Research by J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a Randolph College professor and beer historian, inspired a new brew based on one made more than 200 years ago. Photo: Good Beer Hunting
Thomas Jefferson was not an IPA guy.
We know this thanks to the scholarly efforts of J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a Randolph College professor, whose research provides a fascinating account of the work of Jefferson’s enslaved brewer, Peter Hemings, a son of Elizabeth Hemings. Jackson-Beckham’s recently published article, “Missing Ingredients—The (Incomplete) Story of Thomas Jefferson’s Unsung Brewer,” inspired a new offering from Champion Brewing Company, created in collaboration with the professor and media company Good Beer Hunting. Called Intelligence and Diligence—qualities that Jefferson himself attributed to Hemings—the beer will be on tap at an upcoming event at Champion.
Jackson-Beckham’s article evolved from a tale she had often heard repeated during her decade studying the beer industry: America’s founding fathers all brewed their own beer. Given the hard labor of brewing—especially in the colonial era—Jackson-Beckham was skeptical. “The narrative always struck me as implausible,” she says.
In search of the truth, the Lynchburg resident started at Monticello, where, she learned, much of the beer was made by Peter Hemings, whose mother was a sister of Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemings. As Jackson-Beckham’s article recounts, Hemings learned to brew while he was the principal cook at Jefferson’s estate. In 1821, Governor James Barbour—the namesake of Barboursville—enjoyed the beer so much during a stay at Monticello that he later wrote to Jefferson, asking for the recipe. Jefferson replied that he doubted someone could replicate Hemings’ magic from a recipe alone. The president credited the beer’s quality, in part, to his “servant of great intelligence and diligence, both of which are necessary.”
While Jackson-Beckham failed to discover an actual recipe, her findings were sufficient to create one closely approximating Hemings’ formula—with a modern twist. Jefferson wrote glowingly of Hemings’ brew, except once, when he noted that it had been “spoiled” by “over-hopping.” Given today’s popularity of aggressively hopped beers, Jackson-Beckham wonders whether Hemings may have been 200 years ahead of his time.
And so, Intelligence and Diligence is an homage to the Hemings beer Jefferson said was spoiled. As Hemings likely would have done, Champion and its brewing collaborators started with wheat and corn (along with a little barley for contemporary tastes). To that, they added a healthy dose of Magnum hops. The result is a hoppy wheat ale, 5.6 percent ABV and 56 IBU. Champion’s lead brewer Josh Skinner describes it as clean, bitter, and effervescent with dominant wheat flavors and subtle corn sweetness.
Champion founder Hunter Smith says he’s honored to be part of a project that celebrates the legacy of one of our area’s earliest brewers. The beer, Smith says, “represents another way Monticello and Charlottesville are making efforts to better understand the past and reconcile that with present realities.”
Want a taste?
The Intelligence and Diligence release party takes place at 5pm, February 22, at Champion, 324 Sixth St. SE. The first 50 guests will receive a commemorative glass; copies of Jackson-Beckham’s article, and the author herself will be on hand.
Correction February 14: The original version misidentified Jackson-Beckham as a Randolph-Macon professor instead of Randolph College in Lynchburg where she’s on the faculty.
Petite MarieBette debuts downtown with a new co-owner, Will Darsie, and lovely baked goods.
Photo: Corbett Smithson
MarieBette Café & Bakery spin-off Petite MarieBette is now open at 105 E. Water St., offering coffee and baked goods (of course!), as well as breakfast sandwiches and grab-and-go lunch. Longtime MarieBette employee Will Darsie co-owns the new spot, and will manage it. The son of a chef (mom) and a farmer (dad), Darsie moved from his native California to Charlottesville in 2015. He found work at MarieBette, starting as a busboy and rising to general manager. “I never had any intention of working in this industry, but now I can’t see myself doing anything else,” Darsie says.
Music to your mouth
Prime 109 has a new menu available Wednesday nights to accompany weekly live jazz. Guests can enjoy a more casual midweek bite, while the cooks get to create “experimental dishes that don’t necessarily fit the structure of the dining room,” Executive Chef Ian Redshaw says. In keeping with the improvisational theme, the menu changes weekly. Past offerings have included housemade pastrami banh mi and an “octo dog”—octopus poached in olive oil and served on a Parker House-style hot dog bun with shishito peppers, shallots, harissa, and cilantro. Music, from 6-9pm, is courtesy of jazz trio Adam Larrabee, Brian Caputo, and Randall Pharr.
Winning spirit
For the third year in a row, Lovingston’s Virginia Distillery Co. has taken home a top prize at the U.K.-based World Whiskies Awards. The distillery’s Port Cask Finished Virginia-Highland Whisky earned a medal for Best American Blended Malt, the same award it won in 2018. Aged in Virginia port-style wine barrels, the spirit blends American single-malt whiskey distilled on-site with single-malt whiskey from Scotland. In 2017, the distillery’s flagship Virginia-Highland Malt won Best American Single Malt.
In early January, Magnolia House hosted a five-band hardcore show featuring Lipid (pictured), Future Terror, Asesinato, Rashomon, and Fried Egg. Photo by Tristan Williams
Before Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk band played Charlottesville’s first hardcore punk show, Lackey Die bass player Danny Collins had a prediction.
“I think we’re gonna be the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” Collins said to one of his bandmates. It was 1983, and the band was about to take the stage in the basement of Muldowney’s Pub for “Slam or Scram,” a free show they had advertised on hand-drawn fliers.
“And I also think I don’t give a shit what anyone in Charlottesville thinks about it,” he added.
Whether or not Collins was serious about Lackey Die’s future as “the hottest thing that ever came out of this stinkin’ little town,” more than 35 years after the fact, it turns out there’s some truth to what he said.
Though Lackey Die was short-lived, formed in 1982 and split in 1985, its influence on Charlottesville’s punk and hardcore scene—and the various alternative and underground music scenes that sprouted from it—has been lasting. It’s an underground tide that’s ebbed and flowed, often sustained by just a few people at a time, in a city that’s hung its reputation as a “music town” on some pretty mainstream stuff.
