by Fran Fried
New Haven Register
– As diverse as the guys in NRBQ get, it’s easy to peg them as a rock’n’roll band. Travis, though, defies that with his Philharmonic.
African-rooted chants and beats, quirky They Might Be Giants-style accordion pop, Q-brand slophouse fun, swamp guitar and standard pop balladry all have a home on this Island of Misfit Toys, as their 1999 album “Let’s Have a Pancake!” bears out. So do a slurred Dixieland medley of “Hello, Dolly” and “Me and Bobby McGee,” as well as tongue-in-cheek humor (“Chandler Travis, King of the World”). But attempts to label them as “alt-Dixieland” or “omnipop” (a term coined by Adams) have failed.
And the group’s soon-to-be-released next album, Travis said, will include “Mothra,” which he described as “heavy metal and glam – a little like Bowie, but more dissonant, very loud. It’s as far afield as we’ve gone.”
“The whole point is testing the boundaries – or erasing the boundaries,” Travis said last week. But it has its drawbacks.
The most difficult thing about this band is I don’t think there’s a genre you can put us in that makes sense,” he explained. “We put all our time into doing a sound that’s indescribable. When you tell a club or a record label what you do, what do you tell them?”
Travis, 51, is also a computer-stained wretch (he writes a column for the weekly The Cape Codder and occasional album reviews for the Boston Herald), and, like O’Connell, spent some of his formative years in Connecticut (Darien and Wilton, in between birth in New York and a move to New Jersey).
Travis, a Cape resident the past quarter-century, still plays Sundays in the summertime at the Beachcomber in Wellfleet with The Incredible Casuals, the band he started in 1978.
But along came the Philharmonic in 1996, a band that brings to mind the biblical adage “Say what you mean; mean what you say” – because were it not for a stray moment of sarcasm, there’s no way this band would have existed.
“Dinty Child (a multi-instrumentalist he knew) was doing a guest night at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, and I came up,” Travis recalled. “At the time, I was solo-gigging and he had a rhythm section. He asked, ‘Would you like other music?’ I said, sarcastically, ‘Give me a horn section.’ That’s something I wouldn’t have done in a million years. That’s one of the last gasps of a dying band. People putting horns on white rock’n’roll was never a good thing.
“But Ken Field was a great sax player. He added Keiichi Hashimoto. These horn players led me down some paths. I liked it more than I ever expected.”
Casuals drummer Rikki Bates and multi-instrumentalist Keith Spring (the tenor saxophonist from NRBQ’s old Whole Wheat Horns) fleshed out what became a functional group. Field and Hashimoto anchor the horn section, The June Trailer Dancers.
“I was already writing pretty different stuff anyway, things that were too funny or strange or different from the Casuals,” Travis said. “We were trying to be a fairly coherent band. That’s what that’s all about, especially live. We gave ourselves a little more rope.”And now, he has not only the artistic license, but the vehicle, too. “I don’t think there’s anything we would particularly try not to do, especially on stage,” he said.
And Travis said he has but one goal: “I want to go on tour with a tour bus. Then I could quit.”
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