Long-stashed Little Wretches projects finally see light of day
Robert Wagner has been holding out on us.
For almost 20 years, the singer-songwriter-guitarist has been sitting on a longstashed studio album from The Little Wretches, which he recently released with two companion projects.
“Undesirables & Anarchists” was recorded in 2001 with producer Dave Granati (of The Granati Brothers) with a lineup that featured Wagner’s now ex-wife Rosa Colucci on vocals. If released, it would have come out two decades into the run of The Little Wretches, which evolved out of No Shelter, the band with which Wagner first hit the Pittsburgh punk/indie scene in the late ’70s.
The timely named album has held up well in that the poetic frontman never gave into trends, choosing to hold the line with a driving guitar sound influenced by The Velvet Underground and such disciples as The Dream Syndicate. As Wagner explains, the impassioned album went unreleased because the Wretches were in no position to promote it.
Wagner, now based outside of Philadelphia, has released it along with “When It Snows,” an intimate indie-folk acoustic record he recorded around 1996 with Colucci (who works part-time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) that shows off their lovely harmonies.
The third project is “Burning Lantern Dropped in Straw,” an album that found the Wretches in 1994 rerecording some of its staples and a few new songs for a possible deal with an Atlanta management company. That fell through when Dave Losi left the band to start a family.
All three records are available on streaming sites. Here’s what Wagner had to say about them in a phone interview this week.
Let’s start with “Undesirables & Anarchists,” which has a very timely name. This album was just sitting there all this time?
Yeah. Well, you know, we have a lot of stuff that was just sitting there. There was a time, you know, when you had to make a decision: Are we gonna put this out on vinyl? We gonna put this out on cassette?
Then, later, you had to make the decision: Are we gonna put this out on CD? When I started, the dream was not to be an indie band, the dream was to be signed by a label that would do all that promotion and distribution for you and all you would have to worry about it was the creative side. But when we recorded “Undesirables & Anarchists,” the question was, if we manufacture a CD, how in the world are we gonna promote it? Whatever following we might have managed to attract, most of them have moved on to the next phase of their lives, where they’re more focused on raising families and stuff, so they’re not really coming out much. Older people are not going to attract younger audiences, and the stations that in Western Pennsylvania that we might have hoped would support us never really did, so we have this great recording, and we’re gonna make some CDs that are basically gonna sit in boxes. What’s the point of that? You’re not going to be able to tour or promote it. That’s how bands do it. You make money off the ticket sales and merchandise sales, and, you know, then you go back home and live in your grandmother’s basement. That’s not where we were in our lives. People had families and houses and mortgages and stuff like that.
How did you come to work with Dave Granati, who was in a different scene than you?
We used to play a lot of gigs with The Cynics, when they were more of a psych band, and their bass player [knew] Dave Granati. We had won some studio time, and I’d gone around to the different studios, and his approach to recording was my approach to recording: It doesn’t have to take, uh, 30 takes, isolating every single instrument. You know, work fast. His thing for us was if you could record without headphones, if you knew the material well enough to record without headphones, just set up in the studio like you’re setting up for a live show, except we’ll move the drums, position the drums a little differently than they would be in a live show. He said, by the time you’re done setting up, I’ll be ready to track. So, basically, he worked fast and just intuitively knew what we were going for. And Rosa and Dave had that Italian thing. So, you know, they could trade tomatoes and talk. It was a very, very cool thing.
And now here it is, and it doesn’t sound dated because your influences don’t sound dated.
It sounds pretty contemporary. It sounds great. And it’s like, the line from the song, “all of my friends are undesirables and anarchists,” little did we know that would be the two camps in American society in 2020. And “Who is America?” a