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Asylum Street's spanking new project
A "spanker" in this case, he says, is a term for someone vigorously playing an acoustic guitar. Oh, and it makes a great double entendre for the band to toy with.
The Asylum Street Spankers, performing today at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers' Melwood Screening Room in Oakland, carry a paddle with them to shows, just in case someone needs a couple of birthday whacks.
"It doesn't even have to be their birthday. If they want a spankin', we'll give 'em one," says Wammo, via cell phone from the road, somewhere outside Lafayette, Ind.
The Spankers are several turns down the road from a traditional jug band, contemporary in thought yet retrospective in sound, caught in the vigorous act of "spanking" its way through ragtime, blues and country and western.
"We really loved that jug band style of music," says Wammo, who sings and plays harmonica and washboard. "That was the idea. Even if we couldn't find someone to play the jug. It kind of morphed from there."
In the band's seven years, the music hasn't strayed far from its down-home roots. The instruments played by the septet include acoustic guitar, harmonica, clarinet, washboard, ukulele, fiddle, bass fiddle, snare drum and, occasionally, hand saw.
But no one in the 1920s or '30s would have heard a hoedown-style cover of punk legends Black Flag's anthem "TV Party," which the Spankers performed Downtown at the Three Rivers Arts Festival one year. Or the Spankers' own gems, such as "Winning the War on Drugs" and "Wake and Bake," both from the band's newest album, "Spanker Madness."
Although the band has been in Pittsburgh numerous times in the past few years, its performance today, the first in the Back Porch Ballroom Series, co-sponsored by local music organizations Green Mannequin and Calliope, is a different endeavor than its usual odes to sex and drugs. The Spankers are playing an original score to the Buster Keaton silent film "Steamboat Bill Junior" (1928).
This isn't the band's first endeavor into film music. The group created a score for "The Gold Rush," starring Charlie Chaplin, and were part of a film-music movement in Austin, Wammo says. After touring with the film, the Spankers moved on to "Steamboat Bill Junior," because scoring a Keaton film was the original goal.
Most of the songs will be instrumental, save for Wammo singing an old ballad, "The Prisoner's Song." The music is nonstop, and therefore exhausting for the band, but that won't keep them from playing a regular set after the movie ends.
Excluding an intermission featuring music from Pittsburgh's Allegheny Rhythm Kings, with members of Coal Train and the Boilermaker Jazz Band, the Spankers are in for a long night of old-fashioned rock 'n' roll hedonism - without the rock 'n' roll, thank you.
"We don't get too political," Wammo says. "We don't do too many love songs. We just try to have fun."
| Asylum Street Spankers |
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