“We were raw. We created from the heart…and it just happened to come out punk rock,” says Larry Houchens (left), drummer of Lackey Die. Here, the band plays a set at Muldowney’s Pub, the only official venue for hardcore in Charlottesville in the early- and mid-1980s.
In the mid-1970s, Lackey Die’s future drummer Larry Houchens was a teenager and into Kiss’ album Alive!. He played trombone in school, but what he really wanted was to play the drums, so he set up a bunch of poles, each with a different tone, and knocked out Peter Criss’ drum solos. A few years later, he saw the Sex Pistols on TV. “Whoa, what is this?” Houchens remembers thinking. “There was something going on there.”
And when a friend played him Dead Boys’ Young Loud and Snotty, that was it. “That music was in my soul,” he says.
At the time, there weren’t a lot of punk records out, nor were there many places to buy them. But once his grandparents bought him a three-piece drum kit, he and his friends, who had guitars and microphones, started hanging out in Houchens’ grandparents’ basement to make their own music.
“I think it was more us creating things together, learning how to play together,” says Houchens. And what came out—short, fast, loud, aggressive songs—“just happened to come out being punk rock.”
Sometimes, Houchens made entire songs on his own, in a project he called Latter Day Saints. He’d decide on a song length—say, two minutes—and drum for two minutes to a four-track cassette recorder. Then he’d blast that first tape out of a stereo while playing a bass part to it—thereby recording both to a second tape he’d popped into the recorder. He’d do it again, for a guitar part, and finally layer vocals, which he’d shout, at the top of his lungs, into a cheap microphone.
He’d get totally lost in the moment, and once, he’d been screaming “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!,” when he looked over and saw his grandfather and two of his grandfather’s friends just staring at him through the basement window. “I was no conditioned singer then,” says Houchens, laughing. “No kind of tone…to me, that was total punk.”
This must have been 1980, maybe 1981, and it’s very possible that those tapes, which Houchens recycled constantly, held the first-ever punk rock music recorded in Charlottesville.
From there, Houchens and his friends formed a few other punk bands (The Complaint Department, and later, Social Banned), mostly working on song structure, “figuring out what punk should sound like.” Then, in 1982, Houchens and three of his longtime friends—Collins, Mark Bailey, Dave “Hollis Fitch” Hollis—formed Lackey Die, named for a teacher at Albemarle High School.
“We were raw. We created from the heart,” says Houchens. Lackey Die songs, most of them barely over a minute long, commented on (and often critiqued) things like Charlottesville receiving the All-American City Award from the National Civic League, and impending nuclear holocaust (the “worthless war of idiots, just don’t know when to quit”).
It wasn’t exactly the type of music that Charlottesville music venues hosted back then, says Houchens. “Clubs wanted to make sure people were going to be drinking, so you really had to play cover songs,” he says, like Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” or a winding Allman Brothers jam. Occasionally, Bruce Olsen and The Offenders, a band that Houchens says had a “kind of punk rock thing” going, would come through town. But that was about it.
The longer Lackey Die practiced, the more the guys started thinking that they could play out, get their own scene going. So, they did.
One of the band members asked the owner of Muldowney’s Pub, a gay bar, if she’d be interested in hosting a hardcore punk show in the pub’s narrow basement on Water Street in downtown Charlottesville. She agreed, and on October 27, 1983, Lackey Die played its first show.
Just a few weeks later, on November 15, 1983, another hardcore band, The Landlords, made its debut at a battle of the bands at Plum’s Lounge, at the Holiday Inn on Route 29.
Formed in the fall of 1983 after a fortuitous meeting at WTJU, the four members of The Landlords—vocalist John Beers, guitarist Charlie Kramer, bassist Colum Leckey, and drummer Tristan Puckett—were UVA students who were drawn to punk, especially hardcore, for its intensity, its energy, how it didn’t sound like any other music that was being made. “It was fast and it was loud and it was aggressive,” says Beers.
Heavy rotation: WTJU’s place in hardcore history
While the Charlottesville scene has its own lore, the city also occupies an important point on global hardcore punk timeline: Back in 1980, WTJU DJ Aaron Margosis was the first person ever to play releases by seminal hardcore punk label Dischord Records over the air.
In 1980, Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson founded Dischord Records to release Minor Disturbance, an EP by their band The Teen Idles. The pair was inspired to start their own band, The Slinkees, which later became The Teen Idles, which eventually morphed into Minor Threat (maybe you’ve heard of them).
Margosis, himself a fan of punk and new wave music, continued following the evolution of the D.C. punk and hardcore scene after starting at UVA—and at WTJU—in fall 1979. On his show, Margosis played demo tapes by bands like The Untouchables, and at some point, he and MacKaye started exchanging letters. As soon as he got that Teen Idles record released in December 1980, “I was playing it to death on the radio,” he says, and wishing there was a hardcore scene in Charlottesville. Margosis had to wait a while, but he eventually got his wish.
Aaron Margosis, a friend of The Landlords who’d been playing hardcore punk on his WTJU show for a couple of years at this point, remembers the gig well. The Landlords signed up for this battle of the bands, knowing they’d shock their audience; “Plum’s Lounge was just not the place for this type of music,” says Margosis, who’d brought a tape recorder to capture the set for posterity. “They had the plug pulled on them before the second song even got going.”
So while Charlottesville’s first two hardcore punk bands formed independently of one another, they quickly started sharing bills at Muldowney’s, playing with other local punk bands like Beef People and Baby Opaque (who shared a house with The Landlords), and out-of-towners Death Piggy (which mutated into GWAR), Malefice, and Scream.
