Picked up the album last night and was impressed enough (strong
songwriting, striking harmonies, and some musical twists and turns that'll
make you grin) to want to learn more about the band. Wandered across this
in the process.
Hot Damnations
Leave it to two Yankee sisters to kick it TX style
By Rob Patterson
The Damnations TX
Kelly Willis opens
Saturday, February 20
Gypsy Tea Room
It is a story too good to be true, something only a publicist could concoct
during a fever dream -- so much to hype, so little time. But it all
happened,
and it of course makes for great copy: The Hottest Band in Austin Gets
Hotter, or something along those lines. Get the advertising department on
it.
It first occurred not long ago, when The Damnations TX were opening for
Cake at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City. During the band's set, a
building next door caught fire. Then, less than a week later, while The
Damnations TX were onstage at the Agora in Cleveland, sparks flew once
more.
"We had all these problems with feedback," recalls Damnations singer-
bassist Amy Boone. "We kept looking over at the monitor guy, because it
was really loud and hurting our ears, and he just threw his hands up in the
air."
"I was right next to him," continues singer-guitarist Deborah Kelly,
Boone's
sister. "And he goes, 'I can't even deal with the soundboard right now,
because the system is on fire.' There was smoke pouring out from behind the
curtain. Amy kinda wanders over to me nonchalantly in the middle of the
song and whispered, 'Don't freak out, but backstage is on fire.' It was
kind of
weird: a second 'fire incident' while we were opening for Cake. We thought
they were going to start thinking we were arsonists."
You see -- maybe, in a way, The Damnations TX really are Austin's hottest
band. "We're going to add new meaning to that term," Boone says, laughing
it off.
Almost from the moment The Damnations (as they were once known)
stepped onto a stage in their hometown, they've been adored and hyped
beyond any wannabe rock star's wildest dreams. They've been showered
with open-mouth, wet-kiss press clippings, hailed as saviors and second-
comings before anyone outside of Austin ever heard of them — no easy task
in a city where it takes forever to build a loyal local following. Even the
Capital City's alt-pop hitmakers Fastball were only playing to a handful of
fans after releasing their first major-label album. Since every building
with a
spare corner considers itself a concert venue and there are enough aspiring
musicians to populate a small city, on most any night Austin has an
embarrassment of, well, if not riches, at least original music offerings.
It's not
uncommon to catch some group with a buzz and still find oneself in sparse
company.
Yet The Damnations TX were a strong local draw well before they even
recorded their debut, Half Mad Moon, which will finally be released next
week on Sire Records. And it's not just that the band has found an
audience,
but that they actually have fans -- enthusiastic followers who crowd the
front of the stage, some of them zealously doing a slightly spastic jig
Kelly
calls "the get-the-bug-off-me dance."
Given their music, it's no surprise. With a polished country-punk attack
that's more comfortable in X's "Los Angeles" than the Eagles' "Hotel
California," the band plays with adrenal-charged élan, making the rush they
get from being on stage and performing not just tangible but downright
infectious. Backing up that enthusiastic approach are songs with smarts and
heart, led by Kelly and Boone's bittersweet harmonies and the wiry,
electrified picking of guitarist Rob Bernard, onetime member of the Dallas-
based Picket Line Coyotes and Austin rockers Prescott Curlywolf. Where so
many recent country-rock converts are content to trot out Branson-ready
tribute acts, dressing up in bargain-bin honky-tonk drag while playing
slide-
guitar blues-by-the-numbers, The Damnations TX have achieved a sound
much their own, making their inspirations more implicit than apparent and
melding rural stylings with an urban kineticism.
Although their approach has a distinctly Texan roots-music stamp, Kelly
and Boone grew up in the heart of the Upstate New York rust-and-truck
farm belt. The progeny of a civil engineer father and schoolteacher mother,
they were weaned on everything from Bob Dylan to Stax and Motown soul,
early influences that seal all the cracks on Half Mad Moon. But within the
circumscribed horizons of the Upstate hills, there was little to do beyond
"drive out to the cornfields and drink and smoke pot," as Kelly remembers.
(As to why these sisters of the same parents have different last names,
Deborah explains, "I changed mine to Kelly because we have Kellys on my
mom's side and Kellys on my dad's side. I just wanted to have that name
instead of Boone, y'know — Debbie Boone. The joke got to be annoying after
a while.")
After their parents divorced, first Kelly and then Boone followed their
mother to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they both began pondering playing
music instead of just listening from the sidelines. "When I was in New
Mexico, I kinda thought of music as a fun thing to do, and I was thinking
more of going to college," Kelly explains. "But college is kinda expensive.
