Long-stashed Little Wretches’ ‘Undesirables & Anarchists’ sees the light of day
lot of the songs on there, I think, thematically fit the zeitgeist of the times. Yeah, we made it and never did anything with it, except for wishing we had a way of putting it out and promoting it.
So this was fully finished, you didn’t have to do a single thing to this when you loaded it up on Spotify?
I had several albums that had been unreleased, and I had them remastered because even if you go through your CD collection and you take, say, “Blonde on Blonde” from 1990, then “Blonde on Blonde” remastered in 2016, or whenever they would have done it, the one thing that really changes is the newer stuff is louder and has more presence. So I didn’t want our stuff to come on and then you have to reach for the volume.
So were these “Undesirables” songs ones that you’d been playing in your live set?
Yeah, some of them go back all the way to, like, 1979 or 1980, some of the first ones I wrote. Some of those songs have their origins in No Shelter. And then in the original version of The Little Wretches, we were playing “Don’t You Ever Mention My Name” and “I Rather Would Go.” Some of the lyrics were updated, but some of the songs went way back. And from my point of view, they’re new songs because the world hasn’t heard them yet.
What were the circumstances of working on “When It Snows” with Rosa, which is very intimate?
At that point, I was going to just personally travel as a solo artist to every musical mecca in the United States, like maybe spend a year in Kansas City, spend a year in Memphis, spend a year in Nashville and move from place to place, and be a solo artist. And as it happens, I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, and it looked like, OK, it’s gonna be three or four months before I move. So I put an ad in In Pittsburgh for a singer, because, like, what am I going to do for three or four months? And Rosa responded to the ad, and then all of a sudden, things got good again, so what’s the point of moving? So, the songs on “When It Snows” started off as just me, and then when Rosa became available, then it was me and her, and some of the songs on there Bob Banerjee plays a little bit of violin and mandolin. But, basically, it was just me and Rosa singing. And the model at that point was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Wednesday Morning, Three AM” album — that was in my head, what we were trying to accomplish.
How was your duo stuff with her received?
I was always surprised why there’d be people who loved it and then the people who liked The Little Wretches, they were very lukewarm toward it. It wasn’t what they wanted from me, anyhow. I burned 20 copies at [producer] Michael Ketter’s studio, and we had a little private party down
at an art gallery in the Strip District. That was as far as we went with it.
But, by ’96, a lot of the people that were part of the Electric Banana scene were moving on to more acoustic, folkier kind of stuff.
For me, Angelo George, the bass player for The Little Wretches, was playing in New Jersey with Norman Nardini, and when he came back from the trip, he wanted me to listen to this duet of Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, which then led me to discover the duet on “Love Hurts” of Emmylou Harris and Graham Parsons, and that’s where the idea came for me and Rosa singing together — that male and female voice together with kind of simple country-ish songs underneath them. That’s how I got into it. I didn’t really have any relationship with the Electric Banana people, except Steve Sciulli, whose music cuts across everything.
Rosa is very versatile. She does “When It Snows” in the more Emmylou way, and then she brings an almost B-52s style to the rock stuff.
Yeah, and I don’t know where her connection to any of this stuff comes from. When we met, she had sung karaoke, and she sang in the gospel choir. Her taste in music leaned very much toward pop. The things that are my biggest influences, she doesn’t like them at all or has no affinity for.
So you had these great records sitting there? Why do you think you couldn’t get label interest?
Well, we didn’t even shop it. Anyway, at that point, there was nothing even to shop. If you’re not gonna be able to tour or promote it, at that point in our lives there was nothing to sell. Rosa wanted me to sell songs to Nashville or maybe try to get the songs licensed to movies or something, but the traditional indie thing of making a record and supporting it, that wasn’t it. And from shopping the band, shopping the tape, who’s going to invest in a bunch of 40year-old guys that have day jobs?
The last Little Wretches CD where we tried to get people interested was “Beyond the Stormy Blast,” or the third Little Wretches CD. We were trying to get people in the music industry interested. We would get feedback. We’d make changes based on the feedback we got, and we were hopeful of getting signed. But from ’94 on, I was done.
You had a day job at that point?
I’ve had a teaching certificate since 1988, and I never worked a full-time job until I met Rosa. My understanding when we married was that we’re going to do music full time, she was gonna follow my lead, because the only way you even have a sliver of a chance is if you go for it 100%. You might have to supplement your income working here, working there, but if you insist on having a full-time job with benefits, who’s going to invest in you, you know? Really? So, for me, I worked a bunch of part-time jobs, sometimes had no job at all. I look back on people who basically let me live like a parasite, people who gave me cars, people who gave me enough food to last me for the summer. It’s ridiculous the generosity that was poured out on me when I was younger.
People saw that talent in you. It was undeniable.
Well, if only I could find a way to pay them back. For me, when we started making the first Little Wretches CDs that I made with Dave Losi and Ellen Hildebrand, it was with an understanding that it’s gonna take about a three-year process. First, we’re gonna introduce ourselves to people, and then we’re gonna build off of that. And probably after three years, we will improve in ourselves to be a worthwhile commodity. And so that’s my attitude towards this stuff now is, uh, you know, we’re gonna promote “Undesirables & Anarchists.” When it runs its course, we’ll probably do “Burning Lantern Dropped in Straw,” unless I record something completely new. But follow this one up, and who knows where it leads? I just want to be in the game. When someone mentions Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate or Steve Earle, I’d like for some people who know about them to know about Robert Wagner and The Little Wretches.