GLASGOW, Scotland - There's no right way for a woman to climb into the back of a tour van with the lead singer of a band. Especially when the van is parked in a seedy cobblestone alley and the lead singer is the strapping James Petralli - vocalist-guitarist for the spastic Austin buzz band White Denim.
The three-piece, which also includes bassist Steve Terebecki and drummer Josh Block, has been on the road in spurts throughout most of 2008. Monday night's performance at Stereo, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed office building turned inner city vegan café and venue, was the last of a two-week string of shows in Western Europe and the U.K. with the London-based Six Nation State. The night before, White Denim played the Ruby Room in Manchester and had a late start heading to Glasgow the following morning, delaying their arrival by a couple of hours.
Petralli, whose long hair peeks from under a blue and red knit cap, now sits on a bench seat in the back of the cluttered van, plucks a cigarette from a bronze-colored pack, asks if he can smoke, and begins to explain the band's tardiness. "We had kind of a late night last night." He taps the cigarette in an ashtray on a side panel. "We played the new record for the record label people, and I drank a little too much whiskey." He's speaking of the re-release of "Workout Holiday," the band's first full-length album on the U.K. label Full Time Hobby. The re-release includes selected songs from White Denim's full-length U.S. debut "Exposion," plus the addition of a bonus EP, which bridges the gap between the two albums.
The vocalist is careful to clarify that such late-night indulgences have been the exception for him on this tour; he damaged his voice early on in Holland. "We visited Amsterdam, and I smoked a lot of filterless cigarettes," he says, pausing for a moment of loaded reflection. "... It's been a long couple of weeks."
Just then, Josh Block appears in the window of the van and pulls at the handle on the sliding door. He pokes his head through the rectangular opening, "You've gotta see this band - they're really good!" He's referring to the Glaswegian four-piece Schnapps, whose sonic reverberations can be felt all the way into the alley. Petralli seems unfazed, nods and continues with his train of thought as Block retreats back inside the club.
Of all the rigors of touring, the most difficult task, Petralli says, is the lack of exercise and food selection. "Diet is one of the biggest things ... because I don't like eating fast food."
Though Scotland and England bear many historical and cultural offerings, it is sad to say that food cannot often be included within its list of global contributions. Truthfully, most Scottish and English cuisine can be narrowed down to two categories: boiled or fried. This culinary conundrum lends itself to the affliction of which White Denim menacingly calls "van belly."
But there's a lot more to the U.K. than food. For starters, as Petralli notes, U.K. audiences are a lot livelier than those stateside. "London's been the best for us ... but we're still doing really humble shows. People actually dance to our songs and know the words and even mosh."
What's most curious to the charmingly modest musician, however, is the age range among European crowds. "It's really interesting. We'll have 14-year-old kids show up to well ... did you see the guy with the cane inside? He's our Glasgow fan."
To the credit of the band, there was more than just a lone elder in the audience. In fact, throughout the entire 45-minute set, the basement of Stereo was awash with jerking bodies and spastic dancing. The boys ended with an encore, which seems to be customary for headliners in these parts, and wasted little time in packing equipment and loading up the van.
Terebecki and Petralli had an early flight to catch the next morning, and the band was eager to embark on its three-month respite from touring. Their next show comes after Petralli's wedding in January and just after Valentine's Day in Guadalajara, Guadalajara.
Shannon McGarvey is a former American-Statesman writer now attending graduate school in Scotland.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
GLASGOW, Scotland — On the surface, Austin and Glasgow don't have much in common. Dig a little deeper and the cities, regardless of geographical or cultural differences, share two very important commonalities: the fanaticism of football and the love of live music. It is the latter appreciation for music, specifically independent music, that draws hundreds of touring acts through Glasgow each year and packed the Òran Mór for a sold out performance by Austin's Okkervil River last weekend .
