Issue One 2011

                                                           a bitter cold night for just October, cloudless but bright, and you can feel the rush of cold Canadian air sweeping across Lake Erie, foreshadowing the interminable, cold, grey winter grind ahead.  It’s late 2008 and the evening newscasts blare dire warnings that our economy is crumbling into a recession-maybe a second great depression-a new flu pandemic is about to erupt, and my 40’s continue to quickly erode what I once was or, at least thought I was, and the weight of all of it makes me long for the simplicity of long ago fears and misgivings.
    It’s also mid-work week and it would be easier just to ease myself onto the couch rather than to rally to head back downtown at 10 p.m.  But I’m determined to catch Chris Trapper’s solo show at the Tralfamadore Cafe, to finally keep a promise I made not only to him, but to myself, a few years back-shortly after he performed an impromptu set at our 20th high school reunion.  A promise to catch-up with Trapper and his music after losing touch following his tenure from 1996 to 2004 as front man for Boston’s alt-rock band “The Push Stars”.  A promise to find out what became of a guy whom I knew casually in high school over twenty years ago–someone I remembered simply as a quiet, good guy, with an obvious interest and talent for singing and for drama club, and for an admittedly unhip-at-the-time Barbershop quartet, and a late blooming, but certainly cooler, senior year rock band.  And here I was heading in to see him perform at a place I later learn was a venue he always dreamed of playing when he was growing up here.  So, a bit reluctantly, I keep my promise.
    And I am more than glad that I did. 
    This is the kind of performer Chris Trapper is:  Performing just a few weeks prior to taking to the road for a three month tour–the longest period of time he’ll be away from his wife and kids since becoming a father and family man in addition to his “other job” as a wandering troubadour–Trapper stands atop his amplifier, commanding a room of a few hundred slightly to seriously inebriated revelers in a sing-a-long, the sort you’d expect to encounter in one of Buffalo’s pubs at that point of sudden clarity that hits as you empty your glass yet again and realize you’ve been out too long and these places stay open too late and night is no longer night but not morning just yet either.  That particular gap in time when a look back does no good but looking ahead seems to require too much effort.
    It’s on this night and at this moment that Chris Trapper climbs to the top of his amp and leads those in attendance in that moment of connection that a performer works and strives for–the crowd following his lead through each verse as if the inspiration for the lyrics had come to them along with him. As if they had been there all along from the formation of the song until its performance here–and Trapper pulling them all in tow, connecting the dots with each member of the audience–convincing them to join in and sing out-standing atop that amplifier and doing it all with . . . a ukulele.   
    Haven’t seen that before.
    But it works.  The crowd, in unison, belts out the chorus of “Keg On My Coffin”–a perfect bar song about an Irish wake taken to a logical extreme, a song about the wishes of a dying man to spread joy, not sorrow, to his family and friends at his passing, a song that Trapper wrote proclaiming:
    Here’s what to write on the stone o’er my grave,
    His friends were earned and not a penny saved...
    Put the keg on my coffin,
    And think of me every so often,
    Have a losers’ day parade for all my friends,
    Drink up life like a river ‘til,
    The pizza man delivers,
    Smile and know I loved you ‘til the end.
    And as the sing-a-long ends, Trapper has the crowd in the place he wants them–and the place where they want to be.  And the rest of the show follows suit–a show part jamboree, part sing along, part evocative acoustic spotlight.  Despite a crowd of people who have been beaten down by the news, the weather, their lives out there-inside here, they are warm from imbibing-from singing-and are having a hell of a good time despite it all.
    This is the kind of musician Chris Trapper is:  He’s been there and done that in relative whirlwind of twenty years.  From his humble beginnings as a member of that infamous high school Barbershop Quartet, to a successful run in a college band at Fredonia State, he later found himself climbing the pop charts with the Push Stars.  Along with band members and friends, Dan McLoughlin (bass) and Ryan MacMillian (drums) they were the next “it” band during the alternative/college music scene in Boston in the 90’s.   On their way from pub house-band to recording artists they created a unique sound-tight, fast tempo pop-rock, with engaging harmonies and a touch of Rat Pack style crooning–that seemed right at home alongside music from the other Boston bands that made their mark during that time (think the Blake Babies’ Sunburn, Buffalo Tom’s underrated Big Red Letter Day, the work of Martin Sexton or the pop side of the Lemonheads).
