comp together. "Really, anyone could do it. It helped that we'd been signed to a major label, so we had a few industry contacts. And I was in a position I hadn't been in before, not having to work a day job. A lot of the bands were friends, but some were just people I admired. In some cases, like with Mark Sandman, it was a cold call to the manager. I knew it was a longshot, so I took the attitude of `I'm pretty sure this person will say no, but it doesn't hurt to ask.' It just takes huevos, you know?"

The disc turned out to be therapeutic for another reason. At the time of its assembly, Little John were in the process of being dropped from a major label; they just didn't know it yet. In fact, the band may hold the record for the shortest major-label tenure in memory. Their EMI days lasted all of 11 months (the severance check arrives on the day of our interview). During that time the label re-released Derailer, a perfectly good pop album produced by Mike Denneen and previously out on Crane Mountain. But if you didn't know that Little John even had a major-label album out, fear not -- it seems that nobody else did either.

"What we sold on Soundscan . . . I don't even want to tell you, it's too pitiful," Freeman says with a cringe. "But you can't imagine the torture that puts a musician through. You have to ask yourself every day, `Do I actually suck? Do I need to get out of this business?' We never got to do the major-label thing of hiring a big producer and hanging out for two weeks in the studio. Instead they flushed the money down the drain on a video and sent us on tour headlining to nobody. Our album wasn't noncommercial; it's a pop album. And I'm not saying that it was Sgt. Pepper, but there's no reason a pop album on a major label shouldn't do something -- and it did nothing. Hey, maybe we do suck."

No surprise, then, that the next Little John album (due out in the fall, back on Crane Mountain) includes songs called "The Final Dis" and "Don't Get Up." But at least Freeman and his bandmates (drummer Brendan Taylor and bassist Stephano Capobianco) have come around to the idea that they don't suck. "Nothing on the new album is directly about the label, but I brought my experiences in. It's still basic pop/rock, but maybe it sounds a little more mature. We're back where we started, but at least our attitude is a little more healthy."

TUGBOAT ANNIE

Maybe that should be "Buffalo Annie." Buffalo is where Tugboat Annie hailed from before moving to Boston early last year. And Buffalo Tom are the band I most often think of when listening to the loud/tuneful pop on Tugboat Annie's new CD, Wake Up & Disappear (on Kimchee/ Big Top).

That's not to say that Tugboat Annie are hopelessly derivative, just that they're doing something worthwhile within a well-traveled, guitars-and-tunes format. The BT similarities stem largely from Mike Bethmann's voice -- like Bill Janovitz, he favors the "intense all the time" vocal approach -- and from a melodic sense that suggests their more recent output. But Tugboat Annie's lyrical perspective is less introspective, often more upbeat. Their songwriting comes out strongest on midtempo tracks like "Vendetta" and "Suicide Shoes," the second of which forms an antidote to too much teen angst.

"That's sort of our high-school angst song," explains bassist Jon Sulkow. "You know how high-school poetry magazines are always full of suicide poems? So ours is a more hopeful, `lighten up' kind of song. We made the vocals clear on this album because the lyric theme was a little more pronounced -- Mike wrote a lot about the weird relationship between spirit and technology, being caught up in TV culture. There's a lot of mentions of television and ghosts." To get the mood across they staged a CD-cover shot of a couple talking on cell phones while a taxi and a Red Line train passed by; they spent a few hours on the Longfellow Bridge waiting for the variables to line up. "We actually wanted to shoot in the subway, but that's difficult and costs a lot of money. We wound up on the bridge and got hundreds of shots of startled-looking joggers."

Tugboat Annie have a CD-release party this Saturday, April 12, at the Middle East, with the Sky Heroes and Starlight Conspiracy.

HIGHLAND'S 41ST

Whenever you attend one of Kenne Highland's annual birthday shindigs at the Kendall Café, there's always one overwhelming question: is he going to lose his kilt on stage and get banned from the club this year? By that standard, this year's show -- with eight bands and a packed house at Club Bohemia last Wednesday -- was a little more, uh, respectable: Highland wore jeans that remained on all night, even when he led his band through such tunes as "Kenne Highland to the Rescue" (to the tune of "Jim Dandy"), the nostalgic "Down at Cantones" ("At Milk Street and Broad, where John Felice is God"), and "Kielbasa," the latter featuring his usual lewd gestures with the sausage in question. The one guy who did get escorted out was notorious scenester Captain PJ, after picking said kielbasa off the stage floor and eating it.

As expected, there was a Cantones-era tilt to the music -- Felice and the Lyres' Jeff Conolly did their old hits, and the Throbbing Lobsters did everybody else's -- but a few good new bands were also along. Among them were the Pretty Flowers (who include some of Peter Prescott's Peer Group, and whose sound brought memories of the Proletariat), spirited North Shore rockers the Vic Morrows, and the T. Rex-obsessed Silver Star -- who performed Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti" with the title lyric changed to "Kenne Highland," while the man of the hour raised a glass in approval.

COMING UP

Elliott Smith is downstairs at the Middle East tonight (Thursday) while Verago-go are upstairs; Serum are at the Linwood, and Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas bring Louisiana to Johnny D's . . . Alejandro Escovedo's rock-and-roll band Buick Mackane are at Mama Kin tomorrow (Friday) with former Blood Orange Cheri Knight opening. A "redneck fest" (with Quintaine Americana, Scissorfight, and other rowdies) takes place at the Middle East, Clarence Gatemouth Brown makes a rare local visit to Harpers Ferry, and Buttercup and Ramona Silver make up a strong double bill at T.T. the Bear's Place . . . Orbit and Boy Wonder are at the Middle East Saturday, Honkeyball are at the Rat, Count Zero, Permafrost, and Kaspar Hauser are at T.T.'s, and Lisa Germano and Melissa Ferrick hit the Paradise. . . the Ray Corvair Trio continue their eternal Sunday residency at the Plough & Stars . . . and Superfly are at Bill's Bar Tuesday.