A Tale From Long Ago

Posted by craftlass on October 9, 2013

Editor’s Note: We are absolutely thrilled to put the frontman back at the front today with the first Nativology post by Mat Hutt. Please give him a warm welcome, and if you enjoy this post, make sure to give his blog a gander as well.

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Let’s just jump right in shall we? We can say hello in a bit.

Rover is a story about abandonment and confronting demons of the past and future.

It became a song that always felt to me like it wielded tangible power. Here’s the story of James MacKinlay…

Rover was one of those songs that kind of wrote itself. It just happened.

Now, there are quite a few elements that led up to writing it, so Iʼll do my best to keep things moving.

This is how I remember it –

I was visiting my Dad and family in London whilst on a quick Native break.

My Scottish Granny told me this weirdly sweet little story.

My Granny: My grandfather was a wee little man, very sweet you know Pet, but he liked to have quite a few nips of whiskey. I would say to my Nana ʻWhy is Granpa walking like that?’ and my Nana would say ʻOch Pet, he’s just got sore feet.ʼ His name was James MacKinlay, but everyone called him Rover. Rover MacKinlay.

On this trip, I had two really cool/intense/cool conversations with my Dad.

My Dad is an accomplished songwriter and musician, and he told me to “write a story song.”

“Songs can’t always be about feelings, Mathew. People want to hear a good story from time to time.” I logged that advice away, because he was right.

The second conversation was a bit heavier. We talked about my Mum and Dad’s divorce, and about why he wasn’t around for a while when I was a kid. Big stuff, ya know? Tears, hugs, laughter and a long time coming. It was a milestone in our relationship.

This is where it gets a bit, well… cosmic. Stay with me.

The conversation took place at the top of an Iron Age earth works fort. It was a powerful place. Full on Celt action.

We were staying with some old school hippie friends. At the inevitable after dinner jam session one of the old hippies showed me this incredible chord that oozed Celtic goodness.

Old Hippie: You can move that form up and down the neck, it’s one of my favorites. Pass the spliff.

The next day, I sat down with a guitar and everything clicked – the story, the name, the lyrics, and the music. Like it was supposed to happen. I know, I know. But I was raised by hippies.

When I got back to New York, I showed it to the band. And again it just clicked. Everyone played the part that the song called for. It was really cool.

From Dave, Woody and Mattʼs driving, hypnotic rhythm, the wonderful pads of organ from whomever was gracing the ivories for us at the time, and finally to Mike’s raw, powerful, and other-worldly guitar work, Rover just… rocked.

There were times when we played live that Mike would grab the song with both hands, and wield it like a mighty Celtic battle club, his slide work literally bludgeoning the audience- and his band mates – with itʼs power and beauty. He brought tears to my eyes on many a night.

Rover was about the fear of being left alone, of having the one you love leave you. It was about the fear of becoming “that” person who leaves and causes the pain – we often become what we know. These are fairly universal feelings, we’ve all felt this way before.

Maybe that’s why Rover carried so much weight. Maybe that’s why it was a band and fan favorite. It sure is one of mine.

Here’s a tale from long ago

Of a man who lived to roam

He liked his drink he liked his song

He always left to be alone

He had a wife so young and fine

He didn’t only drink her wine

Story of James MacKinlay

And Roverʼs blood is pumping in me

Man, it’s really cool to be back on another Cornbread Wednesday! Big props to Dave Thomas for bringing us all this vaulty goodness!

Hey, come check out my blog at huttsez.com – life, kids, wife, sex, kids. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

Drinky Drinky, Smoky Smoky!

Rover v.1

Should I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Posted by davenative on October 2, 2013

William Shakespeare was called ‘The honey-tongued bard of Avon’ for a good reason. Aside from his plays, Good Will was renowned for his sonnets, which he wrote throughout his illustrious career, mostly for a private readership, and, as incredible as his plays have proven to be – it is through the ‘sugered sonnets’ that he was able to, as Wordsworth put it, “unlock his heart.”