    They hit their creative stride and greatest success with 1999’s After the Party, an album sprinkled with three-minute gems with the signature sound of 90’s alt pop-songs like “Any Little Town,” “Minnesota,” “Drunk Is Better Than Dead,” and their signature hit, “Everything Shines”-a song that landed on the Something About Mary soundtrack following a chance meeting between the Farrelly Brothers and Trapper after he sung the national anthem at a New England Patriots and put the Push Stars on map.   Little did Trapper know that this chance meeting would crack open Hollywood’s door–a door which he shoved wide open with contributions for other Farrelly Brothers movies, television shows like Malcolm in the Middle, a network TV daytime soap opera, and the theme to the short-lived Rebbeca Romijn vehicle on the WB network, Pepper Dennis (a show scripted by a fan Trapper met after playing a gig in Pittsburgh and who, upon moving to Hollywood and recalling how gracious he was, called Trapper and simply asked him to submit a song for consideration.  He happily obliged and they went with Trapper’s “Better Half”.)
    The Push Stars continued to grow in both popularity and song craft with 2005’s Paint the Town, which contained some of their best work, including the above referenced “Keg on my Coffin,” “In The Galaxy,” “Claire” (a song that should have been on every college radio station’s top ten list that year).  It also featured a personal favorite, “Drifting Away,” in which a Hammond organ, a steady staccato drum brush, and groove rich guitars all blend with Trapper’s hushed vocals (which sound as if he’s singing through a old fashioned high-school PA system) to create a boozy “next morning” vibe-an impromptu jam session, performed at half volume, as if to shake off the lingering effects of the previous night and steady oneself for the next go round.  It’s as easy to picture the band performing it in an empty-bottle strewn post-graduate apartment, under the dimmed lights of a vintage Vegas lounge, or after dawn nearby the smoldering tiki lamps of some Caribbean beach side bar.
    But it’s the last few years of solo work that have really defined the breadth of Trapper’s talents.
    He’s put out six solo albums and an EP in the past eight years, including a dedicated Christmas album.  Trapper would be the first to admit, however, that several of them are collaborative affairs, most notably Gone Again recorded, according to the liner notes, “the old fashioned way, all live, all one night” with the Wolverine Jazz Band.  Despite my initial skepticism, I threw the CD on one cold, winter night and was surprised to find the songs immediately accessible, with layers of traditional (Dixie Land) jazz instrumentation crafted around pop melodies.  Some of the songs would become signatures in his live shows, from “Boston Girl,” to the rollicking title track, to the simple but heartfelt tribute to his parents, the lap steel guitar laced “Kids to Chase.” 
    It is an album that few artists would have attempted at all, let alone as such an early statement in their solo ventures.  What permeates the album is Trapper’s clear affection not only for American musical traditions, but also for the dwindling number of artists who keep watch over them.  Upon listening, it is clear that he was then, as he is now, in it for the song craft, the music and the fellowship of the musicians.
    A more straight forward pop approach underlies 2002’s Songs from the Drive In, containing the standout tracks “Elvis Presley Boulevard” and “Starlight”–the latter an acoustic up-tempo ballad of loneliness and longing of a road-weary performer stuck in the middle of nowhere  (actually a Motel 6, to be precise) but performed as an earnest and striking acoustic ode performed to the silent audience of a midnight sky. 
    Then came 2005’s Hey You, perhaps his seminal “I’m here” statement.  Of note is the excellent “In From The Outside,” an up-tempo acoustic ballad that doubles as the song all his friends request that he play at their weddings.  While it’s a song that certainly leans toward the hopeless romantic variety, it refrains from over-sentimentality, and provides a love song in a seemingly well-worn, well-traveled melody-an old favorite shirt evoking the sounds of Blue Rodeo or The Skydiggers from a decade earlier.  It is also an album that takes a step away from the Push Star pop sounds and toward the singer-songwriter attributes of his most recent works, 2007’s Songs From The Middle Of The World, 2008’s ‘Til the Last Leaf Falls and 2010’s Into The Bright Lights EP.   These albums would easily share the shelf along such works as Lloyd Cole’s Etc., Colin Hay’s Man At Work, and The Great Big Sea’s, Sea of No Cares (featuring the title track which Trapper co-wrote, earning him a Canadian Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers (SOCAN) award along with the band). 
