It's a Long Way:
How a Little Band Called Fancy Trash is Saving Rock and Roll

JR notes: If you're looking for something on the band that doesn't take a whole lunch break to read, I'd recommend you head over to the Fancy Trash.com web site and check out the articles in their press room. On the other hand, if you're like me, and found that the other articles left you wanting more, then you've come to the right place.

Sept 2006 update - since I wrote this piece, Fancy Trash have released two new records, and you can check out my reviews of both. Weighted Down came out in March 2006 (review here) and Three Cheers for the Cheated came out in September 2006 (review here).

Rock and roll may not be dead, but it is surely dying. You can only distill something so many times before all you're left with is pondwater. The Stones distilled the blues and sounded brilliant, then Aerosmith distilled them and sounded pretty fucking good. But distilling Aerosmith was a mistake - you wouldn't recognize the names of the bands that tried. Punk kept things honest for a while, but now that our corporate friends have found punk so convenient for the sarcastic marketing of consumer products, we'll have to look for a pulse elsewhere.

Maybe that's why we head down to the clubs, looking for something yet to be corrupted. We'll endure a lot of cheap beer to find something that proves rock did not go down with its idols. For me, I was lucky enough to stumble onto a little (for now) band called Fancy Trash, a band that showed me not everything in rock and roll has been done before.

Fancy Trash was not love at first listen. As I recall, I had been dragged down to Harry's (now the Eleven's), the joint our local favorites are reduced to calling home. Someone I didn’t even like much had told me Fancy Trash was worth a listen. I was immediately struck by the band's distinctive three piece look, anchored by the stand-up bass; but for most of that night, Fancy Trash was just the "Americana" soundtrack behind me as I tried to make a little time at the bar. Fancy Trash did bring out a few of the local hotties, and the band's going to hate me for bringing up such a shallow point, but they are a pretty nice band to look at - or so I'm told.

Anyhow, something funny happened during that flirt session. In the background, Fancy Trash was slowly but surely ratcheting up the intensity. By the end of the gig, the whole dynamic had flipped. I found myself ignoring the conversations around me, trying to absorb the last minutes of a gig that had suddenly turned hot. What the hell happened? I didn't grasp it at the time, but Fancy Trash had done their trademark Clark Kent/phone booth/Superman routine, the point during each gig where they push beyond obvious influences, bust out of the confines of Americana, and become something else entirely. Something to reckon with.

Let's talk about this Americana thing a little bit. To this day, I don't really understand what Americana is. I think it's a trendy word for a strain of bland modern folk rock that Fancy Trash gets associated with. I do (grudgingly) realize that the success of the band probably requires that their music be played on Americana-friendly stations and that their shows be well-attended by Americana connoisseurs. No, I don't know much about Americana, but I can say this much: Americana is not going to save the soul of rock and roll. Brash young Dylan wouldn't have bothered to plug in his electric and start a folk-rock revolution if he could have foreseen how meek this music would eventually become. Americana fans will surely like Fancy Trash, but anyone who's content to place this band in a category of music-on-life-support just doesn't get it. Good songwriting makes Fancy Trash good, but something else makes them great. It may be awkward, but I'm going to fall over myself to separate the Trash from bands they've been casually grouped with. There's something a lot more potent going on here. If you don't know what I mean, you'd better go see for yourself when they come to a town near you.

To get you primed for the gig, Fancy Trash has one official CD you can buy (and buy it you should!). If you're an alt-country/folk-rock buff, it might be the best CD you buy all year, and it's a lot better than most of the stuff on your local Americana radio station (there's that damned word again). But the first CD (the self-titled Fancy Trash) sizes up the monster this band has to wrestle down: capturing their live magic in the studio. If they ever pull it off, the result will be a CD you'll have to pry from my grip. Fancy Trash shows are not yet riveting from beginning to end, but when the band rips out their best material, they can pull things out of you that you were not expecting to feel. They have this disarming way of making me feel young and free, without denying the discord. I'd call it a brilliant sleight of hand, except this band comes right at you.

We're used to music that indulges our comfort zone, like the NuMetal that Novocaines the airwaves, ruined by its emotional dishonesty. Hip-hop, NuMetal, neuvo-punk - it all sells "attitude" but challenges nothing. NuMetal would have us feel damaged and sorry for ourselves, hip-hop fashions us as players when the dealer is holding the cards. The end result is the same: music that promotes pleasure and pain while wealth and power consolidates. One thing you will never hear at a Fancy Trash show: "I did it all for the nookie!" Hanging around near the lowest common denominator is easy; doing an end-run around cynicism is a hell of a lot harder. Fancy Trash faces this challenge each time they go onstage: they must find a way to entertain without toning down. The solution lies in the band's musical dexterity.