Not surprising then, that the lead singer of a twentieth century musical act called Native, a singer who had trod the stage himself at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, would turn to the Bard for inspiration.

Mat Hutt was really on a roll at this point in the band’s trajectory. By himself, or in collaboration with John Wood, he’d already written enough strong songs in the preceding year to fill an album, but the music was flowing out of him with such regularity that when the decision was made to invoke Shakespeare’s sonnets as lyrics, much time was afforded in carefully choosing the lines that would be quoted or paraphrased in this newest masterpiece.

The line in today’s title is from Sonnet 18, but careful examination shows that today’s featured tune culled lines from all around Mr. William’s canon. Long hours around the kitchen table were spent poring over the sonnets, plucking a line here or there and fitting them in place, like jewels in an ornate piece of jewelry.

As it took shape, Mike Jaimes contributed mightily to the construct, with more than a small influence on the utltra-rocking middle section. With the addition of the rhythm section and the Elizabethan stylings of John Watts, the song was a complete epic, soaring and majestic.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets in his time, but Native edited together fragments from those works, and invested them with such grace and furore that a seemingly new one was born. Which is why we called it —

155

Diamonds are a girl’s best frenemy

Posted by davenative on September 24, 2013

The quest for economic security leads us all in strange directions. The question soon becomes, “How much of yourself are you willing to give away for that security?”

When Mat Hutt sat down and wrote this week’s featured tune, he would dig a bit deeper into his own experience, as he would do with all his songs from this period, and delve into issues that were gnawing at him in a way that he’d not previously done.

The subject of this song is not conveyed in the title, it’s about a girl who we all knew. A victim of the false quest.

Beautiful, poised, excellently coutured, and always perfect. A bit too perfect, as it turned out, for she was acting the whole time. She was leading a double life.

Her quest had been fulfilled — she had all the glitter, gold, and diamonds she wanted. But, they were empty baubles and trinkets. They were in no way any way a substitute for what she now knew she really wanted. Once you’ve given away your most precious possession – you – the accumulation of wealth and lies becomes an impossible-to-escape vortex.

When the truth came out, it was too late, the vortex would never let her go. The pearls and earrings were now shackles.

We all knew her, and we all felt the deep twinge one gets when remembering an absent and well-loved friend.

She hadn’t died. Her two lives had merely converged for a moment, only to wend away in opposing directions, leaving us wondering what might have been a better life for her.

A life with real love, real people, and nowhere in sight – the vain lure of —

Diamonds

Digging Holes Again

Posted by davenative on September 18, 2013

Greetings Nativophiles! And, welcome back to our ongoing excursion through the musty corridors of the Native Tape Vault!`

Before we took a summer vacation (to work) we’d spent a year listening to the many splendid demos, rarities, and anomalies* found in our tape library, as curated, annotated, pixelated, and carbonated by our illustrious drummer, Dave Thomas, HBE**.

Back when Dave was what psychiatrists like to refer to, euphemistically, as “sane,” he undertook the massive task of going through the mountain of recordings we made in our salad years, when all we did was eat salad and make tapes in our studio that Woody built.

Under Dave HBE’s tyranny, Nativology has endured two iterations — Volumes 1 & 2. Now, the planet is faced with the even graver crisis of Vol. 3, and already the Untied Nations General Assembly has issued a statement saying, “Who needs salad when Nutella Hazlenut Spread can feed the world?”

Today’s example of John Fitzwater-engineered analogue-based goodness is a song we have visited already on Vol. 2, in a version from the John Epstein epoch which, much like the Jurassic era, ended in early 1995.

Following a brief, salad-munching summer, the effervescent John Watts joined the band, and a new round of demos were made on the trusty Tascam 8-track cassette recorder, which now sits enshrined in The Museum of Dave’s Storage Locker In Englewood, NJ.

Matt Hutt had come up with a dilly of a song that would eventually be the kick-off tune of our best-known album, Exhale On Spring Street. Woody collaborated on it, and Dave kicked in a line or two. Mike Jaimes and Matt Lyons kibutzed in the corner, and a landmark tune was regifted to the many varied nations of Midtown Manhattan, between Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, sorry, Clinton.

