E-Mail This Article to a Friend Rocking, stopping, and bopping Apple Betty, the Stairs, and the Pixies BY MATT ASHARE
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Apple Betty have never recorded in a professional studio. The raucous, homonymous, seven-song demo they sell at shows is just that: a seven-song demo they recorded on a portable four-track in a rehearsal studio the size of a modest walk-in closet. And with the exception of bassist Jessica Rodden, who spent a year or two in the local indie band the In-Out a decade ago, the members had never set foot on stage in front of a paying audience until a little over a month ago at the Kirkland, when the punk-blooze duo Mr. Airplane Man invited the trio to play an opening set. The following night was show #2: opening for the Coffin Lids in front of a packed house at the Abbey. Gig #3 completed a hat trick of coveted slots, this time joining the Chris Brokaw Rock Band at the behest of Brokaw (Come, Consonant, the New Year, etc. . . ) himself as he debuted his latest incarnation. It’s been a quick start for a trio of rock grrrls who all seem to have been waiting patiently for the right opportunity.

"Jessica’s the professional in the band," offers singer/guitarist Kerri-Ann Richard, as she, drummer Caroline Toth, and Rodden meet me at the B-Side Lounge in Cambridge to discuss the seemingly sudden appearance of Apple Betty on the local scene. "Caroline and I had never been in a real band before. We were pretty green."

Toth had taken a few drum lessons from Brokaw, who though better known for his guitar playing in Come and in Mission of Burma bassist Clint Conley’s other band, Consonant, also played drums in slo-core band Codeine and continues to do so whenever the New Year convene. And Richard started playing guitar and writing songs when she was in college. But all three members of Apple Betty were busy building careers outside music until fate intervened just over a year ago — Toth as a documentary filmmaker, Richard in the field of environmental engineering ("We clean up a lot of hazardous waste sites," she deadpans), and Rodden as a social worker.

"Jessica and I have known each other for 10 years," Richard explains. "We went to school at UMass-Lowell and worked at WJUL radio station up there. We’ve always had a musical connection. As soon as I met her, I said, ‘Oh, you’re going to be the bass player in my band some day.’ It was musical love at first sight. We used to play all kinds of music on the radio, like bluegrass and stuff. I’d bring my acoustic guitar down to the radio show and we’d pick out a couple of songs. It was pretty informal. But she’s known all of my original material as soon as I write it — she knows songs from 10 years ago that I’ve completely forgotten. So, I’m 30 now, she’s getting married, and it was like, ‘Are we going to have this goddamn band now or what?’ You know, our lives are moving on and it’s no longer when we have a band. It just so happened that as soon as we started taking it seriously, a mutual friend introduced me to Caroline. The first time the two of us got together, I bared my soul and played her all my songs."

"I remember I was told that Kerri was looking for people to play music with," Toth says. "I met her at a party, and then I saw her at the grocery store, and I was just like, ‘Let’s play.’ "

"That was in May of 2004,"Richard continues. "It’s kind of corny to say, but it just clicked immediately."

"I think it was important that we had a practice space we could just go to and plug in and play," Toth recalls.

"Yeah, it was easy, we were eager, and it just fit," Richard says, finishing off Toth’s thought.

Richard is a natural frontperson — she beams with confidence, speaks her mind, and is never at a loss for words. And Toth and Rodden keep the trio grounded in their own ways. They may not be eager teens anymore, but they’ve got the infectious enthusiasm of a young garage band discovering the joys of rock and roll. It’s that same intangible quality Red Sox fans refer to when they say Kevin Millar’s a "good clubhouse guy." Apple Betty are the kind of band who can stick a "sex and drugs and rock and roll" refrain in a song and get people to sing along. The cover of the Beatles "Norwegian Wood" that closes out the Apple Betty CD strips the familiar original down to basics — pounding drums, a driving bass line, and fast-strummed Ramonesy barre chords. At the same time, Richard’s fandom runs deep: among her favorites are the dark and stormy Wipers, an obscure Seattle band led by Greg Sage whose "Tragedy" Apple Betty also cover.

"At shows, I’m always the girl who people are almost mad at because I’m up in front dancing and bumping into people," Richard admits."

"Yeah," Toth laughs, "Kerri is uncharacteristically New England at shows: she likes to dance and sing along, and I think bands really appreciate that."

"Entertaining people is pretty cool," Richard reflects. "That’s always been part of my personality anyway. But now that I’m doing it in a band . . . the spotlight is so great. It’s funny because I know people from bands who will say jaded things, and I just think that we’ll never get jaded."

Nobody in the Stairs seems to be the least bit jaded. Yet as we grab seats around a table at the Kells in Allston, the band — at least the five members who have come along to talk — are preparing to play a farewell show. Earlier this year, the Stairs released their second proper full-length, On Sleep Lab, a challenging yet tuneful lo-fi tour de force that might as well be the next great Elephant 6 discovery. Except that hardly anyone had heard of the band before it came out — singer/guitarist Ryan Walsh says he still has about 300 of the 1000 copies of their 2003 debut, Miraculous Happens, in his mom’s basement in Dedham. And he hasn’t sold out of On Sleep Lab just yet either. Both are on the band’s own Access to Vision label, as is the eight-song 2004 EP Chime Away. The Access to Vision catalogue also includes Hierarchy of Hoaxes, the only album by a Stairs side project known as the Motel Candlewasters, and The Unnatural Bridge, which is actually a song-for-song cover of the Silver Jews’ album The Natural Bridge that the Stairs recorded in one day. But that’s a whole other story. Right now, I’m still trying to figure out how a band as good as the Stairs — Boston’s answer to Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel — have managed to toil in obscurity for a little over two years.

