on music
portrait by Maggie Negrete
Nancy Barile: Early days in Punk
Women in Sound, January 2021
Nancy Petriello Barile was a Catholic school girl in the Philadelphia suburbs when she fell hard for punk rock in the 1970s.
After moving into the city in her 20s, she started booking shows, managing bands and attending punk and hardcore shows up and down the East Coast.
Barile’s new book, I’m Not Holding Your Coat: My Bruises-and-All Memoir of Punk Rock Rebellion, came out in January via Bazillion Points and is already into its second printing. It’s full of great stories, photos, show flyers, and, fittingly, culminates in a playlist. I’m Not Holding Your Coat adds another necessary female voice to the record of the early days of American punk and hardcore, a conversation that has long been dominated by male voices, even though women were and still are crucial to the birth and persistence of those scenes all around the country. Barile is now an award-winning high school language arts teacher in the Boston area.
“Days of a Quiet Sun” Chronicles the Early Career of Martin Gary, Richmond, VA’s ’60s Garage Rock King
Bandcamp Daily, June 2020
Martin Gary got his start in music when he was tall enough to reach the counter of his dad’s record shop. As a kid, he helped cashiers in the Richmond, Virginia store bag records; by the time he was a teen in the 1960’s, he’d heard enough music—the jazz and classical always on in the shop, plus the pop, R&B, soul, and rock ‘n’ roll he discovered via Richmond’s two local AM radio stations—to make solid recommendations to customers.
His passion for music followed him home, where he’d press his ear up to the family’s home stereo speaker in an attempt to decipher through the tweed grille cloth how producers like Phil Spector “got all of that sound, all of those images,” as he puts it, into the music. Martin Gary didn’t want to just sell records. He wanted to make them.
Over hard: Punk band Fried Egg goes beyond its hardcore roots
C-VILLE Weekly, January 2019
One week before the winter solstice, the weather is nasty in Charlottesville and it’s cold as fuck inside Magnolia House. The four members of hardcore punk band Fried Egg—guitarist Tyler Abernethy, bassist Sam Richardson, drummer Sam Roberts, and vocalist Erik Tsow—sit on mismatched couches and chairs in the dim living room of the DIY venue where Roberts lives and books shows. Richardson and Tsow drove in from Richmond, as they regularly do.
There’s an old piano in one corner, and a crucified Mikey Mouse, a Buddha figurine, a couple of Kermit the Frog dolls, and other miscellany on the mantle. Neat rows of show posters are taped to the robin’s-egg blue walls.
The band members crack open cans of beer and flavored seltzer and take turns leaning into the weak waft from an old space heater. Tsow blows into his hands to keep them warm.
Hitting the right note: Jazz legend Roland Wiggins reflects on a lifetime of musical expression
C-VILLE Weekly, September 2019
Roland Wiggins taught his first music lesson when he was in elementary school. He was about 10 years old, and his music teacher, Helen Derrick, had written a series of notes and chord intervals on the chalkboard. As the lesson progressed, Wiggins noticed that Derrick had made a mistake.
“Excuse me, Ms. Derrick. You’ve made an error,” the boy said from his desk. “What you told us just doesn’t work, really, musically.”
Derrick replied, “Now, wait a minute. I’m going to check all my theories and check all the books, and if I come back and you’re right, I’ll bring you an ice cream cone.”
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Sweet lowdown: Flutist-guitarist Maxx Katz explores doom with a view
C-VILLE Weekly, November 2016
Before Maxx Katz plays a single note of a FLOOM set, she looks out at the audience in front of her and thinks: “We’re all going to die.”
That thought in mind, she rings out one heavy chord on her silver sparkle Epiphone Les Paul and lets it tumble out of her bitchin’ amps and through the crowd like a slow fog, enveloping everyone in the room in a two-sided truth: Death is inevitable, but the fact that we’re alive “is really big and remarkable.”
