Keller Williams and More Than a Little
Those who’ve followed Keller Williams’ recording career to date know that he has given each of his albums a single-word title: Laugh, Buzz, Dance, Home, Loop, Odd, etc. Each title serves not only as a concise summation of the concept guiding the particular project but also as another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that is Keller Williams. Grass, for example, is a bluegrass recording, cut with the husband-wife duo the Keels. Stage is a live album and Dream the end product of a wish list: Keller collaborating with some of his greatest musical heroes.
The naming trend has continued with 2010’s Thief and Kids, respectively a set of cover songs and Williams’ first children’s record. What all of the titles reveal, when taken together, is an artist of great stylistic breadth and infinite imagination, a singer, songwriter and musician, always on a quest for the new. Keller Williams has never followed the prescribed path laid out by the conventional music business but rather one of his own making. It’s a path that has served him well.
Since he first appeared on the scene in the early ’90s, Williams has defined the term independent artist. And his recordings tell only half the story. Keller built his reputation initially on his engaging live performances, no two of which are ever alike. For most of his career he has performed as a one-man band—his stage shows are constructed around Keller singing his compositions and choice cover songs while accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar connected to a Gibson Echoplex delay system that allows him to simulate a full band. That approach, Williams explains, was derived from “hours of playing solo with just a guitar and a microphone, and then wanting to go down different avenues musically. I couldn’t afford humans and didn’t want to step into the cheesy world of automated sequencers where you hit a button and the whole band starts to play, then you’ve got to solo along or sing on top of it. I wanted something more organic yet with a dance groove that I could create myself.”
Williams’ solo live shows—and his ability to improvise to his determinedly quirky tunes despite the absence of an actual band—quickly became the stuff of legend, and his audience grew exponentially when word spread about this exciting, unpredictable performer. Once he began releasing recordings, starting with 1994’s Freek, Williams was embraced by an even wider community of music fans, particularly the jam band crowd. While his live gigs have largely been solo affairs, Williams has nearly always used his albums as a forum for collaborations with fellow musicians. An alliance with The String Cheese Incident on 1999’s Breathe marked Williams’ first release on the band’s label SCI Fidelity Records, an imprint he still partners with today for recordings. Dream, Keller’s 2007 release, found him in the company of such iconic musicians as the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, banjo master Béla Fleck, bass great Victor Wooten and many others.
“That album took, from start to release time,” says Williams, “about three years. The object was to get people that I admire musically to play my stuff, so when I’m old I can crank this album in my pimped-out golf cart and have something that I’m really proud of. I was going for the historical effect for my own personal listening pleasure.
“Each record,” he continues, “is a little snapshot of history. I like to think of it as a period piece for an artist. Each record is a little bit different but all of them have some kind of common thread, which is my musical ability as far as I can take it. They each show how I progress with age. I enjoy making records. In some people’s eyes, they’re a dying breed, but I’m very passionate about it. They document where my head is at that time in my career and where I am in my songwriting.”
Williams’ story begins in Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C. There he was exposed to a wide variety of music at an early age, starting with country and bluegrass and working his way up through hip-hop and go-go, a brand of funk particular to that part of the country. Once he began playing guitar, Williams’ sphere expanded to what he calls “the post-pseudo-skateboarder punk-rock rebellious type of thing, Black Flag and Sex Pistols and Ramones, Dead Kennedys, things like that. That slid into the more melodic college rock, like the Cure and the Cult, the Smiths, R.E.M.’s first five or six records.”
Then came the Grateful Dead, a seminal influence on Williams’ own music. “I studied and learned their music and went to the shows,” he says, adding that the impact of Jerry Garcia on his attitude toward music remains incalculable. Another major influence was Michael Hedges, the late virtuoso acoustic guitarist. “He was really excelling in a whole different world from what I knew,” says Williams.
After relocating to Colorado, further exposure to bluegrass music and progressive acoustic artists such as Béla Fleck and the Flecktones also had a major impression on Williams. As he began to develop his own distinctive compositional and performing style, Williams incorporated all of the lessons he’d learned from the long list of artists who’d found their way into his world, then filtered their music through his own experiences until something wholly unique emerged. The list of artists whose music he has covered either in concert or on his recordings constitutes a mind-blowing spread: songs originally performed by everyone from Pink Floyd and Ozzy Osbourne to Ani DiFranco and old-school rappers the Sugar Hill Gang!
When he first started out, Williams played in regional bands but also performed as a solo artist, “me sitting on a stool playing covers, like a happy hour situation,” he says. “I’d get dinner and maybe tips. There were bands in high school and in college. But it turned out I could get the same money playing solo that I was getting with the band. Around that time I was also doing temporary jobs like landscaping, and I was making the same amount playing music as I was shoveling mulch and digging up weeds for eight hours in the summertime at minimum wage. So it seemed like the obvious choice was to play music. I started to work and over the years I incorporated more technology. The looping thing started to happen and tickets were sold and people came to shows, so there wasn’t any reason to fix something that wasn’t broken.”
What Williams calls “the looping thing” is actually a big part of what has made him such a compelling live performer. “Basically, I have these machines that are essentially delay units,” he explains. “What I do is step on a button and sing or play something. Then I step on the same button in time and it repeats what I just played or sang. Once that initial loop is created, I can layer on a bass line or a drum line and then have this layer that I just created in front of an audience that I could sing over and solo over. Nothing is pre-recorded. Everything is created onstage in front of the audience.”
