Author: Shea Gibbs

Kylie Wright spent a lot of time with late indie rock icon David Berman while they were students at the University of Virginia. They both hosted radio shows in WTJU’s not-so-coveted 2 to 6am slot. His: “The Big Hair Show.” Hers: “Jane Fonda’s Blackout.”

But when asked about her time with the poet and singer-songwriter, the first story that comes to Wright’s mind is set in the university’s library. The two aspiring musicians were studying one day when Berman decided to use the library’s suggestion board. “How would you improve the library?” the board queried. “More bass,” Berman answered.

Several days later, library staff responded: “We’re more ‘trout’ people.”

“David saw that and said, ‘My work here is done,’” Wright says. “He could really be a very funny person.”

Since Berman’s suicide in 2019, the media has focused much on the former Silver Jews frontman’s demons. He was a reclusive loner, they report, tormented by self doubt and addiction.

Back at UVA, though, Wright remembers how communal the budding lyricist’s energy was. WTJU was a fraternity/sorority for their friends, she says, and the group’s creativity worked in pure synergy.

It’s that sort of synergy that WTJU will try to perpetuate with its recently announced David Berman Memorial Fund, the station’s first dedicated endowment. According to WTJU General Manager Nathan Moore, the fund will be earmarked to support student experiences at both WTJU and WXTJ—much like those transformative programs Berman and his friends enjoyed in the late ’80s.

“Our mission is to bring people together through excellent music conversation,” Moore says. “We’ve been doing that for decades and decades.”

During his time at UVA and WTJU, Berman crafted the logophilic artistic approach that made him and the Silver Jews—founded alongside Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich of Pavement fame—influential for years to come. Berman was always as much a poet as a songwriter, painstakingly crafting lyrics for the Silver Jews, and later Purple Mountains, that reflected humanity’s greatest weaknesses and insecurities. His one collected work of verse, Actual Air, drew perhaps even more acclaim than did his song lyrics, with many critics praising the poetry’s blunt wit and absurdist take on American life.

When UVA alumnus Andy Stepanian approached Moore about starting an endowment, they agreed a fund in Berman’s name would be a perfect fit. “As a student, I tuned in to WTJU because it was always a place to hear alternative music,” Stepanian says. “I still have cassette tapes of some WTJU programs I recorded back in the early ’90s.”

Stepanian and his wife Liz provided the seed gift to start the memorial fund, but Moore says the station wants the legacy to go further. Additional donations, which the Stepanians will match through the end of summer 2024, will be required to maintain the program. 

In the past, WTJU’s summer student internships have mostly been unpaid, something Moore says is inequitable—reserved for those who can afford to forgo income for three months. Indeed, many publicly funded radio stations, including NPR, have done away with their internship programs, citing their high cost.

With further donations, Moore says WTJU can continue to provide the kind of experience that let Berman, Wright, and their friends nurture their creativity, engage in the arts, tell stories, and learn the technical side of the music and radio business. 

“It’s a privilege that can launch people into fantastic lives and careers,” Moore says. “This will help us grow the program and sustain it and perhaps expand it.”

Before he died, Berman was planning a Purple Mountains tour. Wright had tickets to see the band in Philadelphia. She emailed Berman to let him know she’d be there, and he responded with a promise not to do what he always did after shows: disappear. The next day, she heard the news of his death.

“I remember writing at the time that we lost the best and brightest in our group,” Wright says. “I think he had been fighting for years, and the strain of the upcoming tour was too much.” 

Moore says he didn’t know Berman when he was alive, but he’s a fan of his music, lyrics, and voice. And he’s gotten to know more about him by meeting friends like Wright. The portrait is one that so many have come to know—the outsider, the disrupter, the sometime anarchist. But it’s also a portrait of an artist who embraced both people and creativity in all their forms.

“I used to listen to his show. I would come hang out sometimes, and we all kind of fed off of each others’ musical interests,” Wright says. “The media would try to build him up as this sort of brooding poet, and in actuality, it was about having his tribe around him. I just feel lucky that I was in the right time and place in history to have met David. I miss him all the time, but I’m glad his memory is being kept alive and that this is going to help young people in music.”

