Bella's Bartok: Straight Shire

 

 

is a band that defies definition. They’ve been labeled as gypsy-punk, Balkan rockabilly, and circus rock. But the effort to pin down their sound is trivial. You could call them an eleven-piece cacophony parade for all they care. Their goal is to spread the electrifyingly good time they’re having on stage out into the audience, until every last person is out of breath…in a good way. They’re here to have fun.

 

Having just recorded their first album, At the

 Kingmaker’s Ball, Bella’s Bartok will be performing an album release ball at the NEW STAGE Performing Arts Center in Pittsfield, Mass., on November 27 at 8:30. Seven members of the band (Asher Putnam—vocals, acoustic guitar; Vashti Poor—vocals; James Bill—lead guitar; Steve Torres—bass; Mark Schillin—drums, Amory Drennan—trumpet and banjo; and Sean Klaiber—trombone) sat down with me at Dottie’s Coffee Lounge on a recent Sunday afternoon to discuss the woes of recording an album and the lessons they learned, the pros and cons of playing in a large band, loyalty to the Berkshires, and what the future holds. What ensued was an hour-long conversation full of sarcasm, hilarious stories, sing-alongs, philosophical discussions, inside jokes, and overall shenanigans. Somehow I also managed to get some questions answered in between.

 

BL: The first thing I want to hear about is your new album: what was the process like, how long were you working on it, and what is it all about?

 

Vashti: About 5 minutes [everyone laughs].

James: It was done really quickly.

Steve: In about three days....three twelve-hour days.

Vashti: It’s kind of more a compilation of two years of Bella’s Bartok originals. It’s not like a theme-based album; it’s really documentation of an evolution.

James: ...of our existence as a whole.

 

BL: So there are a lot of fan favorites on there?

 

Steve: They’re all fan favorites.—there’s no other choice.

 

BL: How did the decision to record come about,  did you just say one day ‘Hey, let’s make an album!’?

James: We’ve been saying that for like 2 years.

Vashti: People have been yelling at us [to record one].

Asher: We should give some background: this is our third itineration, essentially. We were at first just primarily a street band and pretty much a cover band...then we got Sean and Mark…And he and James are pretty much our primary songwriters [several members interject, “and Asher!”]...and me.

 

 

BL: What’s the song-creating process like?

 

Amory: It depends. Everyone has sort of like a different writing style–like Sean will have a very clear idea of what’s going into a song in an arrangement/composition way, while James has a pretty clear idea and let’s us sort of write along...

Vashti: Whereas Sean does not allow that.

Sean: I don’t’ allow people to change what I have.

Amory: ...and Asher is a little bit more open-ended.

Asher: I usually just bring like the basic chords and song structure and lyrics, and then I have everyone else write their parts because I’m lazy.

Steve: Essentially we’re improvising all the time. It’s an eleven-piece band so technically everything should be orchestrated and written out in charts, but…

 

BL: But it’s not?

 

Steve: It’s not.

Sean: We’ve developed lines and that sort of thing. We used to do a lot more improvising and not really having clear arrangements, necessarily, but we’ve really worked on that a lot in the last half a year or so.

James: It’s been one of the big goals, I think, is to actually harness all of the instruments as opposed to just letting it all…

Mark: Avoid a wall of sound, which happens often actually.

Sean: We’re really good at the wall of sound.

Steve: And that gets into the recording thing—we did it in Hudson at Henry Hirsch’s studio, I don’t know what it’s called…

All: The Waterfront.

Steve: So he had never seen us before, and we went in there, and presented him with eleven people ready to make a ruckus, and his goal was to make it so that you could actually hear everybody.

Asher: He was such a pro, and he looks like Ben Folds.

Vashti: And it’s a converted church from the late 1800s, and it’s amazing, he designed it after Studio B of Abbey Road. And we figured if there’s anybody who can help us hear ourselves, it would be him.