    The Hollywood door will likely stay open following what may be Trapper’s finest and most complex song to date, the gorgeous, “This Time,” a song written specifically for the soundtrack to August Rush, and included on Last Leaf.  It was the first song Trapper wrote specifically for a movie soundtrack and was selected by the film’s producers selected over several other entries from still unnamed–but allegedly better known–artists to represent the pivotal love theme in the film.  The song landed Trapper and his wife, Hania, in the audience at the 2009 Grammy Awards to represent the soundtrack’s Grammy nomination.
    Last Leaf captures Trapper not only crossing the road into parenthood and toward middle age, but, like Cole and Hay before him, the road from pop performer to singer songwriter.  The songs seem weightier, most notably in several of the tracks written using an acoustic piano rather than his guitar.   The road themed tracks also show a certain weariness, and an artist wiser and more self aware as a result of it all–songs like the “Cost of Constant Traveling,” “In My Sight,” and “Least Your Breathing.“  And on this night at the Tralf, with help from the full acoustic instrumentation provided by a supporting band, his friends, Guillermo Izquierdo & The Corrections, these newer songs take full flight.      
    And this is the kind of person Chris Trapper is:  May 21, 2009.  He’s been on the road three months and now he’s back at the Tralf.  Back in his former hometown at the end of what was an exhilarating, but grueling, three-month tour of the Western U.S.  This is his next to last stop on his way back home–back to is wife and children, back to those that matter more to him than his music.H  e stands before a few hundred vocal fans in the darkness and tells a story that tells more about what kind of person he is than the subject of his tale–a woman he met outside a bar in Rhode Island shortly before taking the stage.  Out back, trying to calm his nerves pre-show, the woman bums a light from him and asks, in all naïve honesty, “Are you here to see the Chris Trapper show?”  Not sure how to take this, Trapper raises an inquisitive brow and says, straight faced, “Yeah.  I hear he’s pretty good.” To which the woman replies, without missing a drag, “Oh, he’s really great . . . I’ve seen him like a bunch of times.  I’m his biggest fan.” 
    While Trapper intends the story to provide a thirty-second ice breaker while tuning his guitar-a story to draw a few laughs-it is, at its core, a tale which confirms what many in the crowd already know–and what they appreciate so much about this particular artist.  That despite his success, Trapper remains a humble, self-effacing, regular Joe-a guy who seems to enjoy telling the crowd how un-hip he was–and allegedly still is, at least in the traditional sex and drugs and rock-and-roll sense.  This once-shy kid, who stuttered and was picked on for it–who later, upon discovering music, discovered also a way to finally express himself–now stands before the crowd a seasoned artist, an artist who’s made a living in making the kind of music he wants to make, doing something he loves, something he’s passionate about, who’s been-there-and-done-that but who still seems to be enjoying what it is he does night after night, even after three solid months paying the costs of constant traveling.  The story of his clueless but sincere “biggest fan” simply serves to confirm just how little stock he puts into the other side of it, even here, in his hometown, where one couldn’t blame him for crowing a bit to those old childhood skeptics . . .
    It’s certainly a long way from the high-school Barbershop quartet to commanding the room at the Tralf-a road that Trapper paved by treating collaborators and fans the right way, every step along the way.  And they’ve responded in kind with loyalty and friendship.  And so on this stage, first on a cold night in October and now, after 43 Spring tour road dates later, back on a warm night in May, Chris Trapper runs his fingers through his hair, smiles, and tells this last, self-depreciating story to the crowd he’s already won over.  Then, stating matter-of-factly that his childhood dreams have really come true, he simply thanks the crowd for being part of this moment, in this place, on this night.
    The crowd, in turn, stands and launches into warm applause, knowing full well that they have just seen one of their own who has given them all he has-through his guitar, his piano, his voice, his ukulele, whatever the hell happens to be lying around that can carry a note or a tune-whatever may be worth a listen–whatever may be worth a song.   He’s won the crowd over with his energy and his performance and you can just tell they’re all just rooting for this guy and wishing him every continued success.  
    Chris Trapper will roll into town on another night as he winds his way across the country.  And I will make the trip again the next time he stops by, here in his hometown.  But it won’t be to keep any promise to him.  Rather, it will be because it is simply worth making the effort to see this performer–this musician–this person–if only for a couple of hours on another stop along the road.