Gene Osborn is keenly aware that he is “walking a fine line” between his day job and night life. After performing with his band We Are Star Children in the evenings, the longtime Charlottesville educator shifts gears before morning to serve as Red Hill Elementary School’s assistant principal.

“There is a tension between having a fun and wild rock band … and being with preschoolers through fifth graders all day,” Osborn says. “I love the tension.”

Fans of WASC know tension. When the band unveils Spitfire, its new eight-track album, in January 2024—maybe on January 1 or timed with a release party on January 20, Osborn isn’t yet sure—it will be the first release listeners have heard from the group in almost a decade.

Osborn has fronted WASC since 2010, when the band released its first EP, Love to the Wicked. (The group released one other EP under the name Straight Punch to the Crotch.) In 2014, Osborn and what was then a seven-piece band, released its first full-length record, and the frontman reflected at the time that “the material [had] migrated so far away” from the goofy original name.

At that moment, WASC seemed ascendant. Playing at the Jefferson and Southern and headlining Fridays After Five, the septet was one of the most polished outfits in town. Dubbing themselves “adventure pop,” they were Charlottesville’s answer to the likes of MGMT. Regional, and maybe national, acclaim seemed imminent.

Then? Almost radio silence. No new albums for two years, four years, eight years—an eternity in the world of pop music, and a death knell for any band whose ambitions are big-time stardom.

But Osborn brushes off such talk. Those were never WASC’s ambitions anyway, he says.

“We Are Star Children grows incredibly slowly and deliberately, mostly because we are a collection of mothers and fathers and business owners and teachers,” he says. 

WASC gathers for a few hours every Monday for its residency at Fry’s Spring Beach Club, Osborn goes on to say. And “it’s within that wonderful window of time that we will develop a new song or work on some old material or do some band management.”

Although the group has seen considerable changes away from the studio and stage over the last 10 years—a few new careers and multiple new dependents—WASC has made precious few internal tweaks. The band’s added two new full-time members, but the other seven players have remained the same, and WASC continues to book just four to five shows per year.

According to Osborn, never feeling like they have to pay their bills with music is key to WASC’s members staying together and on the same wavelength. 

“It’s a passion project. We can really choose those wonderful gigs,” Osborn says. “I believe the universe sends us signals and points us toward what it needs of us. I keep getting pointed back to my work in schools and with families, but the band has also really enriched my work. The universe has never asked us to be anything other than that which we are.”

As for its new album, WASC has released two tracks in advance of next year’s full release. Spitfire’s first song, “Fairy King,” adds a western twang to WASC’s classic psych-pop approach; the effect is something in the vein of Calexico, Midlake, or Iron and Wine. The second release, “Landline,” is another divergence altogether: a playful exploration of phone sex that evolves into a full-on sea shanty.

“It has always been a very difficult question for us—who do we sound like?” Osborn says. “It’s really tricky, because the album has such range. It’s not really a shtick, like having each song be a different genre. It’s far more organic, having songs that each relay a different feeling.”

Osborn says a third Spitfire single is coming on November 1. And though he won’t specify which tune it will be, it likely won’t be the title track, something he wrote as a letter to Trayvon Martin’s mother in the wake of her son’s murder. Another genre-defying effort, the song has been a labor of love, Osborn says, and the final product will include accompaniment by a full choir.

As for his ambitions—for WASC and beyond—Osborn says the universe once again has shown him the way.

“Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be in educational leadership. I wanted my own school—that has been my main driving force,” he says. “I serve a wide range of families, and there are families who are fans of the band, and some that have very strong opinions. But when I close my eyes and reflect on the life I have built, the tension between service to art and service to children makes my life full.”

If the origin story of local metal band Age of Fire were a rom-com, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the theater at this point. Put on some Evanescence and try to dig it.

Boy meets girl in South Florida in 1982—but in this case, the girl is heavy metal. After six years of being in love with the girl, something comes of the relationship: a band’s eponymous debut album, Age of Fire.

The boy and girl part ways all too soon. He moves to Charlottesville, Virginia. After 20 years, the boy makes contact with the girl in 2008. But it’s not the same. For the boy, the girl is frozen in time, a memory of his youth. He’s unable to save her from the nothing she’s become (sorry, Evanescence).