If it sounds complicated, it is: but the basic thrust is that the technology has allowed Williams to go out on tour week after week, year after year, and play music by himself—without limiting his sound to what we most often associate with the solo singer-songwriter: a guy strumming a guitar and singing. With his arsenal of tech toys, Williams can expand his reach onstage by, in essence, jamming with himself.
But he has, on several occasions, also performed with real bands. The summer of 2010 found Keller sharing a bus with two of his biggest heroes, former Grateful Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, as a member of their powerhouse assemblage the Rhythm Devils. “That was a very surreal experience,” Williams says. “We rehearsed for a few days and then we were on a bus with 12 people, two of them being the original drummers from the Grateful Dead.” On that tour, Williams was put in the enviable position of singing many songs from the Grateful Dead catalog for audiences that loved every minute of it.
Williams has also toured as part of a string trio with singer/guitarist Larry Keel and his wife, singer/bassist Jenny Keel, hitting key stops on the bluegrass festival circuit. And he has a band of his own, with Keller on rhythm guitar and vocals, Jeff Sipe on drums, Keith Moseley on bass and Gibb Droll on lead guitar. They toured throughout the spring of 2007 to the fall of 2008, and subsequently released a double live record with a companion DVD. In true Keller Williams fashion, it’s called Live.
If it seems as if this is a man who never stops, that would be about right. Having already released the amusingly titled Thief—his all-covers project with the Keels—early in 2010, Williams was getting ready to release Kids, his sixteenth album, in the fall. A father of two himself, Williams was, of course, inspired by his own offspring but, he says, some of the songs were written before his children were born. “When Not For Kids Only by Jerry Garcia and David Grisman came out, I knew that there was hope for me with kids music,” he says. “I was really attached to that record.” The songwriting for Kids, Keller says, “was not necessarily singing to the kids. A lot of it was me singing from the perspective of the kids. That was my plan, to get on their wavelength, on their level, and be one of them, so it’s kind of like one of their friends singing to them.”
The tracks, with titles like “Car Seat,” “Because I Said So,” “Mama Tooted” and “Taking a Bath,” are witty, catchy and never speak down to the intended audience. All of them will resonate with any parent as well as the little ones. “I was thinking not only of the kid getting it but also of the parents having to listen to it,” Williams says. “That played a large role in the writing of this record. I’ve been in the place of the parent having to sit through something the kid loves but I’m not so into. And the music, of course, had to be light and positive but still organic and not too far away from where my musical head is. This record’s not a compromise from what I normally do.” To coincide with the release of Kids, Williams planned several live dates as a touring member of the Yo Gabba Gabba! tour—and if you have no idea what that is or think it’s a Ramones cover band, you probably don’t have young kids of your own.
As if all of this doesn’t keep him busy enough, Keller’s thirst for music of all kinds has also led him to the world of radio. For the past several years he has hosted Keller’s Cellar, a weekly syndicated program available on both terrestrial stations and online at www.kellerwilliams.net. Williams describes the show as “a self-indulgent, hour-long narrated mix tape of stuff I’m into. It’s rule-less except for what the FCC says we can’t do. I don’t play contemporary country music. I don’t play contemporary Christian music—however, there is possibly some old gospel. I don’t play opera. Everything else is fair. World music from all around—African music from all the countries, jazz, funk, reggae, techno, chill, lounge, lounge singers, rub-a-dub, dancehall. I pretty much stay away from smooth jazz. It’s definitely a fun outlet for me. I’m trying to do something different.”
Something different. That, we can assume, is how it will always be with Keller Williams.
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Jon Wayne & the Pain
If Lee Scratch Perry and Deadmau5 died, went to heaven, and recorded an album with Bradley Nowell and Jerry Garcia, they’d end up with something like Jon Wayne and The Pain’s new full length album “Surrender”. In addition to the Minneapolis trio’s signature sound of roots infused Reggae Rock, their latest release adds a bold fusion of Jam and EDM into the fold.
The trio’s previous album “Follow Through” for the most part only teases with a few subtle, dark electronic elements but stays true to the roots infused Reggae Rock sound that could be described as an ideal poolside soundtrack. Until the release of “Surrender”, their sometimes sinister combination of organic drums and guitar with electronic bass and synths could only be heard if fans could catch the band’s live act in clubs and festivals around the U.S. or sift through bootleg uploads on Youtube. Their third full length album is full of electronic instrumentals that build from entrasic dub loops (wait for the drop) then explode into high energy party anthems with intense vocals and powerful acoustic drums.
Pushing boundaries further, Jon Wayne and The Pain inject Roots, Jam, and Ska into the mix with sounds that band members Jon, Chuckie, and Teeto have grown to love while playing alongside some of the most influential musicians in the festival scene. Complete with a sanctioned Grateful Dead cover and a festie-fan shout out track “Festival Friends”, JWP pays tribute to the Jam scene in a big way. Keeping in tune with the sound that made fans rush to see Jon Wayne and The Pain since the band’s early days, heartfelt Reggae-Rock tunes are still a staple in the diverse collection of songs that make up “Surrender”
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