So, settle back with a quart of Sangria, a bowl of Nutella, and a big honking doobie! Click some keys on your favorite computer, and marvel at the majesty embodied in a little number called —

Digging Holes v.2

* A subtle reference to Dave’s current project, a graphic novel called ANOMALIES, which can be found here.

** Half-Baked Empire

Sunned, Stunned & Zooted

Posted by davenative on September 11, 2013

How was everyone’s summer vacation?

Ours was fabulous, minus a cataclysm or two.

The main thing is — the keeper of our vaults, Drummer Dave Thomas (or, as he’s known semi-derisively — Hollywood Thomas) took the summer ensconced in his Dave Cave working fiendishly on all manner of mad things, including new music he’s preparing for a solo or band release. He can’t decide if he’s a band or not — it was that kind of existential summer for Dave!

Anyhoo, he’s back on the Native tip, and starting to sift through the tapes that will comprise Nativology Vol. 3. He hasn’t really given us a report on what’s available, but by the oohs and ahhs we hear emanating from the Dave Cave, he’s either on to some great stuff, or he’s found that online photo of Olivia Munn and ScarJo he’s been searching for!

What can we expect when these recordings find their way into our Bandcamp site?

Good question, Jasper from Omaha, Pennsylvania!

All Dave will say is that Vol. 3 will pick up where Vol. 2 left off — somewhere in the John Watts era, featuring more demos from our Exhale On Spring Street period. But, Dave has that shifty look in his eyes (okay, he always has that shifty look, but go with us here…), a shifty look that suggests something special is forthcoming, or fifthcoming, in addition to the Vault tracks that will turn up on Nativology Vol. 3.

Can it be that a new live Native album is in the works??

Great question, Tanya from Stalingrad, Ohio!

All we can do is wait until Dave gets that shifty look off his face and tells us. But, we’ve got next week’s new round of Nativology to look forward to, and that is excitement unparalleled in all of our accumulated human experience. (Edit: Dave: “Except for that online pic of Olivia Munn & ScarJo!“)

Before we say orderve, a big ol’ BTW — right now is a perfect time to go back to Volumes 1 & 2 of Nativology, which can be found here and here. You’ll find a treasure-trove of great unreleased Native goodness to warm the shackles of your heart!

So, welcome to Fall — it’s all downhill from here, except for the uphill parts!

Drinky, drinky, smoky, smoky!

Happy Summertime fun!

Posted by davenative on July 10, 2013

Hey Cornbread Wednesday people!!!

We here at Native Central hope you are doing what we are doing — having fun, and enjoying a little time off. We haven’t even cooked up any cornbread this week!

We hope you enjoyed the visits our drummer, Dave Thomas, made into our vaults. The results, Nativology pts 1 & 2, are amazing, even if we do say so ourselves!!

Dave is working on some music of his own right at this very second, but he will return to scouring the vaults soon.

In the meantime, he is planning a Native live album to be taken from multi-track sources. He’ll have more on that, and other Native goodies he’s planning, in the near future.

Meanwhile, there is great Native music to catch up on at our bandcamp site — just click on the music links in the sidebar and it’s party time!!

To which we proudly say — “Drinky drinky, smokey, smokey!”

The Wild Atlantic Sea

Posted by davenative on June 25, 2013

There are times in your life when you remember right where you were, and what you were doing when you first heard a bit of music. This is the case for me with the song we are featuring in this week’s edition of Nativology Vol. 2.

Mat Hutt’s dad, Sam Hutt, sometimes known as Hank Wangford strolled into the apartment Mat & I shared on 16th Street, told us he’d written a song on the flight over from the UK, picked up a guitar and played us this brilliant tune. It was full of wistful, faraway chords, haunting melodies, and the loveliest poetry.

I was sitting on our couch, quite probably with my mouth hanging open in sheer awe at the effortlessness Sam displayed in his performance, especially in light of the fact that he’d had no guitar on the plane. That moment forever defined the the long road I’d be on to be a real songwriter, not just somebody poking around with some chords and random words.

