Fathead
Strikes Again
Fathead members (clockwise from top left)
Chuck Keeping, Omar Tunnoch, Al Lerman, John
Mays and Teddy Leonard are beaming with pride at the the birth of
their new baby, First Class Riff-Raff, to be unveiled at the Silver Dollar on June 4 at 7:00 p.m
Chuck Keeping, a young drummer from Newfoundland with a background mainly in rock and alternative music, joined Fathead last August and has been getting his blues education from his new bandmates ever since.
His bandmates, harp and sax player Al Lerman, lead vocalist John Mays, bassist Omar Tunnoch and guitarist Teddy Leonard have a whopping 150 years of musical experience among them.
Keeping, 22, the youngest in Fathead, whose members range in age up to the soulful-voiced 62-year-old Mays, says he's learned a lot playing with the seasoned professionals in the band.
"Everyone has their own approach and ideas when playing blues and R&B. They're teaching me how the music should be played. They've probably taught me more about drums than I've known in the past."
And Keeping did know something about playing drums before taking the Fathead chair. His blues experience before joining Fathead includes a stint playing with London, Ontario's Chris Chown Band. Along with rock and alternative music, Keeping says he's played everything, including jazz. At 14, he began touring Newfoundland bars as the drummer with his guitarist father, leaving home at 17 to pursue music studies in London.
Keeping says playing on Fathead's latest Electro-Fi CD, First Class Riff-Raff, was a walk in the park because the band was well prepared and the guys were easy to work with and relaxed. Although he didn't do any songwriting on Riff-Raff, his input was welcomed when it came to arrangements. "When you're playing with a bunch of musicians like Fathead, it makes things a lot easier."
Al Lerman agrees that the Riff-Raff recording sessions, in September 2001 and March 2002 at Liquid, went smoothly and adds that he enjoyed himself, too, because he trusted his co-producer Alec Fraser. "We had so much confidence with Alec behind the board we could just play," he says. "We didn't worry about the drums sounding good or the bass having enough bottom."
Fathead brought in Michael Fonfara on piano and Hammond B3 and Denis Keldie on B3 as overdub on most of Riff-Raff's tracks. "They're both such great players," Lerman says. "As soon as you point them in the direction you want them to go, they go there."
First Class Riff-Raff, Fathead's fourth CD, is a mix of original blues and R&B written by Lerman, Mays, Tunnoch and Leonard. Lead vocalist Mays' gospel roots influence the band's songwriting, Lerman says.
As with the band's previous recordings, individual band members wrote the songs and then brought them to the band for performance. "When the band plays a song, it takes on a certain life of its own," Lerman says. "A lot of the songs we were playing live and we went back to the drawing board. We changed the groove and chords and made them right."
A prolific songwriter, Lerman gets credit for seven of the CD's twelve tracks, including the title song, "First Class Riff-Raff", a blues with biting lyrics about a certain kind of person. "I've known people like that as I've seen different people hanging around," he says. "The whole point is that clothes and money don't necessarily make the man, the same with a woman."
Lerman's favourite song on Riff-Raff, "musically and emotionally," he says, is Omar Tunnoch's beautiful R&B tinged Just Another Day, dedicated to the late singer Tony Flaim.
Fathead perform the songs from their blistering new CD, First Class Riff-Raff, at a record release party at the Silver Dollar on June 4, starting at 7:00 p.m.
This summer, the band appears at Toronto's Beaches International Jazz Festival, Harbourfront's Labatt's Blues Festival, the Ottawa Blues Festival, Quebec's Victoriaville Blues Festival and British Columbia's Salmon Arm Roots & Blues Festival.
Since Fathead was formed by Lerman in 1994, the band has received many rave reviews for their performances, along with critical acclaim for their first three recordings, the self-titled Fathead (1995), Blues Weather (1998), which won a 1999 Juno, and Where's Your Head At (2000). Fathead has won Jazz Report's Blues Group Of The Year Award and two Maple Blues Awards for Electric Act Of The Year.
The band has a distinctive ensemble sound, "crowd-pleasing stuff with plenty of snap, crackle and punch," wrote Geoff Chapman in the Toronto Star.
Blues is the main ingredient of the Fathead sound, combined with elements of R&B, soul and funk, but Lerman says the band's influences extend to rock, country and even pop, the music he listened to growing up in Toronto.
A fellow musician, The Band's Levon Helm, has called Fathead "the best band I've heard in a long while."
First Class Riff Raff is available at retailers across Canada. It can be purchased from the band at their record release party at the Silver Dollar June 4 or ordered through Electro-Fi's Web site at www.electrofi.com. Fathead's Web site address is www.wezel.com/fathead.
- Ruth Schweitzer