Finally, three decades after first falling for the girl, the boy decides he’ll do whatever it takes to get her back. He wins the girl’s affection again, and their torrid love affair resumes.

The boy here is Greg Brown, founding member of the now-resurgent Age of Fire. In 2018, after re-releasing his band’s debut album for the second time in 30 years, he decided to grab fate by the collar and re-form. Just five years later, the band is touring to support its second album. They’ve played Atlanta, Birmingham, Myrtle Beach, and several dates in Europe. They’ve announced a streaming show on September 5 from In Your Ear Studios in Richmond, and will head to L.A. to play the Whiskey a Go Go, opening for Burning Witches, on December 6. And in the meantime, they’ll be back in the studio this fall to work on the band’s second full-length album—on Sliptrick Records—since getting back together.

“I’m laser-focused on what we are trying to do,” says Brown. “Richmond has been great to us—really embraced us. In this town, metal doesn’t seem to be very well supported. It’s a different beast.”

Charlottesville’s metal scene has been beset by recent losses, both of venues and promising acts. And while Brown admits he operates in “a bit of a bubble,” he’s never given up on the genre, even while pursuing others after Age of Fire disbanded in 1993. 

Brown returned to metal around 2012, after a cancer diagnosis. With a chemo port implanted in his chest, the classical guitar he had come to favor became impractical. The smaller body on his old electrics didn’t rub against the port, and the less technical ax work made playing easier, given his limited mobility.

“I was always into the shredders: Metallica, Megadeth,” Brown says. “But that’s actually the same thing that attracted me to classical and flamenco, the virtuosity of it.”

Working mostly from old-but-never-released recordings, Brown put together a new Age of Fire LP in late 2018, the same year he released the band’s debut for the third time. He “threw it up on the web,” he says, and people listened.

The 10-track Obsidian Dreams, Age of Fire’s first new record in 30 years, caught the attention of Sliptrick Records. Delighted, surprised, and humbled, Brown put together a band. He found a local bass player in Mike Heck and joined forces with a new lead vocalist, Laura Viglione. In 2020, Age of Fire released its first album of all new music since the band formed in 1988: Shades of Shadow. A European tour followed. It was more than Brown could’ve dreamed of when Metallica’s Kill ’Em All first made him fall in love with metal.

Heck and Viglione left the group after the Shades of Shadow tour, but Brown was undaunted. He found local bass player Ric Brown and drummer Bill Morries and decided to retake Age of Fire’s lead vocals. The latest iteration of the band independently released an EP, Through the Tempest, last year, and it’s been well received by indie pubs. 

Brown says Age of Fire still has a strong following in Europe, and he’s optimistic about the future, including the forthcoming album on Sliptrick. “Metal is starting to pick up,” Brown says. “It’s still huge overseas. In the United States in the ’90s, we went grunge, but the rest of the world didn’t.”

Age of Fire’s music has been described as dabbling in various heavy metal subgenres, including thrash, symphonic, melodic, and progressive. But for those who grew up with the ’90s shredders like Brown, it’s Metallica they’ll hear first.

Now, what’s old is new again. Age of Fire has been played on more than 1,000 traditional and satellite radio stations around the world after an unheard of four-decade hiatus. The band has attracted attention from media outlets from Portugal to Slovakia to Norway, and endorsements from Solar Guitars, Scorpion drumsticks, and Dirtbag clothing.

Still, Age of Fire isn’t Brown’s full-time gig. By day, he’s an educational services representative for Guitar Center’s Music & Arts. He says working with music teachers to develop in-school programming frees him up to make his own tunes on weekends and during summers.

As Brown tries to help kickstart the local metal scene, he looks back on his career and thinks of all the young musicians who could use a push toward his favorite music genre.

“I feel bad. … I ran a music store in this town for many years, and kids would come in playing Pantera licks or whatever,” he says. “I would think, ‘Where do these kids play?’ There doesn’t seem to be a supported infrastructure in this town for this type of music, and I would have been lost without it my entire life.”

Watch Age of Fire’s livestream performance on September 5 at In Your Ear Studios via youtube.com/@shockoesessionslive.