The Golden Pony – C-VILLE Weekly

By Shea Gibbs

The “Reverend” Bill Howard found his calendar wide open when the pandemic hit last year. The musician and hospitality industry worker had been gigging regularly with his beloved Americana band, The Judy Chops, and had some free time to fill when the live shows abruptly ended.

Howard’s solution? Weekly livestreams on Facebook with up to two hours of music and conversation. Every Sunday at 7pm “Reverend Bill’s Confessional: Music, Spiritual Guidance & Whiskey” goes live. Without fail.

Howard recently posted his 46th episode, complete with its old-timey church background, on February 7—not even the Super Bowl could stop the streaming. He says he was by some measures slow to react to the pandemic, though. “It took me a while last year to come to terms with the hole in my schedule,” he says. “I didn’t write my first new, post-COVID song until halfway through the year.”

Once the Reverend opened the pearly gates of songdom, a flood of tunes followed. That means plenty of new tracks, like the cautiously optimistic “I Can Be the Light,” grace the Sunday night show. But Howard also includes lots of old songs from the Chops catalogue—such as the bluesy wailer “Drugs” from the band’s first album—not to mention that spiritual guidance and brown liquor sampling.

“It’s become a wonderful community, and I’ve picked up fans from all over the world,” Howard says.
Each show features a theme that often veers toward music—favorite bands, vocalists, and songs—but it also occasionally brings home the guidance element of the confessionals. During Howard’s January 24 stream, for example, he asked folks to take a moment for reflection.

“Tonight, we are talking about things that make you hopeful,” he said during the production. “It’s been kind of a funny week that way. It feels like a different timbre in our national dialogue. It seems like a little bit of a stress has been relieved. So, it got me feeling a little hopeful this week.”

Joining Howard during the digital concerts is his girlfriend and partner Brittany Dorman, who handles the comment board and assists on production.

Howard says the confessionals have come a long way on production quality over the year of shows. The first steps were simply improving their internet capacity in semi-rural Harrisonburg, and finding the right webcams. The Judy Chops sound engineer (and Howard’s roommate at the time) took care of the tech in early days, but he’s since moved out of the pod. Howard and Dorman’s new roomie is another serial livestreamer, and he’s brought green screen technology to the team.

“We would like to get to a point where we can do a real concert experience,” Howard says. “I don’t know if we will ever be back to the same kind of live shows, so I’m trying to figure that out.”

Howard has also partnered with Harrisonburg concert venue The Golden Pony to produce a few confessionals alongside a larger, socially distanced group. The musicians have been forced to stop the semi-monthly on-site shows with the ebbs and flows of the coronavirus, but Howard hopes they’ll be back soon.

“I would really like to take this concept on the road, eventually,” he says. “If I’m on tour with another band, we might do a confessional with a couple of their members.”

On top of his weekly Sunday session, Howard hosts the Socially Distant Fest’s Wednesday Night Devotional, which has become his outlet for cover songs that sometimes also make their way to Sunday nights (many are in response to email requests).

Howard says he doesn’t see livestreams going away even post-COVID—for his confessionals, as well as for the music industry as a whole. According to data from Twitch, music and performance arts category viewers increased from an average of 92,000 last February to 574,000 in March. And while Howard says his video audiences fluctuate from week to week, the shows have raised a fair amount of money via their “virtual collection plate,” and he believes the medium has room to grow.

“I do think the market is a little saturated…but the more you can make your streams efficient and look good and sound good, the more people will come back,” Howard says.

Whatever the role of livestreams going forward, Howard says COVID has changed his approach to music in serious ways. He had been considering doing more solo work prior to the pandemic, and the new normal has accelerated his plans.

“I noticed that, for years, I was writing with horn…and bass parts in mind,” he says. “But now I’m here with my acoustic guitar, feeling contemplative. It seems to lend itself to more singer-songwriter type stuff. I definitely have a solo album in me. We will see.“

The Judy Chops won’t be going anywhere, either. The band recently wrapped a new four-song EP, recording the final vocals on February 6 at Poetown Music with Gordon Davies. Howard expects the album to drop “in the next couple months.” The tracks may have been part of a full-length record if not for the pandemic, Howard says, but he and his bandmates decided not to push things and let the music come as the spirit moved them.
“We have nothing but time,” he says.

From the ground up: While enjoying major-label success, Illiterate Light stays connected to its roots

Nearly a decade ago, a traveling troupe of musicians was midway through its set at the now-demolished Random Row Books in Charlottesville when the power went out. While darkness settled over the crowd, the band continued its performance undeterred, with no noticeable change in sound. That’s because the group’s set-up was running on a bike-powered generator: With one member pedaling a bicycle on a generator stand, a small PA system kept functioning. From the darkness sprang Charlottesville’s next big thing: Illiterate Light.

That night at Random Row, JMU alums Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran were playing in Money Cannot Be Eaten, one of a handful of socially oriented bands cycling around the state together under the heading of Petrol-Free Jubilee.

In 2015, Gorman and Cochran set off on a new project, the rock band Illiterate Light (the name is taken from a line in the Wilco song “Theologians”). Since then, the pair has toured widely, developed a devoted following, and signed a deal with a major label. But they still find themselves recalling those foundational days.

Petrol-Free Jubilee “really pushed Jeff and I to think like, alright, there’s definitely big-picture solutions that we [don’t] know how to contribute to yet,” says Cochran. “But diving in with a bunch of friends and biking around Virginia to talk about environmentalism and sing songs was something we could get into.”

The band’s experience with the jubilee, along with other volunteerism, directly informed the ethos of Illiterate Light, establishing community building and social consciousness as guiding tenets for its musical output.