We shouldn't go further without meeting the key players in the Fancy Trash story. Fancy Trash is a three piece band fronted by lead singer/guitarist Dave Houghton. Josh Thayer is on the stand-up bass, and Ben Laine keeps time on the drums. Their original drummer, Jason Smith, also figured prominently in how Fancy Trash came to be. I've constructed my own fanciful origin story: Dave moving here from Chicago, leaving his last band with that hard regret you feel when a dream is unfinished but the time has still come, arriving in Northampton jaded on the biz, here to lose himself like so many of us are.

Following this version of the Fancy Trash legend, Dave moves here to unplug (and that much stays the same - there's no electric guitar in Fancy Trash). But then he runs into his high school friend and drummer, Jason Smith. It's a fateful turn - only an "old school" friend can get a guy playing just for fun. So Dave starts to play again, and the songs start to come.

I've been trying to figure out how much I should comment on Dave's previous band, the Reejers, and the nine year stint he did with them in the midwest. Now that Dave's got a band as good as Fancy Trash, he probably doesn't want to look back. But I know I understood Dave better after tracking down some Reejers tunes. Most musicians in their thirties have a good band story or two. If you can get a couple drinks in them, they're usually good for some tales of "close calls" with bands that woulda/coulda/shoulda. But more often than not, the bands that "should have been huge" went about as far as they should have. The CDs left behind underwhelm.

There are, however, notable exceptions. I don't know enough about the Reejers to say if they had a real shot or not, but based on the songs I've tracked down so far, I'd place them on a pretty short list of the "undiscovered" rock bands in the '90s. (Track down "Coffee Grounds," a Reejers song available on several CD compilations on eBay, and you'll see what I'm talking about). Despite its baffling name, "Coffee Grounds" is a work of staggering beauty, recorded by a band at the height of its powers. Anyone who puts out a song that good and doesn't make it in the biz is going to have a heck of a hangover. And what better place to drink the hair of that dog than Northampton?

Returning to the official version of events, through their first drummer, Jason, Dave ends up meeting Josh, and they begin to play around with a three piece sound. They got their eventual name from a detractor. After leaving the Reejers, Dave moved in with his brother and did a work stint in Pennsylvania. An acidic co-worker used to taunt him by saying, "you're just fancy trash from Colorado." That workplace abuse came in handy a couple years later when the guys signed up for their first band contest. "What's your name?" was the question, "Fancy Trash" was the makeshift answer, and it stuck.

Fancy Trash turns out to be an inspired name for a band that has vast musical talents but the good sense not to get snotty about it. To me, the "fancy" in Fancy Trash says that the purpose of art is to chase perfection, and the "trash" is a nod to the best aspects of the punk rock sensibility: that in the end, craftsmanship can be our worst enemy, that we are no better than the people we play for, and that good things happen when we let the raw emotion of the moment take over. A great name can help solidify an identity, and their name is expansive enough to push them without limiting them to one sound or look.

To get a sense of how the band has surged ahead, we must first get a better feel for the debut CD. On Fancy Trash, the band takes full advantage of the studio setting, embellishing the record with new instruments. It's always a risk to "dress up" your sound, but done the right way, it can add depth, and you hear the good results on songs like "Something Special." One of the best tracks on the CD, "Something Special" is a very pretty song that benefits from the tweaks of a controlled environment and the addition of a mandolin (played by Bob Hennessy). Yet the song's mix never gets too "fancy"; the sincerity of Dave's vocal work shines through.

The easiest vocal reference for Dave is clearly Neil Young, and based on Dave's respect for Neil's work, he probably wouldn't object to the comparison. I'm more partial to Dave's vocals myself. He lets you in a little more, lets you hear his voice crack. It cracks a bit at the end of "Hollywood," another song that fares very well on Fancy Trash. "Hollywood" turns out to be an old Reejers tune that Fancy Trash carved a deeper soul into, using a spare mix and a gorgeous pedal steel guitar (played by Bruce Tull). The song speaks to the loneliness of ambition, heading home with dreams gone sour ("I've fallen short a few times/have you ever gotten out of the red"). But while "Hollywood" evokes a vast sadness, lines like "It's even worse to see a crumb that's taken/for the one who's full" hint that Dave isn't going to take it lying down. He still has a score or two to settle.

If this CD was all you had to go on, you might think of Fancy Trash as a youthful take on tradition, content to explore well-trod paths of folk craftsmanship. But you would be mistaken, and this is where the "Trash" in Fancy Trash comes in. Even when they started selling their CD at shows, Fancy Trash was making things happen live that did not get captured in the studio.

