Luther
Russell CD
Release Party
with the Chill Tones,
Mel Brown Quintet, DJ Shinez
Berbati's Pan 231 SW Ankeny St., 248-4579 9 pm Friday, Nov.
12., $6
Luther Russell
The Green Room 2280 NW Thurman St., 228-6178
9 pm Tuesday, Nov. 16, Free
"I just take my Buddy Holly way too seriously, to where I
think it's disturbing," Luther Russell confesses over a beer
at a neighborhood tavern.
Russell, a true grit-flavored fixture on the Portland club
circuit both as the leader of the band Federale and a solo
acoustic act, is talking about his contribution to a Halloween-weekend
tribute to dead rock stars. He performed songs by Holly
and his Crickets as if the band had just blown into town
from the last show of its fateful Winter Dance Party Tour.
We agree that flying in small planes is never a good idea.
While Russell has nursed his love for Holly into a fixation
that scares even him, he doesn't approach everything with
the same seriousness. Take his new record, for example.
"It's not a deep record," he insists. A radical departure
from his usual blues and folk repertoire, Down at Kit's,
just released on local indie imprint Cravedog, is a
fluid, instrumental funk experiment--and a happy accident,
according to Russell.
While Russell's previous solo effort, Lowdown World,
traveled a dusty boulevard of loners and wayward souls with
folk, blues guitar and a raspy swagger, Down at Kit's
takes a detour, grooving along a vibrant path all the way
to the next party. On Lowdown, Russell swilled a
pint of whiskey with the likes of Chris Whitley and Dylan.
On Down at Kit's, he passes a joint with Medeski,
Martin and Wood and Booker T.
"I tried to do the freakiest thing I possibly could when
I first started doing the record," Russell explains. "Now
it sounds kind of normal to me." He credits Christopher
Cooper of Cavity Search Records (the label that originally
considered releasing the record) with influencing the direction
of the album. "When we were maybe going to do the record
with Cavity Search, it was a freakier record. There was
this 9-minute acid-trip collage thing I did. It was half
danceable and half kind of freaky, weird stuff."
The acid-trip meandering ultimately took a back seat to
pleasantly stoned grooves. After laying a foundation of
drum tracks, Russell built the music around the beat. Infectious,
bad-ass bass lines surround layers of lavish guitar, with
playful keyboards piled on top. Inventive segues (the crackling
of an old LP, exploding fireworks and an auction-barking
snippet, for example) round out the mix.
A swank, Latin jazz-inspired number, "Fried Bananas," starts
things off, followed by the driving beat and soaring guitar/organ
dialogue of the nascent party anthem "Chicken Pox." You
half expect to hear Money Mark's voice join in with a sweet
pop melody during the muted, laid-back "Vista del Mar at
Franklin." "Strange Auction," with its up-front drums, underwater-keyboard
effects and slo-mo melody, could be a missing track from
The In Sound from Way Out, the must-have Beastie
Boys instrumental album of a few years back. Or, better
yet, a cut from the soundtrack to the gloriously late '70s
skate 'n' surf flick Go for It.
In fact, Down at Kit's is a very cinematic record.
The proud, weathered "Fernando's Revenge" is a theme song
for a Western that's never been made. "Babette Goes to Delaware,"
an exotica number featuring the breezy vocals of Russell's
wife, April, might have been the backdrop for a sexy commercial
in an earlier era. "It's a little Asti Spumante, Riunite
on ice," Russell remarks lightheartedly.
With all these filmic nods, what kind of movie does the
artist himself deem compatible with the funkified Down
at Kit's?
"Porn," he says without hesitation. "Definitely porn."
So how does a white boy known for blues, folk and roots
rock end up making such a lusty funk record, anyway?
"Growing up in L.A., there was a lot of R&B and soul
on the radio, and my dad had a lot of good stuff," explains
the SoCal native. Russell counts seminal funk bands War
and the Meters as major influences. Mix that with the AC/DC
covers rocked by his junior-high band Slight Edge, and Russell
had discovered his life calling.
"Slight Edge was my first rush of fame," he recalls. "I
was such a loser until this one dance. The next day there
were all these notes from girls. A few weeks later, they
found out what a loser I was. But for a minute there, I
had them going."
Since then, the modest 29-year-old has had a lot going.
He played with blues-rock band the Freewheelers in the early
'90s, releasing an album on Geffen and a follow-up on American
that harked back to early Joe Cocker. Russell ventured out
on his own after that band split up in 1996, releasing Lowdown
World in 1997. Federale formed soon thereafter. In addition
to producing recent records by Fernando Viciconte, Richmond
Fontaine and Warren Pash, Russell twisted knobs on Down
at Kit's, playing nearly all the instruments himself.
Though Russell is pleased that the album's out, he stresses
that future live shows will showcase his acoustic Americana
leanings instead of big instrumental grooves. This Friday's
record-release show is the exception; a backing band will
help him recreate Down at Kit's. DJ Shinez will start
off a promising evening spinning Latin jazz; jazz cat Mel
Brown and friends fill the middle slot. Like a Medeski,
Martin and Wood show, the crowd should be pleasantly diverse.
Fans of jazz, funk and rock, fuzzy HORDE Tour types and
plenty of local musicians are likely to rub elbows here.
Federale, too, seems to attract a mixed crowd--label types
and Black Crowes fans who followed ex-Crowes guitarist Marc
Ford to the band among them. Messages posted on the Federale
Web site by "Fedheads" and "Lutherites" hunt bootleg tapes
and the latest news on the status of the band's deal with
Interscope, which no longer appears concrete.
Russell isn't interested in discussing major-label relationships
or specific plans for Federale, but he assures me that the
band is still together. "We're just kind of going at our
own pace," he says vaguely. With Ford still living in L.A.,
it's hard to say when Federale will put something together,
but Russell says there may be an EP in the near future.
For now, he's thrilled about his next departure, which
happens in just a few weeks: a 40-day business and pleasure
trip to Argentina with musical cohort and close friend Viciconte,
who hails from the land of the River Plate. "We're going
to go down there, do some playing, hopefully work on a record
and get some business done," Viciconte explains.
If Russell has his say, they'll probably be taking a very
large plane.
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Willamette Week | originally
published November 10,
1999
|