By 1984, hardcore punk was out of basement practice spaces and into venues and recording studios. Lackey Die visited Floodzone Studios in Richmond to lay down a demo in February 1984, and did another at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studios in March 1985. The Landlords visited Inner Ear in 1984 to record Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party, released that same year on vocalist Beers’ own label, Catch Trout. It was the first recording of Charlottesville punk music pressed to vinyl.
There was a hardcore show at Muldowney’s about once a month, usually with The Landlords and/or Lackey Die on the bill, and that frequency gave people who went to the shows and felt compelled to start their own bands enough time to form, practice, and maybe get on the bills themselves. The crowds were never huge, says Houchens, but they were consistent and they were active, pogoing and slam-dancing (i.e., moshing) when the bands were on.
“More and more people got drawn into the scene as they realized you didn’t have to be the sort of traditional notion of a great musician to start a band and play in a band” and make good music that speaks to people, says Kramer. If he wanted to play his guitar with a corn cob instead of a pick, he could. For Kramer and so many others, punk rock, and hardcore punk in particular, expanded their notion of what music could be.
The Landlords (from left: Charlie Kramer, John Beers, Tristan Puckett, and Colum “Eddie Jetlag” Leckey) play a set at Muldowney’s Pub. Photo by Michael Buck
Plus, young people weren’t looking for polished music, says Houchens. “They wanted an aggressive sound that they could relate to, that anyone could do.” That was a fun thing about early punk, he says: The crowd was as important as the people playing music. “There wasn’t a band playing a scene; the scene was the scene, where you went to. That was a punk scene: everybody showing up.”
For the most part, the scene was Muldowney’s, where bands played in the narrow, unfinished basement, in front of an upside-down American flag. C&O gave hardcore punk a chance once, but when an audience member’s hand went through a plate-glass window, the management decided it was too violent, says Houchens.
But as hardcore grew in stature throughout the country, Trax, a high-capacity nightclub that opened in 1982, started booking nationally known punk bands like Butthole Surfers and Dead Kennedys (for whom The Landlords opened).
The night Lackey Die was set to open for The Circle Jerks at Trax, the band broke up. Collins thought they hadn’t been practicing enough, remembers Houchens, and rather than play the show unpracticed, he quit. So did Houchens, who didn’t want to play without a bass player. Houchens didn’t stop playing music (in fact, he collaborated with Collins on many other projects, and is still a fixture on the scene), but he says he’s come to regret his choice to quit Lackey Die.
Muldowney’s closed a short while after that, and The Landlords had trouble finding local gigs. Beers and Kramer’s improvisational-experimental rock side project, Happy Flowers, signed to Homestead Records, and in what was perhaps the final nail in The Landlords’ proverbial coffin, the band failed to find a distributor for its second album, Fitzgerald’s Paris. They called it quits in 1987.
Charlottesville’s first hardcore bands were over, and the scene stalled…but really, it had only just begun.
Around the time The Landlords broke up, Angelo DeFranzo and his group of friends at Charlottesville High School were heavy into punk rock and hardcore.
They wanted to go to punk shows, to experience in real life the music they spun on their turntables. But they weren’t old enough to get in to see a band like Black Flag play Trax, and there wasn’t much going on as far as local punk shows went.
Instead, DeFranzo and his buddies, with their Doc Martens and, in a couple cases, mohawks, went to the Corner every Friday afternoon. They browsed records and fanzines at Plan 9, snagged fliers for those Trax shows they couldn’t attend but which bore the names of some of their favorite bands, and hung around the Corner Parking Lot to hear Beers and Maynard Sipe, who’d played in new wave bands and wrote a local music fanzine, Live Squid, talk about the early punk and hardcore scene.
Their stories made DeFranzo and his friends want to play music of their own. They taught themselves to play instruments (DeFranzo learned bass by ear, listening to the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks), formed bands, and practiced mostly in their parents’ basements.
One local band they could go out to see was Hedonistic Cravings, which featured Lackey Die’s Collins and, for a short time, Houchens on drums. Hedonistic Cravings was a thrash metal crossover band with serious punk and hardcore roots. DeFranzo remembers the shows as being crazy in the best kind of way, ones where he and his friends could get a good circle mosh going. He also remembers that after Hedonistic Cravings played a few shows at a place called the Back Door Café, the venue made audience members sign waivers absolving the owner of responsibility for any injuries caused by slam-dancing.
“People of many subcultures gravitated toward Hedonistic Cravings,” says DeFranzo. And the group inspired a bunch of other bands, mostly metal and punk, that started playing house shows in the 1990s.
In 1993, DeFranzo co-founded a fanzine, Filler, to help highlight and support the local scene. The objective was, “first and foremost, to support the bands we had, to spread this music that we were quite familiar with, but that a lot of people might not be aware of,” says DeFranzo, who would eventually play in bands like The Halfways, Smashcasters, and currently, XSmashcasters. Someone could go into Plan 9, buy a copy of Filler for 50 cents, and see that there were people interested in this subculture, right here in town. It helped them find their people.
While stories and music and a few not-quite-punk bands sustained the scene, many musicians say that it was sushi restaurant Tokyo Rose that saved it (this time around).
It would be difficult to overstate what Tokyo Rose did for the broadening Charlottesville punk scene when it started hosting shows in the 1990s, say the people involved.
“There would not have been a punk scene if [owner Atsushi Miura] had not been so [tolerant] and given us a venue,” says Porter Bralley, who has played in such local punk and punk-adjacent bands as The Deadbeats, The Elderly (for which Houchens played drums), Hillbilly Werewolf, and currently, 40 Boys. Miura didn’t play punk rock, says Bralley, but he made a space for it—and many other genres of music, including the local underground goth and hip-hop scenes.
Plus, many of the band members—including Bralley and his 40 Boys bandmate Tony Lechmanski—became Miura’s employees.
“It was like two separate worlds, between upstairs and downstairs,” says Lechmanski, who booked a lot of shows at the Rose, and whose hardcore band Riot Act and metal/darkwave band Bella Morte played there countless times. Upstairs, nicely dressed older folks would be eating sushi, but downstairs, in a red-walled room with low ceilings, you might see Jeff Melkerson, who fronted local punk band The Counselors, rubbing butter all over his naked body.