In their early days, during junior and senior year, Cochran was on the medical track at JMU and worked as an EMT.

“So much of the pain that I was seeing in the ambulance and the runs we were going on were people with food-based illness,” he says. “We were going to the same neighborhoods picking up the same people. It was all food-related and it was addiction-related and it weighed heavily on my spirit to know that there was this bigger problem.”

In response, Cochran and Gorman helped out at a local nonprofit, Our Community Place. The center operated as a soup kitchen and offered resources for those who were formerly incarcerated, or facing homelessness or addiction. There, the duo connected with area farmers, which inspired them to do an organic agricultural internship. After graduation, they continued to grow produce and sold it at the farmers’ market and co-op. They’d often bring hoards of potatoes, onions, and tomatoes door to door, offering them to nearby restaurants.

“It was really a big part of integrating so deeply into the community here,” Gorman says. “We [were] playing music at night and then living this totally different lifestyle during the day.”

The main venue they played was the Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant whose basement served as a club. Opened by the Arefaine family, who immigrated to the United States in the wake of the Ethiopian civil war, the Blue Nile was a counter-cultural hub.

“The Nile was the only place that really was permissive to outsider music—alternative, punk, metal, hip-hop—being played live in their facility,” says former bar manager Paul Somers. “That really changed the music scene in Harrisonburg.”

Somers took over in 2014 and reopened as The Golden Pony the following spring. Gorman and Cochran helped Somers book and promote shows—and even created a Harrisonburg guidebook for touring bands rolling through town.

“It showcases where their hearts are when it comes to live music, you know, it’s not just about them,” Somers says. “It’s about the whole scene and the larger scheme of bands that they see and know and believe in, and think that other people should appreciate.”

The duo took it a step further by booking The Golden Pony as Illiterate Light’s home base and doing several shows a year at the venue. After extensive touring across the United States, the band had a reputation for its high-energy performances and unusual setup, so it wasn’t uncommon for these shows to sell out.

“It’s always cool to put on a show with them because we know it’s going to be this huge, utterly cathartic rock and roll,” says Somers. “Every- one’s just moving and dancing and surging with the music.”

Jeff Gorman and Jake Cochran push positivity through raucous tunes and a holistic approach to their lives as musicians, supporting big-picture solutions through volunteerism, environmentalism, and mentoring. Image: Joey Wharton

Magical musical universe

Gorman sings lead vocals and plays guitar and a “foot bass.”

“There’s some tap dancing that’s going on; I’m actually hitting a big keyboard with my feet as we play and then I run that through its own bass,” he says. “It’s its own little universe that I’ve created.”

Meanwhile, Cochran plays a stand-up drum kit, taking a normal drum kit and raising it up higher. He stands on his left leg and plays the kick drum with his right foot.

“It started out as a very visual change. Jeff and I, as two people, really want to be able to interact. The way I decided to do that was to bring the drum kit up front and one time I just tried kicking the stool out and standing up,” Cochran says. “It was a fun way to trade energy and we set up right on the edge of the stage so it’s in your face—and drums are very rarely that forward.”

After establishing a signature live sound, the duo had to figure out how to harness that same energy in the studio. Richmond artist Charlie Glenn (The Trillions, Palm Palm) connected them with Adrian Olsen, producer and owner of Montrose Recording in Richmond, and they set to work on Illiterate Light’s first full-length LP.

“The main critique I had heard coming into recording Illiterate Light was that they sounded massive live, but the recordings they had done up to that point didn’t represent the sound they had developed live,” Olsen recalls. “So my approach was to have them play live in the studio and go for as much of a maximalist approach as possible—lots of room mics and amps…Jeff usually gets a pretty epic pedalboard going with I’d say upwards of 40 pedals at his feet if I had to guess.”

The duo’s work with Glenn and Olsen caught the attention of another stalwart on the Richmond scene—Tyler Williams. While Williams might be best known as the drummer for The Head and the Heart, he’s also worked with Lucy Dacus and was seeking another local project to champion, so he checked out one of the duo’s shows at the Richmond venue The Camel.

“I immediately was taken by the energy on stage when I walked into The Camel,” says Williams. “It just felt like there was like an electricity in the room…that’s the first sign when you know that something is happening with a music artist. You feel it in the room. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever felt to magic.”

As the band propelled forward, Williams took off with them in a management capacity. It wasn’t long before major labels came knocking, and Illiterate Light signed to Atlantic, releasing its self-titled label debut last year.

Illiterate Light’s self-titled debut was released in October 2019 by Atlantic Records, further propelling the Harrisonburg duo from house band at The Golden Pony into the national spotlight. Image: Joey Wharton

Shining their light

In 2020, the band launched an ongoing series that captures live performances from past shows called “In the Moment: Illiterate Light Live.” One of the series’ most featured venues is The Golden Pony. This nod to Harrisonburg isn’t the only way Gorman and Cochran continue to acknowledge the community that made them.

Professor Joseph “Ojo” Taylor remembers Gorman as a student in the music industry program at JMU.

“My songwriting class is where we get our hands dirty, you know, get under the hood and really analyze a lot of songs,” Taylor explains. “[Gorman] stood out to me initially because he just had a depth and an interest and passion for this that a lot of students don’t have right away.”

Gorman and Cochran keep in touch with Taylor, guesting during class workshops, sharing what they’re working on, giving students an insight into life as a nationally touring band. Before COVID-19, the duo would often invite students to shows or offer mentorship over a cup of coffee.

“The way that they create community and support their community is the thread that binds their whole vision together,” says Williams. “You know, we are on a major [record] label, but we still use the same video- graphers from Harrisonburg that have always made their videos…Virginia makes them who they are and they want to give back.”