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48Straight music: The Devil Makes Three |
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Written by Paul Raymore
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Tuesday, 05 February 2008 |
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Devil Makes Three has been setting the San Francisco Bay Area ablaze with their hyper driven version of old-time music. The trio’s sound combines bluegrass, primitive country music, folk, rockabilly, Piedmont blues and ragtime, played with a blazing post-punk attack.
Tahoe World Web Editor Paul Raymore conducted this Q&A session via e-mail last week with Pete Bernhard, frontman for The Devil Makes Three, to preview their performance at the 48Straight weekend.
Tahoe World: You guys have a lot more tattoos than your typical old-timey band. In your own words, how would you describe The Devil Makes Three’s sound?
Pete Bernhard: Our sound is the bastard child of all the music we collectively love.
TW: What inspired you to start playing ragtimey/country/bluesy/folky/rockabilly/whatever-you-want-to-call-it music?
PB: Cooper and I both loved old music when we were young and our parents had folk and blues music in their record collections.
TW: What inspires you to write songs? Any perennial topics or does it change from song to song?
PB: Our songs our inspired by life in general — things that happen, places we break down, people we know — all that good stuff.
TW: What are The Devil Makes Three concerts like? How are your live shows different from your studio recordings?
PB: People dance at our shows and yell and usually break things by accident. Our live show is faster and louder than our records.
TW: What makes for a great crowd to play for?
PB: High energy, people being there to make it a good time, not just be entertained.
TW: Have you played the Tahoe area before? When? Where?
PB: The Crystal Bay Casino some. Our earnings were lost in gambling right after the show.
TW: Anything else you’d like to say in anticipation of your Feb. 8 show?
PB: Come one, come all!
Band bio from Web site (www.thedevilmakesthree.com)
With a slightly punky perspective on vintage American blues, The Devil Makes Three is a breath of fresh musical air. Laced with elements of ragtime, country, folk and rockabilly, the critically praised, drummer-less trio — consisting of guitarist/frontman Pete Bernhard, stand-up bassist Lucia Turino and guitarist Cooper McBean — brings forth a genuine approach to acoustic music that is deeply steeped in rhythm.
“The rhythm is what our band is about,” Bernard enthuses. “We write with rhythm and dancing in mind.”
Launched with the “The Plank,” an ode to meeting one’s maker, The DMT’s infectious amalgam of styles talks the talk and it walks the walk right out of the starting gate. From the outfit’s badass, back-porch blues ode “Ten Feet Tall” — which is alive with three-part harmonies — to “Shades,” a wry look at barstool hugging daytime drunks, Pete, Lucia and Cooper create music that is pleasingly dissimilar to most other bands in modern music.
“I grew up listening to a lot of old blues music when I was young,” explains Pete, who was raised in rural Vermont and first befriended McBean in the eighth grade. “He was the only person I knew who was into the same style, although he leaned more toward the country side of things. When we started out playing, we were doing punk and rock.”
Fast forward a decade as The Devil Makes Three took shape in Santa Cruz, California. Pete moved west right out of high school with Cooper soon following suit. After first settling Olympia, Washington and playing in an ill-fated band, McBean — who by now had the name of his home state tattooed across his neck — again joined musical forces with Bernhard. In turn, they later teamed with New Hampshire-native and U.C. Santa Cruz attendee Lucia. A spiritual fit, her enthusiasm made up of for her initial lack of ability.
“Lucia had always wanted to play bass,” says Pete. “Cooper and I had already rented a stand-up bass for the group. And the main reason we were really excited about letting her give it a shot was because she didn’t know how to do anything we didn’t want her to do. And our music is simple, so the last thing that we wanted was someone who was overplaying for fear it would ruin the songs. She wound up learning really quickly, and it wasn’t long before she surpassed us.”
With the goal of being “an acoustic band but to play our shows like a rock show,” the band changed notions of what acoustic music could be.
“A lot of it is really calm, and performances are sort of a ‘sit down, don’t talk, don’t move’ kind of an event,” Pete says. “Thinking back to the old blues, ragtime and jug band music, it was house music, party music. That was what we wanted to do. And there really aren’t any other bands doing that.”
While McBean takes inspiration from folk fixture The Reverend Gary Davis, Doc Watson and axe-wielding guitar gods The F***ing Champs, and Turino counts Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, The Pixies and Gillian Welch, Bernhard was heavily swayed by the art of Lightnin’ Hopkins, the aforementioned Dylan, Tom Waits and Robert Johnson. The end result is genuine blues music that thrives as much in a live setting as it does on The Devil Makes Three.
“We play mainly rock venues where it’s not seated,” Pete explains. “Everybody dances. And except for the instrumentation and the fact that we don’t have a drummer, it’s pretty much like a rock gig. It can get pretty crazy, people are dancing and drinking and yelling. And that’s the way we like it.”
Proof that mayhem can be found without a drummer, Bernhard adds, “Our thinking is, ‘Let’s get people to have a good time and get together and go crazy.’ And they should treat seeing us like going to a punk rock show, even though it’s something that sounds considerably different.”
Different but alluring and undeniable, as evidenced by the ferocious “Dynamite”, which is upheld by what Bernhard calls, “stream of conscience lyrics,” The Devil Makes Three intend to spread its fiendish blues across the fruited plain in support of its first proper album.
“We thought these recordings are the best representation of what we can do,” Pete says. “And the word is spreading to a vast array of music fans, from Deadheads to punk rockers, bluegrass barflies and beyond.
Of their ability to draw a wide spectrum of fans from all genres and ages, Bernhard says, “I’ve never really understood it, but I’ve always been really happy about it... We’re not really a genre-specific band, I’ve actually had people come up to me and say, ‘I don’t listen to anything but hip-hop, but I love The Devil Makes Three. So I think we’ve always tried to keep it so you can’t really define our band. That always keeps things really exciting.”
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