“It was like our CBGB,” says Bralley, recalling the legendary New York City venue that fosteredthe punk and new wave scene in the late 1970s. At Tokyo Rose, people would show up early and hang out in the parking lot for hours before set time, as if they were tailgating for a football game, he recalls. During one show, that he’s pretty sure was at Tokyo Rose, the drummer of Pennsylvania band The Pits, who often set his cymbals on fire, set himself on fire, too, and members of the other bands hopped on stage to extinguish the flames with their beers.
For a few years, the local punk and hardcore scene—which incorporated closely related metal, garage, and rock ‘n’ roll bands—thrived. Bralley, Lechmanski, DeFranzo, and Houchens’ bands played there regularly, and often cross-pollinated, sharing bills and band members, starting side projects and other bands.
The shows were rowdy fun, but they were rarely out of control, says Lechmanski. Bands “cared about the place…that was our home. And you don’t shit where you eat,” he says. The idea was, “no one else is letting us have shows, so if you screw this up, then you’re going to be the one complaining about how there are no shows anymore.”
And the shows were about more than the music, says Lechmanski. Subcultures like punk “are important everywhere. There’s always going to be somebody who feels left out…I think it’s important that people feel like they fit in somewhere…that those people have somewhere to go.”
Tokyo Rose wasn’t the only place hosting punk at that point, but it was at the center of what became a rather robust scene. Jeyon Falsini booked some great garage and pop punk at Atomic Burrito (now Jack Brown’s), says Lechmanski. And The Pudhaus, a Belmont practice space in an industrial-zoned warehouse, was known for holding more experimental hardcore and art punk shows before the city shut it down in 2003. Satellite Ballroom had the occasional punk show, too.
Riot Act, a hardcore band with heavy metal (and a little bit of jazz) influence, plays a show at Tokyo Rose. The local band was a mainstay on the Tokyo Rose stage, with guitarist Tony Lechmanski booking many of the punk shows held at the venue that some consider the CBGB of Charlottesville.
In 2004, Miura sold Tokyo Rose. When the venue closed, the punk scene seemed to go with it.
The health of any music scene depends not just on the people playing it, but the people willing to make space for it, says Bralley.
“The bigger venues [wouldn’t] book you unless you were a dreamy singer-songwriter,” he says, and at the time, he wasn’t aware of anyone having house parties. “Those days were over, because Charlottesville grew up and got…a lot more gentrified, where you’d get the cops called on you in a heartbeat” for playing loud music, he says.
“There was a time where I didn’t know if I was going to see bands like that in Charlottesville anymore.”
But this is punk we’re talking about, and it was only a matter of time before a new generation of punk and hardcore fans started their own bands and sought spaces for shows.
Sam Richardson remembers his first punk show well: His mom drove him to Outback Lodge, in Preston Plaza, so that he could see street punks Dead End Kids and The Stabones. His mom sat in the back of the venue (and got hit on by a drunk bar patron) while Richardson watched the bands, and ended up meeting people who would later become his bandmates.
More than anything, he remembers how the show made him feel: electrified.
Richardson had been into punk for a while at that point, and through his job washing dishes at Continental Divide, he met people who’d been in the local scene for some time. Those guys introduced him not just to seminal punk bands like The Screamers, The Cramps, and Poison Idea, but to the music and lore of local acts. “It was total euphoria,” he says of this period in his life, of discovering this music that came from a deep culture. “I found my passion in life, realized that nothing would ever compare to how that makes me feel.”
Richardson admired how these people–particularly Houchens–had carved out and fought to maintain spaces for their music, their mode of self-expression. He got his younger brother, Jack, and a few of their friends together to play music in the basement and, with a nod to The Landlords’ 1984 debut record, and perhaps the fact that all but one of the band members were still in high school, named themselves Teenage House Party.
And when the band played a gig of what Richardson now describes as “super sloppy, stupid, hardcore punk” at Outback Lodge, a few members of Teenage House Party decided to charge the crowd, toppling everyone standing in the front. They thrilled the older punks in the audience and pissed off the management…much as The Landlords had done at Plum’s Lounge decades earlier.
Full Court Press was one of the local acts that frequently shared Dust Warehouse (now Firefly) bills with regional, national, and even international bands. Photo courtesy of Sam Richardson
Shortly thereafter, Richardson sought to book shows for another of his hardcore bands, Shin Kick. A friend put Richardson in touch with a guy named Kirt, an older hippie who let bands (like Bralley’s surf punk band The Sheiks) practice in his Woolen Mills warehouse, where he lived in a shack he’d built in the corner.
Kirt was cool with Richardson booking all-ages, no booze shows in the warehouse, and from sometime in 2006 to summer 2009, the spot—Dust Warehouse—fostered a new punk and hardcore scene that was open to everyone. It wasn’t Tokyo Rose, but it wasn’t trying to be. Dust, with Kirt and his shack, random pallets of Utz chips lying around, and Mad Max looping on a small television alongside a bunch of rag dolls and plastic dinosaurs, was its own thing.
Local bands like Shin Kick, Total Wreck, Full Court Press, and Sucker Punch were Dust regulars, and Richardson filled out bills with regional, national, and even some international acts he’d met via fanzines, including his own, Got Myself.
It was “a great, warm punk scene, a vibrant punk scene,” says Marina Madden, who started going to shows at Dust when she was about 14, often with her older brother, Pat, who played in Total Wreck.
In summer 2009, Richardson moved to Richmond and the Dust scene fizzled out.
Madden complained to an older punk that there wasn’t any punk in Charlottesville anymore, and he told her, “You just need to make it happen. That’s the only way to have punk, is to do it yourself.” So she took matters into her own hands and started booking shows at DIY space Magnolia House, where musicians lived and hosted shows.
