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Guitar guru comes to C’ville fresh from Grammy nod

Samantha Fish brings her electric blues, rock, and soul to The Jefferson Theater on Friday. Publicity photo.

Blues rocker Samantha Fish says she “didn’t know what [she] was doing” when she made Girls With Guitars alongside Cassie Taylor and Dani Wilde in 2011. The same might be said of the albums’ producers, who probably should’ve known better by then.

When Wynonna Judd released her hit song of the same name in 1994, the guitars-are-for-boys trope was maybe not so tired. Thirty years later, Fish is part of the reason it’s hopefully ancient history.

Fish will take The Jefferson Theater stage on August 30 in the wake of 2023’s critically acclaimed Death Wish Blues, which earned the artist/singer-songwriter/guitarist her first Grammy nomination earlier this year. A collaboration with punk rocker Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album and sat at No. 1 on the Billboard blues chart for three straight weeks.

“I really hadn’t collaborated since Girls With Guitars,” Fish says. “Now that I have some experience, coming back and doing this with Jesse … you learn to take ‘no’ out of your vocabulary. Even if it is something that is a complete departure from you as a singular artist, you say, ‘I can try that.’”

Fish grew up in Missouri and began learning the guitar at age 15, essentially teaching herself, with family and friends showing her tricks here and there. Without any formal lessons, she listened to classic rock—AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, Tom Petty—and learned to pick out the riffs by ear. She began writing songs in her late teens, citing Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen as central influences, and found gigs by cold-calling bars. 

“Blues was all of my favorite musicians’ favorite music,” Fish says. “So I was just digging backwards and going through the list of all the great traditional blues artists.”

Fish has produced an album every two years since 2009, when she recorded Live Bait with what was then known as the Samantha Fish Blues Band. The guitarist began attracting high praise in 2019, when she made the first of three albums, Kill or Be Kind, on Rounder Records. Produced by Grammy winner Scott Billington, Kill or Be Kind landed on album review outlet AllMusic’s list of editors’ “Favorite Blues Albums.” Fish’s next solo effort, 2021’s Faster, received similar critical acclaim.

Death Wish Blues was born when, after many years of discussing a side project, Fish and her manager decided to approach Dayton, whose resumé includes recording with Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, touring with seminal punk band X, and working with Rob Zombie on horror film soundtracks.

Produced by Jon Spencer of The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Death Wish Blues attracted not only the attention of the Grammy committee, but also two of Fish’s idols. Eric Clapton invited her to perform at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in Los Angeles, and GNR guitarist Slash brought Fish on for a run during his S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour earlier this year.

Now onto her own Bulletproof tour, Fish says she’s finally able to ruminate on her full career and focus on her growing canon. “This is the first time I’ve been on tour without a new record,” she says. On August 30, that means Charlottesville fans will get to see the musician revisit older material and dig into unique covers, along with adapting songs from Death Wish Blues to arrangements sans Dayton.

“It is weird, your relationship with songs over the years,” Fish says. “I will hear some things that I did and cringe—like, ‘what the fuck was I thinking?’—but then other things will hit differently. Here I am years later, and I’ll find I wrote about something I’m just now experiencing. It’s a refreshing look.” 

While Fish shakes up the old and new arrangements, she’s also eyeing her next record; after all, she’s never gone more than two years without recording. If her luck holds, she says she’ll be back in the studio sometime during the Bulletproof tour. “We’re aiming for spring or summer, but every time I verbalize it, it doesn’t happen,” she says. 

What that record will be, Fish has yet to decide. She’s come a long way since Girls With Guitars, and she says part of the evolution happens all the way up to the time when she steps into the studio with her band. By way of example, Fish says she and Dayton originally conceived of the decidedly roots-driven Death Wish Blues as a “punk rock side project.” 

“Talking about things doesn’t necessarily guarantee what they will be,” she says. 

What Fish does know is that she plans to make music for a long time to come. “I don’t know what else I would be doing. I don’t have any other skills,” she laughs. “I love playing music, and there’s a little ecosystem built into what we’re doing. We’ve got the train rolling here.”