It was also at this the time of this visit that Sam asked a very cogent question as we viewed an old gangster serial — why do gangster’s henchmen simply accept their orders to go knock off an adversary? Or, as Sam put it, “How come nobody ever asks ‘And then what’?”

Years later, that question (sans question mark) would become the title of our third studio album.

I tell that story, not as a digression, but to illustrate how long we’d hang on to good ideas before incorporating them into our work.

It would be years before Native took up the song. But, once we did it became a tentpole of our shows, often popping up at the end. And there was little that could follow it.

When I produced the Exhale On Spring Street album, I somehow left off Sam’s writer credit — a fact that I regret every time I hear it. So, let me publicly apologize to Sam for the egregious oversight. It was not a slight, but rather a mistake made by someone just a bit over his head on his first album production. I’m truly sorry for it, Sam!!!

This version is our demo from 1996, featuring Mr. John Watts on keyboards. And, just as it served as a closer to our sets, the same is true today as it will be the final song in this volume of Nativology.

We will resume our scouring of the Native Tape Vault with Vol. 3 in the coming months. In the meantime, we are preparing a live album release, the details of which will be disclosed soon.

But, for now, sit back and enjoy a tour of the beautiful, rocky shores of —

The Wild Atlantic Sea

Twisting, turning, flying, burning…

Posted by davenative on June 19, 2013

Adding John Watts to the band had really paid off and, by the summer of 1996, the band was really running smooth on all cylinders. Constant, relentless rehearsal and gigging resulted in a band that was air-tight, confident, and armed with the largest playbook of our existence!

In the midst of all the chaos, we continued to write new material, and we were sure-enough of ourselves to play the new music in public, letting it grow and evolve before laying down the demo on our trusty Tascam 8-track recorder.

This week’s tune is a very impressive Mat Hutt composition, inspired by a comment made by our manager, Paul Ducharme.

Paul, ever vigilant against the incursion of fake-hippies into our real-hippies scene, had coined the term ‘krevelers’ to describe those who look, sound, and dress like hippies, but who were actually predators — taking advantage of the naiveté exhibited by so many of us flower children.

Paul’s comment came in the early hours of morning after a gig, when most folks have gone home, but there were a few still hanging around that seemed to have an awful lot of energy considering the hour. “It’s just another junkie sunrise.”

That was all Mat needed to put on his dramatist’s hat and put himself in the place of a lost soul, on the brink of destruction, living not from day-to-day, but score-to-score. He envisioned that soul having a moment of clarity, perhaps the only one of the day, as a stark colorless sun rises overhead.

I’m pretty sure he got some help from Woody and Paul along the way, but however it came about, and whoever helped develop it — it’s a Native masterpiece, in my opinion.

This version comes from August, 14, 1996 and, appropriately, it was the last song of a long set which puts it at the right hour — around four a.m.

Our good buddy and compatriot, Kregg Ajamu, can be heard trading off with Mat at the end.

The band would pack up, go home and sleep, but for some tortured souls in the room, what awaited was a —

Junkie Sunrise

Older? Yes. Wiser? Perhaps. But, we’re all still kids in a Thunderstorm

Posted by davenative on May 28, 2013

Native was humming along on all cylinders in the fall of 1995.

We had endured the loss of keyboardist John Epstein, and a summer wherein we toured as a five-piece band. John Watts had come on board in the fall, and we hardly missed a beat — he assimilated our old material, even as we were coming up with enough new stuff to fill another two albums.

Speaking of albums, our first effort had floundered, due in no small part to a poor mastering job which nobody on our team recognized, but which kept radio from playing it.

We were hungry, hunkered-down, and humbled. We kept stumbling & rumbling along, oblivious to any muse but our own. The places we visited were farther-flung than ever, Buffalo, Rochester, all ports of call up the east coast, and of course — Bar Harbor, Maine. Aside from New York City, there was no place we visited more often, or felt more at home. The names of the bars there kept changing, but the faces of friends in that incredible place were as important to us as any we would ever know.