The first show she booked was Total Wreck and Crooked Teeth, a band Madden had seen perform a few years before in Richmond, and whose vocalist, Ericka Kingston, altered Madden’s idea of what punk could be. “I didn’t realize until then that women could do it,” Madden says. She knew of bands with women in them, but it was more of an idea, not something she’d actually seen. “It was simultaneously the scariest thing I’d ever seen and the most inspiring thing I’d ever seen. And I wanted to watch them play all the time,” she says.
Madden booked shows at Magnolia for a few years and eventually started performing in bands of her own—she’s fronted a few different hardcore bands, including Last Words, Kommunion, and Sow, and she currently plays bass in punk band Sensual World; she also plays folk music with Sweet Afton.
“It was a completely life-changing, amazing experience, to have a platform to express myself,” she says of punk music. “I learned a lot, about the things I say having impact.”
Touring has offered Madden a bit of perspective on how Charlottesville’s scene is unique. DIY culture exists everywhere, “but in a small town…it feels a little more urgent at times, especially if you’re one of five people who gives a shit about what’s going on, about the music, and making things happen,” she says. In bigger cities, the responsibility of making the music and hosting the shows doesn’t fall to just a few bands or a few people at a time, like it does in Charlottesville.
And while places like IX Art Park (where Falsini books shows) and Champion Brewing Company are hosting harder music—punk, hardcore, and metal—on occasion, it’s Sam Roberts, current steward of Magnolia House, and a few local bands that are keeping the punk and hardcore scene going right now.
Sam Roberts, who drums in hardcore band Fried Egg and punk ‘n’ roll band Wild Rose, is the current steward of DIY space Magnolia House, which has hosted music on and off for about a decade. Roberts has two theories regarding how punk in Charlottesville lives on: 1. There’s one or two local punk bands at a time that draw people into the scene; and 2. There’s one or two local punk bands at a time that make someone want to book shows…and those bands are not always the popular bands. Photo by Kyle Petrozza
Roberts got his first taste of the local scene at Dust and The Bridge, and a couple years ago he moved into Magnolia House and took over the booking efforts previously run by members of Haircut, another punk band that started in Charlottesville (and is now based in Richmond). Currently, Roberts drums in punk ‘n’ roll band Wild Rose and for hardcore band Fried Egg (Richardson is one of his bandmates), and while he opens Magnolia House up to all types of music, he tries to get a good punk and/or hardcore bill in there every couple of months or so.
There will always be people who don’t want to be into mainstream culture, and some of them gravitate toward punk, says Roberts, who speaks from experience. That audience is what motivates him. “There’s no one else bringing underground bands to town like I would like to,” he says. “I have to do it, or no one will.”
Nearly four decades after Houchens and his friends started playing punk rock in their families’ basements, and 35 years after they started playing out, the small scene they effectively started is quite healthy, and that legacy has only recently come into focus for Houchens.
He says it began to sharpen when Richardson started his own label, Feel It Records, in 2010 with a 7-inch of eight Lackey Die songs tracked during those sessions at Floodzone and Inner Ear.
It sharpened further last summer, when, two years after Richardson issued The Landlords’ previously unreleased second album, Fitzgerald’s Paris, he reissued The Landlords’ debut, Hey! It’s A Teenage House Party!, and the band reunited for a well-attended show on a hot and sweaty night in late June at Champion Brewing Company. The Landlords shared the bill with current Charlottesville bands Girl Choir (whose members include The Landlords’ Leckey and “Live Squid” writer Sipe), Wild Rose, and Fried Egg, and covered a Houchens-penned Lackey Die classic, “Never Change.”
Fried Egg, whose members live in Charlottesville and Richmond, is one of few hardcore bands playing in town regularly. The band releases its first full-length record, Square One, this week. “If they had existed in the time that we were doing it, back in the ‘80s, we would have worshipped those guys,” says The Landlords’ guitarist Charlie Kramer of Fried Egg. “They’re so tight, they have so much energy. Fried Egg is just this explosion going off; it’s incredible!” Photo by Tristan Williams
It got even clearer just a few weeks ago, when Richardson delivered to Houchens a cassette of Fried Egg’s first full-length, Square One, a nine-track record of songs that express, much in the vein of Lackey Die songs, frustration and disenchantment with modern-day American life.
Square One sees an official release on Feel It this week, 35 years to the week that Lackey Die visited Floodzone studios to record that demo.
Houchens, who’s never stopped playing music and has wax from one of Richardson’s previous bands, Slugz, nestled among his punk classics, wasn’t at that Champion show—he didn’t hear about it in time. But it quietly thrilled him that the younger generation mingled with the older one on stage, and that The Landlords paid homage to Lackey Die.
“That’s punk rock. That is what punk rock is to me,” Houchens says, drumming out a beat on a padded stool in his Palmyra living room. “It’s not some fucking dollar sign. It’s something you spread. You play it, and let people enjoy it. It’s your local scene. That’s what it is.”
After a five-year hiatus, The Falsies return with more outrageous and insightful theatrical punk on Saturday at The Southern. Photo by Rich Tarbell
It’s hard to decide what deserves your attention at a Falsies concert.
Is it the music? The musicians themselves, constantly swapping guitars for saxophones, for drums, for keyboards? Or is it band founder Lance Brenner in his yellow chicken suit, gesticulating wildly while shoving a microphone into the beak to sing? Maybe you’re wondering how hot it is inside that chicken suit, or caught up in the anticipation that comes with knowing—once Brenner sheds the faux-feathered fowl—he’s likely to reveal at least two other costumes underneath.
Is it the song lyrics? The choir of a dozen-odd characters singing and dancing behind the band?