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Arts

Rap videos get a boost at the Virginia Film Festival

Local duo Equally Opposite brings an element of fun to Paul Dixon’s video for “Teach You,” a track by Las Vegas rapper J. Ran (center). The Nine Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase screens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday. Courtesy of NOXID

Doughman got into filming music videos because he had to.

The area music producer was handing out beats to rappers left and right, but they wanted more than just music. They wanted a visual component to match the aural experience created in the recording booth. They wanted music videos.

This was back in 2012 or so, says Doughman, and at the time, there wasn’t really anyone local making music videos for rappers. Doughman had been vlogging some of the studio sessions, and so he took it on.

Since then, other independent filmmakers have joined the rap video hustle, and eight of them (including Doughman) will show their work at this year’s Virginia Film Festival.

Music videos have been vital to hip-hop since MTV aired Run DMC’s “Rap Box” in 1984. Since then, rap videos have had a lasting effect on the music video industry, and on American visual culture as a whole.

But the music video “is more important [now] than it has ever been for hip-hop,” says Cullen “Fellowman” Wade, rapper and co-director of the Charlottesville-based Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest. The internet is full of more music videos than MTV could ever air. Wade’s even heard some local rappers say that if they can’t make a music video to share on social media, there’s no use in recording the song in the first place.

Some mainstream, high-budget rap videos have come to be regarded as a form of short film, but that consideration hasn’t extended to their independent, low-budget counterparts, says Wade, who, in addition to his musical pursuits, co-hosts  “Arts & Crass: The Highbrow Lowbrow Film Podcast.”

But the opportunity to screen independent rap videos at the Virginia Film Festival—which, in recent years, has hosted Spike Lee (2017) and Allen Hughes (2018), two of the biggest names at the intersection of film and hip-hop—can help bring that sort of credit to the genre, says Wade.

In curating the showcase, Wade asked independent filmmakers in the local hip-hop scene to submit their best work, knowing he’d get different pieces that together demonstrate a breadth of creativity and vision.

Paul Dixon (aka NOXID), a music producer who’s new to filmmaking, submitted the video for “Teach You,” a track by Las Vegas rapper J. Ran featuring Charlottesville duo EquallyOpposite.

Throughout the song, J. Ran tries to woo a girl, and the video follows the rapper on his ultimately successful journey. But that alone wouldn’t be much of a film-worthy story, decided Dixon. He wanted a little comic relief.

EquallyOpposite’s Zachary “ZacMac” McMullen and Lamar “Gordo” Gordon go after a girl and get completely, utterly, rejected. Dixon laughs when he talks about it—“they’re so cartoonish, so alive, and animated. It’s kind of perfect.”

Doughman’s submission, his video for Chef G’s freestyle track, “No Hook,” is a completely different type of video—this one sticks out to him for a number of reasons, namely the “gritty feel” that matches the essence of the song.

Chef G is the only person in the “No Hook” video, and he raps in three different locations: sitting on a bike on a street corner, on a broken-down mattress in an overgrown yard, and on the eaves of a yellow house. His presence is constant and his flow inescapable. You can’t help but listen.

And that, says Doughman, is exactly what a video can do for a song, for an artist. “Let’s just say, it’ll give you another look…it’ll make you listen different once you have a vision to it.”

The Nine Pillars Hip Hop Music Video Showcase screens at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Friday, October 25.

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Arts

Keeping tracks: Thomas Dean loops in Virginia-based bands on his new indie label Infinite Repeats

Artist-musician Thomas Dean started his own imprint, Infinite Repeats, as a way to document and preserve great independent music being made in the commonwealth. Photo Credit: Tristan Williams

Thomas Dean takes unusual pleasure in digging through crates of junky records.

It’s partly the aroma of acidic paper inserts mingling with that of musty cardboard sleeves. It’s partly weirdo cover art, bonkers band names, and eyebrow-raising (or head-shaking) album titles.

But mostly, it’s the music. Dean loves the thrill of sliding a random slab of vinyl out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and finding a really cool rock ‘n’ roll song or, even better, an album full of them. They’re often songs from 25, maybe 30 years ago, hiding in plain sight in a thrift store dollar bin because neither the band nor the label has big-name recognition. Music that, if it hadn’t been pressed to wax, very likely would be completely forgotten.

