Preview: Ragged Glory - A Tribute to Neil Young
Ragged Glory plays tonight at the Velvet Lounge.
Can’t afford to pay $100 for a cheap seat at Neil Young’s upcoming DAR stop in November? You’re in luck. During our last chat with Ryan Walker from The Beanstalk Library, we found out he also put together a Neil Young cover band a few years back. They call themselves Ragged Glory, and the lineup plays something like a who’s who of up-and-coming local bands: Brian Kent (of the Beanstalk Library) on guitar and vocals, Dave Eelman on guitar and vocals, Walker on still more guitar and vocals, Dallas Hudgens on bass, and John Thayer (Exit Clov) on drums. On top of that, Tom Hnatow of These United States will play some pedal steel and join a whole slew of other guests.
The band’s getting back together tonight for the release of bassist (and author) Dallas Hudgens’s new book, Season of Gene. The book is, in Hudgeons’s own words, “about a guy whose life revolves around video games, painkillers, and his Friday night baseball league”, and it’s already receiving good reviews – Kirkus called it “a nourishing slice of Americana, expletives and all." Sounds like Neil himself might even enjoy it.
The whole shindig is going down at Velvet Lounge, and Hudgens is promising free copies of the book and cupcakes. Walker took a few minutes to chat with us about Neil Young, ticket prices for his upcoming show, and playing at pool parties.
How did this whole project come about?
In 2002, my friend Dave, also a big Neil fan, had gotten some PA equipment in his basement and asked me if I wanted to come over and just jam for fun. His friend, writer and bassist-on-the-side Dallas, came over as well and we started working up some stuff, mostly Neil songs, but some tunes by Dylan and other similar artists. We got a gig playing at a friend's party and rounded up a couple of others to fill out the lineup. As we were getting ready to play, the host of the party asked how she should introduce us. I happened to glance at a Neil Young CD booklet that someone was using as a lyric sheet and just told her the title of the record, Ragged Glory. It stuck.
We played a lot of shows over the next several years, some much more bizarre than others, at parties and occasionally at bars in Northern Virginia, with different lineups. Once Beanstalk started taking more of our time we couldn't really do it anymore, so Ragged Glory hasn't played in over a year. But Dallas and I still played together in different settings and remained great friends and when he got ready to publish Season of Gene, we decided it would be a good time to get this band back together and play to celebrate.
I'm pumped about the lineup for this show. Dave moved back to town, so now we have three guitars on some tunes. Also, some musicians I've met over the last couple of years through the scene are involved. John Thayer from Exit Clov is playing drums and Tom Hnatow, who plays with a handful of bands including Beanstalk and These United States, is on pedal steel for some of the show. We've also got a great harmonica player named Dave Foerter and our friends Natalie Tedder and Keli Burke on sultry backing vocals for a handful of songs. I'm also excited to be playing a place that sounds as great as Velvet Lounge, as opposed to lugging our PA around and setting up by someone's pool.
Why a Neil Young cover band?
His songs are soooo great but easy to play, so this band involves a lot of payoff for a pretty little amount of work. Toward the end of our run last year, we started getting pretty ambitious, learning "Don't Fear The Reaper" and stuff from Dark Side of The Moon for a Halloween show and so forth, which started making the band feel like more of a chore sometimes; for this show (and most likely any future shows) we're just doing Neil. There are some non-Neil songs we used to play that I kind of miss, but for the most part it's really better this way. Rehearsals have been really fun and relaxed. Dave's got a great Neil voice, so he's sharing some vocal duties, which takes even more of a load off of me. It's just a blast to kick back and play this stuff.
Neil's coming to town in November. Are any of you all planning to go?
Yeah, for sure. Brian, Dallas, Dave, and I are all planning on it. We were joking about how much it would have sucked if his show had been announced for the same night as the Ragged Glory show. I'm really excited about the forthcoming album. The song "Ordinary People," which you can hear online, is just transcendent.
How do you feel about the ticket prices?
I'm disappointed that they're so high. I'm probably gonna just get the cheapest ones. Neil shows didn't used to be so expensive, though I guess it's still nothing compared to an act like the Stones or McCartney. I don't really judge; I know very little about how tickets and ticket prices work at that level. But it's disappointing because there are a lot of people who'd really like to see Neil but just can't swing that for a ticket.
Who's the biggest Neil Young fan in the group? How did you first get into his stuff?
Everyone who knows me at all knows that Neil is one of my biggest heroes. I heard "Cinnamon Girl" and "Southern Man" on the classic rock station when I was in junior high and bought Decade. At that time, Neil was having kind of a renaissance, playing with Pearl Jam, being called "Godfather of Grunge," etc. My dad took me to see Neil with Crazy Horse in '96 and I was blown away. I started buying more of his records and just got hooked. He hasn't made one single musical/career decision in 40 years, based on what was hip, what was selling, or what anyone else thought he should do, yet he's reaped every reward any artist could hope for. There's something so remarkably compelling about that. We pay tribute to that ethic with our motto: "Giving The People What We Want."
All of the guys in the core group are huge, huge Neil fans, but the fact that Everybody's Rockin' can be found in my record collection may give me the edge.
What are your favorite tunes of his?
Even though Ragged Glory hews closer to the noisy guitar side of Neil's work, I really love just about everything he's done. Tonight's The Night is my favorite, but almost every album he put out from '69 to '79 is a hands down masterpiece, and there are other masterpieces scattered throughout the more recent years, not the least of which is our namesake. Picking favorite Neil tunes is virtually impossible, there are so many. I will say that one of my favorite Neil songs that most people don't know is a song on American Stars n' Bars called "Bite The Bullet," and I'm excited to finally be playing it for this show.
What's it like playing with a cover band vs. playing with your real band?
Well, in our particular situation I think there's a lot less pressure involved with Ragged Glory, it's just for fun. But it's not like we're trying to dress and act like the musicians we're covering; I can't really speak for these guys whose entire careers consist of impersonating Guns n' Roses or The Doors or whatever. There’s not the same level of fulfillment that comes with performing your own songs and having people respond to them, but since I have The Beanstalk Library for that, I don't need to get anything out of Ragged Glory other than having fun playing music that I'm a fan of.
Do any of you do these covers with your other groups?
Beanstalk has played "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," "Down By The River," and "Cortez The Killer," and I've played some others in my solo shows. A song we used to play in Ragged Glory, but which isn't in the list for this show, is "Revolution Blues" from On The Beach; we've been talking about working that up in Beanstalk. Surprisingly, dark songs in minor keys about Charles Manson aren't what people want to hear at pool parties.