The answer is all of the above, and now that Charlottesville’s absurdist rock band is back in action after a five-year hiatus, we’ll all have more chances to hunt for meaning in this musical wilderness.The Falsies—Brenner, along with multi- instrumentalists Carter Lewis, Morgan Moran, Corinna Hanson, Katie Albert, and Sophia Mendicino—play the Southern Café & Music Hall on Saturday, and whether or not Brenner will don his “FUCK YOU” candy heart costume from Valentine’s Day hangover shows past remains to be determined.
Photo by Rich Tarbell
The Falsies began as concept. “It was a joke, really,” says Brenner. He’d been playing in power poppy rock band The Naked Puritans with some success—the band toured up and down the East Coast, and in 2004, Village Voice music critic Chuck Eddy said the band’s three-song EP “exudes more power and pop than most powerpoppers’ entire careers”—but at some point, it stopped being fun.
Brenner mentioned to a friend that he dreamed of playing drums (not his primary instrument) in “a band of neophytes that would eventually end up with an album” perhaps one titled Greatest Tits, full of songs that seemed ridiculous on the surface but had depth to them.
Brenner put together a band full of people who he clicked with socially, and they started writing songs. Songs like “Fuck,” which uses the titular word in every way possible. “Maybe it’s overtly aggressive, but the spirit of it isn’t aggressive at all,” says Brenner of that particular Falsies classic.
It turns out, Brenner says, that everyone he recruited for the band was a pretty good musician. The more they practiced, the better they got, and the more The Falsies’ catalog grew. And the more complex the songs (written by Brenner and fine-tuned by the band) have become.
The Falsies have this “fuck you” energy combined with “quite a bit of camp,” says Brenner, and the careful steps required in walking that fine, sometimes moving, line is what makes the spectacle that is The Falsies more complicated than one might think.
The Falsies played their first concert in five years last November, at Live Arts. Photo by Rich Tarbell
Brenner hesitates to explain the concept of the band—”theatrical punk” is as far as he will go—or the songs, too deeply, lest he ruin the fun of discovery.
But he will talk—briefly—about the four new songs the band will debut on Saturday night.
There’s “Get It On & Get Along!,” “a Falsies prescription for world peace,” and “My Balls!,” a “body-positive song” on which Hanson sings lead, often to the audience’s surprise. “(But Then) I Stuck It In the Wrong Hole,” is another, one that started off with a bass guitar and amp plug-in blunder during practice. And the “OMG, You Dirty Talker,” a song with a conceit based in mystery and mundane objects.
Brenner knows not everyone is up for this level of absurdity. More than anything, Brenner’s happy that his band members—and those who come to experience The Falsies—are more than ready to join him on his “conceptual playground.”
Ed Haddaway's "An Even Larger and More Important Animal" draws influence from his time spent studying in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Photo courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
Winter gray getting you down? Les Yeux du Monde offers a potent dose of Southwestern heat in the form of paintings by Russ Warren and sculptures by Ed Haddaway that will banish those February blues.
The two artists, who are native Texans, met as students at the University of New Mexico in 1971, where they forged a friendship based on similar experiences and outlooks. Rejecting the abstraction then in vogue, they hankered instead for art that, as Warren puts it, showed the “touch of man.” Following graduation, Haddaway remained in Albuquerque. Warren moved east and the two lost touch. After a painting career that included teaching at Davidson College in North Carolina, Warren married Les Yeux du Monde director Lyn Warren, and settled in Charlottesville. Warren and Haddaway reconnected a couple of years ago, and realized that despite being separated by time and distance, they had been pursuing remarkably similar tracks all along.
“I chose ‘Surrealities’ as the title,” says Lyn Warren. “Because both Russ and Ed are interested in depicting imaginary worlds that evoke deeper truths. They value chance, humor, dream, and inner realities over external ones, and in similar fashion to the original surrealists of the 1920s, they favor the irrational over the solely rational, opting for a magical, dream-like, or humorous alternative.”
The surrealists were reacting to World War I and the instability and turmoil that followed. Finding their reality untenable, they rejected it, turning inward to their subconscious for inspiration. Warren and Haddaway came of age in a similarly chaotic time, at the height of the Vietnam War. Their work also rejects reality even as it retains a profound connection to its Southwestern surroundings.
Haddaway resists having his work labeled as “childlike.” It’s a tall order, given the bright colors, fanciful creatures, exuberant gumbo of shapes and underlying humor that permeates the work. But for Haddaway they are the creatures and objects that inhabit his imagination and visit his dreams. Thinking of them within the context of New Mexico, one can begin to see associations. In Native American mythology it wouldn’t be unusual for a man to be in conversation with a wolf as in “Meeting Mr. Wolf,” or for something like “An Even Larger and More Important Animal” to exist. The hand festooning the animal’s tail is both an ancient symbol and a humorous salute to the viewer.
In Haddaway’s larger works, the scale and color command attention, but he is able to sustain the interest in smaller works like “Click Clack Moon Metaphor” and “Wee House in the Forest.” A series of oxidized pieces, which seem made from organic matter, strike a subtler note. Haddaway’s monotypes are really appealing with their sophisticated palette and commanding, almost brutish gestures. The abbreviated images he produces are witty, edgily charming, and, yes, evoke Picasso.
Russ Warren, “Still Life with Curtains, 2018.” Image courtesy Les Yeux du Monde
You can tell that Warren revels in painting. The richness of the color, the texture, the energy, all convey a marked sensuality. Warren uses interactive acrylic paint to achieve a quality similar to the effect of oil, whisking the paint vigorously before he uses it. This creates bubbles that pop when applied, adding depth and texture to the work.
Warren’s recurring iconography has great personal meaning. There’s his dog Zeke, hit by a car shortly before his best friend was killed in a car crash that is both an homage to the adored pet and a stand-in for the friend. Guitars (Warren is a talented player) and other stringed instruments are represented, along with apples and half a watermelon.