To better explain this phenomenon, a quick scan through rock history is in order: all those years ago, when Dylan plugged in his guitar, he was looking for an intensity he couldn't get from his acoustic. A lot of loud things have happened since then, things like Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, the Ramones, Slayer, Metallica, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Tool. But have we seen the end of loudness as innovation? The lame duck metal bands of the last decade concede the point. When the best you can do is Velvet Revolver, you're firing blanks. I think Dave realized that trying to get more intensity out of an electric guitar had become a cliché. But what if you went back to acoustics with an appreciation for those who pushed the electric to its limits? I don't know if Dave stashes Metallica's Master of Puppets at home, but I know he is aware of thrash metal pioneers like Dave Mustaine of Megadeth.

Of course, the thrash metal guys weren't the first to push those particular boundaries. You can look to the Velvet Undergound for a late sixties example of a band that used electric guitars to really work a groove over, using their rhythmic power to achieve a heightened level of intensity. Many of Fancy Trash's best songs have that kind of thrashy, jamming potential, which can be exploited in a live setting. Generally speaking, I am not a fan of noodly jam bands like the Dead and Phish, but that's not the effect of a Fancy Trash jam session. Fancy Trash uses the repetition of chords and rhythms to push the emotional core of its music further than it could otherwise go.

I think of some Fancy Trash songs as "mini-thrash" - these songs are teasers that get the band warmed up and give them something to dig into. "Hello," "Weighted," and "Three Cheers for the Cheated," all slated for possible inclusion on the second CD, fit this description. There's room in each song for the band to go a little nuts. Then you have full-on acoustic thrash numbers like "Windows" and "Half of Nothing." These songs start out innocently enough, but if the band is feeling it, look out. "Half of Nothing" might wind up on the second CD, and "Windows" is actually on the first, but it's a short version, and you don't get a sense of the massive things the band can do with the song live.

The king of the "acoustic thrash" numbers is "A Fish Called Hope." The band used to close every show with this one, now you have to be a bit luckier. The song starts out spare and ominous. You're conscious of a tribal beat coming from the drums, with Dave singing near a cappella. The exact words don't matter, what you pick up on is the urgency underneath, with Dave channeling the burn of a world off its hinges. The phrase "desperate decade" always hits hard. When Dave sings it, you somehow feel just what he means, and when the band leans into the thrash, it's a blistering purge of existential frustration, escorted by the kind of hope you can only feel when you're playing your heart out. When you're finished, maybe you'll see things differently. And more often than not, when they wrap this song up, you are in a different place, and you have the sweat to prove it.

Of course, you'd have to be dancing to acquire that sweat, which raises a classic "bone of contention" about Fancy Trash: that you can't dance to them. Having danced my ass off at plenty of Fancy Trash shows, I can categorically say that's not true. To appreciate the dilemma posed by "the danceability factor," you have to understand the nature of being an up-and-coming band. If you're "danceable," more clubs will book you, and you'll draw bigger crowds.

I recently talked to the singer of another local band who doesn't think Fancy Trash can make it with their current sound because they don't have enough crowd-pleasing grooves. I happen to think Fancy Trash is going much further than this guy's band, precisely because the Trash aren't your typical dance band. The problem with the dance band niche is that you're ultimately limited by the same generic appeal that gets you off the ground. In our town, the arc of a dance band's career peaks with a headline spot at the Taste of Northampton. Nice gig - have some blackened scallops.

The "can't dance to Fancy Trash" beef is muddle-headed. Don't take my word for it, just look at the case of Joe Pernice and the Pernice Brothers, one of the most famous bands to come out the valley in the last ten years. Joe P used to play in a great local band called the Scuds, but it was only after he took down his amps and became the Scud Mountain Boys that he developed a national following. Scud Mountain Boys shows were total no-dance zones, crowded with candles and mellow ambiance. With all the fawning I heard over that band, nobody ever complained they weren't danceable. I personally thought they were pretty fucking pretentious, but I never denied their talent, and Joe's continued success proves they knew exactly what they were doing. I actually liked them better as the Scuds, but there are a million other Scuds out there, tough rock units you can approximate this weekend in any town with a decent music scene. But the Scud Mountain Boys were different.

The same goes for Fancy Trash. Will they have a harder time given their uncompromising sound and supposed "dance handicap?" Perhaps. In the short term, they may lose out on some gigs because they don't have a reggae beat. But over time, I think the clarity of their identity will drive them towards an audience. The crossroads Fancy Trash now faces is whether to pursue a familiar Americana sound (a sound which has an established record-buying demographic and tour circuit), or to continue to write urgent, boundary-pushing music. This dilemma can be illustrated by a little back-and-forth I had with the band about a blurb on their web site. Their original band description read:

"The sound is rootsy and dynamic. Country-tinged punk meets spazzy folk rock. Fancy Trash is working the long-standing tradition of the three piece - acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums. And some harmonica, too."

