Will Success Spoil Rock and Soul?

Despite the chill outside, the bodies packed inside are pumping out uncomfortable amounts of heat under low ceilings. Meanwhile, local stag-film of a band Hemi Cuda is pumping out heavy low-end motorcycle movie rock. A denim-clad younger Evil Knevil is smiling blacklight while he bounces with his pals. His short blonde curls match the twin platinum Mamie Van Doren wigs on the guitar and bass players. Between songs one Majel Barret reminds the crowd of the impending arrival of the BellRays. The revelers respond enthusiastically, while Bob Vennum looks up momentarily from his local rag and Lisa Kekaula laughs at an excited story delivered by Jeff Porterfield. Even with the heat, the mood is relaxed on most fronts as the opening act finishes up.

"I have been doing this for a long time. I feel confident that I know what I’m trying to do. Whether or not we achieve it is basis for speculation." Vennum and his small wife with the tall hair have been in music for quite a few years. And the years have seen them in a lot of clubs big and small. He describes the scene in L.A. as, "Pretty sad, there's a few bands. There are no real hot spots like there were four or five years ago. There was an upswell of a lot of stuff. Now it’s kind of subsided. Some places that people were going to check out are drying up for whatever reasons. Having to close down, or chasing booking agents away. The bands that were in that upswell are now out and about."

During the break, guys scan the crowd for unattached women or steal sly glances of the hotpants onstage as the band tears down. Apparently unaware that the mirrored wall reveals their leering. Off-duty officers consult with Kekaula, to a hail of flashes from irony seeking cameras. Laughter follows the photo-op. As the ‘Rays begin to set up, the anemic off-duty stripper in front shrieks painfully, "Go Bob!" All eyes divert, shocked that a sound so piercing could come out of someone so brittle thin. More communal laughter as Bob poses. Part-time fourfinelads.com cartoonist Porterfield looks a little like an early seventies Saturday morning cartoon himself, as he sings sideways into the mike, "This is the bass player checking his mike!" He looks pleased to be back in the band as he adds "And it sounds OK here." Vennum later emphasizes Porterfield’s contributions to the bands massive repertoire. Mikes are checked, someone yells to Bob, "You’re not Lisa!" The exotic dancer screams at the top of her scrawny lungs, "Lisa!" It’s less amusing this time…much. Lisa has finished giving instruction to the boys in blue and pushes Bob aside. The rhythm section rumbles as the last levels are taken. A foreboding Kekaula raises her tambourine and a crash and a boom later, a sea of heads are bobbing.

The sound is akin to the Godfather of soul wresting with the Godfather of punk. The first songs are from Let It Blast mixed with unreleased material. If the attendees are not familiar with the material it doesn’t show. The rhythm section plows through non-stop, injecting the audience with energy.

"There were three or four tunes that hadn’t been recorded. To me that keeps it interesting." Vennum informs. "I don’t want to go see a band and then six months later come back and see them do the same set. They may be a great band, but that kind of quenches my enthusiasm a bit." The studio recordings also capture the live spontaneity. "We had a blast the way we did it actually. It wasn’t all recorded at one time. We had a practice room with all the recording equipment set up we would turn on the recorder and let the tape run. We’d fill it up with a bunch of shit and when it ran out we’d say let’s record this. Or we’d have a jingle idea and record that. So after about six months we had all of this recorded shit. And we could pick out something. There’s a section on Let It Blast that is four songs recorded back to back. That’s what we wanted to keep was that organic feel."

"Grand Fury was recorded pretty much the same way. Only that our practice room got ripped off. All the stuff we recorded Let It Blast on got stolen. And it was all insured so we recorded on an eight-track reel to reel as opposed to a six-track. A little bit better outboard gear, a few more microphones. Basically we just jammed every weekend and recorded about 45 songs that came out of the Grand Fury sessions. A lot of it went to compilations, or seven inches like a split with the Screamin’ Cheatahs. It all went somewhere. We got a few tracks we recorded with Todd the whole year he was with us. A couple of tunes that never got released. So when we get home, we’ve got about two months to work out a bunch of new stuff. When we go out on tour I think we learned about 40 songs for this tour. And we do different songs every set. So every time you come see us you’ll hear something different."

Vennum leaps around like Townsend as much as the ceiling will allow. His riffs come blasting out fuzzy and frantic. Occasionally he lurches toward the mike to throw in his two cents on vocals. Lisa fiercely stares down each person in the house in turn, often pointing them out individually as she glares. The impact of this exchange is both lasting and intentional. Whether wailing out the song or preaching rebellion to the congregation, the pipes are calling. When vicious eye contact is not enough, she disappears into the mass of bodies. Visible only to the few surrounding her, she pushes her face at her newly converted proselytes. This grassroots, personalized approach is exactly how new recruits are drawn in. Not through mass media, but one by helpless one.