Steve: Coincidentally, we designed all of our songs to be exactly like the Beatles.

 

BL: What was the recording process like for you?

 

Vashti: I think one of the challenges of us recording was that this band is not the kind of band that you could put eleven of us in your living room and record to your computer and have it sound like anything less than crap.

Asher: We tried that once.

Vashti: We tried that again and again and it’s just really hard to achieve that. There’s all these duos out that we’re sort of jealous of because they can do that, and this required something a little bit more serious in terms of microphones and acoustics. And even so, I think we learned from this experience that we even need to be more arranged before we get into this process because it’s just a lot instruments—it’s an orchestra more than it is a rock band.

 

BL: So you guys jumped into this process completely unaware of  what was going to happen?

 

James: We booked two days. Not surprisingly, we realized that we had taken on way too much. We were like, "Let’s book two days, we’ll just bang out twelve songs, we’ll put it all on analog tape, transfer it, have it mixed and mastered in two days...," and somehow we thought that would work.

Steve: Incidentally, it takes an entire day to transfer an album.

Vashti: And it takes a half a day to set up microphones for a band this size…so, next time we’ll probably do it a different way!

 

BL: Well, you got it done, so you must be really happy about that.

 

James: It was an adventure.

Vashti: The mixing-down process took weeks, and the guy that mixed it is a Grammy-winner, he did Lauren Hill’s Miseducation of Lauren Hill.

Asher: He was actually very patient with us, there’s a lot of us and we were kind of…

Vashti: Awful?

Asher: Well, we weren’t awful, there’s just a lot of us, and we didn’t know what we were doing. But it was cool. I mean, I don’t know about you guys, but I’d like to be able to work with him again, maybe on an EP instead of 90 songs.

[Everyone agrees]

Vashti: We raised all the money to do the recording in about two months, all from gigs this summer, and…it’s kind of incredible, because this is a real recording studio…it’s a really cool process. I knew there would be a first time and it was gonna be rough—the first time is always rough! [laughs], no matter what. So, I’m glad that our first time was with [Waterfront Studio], because they were pros and really they kind of lead us through it and they were teachers too.

Asher: Patient, patient people. I don’t think I could emphasize that enough.

 

BL: I’m sure they saw you guys walking in the door and thought, “Oh, shit.”

 

Vashti: Yeah. In their typical work schedule, they’ll do an album in like six to eight months there. So, this was not their normal process, but they were totally up for it.

 

BL: You have a pretty long history together as a band—what was your first big gig like?

 

Steve: Our first real gig was—Olu Dara was supposed to play at Club Helsinki in Great Barrington when it was still around, and he cancelled. Olu Dara is [rapper] Nas’s dad, he’s a famous jazz trumpet player, he’s like big shit, and he cancelled. So they were scrambling for a gig, and somebody who worked there—my old roommate—knew that we had this band. And so all of a sudden we’re at Helsinki on a Friday night, and everybody thinks Olu Dara’s playing, and we were like, “What are we doing here?” But we did it, we pulled it off, and then we were like “Oh, we’re a band.”

 

BL: I’ve read and heard so many different descriptions of your music, from gypsy-punk to Balkan Rockabilly, but I want to hear straight from the horse’s mouth: How did your sound develop and how would you describe it?

 

Sean: I guess Asher started doing a bunch of a traditional stuff and more gypsy-punk-wave stuff, and then there are ten of us, and no one really listens to that music, so we sort of tried to keep on that whim, but you know, develop ourselves a little better…

Asher: What we play now is…it’s like Vaudevillian circus, we’ve got New Orleans feel in there, we have blues, kind of a more Latin beat…

Steve: It’s post-modern pastiche.

 

BL: So is it an ever-evolving sound, with everyone throwing in their own ideas?

 

Asher: Yeah, whatever someone is listening to….

Amory: I think also a lot of us tend to not be terribly flexible in our musical styles, so we don’t really have any choice but to sound like us. We’re not going to be able to sound like a traditional band because we don’t know how to play like that. We know how to play how we know how to play.