Picasso and Cubism, in particular, are major influences. Warren is drawn to the fracturing of space that makes several views of an object visible at once, and the colorful flatness, simple shapes and use of dots that pervade his work are hallmarks of synthetic cubism. Take for instance “Still Life with Curtains,” a dynamic composition of abstract shapes with an arrangement of objects in front. The guitar, watermelon, and apples are all there, along with Zeke, curled up under the table. Here the dots not only add visual interest, they also veer into narrative, representing stars in the sky and watermelon seeds.
“The Ready Jester” reveals Warren’s eye for composition and color. The masks are Mexican, not African, with Day of the Dead connotations, and the turquoise, yellow, and orange evoke a southern border aesthetic. Horses and cows, a cat, and perhaps Zeke, are jumbled together to form a semblance of “Guernica” without the horror. On the left side, the background is a solid, smooth opaque, on the right, Warren introduces red and allows the brushstrokes to show.
A welcome seasonal respite full of joyful, eye-popping work, “Surrealities” also comes with a delightful backstory that speaks to the endurance of friendship and the power of personal convictions.
“Surrealities: The Art of Ed Haddaway and Russ Warren” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde through March 10.
Activist Zyahna Bryant will launch her book Reclaim at The Hive on February 17. Image: Eze Amos
Zyahna Bryant became an activist about three years before she wrote the petition to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename Lee Park in 2016. It was the day after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, when Bryant, then age 12, organized her first protest. In the intervening years she has written poems, journal entries, and essays about how activism has shaped her. This month, the Charlottesville High School senior releases a collection of writings titled Reclaim.
In three parts (Space, Identity, and Here), Bryant considers how she occupies space as a black woman, how embodying different identities can shift perception of that space, and how her sense of space and identity intersect in her hometown of Charlottesville. This last section examines the erasure of the history of activism led by black women in our city. It is to these women, and her family, that she dedicates the book.
When Bryant writes of erasure, she speaks from personal experience. Following the petition for the removal of the statue and renaming of the park, her words were quoted without attribution as news spread and “my single act was being amplified without any sign of myself,” she writes.
She learned this experience was all too common for black women in Charlottesville and elsewhere. “The reality is that black women have been doing the work of organizing and activism for decades,” she says, citing her great-grandmother, Thelma T. Hagen, who fought for integration and educational justice, and whose sons, Marvin and William Townsend, were two of the Charlottesville 12—the first 12 African American children to integrate previously white schools in 1959.
“Black women are present and have been building infrastructure for activism,” Bryant says. “But the national conversation about Charlottesville has been about white supremacy and racial reconciliation while black women have been erased.”
She writes about the idea that the white supremacists who organized and participated in the Unite the Right Rally on August 12, 2017, were all outsiders and the effect this perception had on black women. The main organizer, Jason Kessler, was from Charlottesville, she points out, and black women had been resisting the likes of him long before August 12.
Through her work, Bryant aims to re-center the narrative. “It’s important when people put their lives on the line and fight for justice, that their voices are not erased and their work is not discredited,” she says.
In addition to honoring the legacy of activism among black women in Charlottesville, Bryant was motivated to write in order to process her experience. “Writing has been kind of like self-care for me after being in the public spotlight,” she says. Consequently, some of the journal entries and poems address her anxiety and activism burnout.
Reclaim is available at The Hive in Charlottesville and online at Amazon.com.
In the short poem titled “grounding” Bryant writes, “In those moments / Where the world is whirling. / Care for your roots. / Plant yourself deeply in what you know.” Another poem, titled “Monday Mantra,” reminds, “Slow down / Smell the coffee / Have the tea / Recite the Affirmation. / Black Lives Matter. / (Repeat),” weaving a single thread of emotional well-being and activism, her self-care as a black woman reinforcing the very concept behind the racial justice movement.
Ever looking for ways to lift up the community, the activist-author will give a percentage of her book sales from the launch this week to the Charlottesville-area Black Mamas Bailout, which raises funds around Mother’s Day to support and ultimately free black mothers from local jails.
Bryant chose this cause because, she says, “when we think about mass incarceration we often think about men.” Yet according to the NAACP, African American women are imprisoned at twice the rate of white women. Bryant also cites the brutalization of transgender women by police, and the fact that Sage Smith, a transgender black woman from Charlottesville, has been missing since 2012. “People are doing the work to liberate black women, and it’s important to amplify that work,” she says.
Nearing the end of her final year of high school, Bryant says she hasn’t decided where she’ll go to college (at this writing, she’s been accepted at UVA, Howard, George Mason, and VCU). Wherever she matriculates, she plans to study urban planning or law. After that, she sees herself back in Charlottesville, continuing the work she has already begun “on systems that I see are flawed,” she says.
And she encourages others to do the same, closing her book with one last word: reflect. “I hope people take the time to think about some of the concepts and points that are made,” Bryant says. “In the end I think there’s room for everyone to join the fight for justice.”
Jontavious Willis peforms on Sunday at Fry's Spring Beach Club. Publicity image.
Blues on the side:A gospel singer as a child, Jontavious Willis made a life-changing discovery around age 14 when he came across a YouTube video of Muddy Waters’ “Hoochie Coochie Man.” The Georgia native became an instant fan, and began his mastery of the Delta, Piedmont, and Texas blues, honing his chops as a fingerpicker, flatpicker, and slide player. Now a college student, Willis picks up gigs with major blues dudes such as Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal between sociology classes at Columbia University. Mahal called him, “a great new voice of the 21st century in the acoustic blues.”
Sunday 2/17. $25 (dinner included), 5:30pm. Soul Suppers at Fry’s Spring Beach Club, 2512 Jefferson Park Ave. 806-7062.
Award-winning pianist Andrew Le performs with Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia for shows at Old Cabell Hall and Monticello High School. Publicity image.
Dance the night away with Wes Swing and company as they celebrate the waltz. Image: Kristen Finn.