With no support from radio or promotion machine, the following has been established at the street-level. "So far it has been all word of mouth," says Vennum. "It’s whatever press we’ve been getting, which is a lot for a band that’s selling shit out of their trunk." Kekaula continues, "We don’t have any money to put into advertising, so it is word of mouth. I don’t really have that much faith in mainstream radio. I think college community radio is kind of the waves of the people right now. Too much time has to be bought to be on commercial radio. We don’t have that kind of money. We don’t play that game. We just don’t, we shouldn’t have to. We’re good at what we do, you know?"

Vennum offers mainstream radio the same support afforded them. "Call up the radio and complain about it. Let them know that what they’re playing is pap and it sucks it’s awful and you don’t want to listen to it. You want something else. Just let them know and if enough people do, they will change it. That’s what they do, they react to what people tell them. They’re not forward thinking people anymore. I think there was a time when they were, but they’re not anymore. They’re very reactionary. It’s like those people think that everyone has to go to them. And when people stop going to them, they got nothing. Which is what you’ve got on the radio right now, basically."

Unable to place a suitable label on the band, most stations choose to pass. Kekaula points out, "We hear all the time, "Well The BellRays don’t really know what they want to be, do they want to be punk rock? Do they want to be rock & soul? Free jazz?" It doesn’t matter. As soon as they figure out a way to capitalize on what we’re doing, they’re going to be putting cookie-cutter versions of us out there for everybody to here that aren’t going to be half as good as what we’re doing." She does hold out hope that someone in music still has their head on right-side up. "Well there might be…I dare that one person. That one A&R guy that is of that old school. That feels that way to come on out and talk to us. It feels like there are some people that are imbedded in that industry that can’t really do what they want to do."

She also dares the barflies and the back-row Baptists at the show to try to ignore her. "Hey you!" She points an accusing finger across the bar, which she has reached by raking the mike cord through the crowd. "This is Blues For Godzilla I’m talking about here." The hipster patrons by the window are too stunned to muster up "And I can dig it." "Go talk somewhere else!" she suggests. The crowd’s agreement distracts her enough that she doesn’t see her flustered victim flip a matchbook at her as she returns to the stage. Fate was with him that night.

Fate was not, however, with The BellRays. A major element in shaping the sound of Grand Fury and indeed The BellRays signature sound was guitarist/songwriter Tony Fate. Fate is currently forming a new outfit, "influences--Wilson Picket, Mitch Ryder and Iggy Pop." Of his departure Vennum states, "When we started the band it was a more soul feel. It wasn’t because I wasn’t writing hard rock songs, it was because we didn’t have people who could play them. The people we had in the band just couldn’t get it. They weren’t coming from a hard rock perspective. They were coming from R&B and jazz perspectives. We couldn’t get a hard rock feel out of it until I switched to bass and Tony took over on guitar. That’s what we were always trying to do. I would take our band to see Tony’s band, The Grey Spikes, and say "Look see, that. We want to do that…THAT." And Tony became free and it sort of solved that problem. So it’s always going to have that element. I’m not as prolific a songwriter as Tony, but Jeff writes a lot of tunes. He wrote one for Let It Blast, he wrote a couple that came out on seven inches. So it’s always going to be a hard rock and soul project."

The usually stationary Porterfield parts the crowd, wielding his bass like Moses’ staff. He plants himself smack in the middle of curious onlookers and continues pummeling the strings. Kekaula is off ministering to the wallflowers in the far corner away from the limelight. Bob shrinks to the back of the stage near the drummer after the drummer after Ray Chin. To his credit, Vennum’s return to lead guitar sounds like Vennum, and not like Tony Fate. He does not attempt to mimic the style, but uses the inherent lines to make them his own. To do otherwise would be an insult, and in a world where little integrity remains, The BellRays stand defiant.

"As long as we have known Ray, he was a company guy, he really likes that environment. He was a marketing major. Then he wanted to get his MBA and not leave his job and do our thing. So he came up with that argument about a year before it came up with Tony. So it was like "All the things we’re saying to you are the same things you said a year ago to Ray" I have always been Tony’s number one fan and I have always wanted to get his music out there. We have played a lot of his music and we always will. Before he joined the band we played his music and I want to get it out there." With regret in his voice Vennum says, "Tony and I have known each other for twenty years. We’ve been real good friends for twenty years. It took fifteen years to get us in the same band. I was the original guitar player and we couldn’t find a bass player. So I switched to bass to let him play guitar. And that step wasn’t like enough, it doesn’t seem." He laments, "It’s not real amicable I’m hoping twenty years of friendship with him will override this. We’re still working it out. Vital Gesture Records was started by Tony but we took on a lot of the administration stuff. We got a lot of the contacts and e-mail site. So there are business things we have to work out and other stuff."