When we were back in NYC, our regularly-scheduled recording sessions kept us busy. The John Watts period saw us refining and improving songs we’d already demoed with the mercurial Mr. Epstein, and today’s song is among those on that list.

John Fitzwater, our erstwhile soundman, had developed a technique for recording the band on only eight-tracks. Since we were limited to that number on the Tascam Cassette recorder we were using in this project. Fitz would record the rhythm section of the band on DAT, and then transfer that to the first two tracks on the Tascam. We would then have six tracks left on which to overdub guitar, keys, and vocals. The hard part was getting a perfectly-balanced take of drums, bass, percussion, and rhythm guitar on the DAT. But, when we re-recorded today’s featured tune, an awful thing happened.

I was beginning to make demos of my own compositions on the same DAT machine, and one fateful day I accidentally recorded over a completed take of today’s song before it could be transferred to eight-track. The band was furious, Mat Hutt was ballistic (and, indeed, could not even talk to me for quite some time, such was his anger). I was devastated, and the event only made it harder for me to bring in material of my own creation.

source: imgur

For a time, I was quite isolated within the structure of the band, and a bit of a pariah. To make matters worse, when we re-re-recorded the song yet again — although it was a fine take, and the overdubs went well (with Mike surpassing himself on lead guitar), we did not take the care we had exhibited on all the other demos, and we found ourselves out of tracks and unable to do the harmony vocals.

At that point, lethargy and inertia set in. We took a break from recording, and the song languished, never getting a proper mix as all the other songs had done — which is too bad because it’s really quite splendid, as I think you’ll agree.

So, here it is — one of Native’s finest efforts, and a lost page from our playbook —

Thunderstorm v.2

Barefoot Girls

Posted by davenative on May 22, 2013

Before Native, your humble narrator was in a band called Kitchen Ethics. Based in Hell’s Kitchen, and helmed by Joel Golden, Mick Ryall, and Ron Brice, we were lucky enough to play gigs with Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors, God Street Wine, and were a part of the burgeoning New York Rock Club Scene in the pre-Wetlands days when small clubs like Nightingale’s, and McGovern’s ruled the roost.

It was during this period that I started to take up a guitar and attempt to write songs. As a drummer, I’ve always tried to play with really good songwriters, and the day came when I had collected enough influences and arrangement practices that I was compelled to take it a step further and write the darn thing myself.

I was like Candide, throwing myself into the role of writer and hoping that sheer luck and effort would make up for things like not knowing the names of the chords, or how to play the guitar.

But, I had one very good advantage, as a drummer I knew very clearly what the beat was, and how I wanted it played. This may not sound like much, but let me tell you something, most of the songwriters I worked with, as good as they were, usually had no idea what they wanted, beat-wise. Quite often, I’d be playing a song and wonder if I had it right, and I seldom found out!

So, I was motivated to write songs from the beat up, and with the encouragement of the Kitchen Ethics guys, I wrote a little ditty called The Better Part Of Valor. Good title, but that’s about all that’s good in it. Oh, the band plays it fine, it’s the lyrics and melody, and singing that makes me absolutely sure that I’ll not be playing it for anyone.

Kitchen Ethics broke up, sadly, and I was left with The Radon Room in Mott Street. Two years later, at the same location, Native was getting going, and I decided to dust off this tune and give it a revamp. Inspired by the intoxicating sight of beautiful girls dancing around an open fire after a Grateful Dead concert, (and with Something Worth Remembering already under my belt) I proceeded to work up a tune that worked out pretty well, and would stay in our setlists for the rest of Native’s touring days.

We never recorded an album version, other than the epic live version found on Native’s cd – Live From Marmfington Farm Vol. 1. But, we *did* tape a demo of it during the sessions from Fall 1995 that have made up a big part of Nativology Vol. 2

In my humble opinion, it’s one of the best things we did in these sessions. So, take a trip back in time, to a Grateful Dead parking lot bonfire, and the silhouetted dancers around it, those —

Barefoot Girls