And after things started working out playing music, things started shifting
the other way, and I started thinking maybe that college was the thing that
was unrealistic, and music was maybe a little more realistic."
"We always messed around with [music]," Boone says, "but didn't feel the
songs were good enough to show around publicly.
Kelly had a boyfriend in Santa Fe who used to hang out with some
musicians in Austin who shuttled back and forth between Texas and New
Mexico. They would always talk about Austin -- the scene there, how it was
indeed the oasis outsiders always portray it as -- and when Kelly decided
it
was time to leave Santa Fe, she headed for Texas. She came to simply check
it out and ended up staying, becoming enamored of a college town with so
many clubs; she thought it was a "music town through and through," the
perfect place for a punk-rocker on her way toward becoming a honky-tonk
angel. Soon enough, Boone followed.
The sisters first ventured into public performance at open-mike nights at
Chicago House, a now-defunct performance space with an egalitarian
booking policy. They eventually put together an all-girl lineup that
debuted
at the venerable (i.e., about-to-collapse) Hole in the Wall across the
street
from the University of Texas. At the time, Boone had been playing bass for
only a month. "I played other instruments, so I picked up bass pretty
quickly," she says.
The band started solidifying when Keith Langford, one of the musicians
Kelly met while working as a bartender at the Electric Lounge, signed on as
their drummer. He was followed by Bernard, his bandmate in Prescott
Curlywolf and a native of Shreveport whose previous band the Picket Line
Coyotes were part of the nascent Deep Ellum scene during their Dallas
residency from 1987 to 1990. Something of an anomaly within the prevailing
New Bohemian-ish, neo-hippie trend of that time, the Coyotes were a
scruffy, devil-may-care roots-rock band whose hard-working reputation on
the regional circuit waned after the group moved from Dallas to Austin.
Bernard came to The Damnations camp first as a fan. "I used to see them
play at the Hole in the Wall," he recalls. "It was really cool. Then Keith
asked
me to come down and play with them. None of us really expected all this
stuff to happen, of course. At that time it was a lot more informal." After
Curlywolf's disappointing one-album tenure with Mercury Records, the
experience rejuvenated Bernard.
"I really liked the harmonies," he says. "You can't beat their harmonies.
And
their songwriting. They both had something seriously good songwriting-
wise."
Their moniker came out of a drink-tank session one evening at happy hour
and created a glitch when Half Mad Moon was originally scheduled for
release last fall, when suddenly all these other bands with "Damnation" in
their name started cropping up (though "none of them are The Damnations,"
Kelly notes). Hence the additional appellation TX, which in the act's
lexicon
makes their new name "Damnations, T-X," not "Damnations, Texas."
While the rise of The Damnations was powered by strong songs and
resilience, they were also carried along in the slipstream of The Gourds,
who
are their musical brothers. "It's kind of a clan, I guess," says Bernard,
who
played with Gourds Kevin Russell and Jimmy Smith in the Picket Line
Coyotes and is the brother of Gourds accordionist Claude Bernard. Sharing
stages as well as similar musical bents, both bands captured Austin
audiences with an energetic and imaginative approach, something most
alt.country bands sorely lack. Cementing the connection further, Langford
decamped from The Damnations to The Gourds after playing on Half Mad
Moon.
A limited-edition EP from an appearance on Austin public radio station
KUT's Live Set show stoked the Damnations' buzz, and when labels started
sniffing around, the group decided to record an album on their own. They
rounded up producer and ex-Reiver John Croslin (Sixteen Deluxe, Guided
By Voices, Spoon); if nothing else, they could at least see what the
interest
was.
The result was a deal with the resurrected Sire Records, whose honcho
Seymour Stein (the man who discovered Madonna) is betting that
lightning will strike twice -- that so-called alternative country might
mirror his label's success with such punk and new-wave bands as Talking
Heads and the Ramones in the late '70s. "It's hard to believe," says Kelly
of their leap from the Austin clubs to the Warner Bros.-distributed label.
"We figured if we signed with anyone, it would be a smaller label, and
then put out a few records and see what happens."
With Half Mad Moon bucking in the starting gate, The Damnations TX are
already facing the vagaries of the genre game that plagues so many roots
acts whose music doesn't fall into today's strict market categories.
"It's funny, because when we go on tour and we pull up to the show, there's
the poster saying 'The Damnations,' and there's always that little line
underneath it that describes us, and it's different in every town," notes
Bernard. "But in Alpine, Texas, it was 'progressive Americana,' which I
kinda dug. That's my favorite one so far of labels stuck on us. As far as
what
I'd call it, it's just music, y'know? The album will hopefully speak for
itself."
Copyright 1999, Dallas Observor