That is accurate enough, and yet it misses something critical. I reworked the description like this:

"The sound is edgy and hypnotic - a swaying, country-tinged punk cranked up with end-times exuberance. Fancy Trash steals the long-standing tradition of the three piece - acoustic guitar, upright bass, and drums - and uses it for more subversive purposes. Each show is a howl against what is and a dance-worthy search for what could be."

They didn't end up using my writeup, God bless those stubborn motherfuckers. But I got what I wanted most, because with each gig, Fancy Trash is starting to resemble the essence of my description. Dave said as much in an interview with performermag.com: "The first album was Americana, but this next one isn't Americana at all. Well, maybe a sliver of it. Ben brought out my alternative rock side."

As happy as I am that the band is bringing out the "Trash" in the Fancy Trash, they do not have to choose one direction to be successful. On the contrary: it's their respect for "roots rock," clashed up against an affinity for the Nirvana-type bands who tried to destroy such traditions, that sets up the creative tension inside of Fancy Trash. You don't ever want that tension to slack.

After one gig where I bitched about a few slower numbers in a row, Dave told me that "we can't go full-tilt every song," and he was right. Americana is a valuable genre for Fancy Trash to draw on, as long as they do not accept it as a defining label. Perhaps no band can move from folksy contentment to edgy discord as deftly as Fancy Trash, but it's all part of the whole, and the more the band defines itself in terms of genre-busting, the better they will become. As for me, I don't care what type of music they play, as long as they play it with wild hearts.

Case in point: Fancy Trash does have some great "Americana" tunes I hope they never drop. One shining example is "For Worse," a beautiful tune that would fit right in on folk radio. "For Worse" captures Dave at his lyrical best: world-weary from love gone bad, yet still holding out. Brightened by harmonica bits, "For Worse" glides along Dave's emotional fault lines, and it's a treasure - though I much prefer the live versions to the version on the first CD. (A fan named Ed used to tape some of their live shows on his laptop - Ed, we miss those live CDs, man!).

Along with "acoustic thrash" and dabbles in Americana, Fancy Trash has a growing batch of inspired songs that don't really fit either description. Prominent examples include "Compromise," "Tulips," "Deeply Concerned," and a new song without an official name they've taken to calling "Super Rock" (the first line in the song is "It's a long way," so when you hear it, you’ll know "Super Rock" is coming). If they keep cranking out songs as good as these, the next CD is going to be a doozy. "Compromise" is the most straight-up rockin' of the four. The other three are more sophisticated, but still riveting. All four are currently in demo consideration for the next CD. "Compromise" has a back story involving me and the band and a good-natured tussle about its live merits, but I'll get to that in a bit.

For now, "Deeply Concerned" deserves special mention, simply because it is one of the greatest folk-rock songs ever written. "Deeply Concerned" is one of those songs a musician hesitates to take full credit for. It must be an amazing feeling when you sit down to play, just like any other day, and a song jumps out whole. Once or twice in a lifetime, if you're lucky, you get one straight from the Gods. "Deeply Concerned" is that kind of song. Of course, you have to practice your whole life to prepare for that moment; it rarely comes by accident.

From its first haunting chords, you can tell this one is special. Dave switches up his lyrics a lot, but on the live version I've got, he starts with: "It's a wish/that you blew out/but where does it go for now/and the weight of the world/makes it even worse." You follow Dave through a song that rises and falls, flowing from one section to the next, taking everything that is not right in this world and forging it into something else. About two-thirds of the way through, after the song's reached all the heights you think it can reach, Dave's voice trails off, and you're left with one simple, perfect chord progression. Then, like a storm that heads out to sea and finds its legs again, "Deeply Concerned" comes back one more time. How a three piece can generate this much mass without an electric guitar a little boggling to me. "Deeply Concerned" is one of Dave's finest songwriting moments, evoking personal angst in a reeling world without a trace of dogma. Though the band hasn't figured out how to end the song (a song this huge should end on a dime, rather than meander off), it is nonetheless a masterpiece.

Speaking of Dave's lyrics, he really does downplay them, so you're not likely to find lyrics on the web site or anywhere else; but Dave underrates himself. Dave paints broad strokes with his lyrics, giving an impressionistic feel for his emotions and the state of the world without tossing in distracting details that would concern only him. I sometimes describe Dave the lyricist as a more emotionally-direct Michael Stipe (REM). You get the same easy flow from line to line, but with a bit more autobiography and a little less "what the hell did he mean by that?" Dave's memorable lines include the beginning to "Something Special," where he sings "Is there something special to you/and if there is, can you show me now/all these thoughts bewildered and blue subdued/things you can't even copy/even now."

go to part two of "Fancy Trash"