"We played the circuit," Walsh says. "And there was no intentional attempt to stay below the radar. At the same time, none of us are very good obnoxious salesmen."

Evan Sicuranza, who splits the songwriting with Walsh, plays guitar and various keyboards, and is leaving this fall to get a creative writing masters degree at St. Mary’s College in California, agrees: "I don’t think any of us were really driven to do this in order to become, like, famous or anything."

"Yeah," says Rob Johanson, "there was no attempt to stay above the radar either." He used to be the band’s full-time keyboardist. That was before he moved to New York and Sean Spada joined the Stairs. But since Spada’s in the band playing the opening set tonight at O’Brien’s, Johanson, who’s returned to rejoin the band for the final show, has come along to help the others separate fact from fiction as we unravel the Stairs’ tangled history.

"We were just kind of like, ‘We’re going to put this out and see where it lands,’ " says Sicuranza. "And I think we’ve been really happy with the results."

"It’s nice to be underground," says drummer Eric Meyer, who also resides in Dedham, where he teaches high-school marching band. He can read and write music, something that came in handy when after receiving an arts grant from the city of Dedham the Stairs decided to include a gospel choir and a marching band on Miraculous Happens. "Evan just sang me the line and I wrote it out," he recalls. It appears that wasn’t nearly as difficult as recording the drums for that album. "Ryan came over to my basement, demanded I set up my drum set, and then told me to play drum tracks to songs I’d never heard."

"Yeah, he had to guess about the dynamic of the song," Sicuranza laughs.

On Sleep Lab doesn’t have a choir or a marching band. And Meyer and bassist Leeore Schnairsohn, who’s leaving this fall to get a graduate degree in comparative literature from Princeton, had the luxury of recording their basic tracks at a professional studio. But the album’s no less adventurous than Miraculous Happens — flute, cello, melodica, and banjo are some of the additional instruments that show up. And despite the complexity of many of the arrangements, it’s still largely self-recorded. "It’s the first time we ever went into a studio," Walsh says. "We were there for one day, and then we took it home and did the rest on our Boss 64 digital track that records on zip discs. It’s simple enough for anyone to figure it out, but it’s somewhat sophisticated. I think spirit and necessity beat out big budgets nearly 100 percent of the time."

"I think we’re all huge fans of those types of bands," says Sicuranza, "even the ones that go way back like the Velvet Underground, who I always consider to be one of the first lo-fi bands. Just the idea of putting a bunch of crazy people in the studio, turning the tape on, and that’s it."

On Sleep Lab appears to be full of references to the Stairs’ imminent demise — "Don’t Abandon Your Band" is the first track; "We’re So Underground We’re Practically in Japan" is the second to last. But Walsh, for one, is determined to solider on. "After tonight, Eric and I are starting a band called Hallelujah the Hills," he confirms. And even the grad-school-bound Schnairsohn admits, "I can’t imagine ever being done with playing . . . "

"There are bound to be many side projects," Johanson interjects. "And the amount of music we’ve recorded together already . . . We were talking today, there are how many songs?

"We couldn’t figure songs," Walsh explains, "but we figured in terms of hours, released plus unreleased is somewhere between 11 and 12 hours."

"We can be the Charles Bukowski of rock and roll," Sicuranza concludes. "We’ll still be putting out new albums for years after we’re gone."

The Stairs may want to take notes on the Pixies, a Boston band who said goodbye years ago only to return in 2004 for what’s turned into a triumphant and seemingly endless reunion. At this point, the Pixies may even be the biggest unsigned band in the world. And that’s freed them to make a little money by playing to sellout crowds around the world, doing big festival gigs (like their "acoustic" set at the recent Newport Folk Festival), and selling many of those live performances as downloads. The first new product from the re-formed Pixies is due October 4, the DVD Pixies Sell Out (Rhino), with a 28-song set shot in France in 2004 and plenty of bonus material, including four songs from their Coachella festival gig in May 2004.

A week ago Monday, they were at the Paradise to shoot yet another DVD for Club Date, an Eagle Vision imprint specializing in live concert DVDs. (The first Club Date disc, Elvis Costello and the Imposters with Emmylou Harris, has just been released.) The DVD isn’t slated for release until September 2006. But to judge by the upbeat mood at the Paradise, there’s a good chance the Pixies will still be a going concern then. It did take them a while to warm up to the flock of cameras that surrounded them, so they took it slow, playfully banging out throwaways like "La La Love You" and an old folk cover they’d learned for Newport, before Black Francis traded his acoustic for a Telecaster, Kim Deal lit one of her trademark smokes, and the sweat started flowing as they bit down hard into classics like "Where Is My Mind?"

Back in the huge, air-conditioned video truck parked out front, a whole other show was in progress. "Give me a close-up of that, Brian," director Mike Borofsky commanded through a headset as he sat before a wall of dozens of screens. "You read my mind, Mike . . . Watch your focus, Brian . . . Good, now look at those crazy heads bopping . . . Let’s get more of them, Danny . . . Good, good . . . Now let’s sweep in for a close up on Kim . . . Pull back, Brian, so we can see the drums . . . How come Kim gets to smoke and I don’t? . . . "

Back inside, the young heads were indeed bopping as the band tore through another nugget, "Debaser." And Deal was still smoking.