It’s hard to escape the cloud of sound; it seeps into every corner of the room, and if her listener is willing to join her on that cloud, he might reach a certain level of mysticism. It’s what Katz aims to achieve, for both herself and her listener, with FLOOM, her solo musical project that yokes the weight of doom metal—heavy, heavy metal from a low-tuned guitar played at slow tempos, often with foreboding lyrics—with the haunting lightness of the flute.
Window to the soul: Richelle Claiborne looks at her own history through black music
C-VILLE Weekly, March 2019
Like many ideas, singer Richelle Claiborne’s latest musical endeavor came into focus after a couple of bourbons.
She had a story she wanted to tell—one about her creative influences, her ancestors, herself—and she wasn’t sure how to express it. An artist of many talents, Claiborne could work it out through poetry, a spoken word performance, or a play, but the more she thought about it, music seemed to be the only option.
After some sipping and talking with her friend, guitarist Jamal Millner, she had it—she’d perform her personal history through black music: blues, jazz, funk, and soul, reggae, R&B, and maybe a little rock ‘n’ roll.
Well-versed: A.D. Carson finds his place in the unlikely bridging of hip-hop and academia
C-VILLE Weekly, November 2018
It’s a rainy Friday in late October, the first cold night of fall, and the people who’ve dared to venture outside tiptoe quickly around autumn leaves sticking slick on the Downtown Mall bricks.
A few stories above, it’s warm and cozy inside the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, where a small crowd has gathered to hear some rap.
A.D. Carson stands a few feet away from the stage and listens intently to Sons of Ichibei, Marcel P. Black, and Black Liquid. He puts his hands up when artists ask for it, joins in on the “no human’s illegal,” “peace to Puerto Rico,” and “fuck Donald Trump” call-and-response segments. He nods his head with the beat and occasionally runs a hand through his beard.
Fast forward: Punk band The Landlords’ first album gets a slick reissue
C-VILLE Weekly, June 2018
In his early teens John Beers was “certain that punk rock sucked.” He’d seen the Ramones on television and thought all their songs sounded the same; and he thought Patti Smith singing, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” was “kind of scary.”
Heavy metal was Beers’ thing. But a few years later, he saw Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor” single in a Northern Virginia record store and, amused by the title, “had to buy it and see if it was any good.” It was great.
Dead Kennedys led Beers to the Sex Pistols and The Damned, and eventually Minor Threat, Government Issue and The Teen Idles—bands that played the short, simple, anti-establishment songs of punk rock, but faster, harder and more aggressive. Hardcore punk.
“I’d found what I had been looking for,” says Beers. Hardcore “spoke to me in a way that heavy metal, with the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll did not. The rock ‘n’ roll part? Hell, yeah. But everything else? Ehh.”
Instrumental rejuvenation: Will Mullany builds a wall of sound at The Bridge
C-VILLE Weekly, August 2017
A small metal bucket. Segments of rough-hewn PVC and metal pipe. A coffee tin. A red British post box coin bank. A spool of piano wire. A tiny, wooden drawer. Light switches, control boards, dials, film cans, electrical sockets. Pliers. Wire cutters. Rings of tubing, spoons, forks, nails, springs. Motors, yarn, string. A matte silver Christmas tree cake pan, film cans. Speakers, a license plate. A nest of wires.
To most, these things would be trash, but to musician and artist Will Mullany, one of three artists in residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative this summer, it’s treasure—items found in dumpsters, in friends’ attics and under art studio tables are precious components for instruments that challenge how music is made.
Instead of different: Singer-songwriter Devon Sproule comes home
C-VILLE Weekly, November 2015
The last time C-VILLE Weekly talked with Devon Sproule, she was jetting off to Germany with her husband, Paul Curreri, to pursue a musical life abroad.
The couple recently returned to Charlottesville, and Sproule is feeling more adventurous than ever.
“Everything that led away from Virginia felt necessary, and so did the coming home,” she says. After their Berlin adventure, Sproule and Curreri moved to Austin, Texas, in 2012 and lived in an apartment attached to their friends’ home. They watched Longhorns games, played music in the living room and meditated in an Airstream trailer in the backyard.