Waltz with me:Wes Swing says the intention behind his Fern Hill concert series is to present beautiful music in beautiful spaces, offering “qualities I’d like to see more of in the world of music.” His latest endeavor, A Tribute to Waltz, showcases the enchantment of the dance, and invites the audience to pair up, and step in triple time, to mostly original pieces by Swing, Devon Sproule, Paul Curreri, Diane Cluck, and Paige Naylor.
Thursday 2/14. $12, 8pm. Fry’s Spring Beach Club, 2512 Jefferson Park Ave. wesswing.com/tickets.
Painter Sharon Shapiro was captured in the midst of her process by photographer Stacey Evans for “Inside the Artists’ Studio,” on view at Second Street Gallery through March 22. Image: Stacey Evans
Art in a white-walled gallery can take on an aura of total separation from the person who made it, and the context in which that person worked. For that matter, so can murals seen from the car—so often, we’re looking at art in a vacuum. Here’s an antidote: Second Street Gallery’s current show, “Inside The Artists’ Studio.” Curators paired four photographers with four local painters for the purpose of documenting the painters in their studios. In this show, places and personalities come forward to stand next to the finished works they produced.
Each painter/photographer pair gets a dedicated portion of the gallery where canvases rub elbows with color photos. We’re invited backstage to see, for example, what Russ Warren wears when he paints, or the architecture of Ken Horne’s studio, or how Cate West Zahl stores her paints. These details demystify the artmaking process in a way—like watching a baker make bread—but they also tend to elevate the painters in a minor cult of personality.
It’s intriguing to track the way an idea moves from inspiration through work-in-progress to a complete painting. In Warren’s studio, for example, Bill Moretz has photographed little Day of the Dead skeleton figures and folk-art wooden animals—clear precursors to the graphic doglike animal and skulls in Warren’s painting “We All Sat Around in a Circle.” Then again, other objects given a place in the studio may have a less obvious connection, like the Frederic Remington-style bronze cowboy sculpture that Warren contemplates in one of Moretz’s portraits. We learn that Warren nurtures a real variety of totemic inspirations—from tribal masks to a dense wall of postcards to a glass of red wine.
Processes are also evident here. The best of Kristen Finn’s photos of Zahl shows her in a plein-air session outside the Beck Cohen building where they both keep studios. Zahl’s image of the building, and a nearby tree, is juxtaposed with the real-life building and tree. In the painting, the tree becomes more substantial and active, while the building is partially abstracted and takes on a moodier relationship to the sky. It looks like fun to alter reality this way.
The painting, too, is different than the three big canvases Zahl has in the gallery—it’s smaller and more figurative—but seeing her Beck-Cohen image in progress offers insight into how her large, abstract works might develop from architectural beginnings. They invite the viewer into seas of layered color whose linear boundaries are permeable, like the form of that tree.
The most successful pairing in the show is that of photographer Stacey Evans with painter Sharon Shapiro. Evans’ images are more than just documents of Shapiro and her workspace at her Louisa home; they are artworks in themselves. The photos manage to add another layer of meaning to Shapiro’s already meaningful art.
Collage-like compositions reveal the images and words that Shapiro collects in her workspace: magazine clippings, snapshots, a James Tate poem. Handwritten notes show the painter thinking through themes that drive her work: “…critique of culture / joy / central ache / body language / human myth(ology)…”
These words in the gallery next to her paintings don’t explain too much; they just give useful clues. And although viewers can see exactly which found images Shapiro started with—like a photo of women lounging next to a Palm Springs pool—the transformation she achieves still seems like alchemy. The poolside women begin to melt and distend into fragmentary shapes and patterns in her painting “Golddiggers”; the central figure holds a cocktail that Shapiro renders as a garish clump of gold glitter. The scene, originally a depiction of wealth, femininity, and leisure, has become a kind of surrealist melodrama.
Sharon Shapiro, “Goldiggers”
Evans suggests something of this breakdown process when she layers several photos of Shapiro into one image, so that the painter appears in three places simultaneously in her studio, working on two different paintings. Her body is partially covered by her work and also reflected in a mirror. As an artist, Shapiro becomes a refraction: a maker, a channeler of cultural norms, and a mind that is inseparable from the work she creates.
Guillermo X Ubilla’s photos of Ken Horne reveal little of his inspirations, but do suggest some of the nuts and bolts of his process: how he paints with the canvas lying flat, and surrounds himself with dozens of jars of Flashe paint. His works favor dissonant, fluorescent hues and blocky geometric compositions based on crude grids, with brushwork so deliberately unrefined it’s unsettling. An occasional burst of precision belies the overriding childlike quality.
A more diverse group of painters (demographically and aesthetically) would have made this show an even more valuable documentary project. But even so, for people who want to make art or just understand art better, it’s very worthwhile to see what it looks like when someone has mastered a practice and given herself the gift of space and time to fully pursue it.
While the Charlottesville scene has its own lore, the city also occupies an important point on global hardcore punk timeline: Back in 1980, WTJU DJ Aaron Margosis was the first person ever to play releases by seminal hardcore punk label Dischord Records over the air.
Aaron Margosis, a friend of The Landlords who’d been playing hardcore punk on his WTJU show for a couple of years at this point, remembers the gig well. The Landlords signed up for this battle of the bands, knowing they’d shock their audience; “Plum’s Lounge was just not the place for this type of music,” says Margosis, who’d brought a tape recorder to capture the set for posterity. “They had the plug pulled on them before the second song even got going.”
Instead, DeFranzo and his buddies, with their Doc Martens and, in a couple cases, mohawks, went to the Corner every Friday afternoon. They browsed records and fanzines at Plan 9, snagged fliers for those Trax shows they couldn’t attend but which bore the names of some of their favorite bands, and hung around the Corner Parking Lot to hear Beers and Maynard Sipe, who’d played in new wave bands and wrote a local music fanzine, Live Squid, talk about the early punk and hardcore scene.
It was “a great, warm punk scene, a vibrant punk scene,” says Marina Madden, who started going to shows at Dust when she was about 14, often with her older brother, Pat, who played in Total Wreck.
