Just down the street from Baby Rosebud accorganist Courtney Lain’s place of employment, there is a movie filming about the corporate takeover of a small mom and pop cereal store called Flakes. The fact that Lain’s place of employment, the small, independently owned and community minded coffee shop Z’otz, is being evicted over a dispute with its landlord, causing Lain to lose her day job right after the release of Baby Rosebud’s latest album, Shipwreck, makes for a semi-coherent parallel—something about musicians struggling to make art in a world that doesn’t always reward artistic merit.
“I think that in your life of being a musician, it kind of seems like you have to have your thing on the side that you do,” says Lain. “I’ve been really depressed lately with this place shutting down. I’ve worked hard here for a year to be able to put out our album and support myself as a musician. Here’s what I get after I record: nowhere to live and no job to work at. This is my seven years of hard work in New Orleans.”
"The two piece Baby Rosebud, which also includes drummer Lauren Dinkler, got together about six years ago, in 1999. Lain and Dinkler worked together in a “shitty tourist place” when Lain got asked to play a show at the Spellcaster Lodge.
“I didn’t want to do it alone, so [Quintron] suggested I ask Lauren to do it with me. She played drums with Fireball Rocket at the time. We just kind of clicked and began writing music together,” says Lain. Baby Rosebud is an equal collaboration between both Dinkler and Lain, with both contributing to the songwriting process. “A lot of times, it’s about coming up with beats. Most of the time we sit around and come up with stuff together, compare the parts we’ve written and see how they work together. It’s always a trick to get it to sound full and interesting enough so that it works.” The resultant circus exotica is dark and minimalist with an Eastern European flair—what one might expect to hear in an imaginary Hungarian cabaret. That kind of atmospheric music is not exactly typical New Orleans fare, which may be why they have flown under the critical radar.
“It’s not necessarily a big party thing. It’s more like soundtrack music. It’s always been our goal to convey a feeling—not like emo, but a sense of something. A change, I guess,” says Lain. Despite their minimalist approach, Lain and Dinkler are able to convey that emotion through their instrumentation—their use of syncopated rhythms and, of course the signature accorgan. The accorgan is a rare, analogue cross between an accordion and an electronic organ made by the Italian company Elka.
“The mix of acoustic and electronic allows for a wide range of tones and sounds,” says Lain, who received the accorgan as a gift shortly before getting together with Dinkler. “It’s kind of a tricky instrument, and it’s got a lot of complicated circuitry. It’s put together in a funny way.” The 20 to 30-year_old instrument, so vital to Baby Rosebud’s unique sound, does tend to break—owing to climate and age—necessitating a trip to the only person Lain knows who can fix the instrument in Florida. “It broke during the recording of our last record. My brass buttons kept falling off. At one point, I had to break it open and do surgery on it and try to limp through the recording session. We ended up having to break up the recording of Shipwreck into two parts.” The new album, Baby Rosebud’s second, is a collection of nine originals recorded at House of 1000hz by Andrew Gilchrist. In a master stroke of irony, the recording process was indirectly funded by the closing of Lain and Dinkler’s former employer, El Matador.
“[El Matador owner] Rio [Hackford] always supported us. We played there a lot in addition to working there. We played the closing of El Matador with Quintron, and that gave us a lot of money to fund the recording. That was a good show for us, but it was also a sad show. We got a burst of money at the right time to get the album done professionally, but it was like saying goodbye to an era,” says Lain, who, despite ups and downs, is quick to point out that it isn’t as grim as it sounds.
“It’s hard, because being in a band is so much effort and so much work that it sometimes seems completely fruitless. Then you get caught and torn by your personal life, and it doesn’t seem like it’s worth all the effort… but taking a break from it helped us realize how important this is and that there is an audience of people who support us and care about what we do. It makes it easier when you feel like you have that.”
Baby Rosebud is performing at the Circle Bar Sunday, February 6, and on Saturday, February 26, with Quintron as part of a Rhinestone Records Party.
FATALISM
As every Mardi Gras is but an exercise in culturally relevant excess, a laundry list of show plugs probably won’t do the casual reader any good. After all, space doesn’t permit me to outdo our listings section, you probably won’t stick to your plans and the other OffBeat columns do a decent job in their respective genres.
Nevertheless, I feel obliged to mention one event that has eluded our crack team of music nerds. The Big Top, New Orleans’ foremost (only?) non profit art gallery/performance space/music venue/bar/yoga studio, will play host to the Third Annual Femme Fatale Ball, entitled “Circus Magickus: Wild, Weird and Wonderful” on Friday, February 4. The Ball, in keeping with the Big Top’s circus-like multi-tasking ability, will feature performance and visual art as well music. At 10:30, right after the parades, the Harlequin Harlots drum ‘n’ dance corps will march crowds two convenient blocks back to the gallery where revelers will find fire breathers, rolling Elvi (which I can only assume means more than one Elvis on skates) and carny food. Inside, trapeze artists, dancers and a costume show will share the stage with all-girl hard rock acts Grown Up Wrongs, Manwitch and Pink Slip. Artists Tina Girouard, Sean Yseult, Coral Lambert, Michele Elmore, Lateefah Wright, Rachelle O’Brien, Michele Lacayo and Cree McCree will have their art on display through February. Tickets are $10 with costume or $15 without costume.
IN EXCESS
So Mark Burnett, the man who brought us Survivor and the Apprentice, is coming to town to audition people for a new reality show tentatively titled Rock Star that pits contestants in a Big Brother meets American Idol-esque showdown for lead singer of late ’80s new wave heavyweights INXS (whose lead singer and front man, Michael Hutchence, hung himself in the wake of the band’s post-grunge era popular decline) on February 14and 15 at Tipitina’s, compelling me to point out the absurdity of holding auditions to replace a man rumored to have died from autoerotic asphyxiation on Valentine’s Day in the form of one gigantic run on sentence. For more information, go to www.inxsrockstar.com.
EXPORTING OUR CULTURE
If perchance you catch this in time, the affable, all-beef centric website www.watchmeeatahotdog.com is hosting a benefit concert for New Orleans punk rock ‘n’ roll bands Die Rötzz and Kajun SS (featuring King Louie) Arctic Shatter European tour at the Circle Bar on February 1. The bill also features Atlanta bands the Carbonas and Beat Beat Beat. God help us if the continentals just don’t get it.
LAST WORDS
Have an event coming up? An album coming out? Unsubstantiated rumors? Email me at [email protected]. I’ll print anything I find entertaining.