On the business end of the mike, the powerhouse in the small package is anointing the heathens with the spirit. The first recognizable Grand Fury offering comes in as "Screwdriver." It’s sing-along time on the acidic Fate song. A beady eyed paparazzi brazenly holds his camera in one hand and flash unit in the other over the head of Vennum’s spastic guitar for the money shot. Narrowly avoiding being high sticked, he snaps it and clutches the equipment to his sunken chest. Kekaula admonishes, "We just came here from Minnesota. And if we drove all the way here from the cold weather of Minnesota, you had better move something. We came down here for you." She points, "And you, and you, and even this mother fucker!"

It was this kind of itinerary, which drove off members. "Tony couldn’t tour anymore, basically." Vennum explains. "He had a really hard time taking that step. You get to a certain point where we are right now and you say OK, we’ve got people coming to shows, we’ve got nothing but good reviews about the record. And a lot of people are talking, people know about you already; it’s time to push it. You’ve got to press it especially when you’re not courting record labels. You’re not courting the industry. You have to go out and push it. I think it’s a tricky situation for me. I mean Lisa and I are married, we have a daughter, we have a house and this stuff we have to take care of. And its like so much for our day jobs, we have to do this. And this is what we’re doing.

"Tony couldn’t make that stretch. That was the thing, Lisa and I started this band with the intent of getting it out there. Working hard and doing what we could to do to get it out there, and we have this momentum behind us. And we were trying to go out and tour around peoples work schedules. Touring two weeks out of the year its just not going to get it because that’s all the vacation time that they have. When we were going to go to CMJ this last year, we toured before that and said we’ve got to go do that. And we posed it to the other drummer we had, Todd, and Tony. We got together and said this is what we’re going to do. And Todd came back and said "Well I’m sorry, I can’t do this. I’ve got to have my job, have my wife. I don’t want to be a touring musician." Which was cool. Tony couldn’t actually say that. He said, "I’m not ready to give this up. I want this," He wanted to stay in his safe job and put out records, tour a couple of weeks a year."

A religious fervor has taken over the floor. A tall young woman seems to be in tears as she reaches stageward to clasp hands with Kekaula. The indoctrination has taken hold, as the believers are enveloped in the warmth of the rock & soul spirit. Through all the confrontation, there is a bond among those gathered. No longer is this entertainment; it’s the freeing message they feel compelled to "bring to the people."

After being the wild-card darlings at SXSW, fewer have rubbed elbows with more industry scouts than this crew. "There are some A&R guys out there who see it, you know?" braves Vennum. "They’re the ones who don’t tell you they’re coming to the show. They pay admission to get in. They walk up to you after the show and say "Hey I’m such & such I really like you guys." You see them at other shows, and they never call you up, they never ask to get in free. You know, they’re working it. They’re really emotional about it. They like to see good bands. That’s why they got the job they got. It’s the people above them that are narrow-minded."

Kekaula adds, "The people above them are the ones that start out as bean counters. They just kind of lose the perspective that this is not about dollars and cents. It’s about music. And that’s why the state of music right now is so crappy. I mean people are thinking that Britney Spears and N’Sync and all that crap is the music of the youth. They’ve got so many old fuckers behind them that it’s not even funny. That’s somebody else’s vision, some old man’s vision of what young people should be listening to. And then they’re cramming it down kids’ throats. Making them think it’s what they want, when they haven’t even had a choice."

While this may give the impression that The BellRays eschew the current Gallup poll trend in music marketing, Kekaula sets the record straight. "To an extent we are interested in demographics." She clarifies, "We see the world as something to dominate. But we’re not into dividing it up. We see every human being that is living and breathing as possible constituents for The BellRays." Satisfied with that, she proceeds to press the flesh with various eager supporters. Vennum finishes, "And if you look at tonight’s crowd, I saw at least a dozen or so that are past 50. They’re in here rocking out and shit, you know? I don’t get that whole thing, I find it very smug that you can go out and sample 500 people and all of the sudden have a "demographic." If I was an A&R guy I would come in here and see that on a Tuesday night, in the dead of winter, an out of town band comes in and there’s all these people here and all these different kinds of people. If you magnify that by 50 or however many times putting it on MTV magnifies it, then you’re going to have something."

The night ends with a whimper. Though favorites from Grand Fury were left out, no one seems to have the energy to demand an encore. As the lights come up the altar call is to buy merchandise to fund this tour. The loyal do just that, depleting the supply to a few trinkets.

""Head On Upside Down" hasn’t been worked in yet," Vennum explains. ""Fire On The Moon" has, it just wasn’t in tonight’s set. "I thought we kicked ass!" Kekaula says about the performance. She proudly admits that The Bell Rays demand a lot from an audience. "They didn’t put out everything that I wanted, but I’m not going to complain. I’m grateful to be here and we let them know that. We let them know that we’re here for them. We do have expectations."

"The last time we played here the place was just packed all the way to the walls and every single one of them were just out of their minds." Vennum reminisces. "They were just freaking out. It was a real good crowd tonight, people came in to see some rock n roll." He then confirms, "We are demanding. "

~Ewan Wadharmi