Month: June 2009

In Charlottesville, reggae music typically seems like more of a passing fancy than a fundamental part of local music—an indicator of an uptick in Bob Marley blunt posters in UVA dorm rooms, perhaps, or a double-dub dare for some adventurous booking agent. Heck, it was a phase for local Lem Oppenheimer, a co-founder of the Easy Star record label and manager of the Easy Star All-Stars. Oppenheimer simply found a way to make the phase last.

After he graduated from Oberlin College, Oppenheimer and a few New York friends pooled the bulk of their savings—roughly $5,000 per person—and started Easy Star in the mid-’90s. In 1997, Oppenheimer and his future wife moved to Charlottesville and saw just what a “phase” reggae could be.

“We did Reggae Mondays at the Blue Moon Diner from 1999 to 2001 or 2002,” said Oppenheimer in a recent interview. “I would go DJ, and we had Jamaican specials. It was a great scene, but it wasn’t particularly like there was a live music element, because there wasn’t anyone to play here.” Acts like The Greg Ward Project and Stable Roots reliably visited from Harrisonburg, and DJ Scotty B threw a few great reggae dance parties, but the idea of anyone making a living from dub or dancehall music seemed about as likely as a reggae band recording a new Dark Side of the Moon.

For those of you familiar with the Easy Star All-Stars, however, you know that this is precisely what the band managed on Dub Side of the Moon—a song-by-song remake of the classic Pink Floyd album. (Yes, it syncs up with The Wizard of Oz.) “Dub Side of the Moon sells enough consistently, and gave us a real base of income coming in, that we could count on,” explained Oppenheimer. “Then Radiodread”—the All-Stars’ take on Radiohead’s OK Computer—“added into that. It doesn’t sell as well as Dub Side but, combined, we [can] expect 300 records sold a week in the U.S.”

And each new effort from Easy Star All-Stars means another peak in Charlottesville’s reggae phase. The group’s latest tour, in support of the Billboard Chart-cracking Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band (guess who, Billy Shears?), brings the group back to town for a gig at Is on June 5 ($15, 9pm). It’s a spot the group knows well: Easy Star All-Stars played its first gig in the same space when it was the Starr Hill Music Hall in 2003.

“As someone who’s been to a lot of shows there, I know I have a personal bias,” laughed Oppenheimer. “But that [show] was just one of those spine-tingling ones. They would go into a Pink Floyd song, and all of a sudden they’d stop singing and the whole audience would be singing. It was a good one.” You can expect a good deal of tracks from the Lonely Hearts Dub album, like the entrancing “Within You, Without You,” as well as some Dub Side tracks and the obligatory “Karma Police” cover from Radiodread.

On a separate track, props to Is booking agent Jeyon Falsini for once more giving a room to a sound we don’t hear too often in town. Falsini’s efforts at Is make the venue a spot to check out in the next month, when he brings back Brooklyn art-cowpoke Andy Friedman on June 12, lends a stage to Scottsville’s The Honey Dewdrops on June 18 for the release of the group’s first record, If the Sun Will Shine, and outdoes himself with sets by Sarah White, The Invisible Hand and The Extraordinaires on June 20. Seems like a good phase for Falsini and Is.

Moving day

One of the more ridiculous projects we’ve ever done at our house: moving an old wooden shed to a new spot, 30 feet or so uphill. Why? you ask. Well, we were supposed to tear it down altogether for insurance reasons—its stone foundation was beyond precarious—but we liked the building, knew we’d make use of it, and convinced the powers that be to let us rebuild instead of demolishing. While we were at it, we figured we’d move the shed to the edge of the yard to make our outdoor space more open.

First step: Remove rotting floorboards and shore up the bottom of the walls with a band of wide planks and diagonal braces in the corners. Next: Attach a heavy chain and comealong to the frame of the shed and, at the other end, a large tree. We then used hydraulic and floor jacks to lift the shed off its foundation and insert a system of rollers (really just lengths of iron pipe, with planks to roll on).

There then ensued many, many hours of winching the shed a few inches at a time and making endless adjustments to compensate for the slope of the yard and the general crookedness of the structure—both of which meant the shed kept falling off its rollers. In truth, this was less a D.I.Y. project than a H.Y.D.D.I. (Help Your Dad Do It) project, and we’re glad no one lost a finger. Now, where the shed used to be, we’re growing tomatoes.—Spackled Egg

Lots of people look for a big kitchen when they’re house-shopping—sometimes more because of looks than function. Not so with Anita Gupta. The enormous granite-topped island in her kitchen is an essential feature, because she runs a business making custom cakes for weddings and birthdays. “This was the thing I needed the most,” she explains: “the island to roll out huge fondant sheets for 20-inch cakes.”

She got what she needed a year and a half ago, when she, her husband and their young kids (two at the time; now three) moved into this brand-new house off Cherry Avenue. They’d been living in a “little tiny condo,” she says, where she’d started Maliha Creations and learned the ropes of maintaining a state-inspected kitchen at home. Here, the spaciousness was a relief. She has a separate fridge for the cakes, a double oven, and “a huge stash of pans in the basement.”

One might think that keeping the kitchen up to health-department standards would be tough with a young family, but Gupta says that’s not so. “It’s actually easier because we live here, so we’re obviously going to keep it clean. I want my family to be healthy; I would do this anyway.”

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“I do everything at night when [the kids] are in bed. They’re curious, and my oldest is really into it. She wants to open a bakery when she grows up. She’s almost 6.

“I won’t take more than three [orders in a week]. With wedding cakes, for a Saturday wedding, I start on a Wednesday night when I bake the cakes. On Thursday I frost and fill. They sit overnight in the fridge and get nice and hard. Then Friday I decorate. Saturday I do delivery. My husband is a humongous help. We tag team on the deliveries.

“I use that little tiny mixer—surprise, surprise! I do batches. Once they’re baked and cooled, I put the whole thing in the fridge and the whole space has to be cleaned. I go through a lot of cleaning stuff.

“[Thursday] I bring the cakes inside and start with a huge ball of fondant. This half of the island will be covered with cornstarch so it doesn’t stick. I just use a regular rolling pin. I lift that huge sheet of fondant onto the cake; I have my tools out and ready. These are the smoothers. This [pizza cutter] cuts off the excess. These dowels go in every tier for support. The biggest challenge is to make sure they’re structurally sound. And there’s quite a bit of math. I have recipes scaled for certain size cake pans—when I have to go up or down, or feed a certain number of guests, there’s a lot of math.

“After it’s all put together, I start the decorating. Some are airbrushed. My husband built a hood for me outside. The first time I airbrushed a cake here, it was outside without a hood and the door was cracked. The next morning, we noticed our socks were pink. The counters were pink. I had to get the carpets cleaned. The whole downstairs was pink.

“If it’s a really difficult design, knowing it gets delivered Saturday morning, sometimes Friday night can be stressful. But that’s also the part I enjoy the most. Now that I’ve done it so many times, I can say ‘This is what I need to do.’ The first time I did a Rotunda cake it was hard, but I just did another one last week and it was much easier.

“[To transport cakes] you just crank up the A/C and drive really slow. That’s always the most stressful—if a dowel shifts on the bottom, that could be the end. It hasn’t happened yet [knocks on wood]. It’s going to happen. It’s happened to every cake person I know; once it happens it’s almost a relief.

“This is my one-woman factory. Since I do everything after [the kids are] in bed, dinner is done. It does take some planning. It’s almost two separate kitchens. I do tell people if they want to have children around keep [the cake] away, because they can’t help themselves [from touching the cake]. Adults too—‘Is it real?’”