Also this issue:

Sound Judgments
Nostalgia, varnish and acoustic doors: tuning Verizon Hall to the Orchestra -- and expectations.
-Peter Burwasser

Progress Report
Year one in the Orchestra's new home.
-Peter Burwasser

Kara Lafty
-Interview by Patrick Rapa

Philadelphia Orchestra
-Peter Burwasser

The Greg Osby Four
-Nate Chinen

The Go/The Witnesses/Gregg Foreman/The Trauma Queens
-A.D. Amorosi

Zwan
-A.D. Amorosi

Elliott
-Chris Parker

December 12-18, 2002

music

Rick Henderson

by A.D. Amorosi

While there’s certainly a klatch of local musicians intertwined in each others’ lives and art, few have been more Kevin Baconish since the mid-’80s than Rick Henderson. He hit the band scene with The Chowderheads in 1986 (featuring drumming pal Ted Johnson, a constant collaborator still). Henderson has done everything -- operate his own label (Schwa-Disk); write, record and play with Ben Vaughn; create the distaff Emma (with current Bardo Pond drummer Ed Farnsworth); join eerie poppers Eltro (whose third CD, Past & Present Futurists, is set to burst big, March 2003); become musical director for Headlong Dance Theater; team with D. Nicholas for Mouth of Flowers (whose CD is nearly finished); and make opulently arranged diverse forms of electronic music under nom de plumes like City of Horns, DJ Flux, Harpoon and Positron -- all with CDs due. But it’s the solo-initiated, now full-band The Wayward Wind that is Henderson’s most ambitious project. This Eno-like morass of moods and tremulous tones -- as first heard on his Christmas EP In Advance of the Broken Arm, and on Drenched & Drained -- is stretched to include faerie-esque folk and lap-steel loopiness of the first order for his Wait For Green CD. Cordalene’s Jim McGuinn, Matt Pond PA’s Rosie McNamara-Jones, She-Haw’s Ramon Sender and Gentlemen 4’s Chris Unrath join in on Green (which you won’t hear till March) as well as Henderson’s annual holiday extravaganza -- a mixed bag of music, perf-art and gallery installation fun.

City Paper: Any nostalgia for the alterna-hoohaa you found when you arrived in Philly in the mid-'80s?

Rick Henderson: I don't have very many fond memories of the '80s musically.

CP: It's only in the last decade that electronic music has become less of a curse word. What signaled the beginning of electronic music-making for you? Did you catch any hell amongst live-loving players or contemporaries for it?

RH: I've actually made electronic music since I was a teenager. Didn't pick up a guitar or sing until 1985 or so. Writing songs was not my primary interest. Probably still isn't. I'm sure there must have been some hell thrown in my direction, but I wasn't paying enough attention to catch it.

CP: Given the frequent trips to L.A. and the video in the works, Past & Present Futurists could very well break Eltro. Where do you see your role there with so many other things afoot?

RH: I've been involved in the music business on both ends for too long to put stock in any of it. Likewise, I don't think anyone else in the band has a burning desire to live in a van nine months out of the year. We'll cross any schedule-conflict bridges if and when we have to.

CP: Jorge Sandrini of Eltro just started doing his own solo electronic things, groovy Cologne-inspired electro jams. Did you have any words of advice for him?

RH: "Why don't you shop that thing around in the international electronic community?" They'd love it. I don't think he's listened to me so far.

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CP: What links your previous work with present musical projects?

RH: At any given point I'm working on two kinds of material: songs, and things that aren't songs. The pop songs -- and this is pop in its broadest sense -- become the repertoire of the band I'm fronting at that moment -- Chowderheads in the '80s, Emma during the mid-'90s. For every song that gets recorded by one of my bands, there are many more that never make it past my home studio. Harpoon is a platform I've begun using recently to release the better material from that time, most of which is more eccentric than what made it onto the band-related recordings. After recording for 15 years in primitive conditions, The Wayward Wind started as an attempt to duplicate the spirit of home recordings in a professional studio. Over the last two years, it transformed itself into my current pop band.

CP: The new Wayward Wind CD is fragrantly folkish -- albeit on the electronic chamber tip -- somewhere between Before and After Science and pre-T. Rex Marc Bolan. What about these newer songs lends itself to that sound?

RH: There are more blatantly electronic songs not recorded yet. I wouldn't come to any conclusions about a shift in emphasis and/or tone until you hear the finished product. Certainly having a large pool of musicians to work with and contribute arrangement ideas has had an effect, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

CP: You're singing more, and in a more natural, relaxed but still oddly mannered tone. How much of that lyrical or vocal expansion has to do with expanding the physical breadth of Wayward Wind?

RH: All those vocals were knocked out in about two hours. They're scratch vocals and tend to be a lot closer to how I sing in a live situation. The finished vocals may be quite different. Or not. I may end up using some of these scratch vocals in the finished product as I've grown quite fond of them.

CP: The first CD's a Christmas one and only available at shows this time of year. There's this second extravaganza. What's the big connection to Christmas?

RH: Anyone who knows me knows I'm not a big Christmas person. It's kind of a running gag. It's also an excuse to do an annual show with our friends. Besides, it's not a Christmas extravaganza, it's a holiday extravaganza -- any holiday, all holidays for that matter.

Second Annual Wayward Wind Holiday Extravaganza occurs Fri., Dec. 13, 8 p.m., $5, with Hoopty Heaven, DJ Dan Buskirk, and installation by Mouth of Flowers, The Parlor, Broad and Federal sts., www.schwa-disk.com.