 

BL: Your upcoming album release ball is at the NEW STAGE, an awesome new space in Pittsfield. Do you have an idea of what your performance will be like in that space?

 

Vashti: We’re doing two sets…and they’re actually making the stage bigger in order to fit us….the great thing is we’re relatively close to the same level as the audience so there’ll be great dancing in that space.

James: It has the feel of a club as opposed to the theater.

Steve: We play living rooms, we play fields, we play dingy clubs, we play nice clubs…we play cardboard boxes. We do it all. And it’s impossible to know what is going to sound good with a band this big. It’s just like having ten boom boxes all going at once.

 

BL: Would you say the space makes the performance?

 

Steve: We make the performance.

Mark: It’s how we handle the space, because some spaces really kick our ass.

Vashti: Yeah, there are some places that are just too small for the amount of sound we put out.

Mark: There’s never really an excuse, but some places are hard to play.

Vashti: We’re learning to play more softly when necessary…As our set has been getting longer and longer—for a long time we did just one set—I’m noticing that people are actually getting tired sometimes, like “Phew!” [She pantomimes wiping her forehead], and we’re still going, and so this show I think we’re going to do two sets.

Asher: We’re in shape. We had 18 songs last week, but I cut two because the audience was so [breathless]…people were tired because we just played straight through all these really fast-paced songs…

[Meanwhile Sean and Steve are lip-syncing to “Killing Me Softly” and distracting everyone]

…and then we played some slow songs.

 

BL: Like this one [Killing Me Softly]?

 

Vashti: As there are more originals, fewer traditionals and fewer covers have been in circulation….[Sean and Steve are still singing] I don’t mean to interrupt you guys, you can keep going.

Sean: This is one of the few songs I have to sing every time I hear it, no matter where.

 

BL: So what’s the plan for the future?

 

Steve: Sell out as quickly as possible.

James: I think actually we do want to start getting our—this is another thing we’ve been talking about for like three years—actually getting together proper press material and starting to expand our sphere of influence, start playing outside of the Berkshires. Because right now we actually play a lot, but probably most of the gigs we get are gigs that are offered to us.

Vashti: We’ve actually never successfully said, “Hey, I’d like to play at this place,” and then have it happen. We just get invited, and this has been perpetuating itself just from doing nothing. So, if we did something we could actually have a say in what happens with our destiny…Definitely playing in more places where more people haven’t heard us before is a goal for us, because even when we play in New York—and it’s not always the best gig in the world—but there’s still this thrill with people hearing you and they’re like, sometimes you see people hearing it and going, “What is this? I like it, do you like it?,” and it’s exciting.

 

BL: It is great that you guys have kept your Berkshire roots though.

 

Steve: Dude…[Pulls up his shirt to reveal a big “413” tattoo on his right side, after which Asher shows a matching one on his back right shoulder]…We roll deep.

 

BL: Hey, born and raised right here, I’m all about the Berkshire pride. Tell me why people should want to come to this show?

 

Steve: It’s the best band you’ve ever heard in your life. I’m not trying to be crazy but, Bella’s Bartok has something that everybody wants to hear.

Vashti: Yeah—you, your grandmother, and your teenage daughter—we’ll get them off their ass and dancing.

Steven: We’re not beholden to the past, and, it’s like Amory said, we can’t help but sound like ourselves. And we’re not a folk-band from the foothills; we’re straight Shire to the bone.

Vashti: That’s going to be our new t-shirt, I’m going to make it right now.

Steve: We don’t need to cater to anybody, you know, we know that our shit is the best, straight up.

Mark: We bring the party. We will double the size of the party just by playing.

Vashti: We are the party!

 

 

 

Bella’s Bartok Album Release Ball: At the Kingmaker’s Ball

NEW STAGE Performing Arts Center

Pittsfield, Mass.