Okkervil formed in 1998 and are currently on tour in support of "The Stand Ins," their most recent release on the Bloomington, Ind.-based record label JagJaguwar and a follow-up to the 2007 critically acclaimed "The Stage Names." There are six of them — nine, if you count the road crew and the Czech tour manager — crammed into "a Gypsy wagon," as bassist Patrick Pestorius calls it, for a 20-date European tour that began in late October with a rather adventurous kick-off performance at the Loppen Christiania in Denmark's capital city Copenhagen.
The Loppen, Austin music veteran and Okkervil keyboardist Justin Sherburn says, began as a "squat" in 1971 and, in recent years, has come under pressure from conservative local government. "There was actually a police raid the morning we were trying to load out," Sherburn says. "(The police) were trying to tear down some buildings so we had to basically just grab our gear and split so we wouldn't get locked down." Lucky for Okkervil, everyone escaped with an interesting story, the likes of which are surely commonplace for a band that tours six to eight months out of every year.
Sunday's performance at the Òran Mór marked their eighth stop in Europe and, judging by the looks of sheer enthusiasm and elation among faces in the audience, probably one of the more electric live shows on this tour to date. The Òran Mór, which is Gaelic for "the great music" or "big song," was originally established as the Kelvinside Parish Church in 1862 but after many years spent derelict, the building was refurbished in 2002 and opened as a theater, restaurant, and live music venue in 2004. From the outside, the Òran Mór is an impressive, three-story Romanesque relic with a towering brown stone steeple and an imposing arched front entrance. Once inside the basement venue, in contrast, the old church transforms into an intimate, dimly lit gothic chamber with chiseled stone walls and low wooden ceilings that draw the eye to a small stage at the heart of the room.
Lead singer Will Sheff and the rest of Okkervil walked onto stage at 8:40 p.m. and began picking through the opening chords of "Singer Songwriter," the third track off "The Stand-Ins." At the mere sight of the band, the audience — a sea of more than 500 bobbing heads — unleashed a deafening barrage of screams and hoots that, for a moment, threatened to drown the vocalist's recognizable tenor and continued between songs throughout the entire 80-minute set. Who would've thought: Thousands of miles from home, across the Atlantic, on rain-soaked Scottish soil, that these hometown favorites — this group of Austinites — could incite such sustained musical fever among Glaswegians? Any silence, such as the hush before Sheff eased into an acoustic rendering of "A Stone" with multi-instrumentalist band mates Lauren Gurgiolo and Scott Brackett, was filled with requisite song requests, genderless shrieking, or the occasional desperate cry of "I love you."
Admittedly, though, an Okkervil River show is an emotive experience. Sheff is the quintessential front man — engaging, enigmatic, tender and slightly aloof — but it's the chemistry and talent of the band together that really make the live show fun. Even through the sure strain of countless weeks of touring, innumerable performances of the same songs, and various drafts of set lists, the band maintains a dedicated passion to their performance and pours that emotion over every song and every person in the audience.
One couldn't help but feel moved at Gurgiolo's banjo picking and Pestorius' baritone as the band cut into "Lost Coastlines." There was a collective, venue-wide swoon at the sound of Brackett's bellowing trumpet in the literary and musically allusive "John Allyn Smith Sails," which ends with a brief cover of the Beach Boys' bittersweet 1966 single "Sloop John B" and the haunting repetition of the verse "I want to go home."
Home, for the sextet, is about seven performances and just less than a month away. Okkervil River's return stateside precedes a four-month respite, the longest amount of time the band has spent in Austin in more than two years, Pestorius says. Time at home leaves most of the band entertaining ideas of a "normal life," returning to respective relationships, side projects, and day-jobs in the live music capital of the world. While Glasgow — "Europe's Secret Capital of Music" as Time Magazine once called the city — anxiously awaits the next Okkervil return.
Shannon McGarvey is a former American-Statesman writer now attending graduate school in Scotland.
— Originally featured in the Austin American-Statesman and on Austin360.com
...please visit my Scotland-related blog at thelookingglasgow.vox.com.