Dean also loves the idea that, decades from now, someone might be digging through another crate of records and find one released on his record label, Infinite Repeats, toss it on the platter, and say, “Hey! This is cool!”

That’s entirely possible, because Dean, a musician, DJ, and screen print artist who’s been a fixture in Charlottesville independent rock music for close to 20 years, is releasing some pretty cool music, most of it local, on the newly-minted Infinite Repeats.

It might be fair to say that the idea for Infinite Repeats started spinning when Dean was growing up in Lynchburg and skipping school at lunch to drive up to Plan 9 on the Corner, where he and his friends would flip through records and scope out flyers for upcoming shows at Trax nightclub.

In 1999, Dean and a bunch of his friends moved to Charlottesville, into a house on Summit Street in Fry’s Spring. They had a band, a “pretty noisy” one, says Dean, and played and hosted shows in their basement. He’s gone on to play in Order, Invisible Hand, New Boss, Orange Folder, and Good Dog Nigel.

Dean has great memories of seeing shows at Trax, Pudhaus, and Tokyo Rose, and later at Dust Warehouse, memories that he can jog with a few band recordings, some photos, and a couple of VHS tapes. But a lot of that music is lost to time, and he often wishes he could hear it again, share it with folks who missed it. It’s something he’s very aware of now, too, as he attends and plays shows at Tea Bazaar, Magnolia House, The Bridge PAI, The Southern, and IX Art Park.

He also wonders about all the Charlottesville bands nobody remembers, or knows about, because they never made a recording—or if they did, it’s sitting on a hard drive in a basement, or in a box of tapes at the back of a closet, or on a CD in a cracked jewel case at the bottom of a desk drawer.

“This town’s had an interesting scene for a long time,” he says. “There are plenty of phases of it that have gone pretty poorly documented. Though there were plenty of people there to enjoy it, I think there was some pretty enjoyable stuff for the folks who missed it, too.”

“So much gets lost,” says Dean, and with Infinite Repeats, he hopes to minimize those losses, and give current fans of these bands something to have and to hold, to take home after a show.

Infinite Repeats’ first official issue, in May 2018, was the vinyl release of New Boss’ No Breeze EP, six songs by Dean’s own indie rock power-pop band. Dean followed it up with The Implied Sunrise, an EP from Parker Emeigh’s Lynchburg-based experimental psych rock power-pop project, Good Dog Nigel, in February 2019. This week, the label releases Cosmic Miasma, a four-song, 7-inch record from Charlottesville punk band Wild Rose.

There are others in the works, too, says Dean, like the Night Prancing LP from his longtime friends, Shrouded Strangers, a Good Dog Nigel full-length, and something from local garage punk band The Attachments.

In some cases, Dean’s had a hand in the recording process as well. Good Dog Nigel, Wild Rose, and The Attachments have recorded their Infinite Repeats releases at Dean’s in-home studio, Studionana, named for a nearby sticker of an anthropomorphic banana wearing sunglasses and playing a guitar. Studionana is actually located in Dean’s kitchen, where there are drums stacked on shelves alongside pots and pans, amps on the counters, guitars leaning on cabinets, microphones standing in front of the fridge, and where the recording console itself isn’t far from the stove. For a long time, Dean didn’t have his own recording equipment (most artists don’t) to get his bands’ music down, and now that he does, he wants to share that wealth.

Infinite Repeats, which presses a couple hundred copies of each release at Blue Sprocket Pressing, a vinyl pressing plant that opened in Harrisonburg in spring 2018, isn’t the only independent label working to get Virginia rock music on the literal record (and cassette tape, and CD). We’ve also got WarHen, Funny/Not Funny, Beach Impediment, and Feel It Records, to name just a few, making sure some of the great music being made in the Commonwealth right now is out there in the world, being enjoyed, and less likely to be lost to the sands of time.

It seems like a lofty goal, and in some ways it is. But it’s not impossible. And, if you ask Dean, (business and money aspects aside) it’s not terribly complicated, either. “I like things by cool people, bands that I like,” he says. “I’m just going to keep watching for things that I like and see what needs to come out in the world.”