Starters Nightlife
Blitzen Trapper: Oregon band combines banjo, fuzz guitar, pedal steel and roadhouse harmonica
Blitzen Trapper at Rio Theatre, Santa Cruz, and Mystic Theatre, Petaluma; Calendar
Stealth angels, Honda beaters, children that run with wolves, sad-eyed girls and album-oriented rock all surface in the music of Blitzen Trapper’s Eric Earley.
That menagerie of wild things, strange histories and storied family treasures effortlessly incorporates banjo picking, fuzz guitar, pedal steel and roadhouse harmonica in a way that evokes the open road, backwoods rambles and bad-boy misadventures that feel like good times all the same.
So somehow it follows that the Portland, Ore., band’s most recent long-player, 2011’s “American Goldwing,” came to pass during tragic times, when Earley was trying to wrap his head around a death that he still can’t discuss.
“It was a really bad year, a particularly bad year, actually,” he says now.
Earley is bound to take off on a stream-of-consciousness reverie when the feeling grabs him, but when it comes to that annus horribilis, he gets tight-lipped, leaving it with, “People always die. Each one of us will die at least once.”
The phone connection is poor, and the bandleader fades in and out as he drives Blitzen Trapper through Arkansas to its next date. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the Salem, Ore.-raised Earley, 35, whose late bluegrass musician father was from the Ozark Mountains. Not that he knows the area well: “Once you go to Oregon, you don’t want to leave there,” he says.
Still, the family one’s born into and the family one makes for oneself haunt Earley and his band’s songs, while he’s busily draping his reality in metaphorical fancy. The lived experience shines through as he grinds with good old boys like Skynyrd in “Might Find It Cheap,” glides on an Eagles-esque countryrock tip in “Taking It Easy Too Long” or eases into a soulful chicken-fried boogie reminiscent of “Young Americans” David Bowie and sings about hopeless love a la electric Dylan with “Astronaut”: “Now I’m standing on the edge of the pack/ In my spacesuit hopin’ that this woman will call me at last/ ‘Cause I’m an astronaut on the shores of this grand illusion/ and I’m fallin’ down at the sound of this beating heart.”
All the references to real life can sometimes sting, Earley confesses. For the ferocious, taunting “Your Crying Eyes,” he explains, “I just stole that from a girl. She said it in my apartment in a strained and emotional moment. I think I asked her if I could use it then. Does that make me heartless? Maybe.”
The melancholy “Love the Way You Walk Away” and the tenderhearted “Girl in a Coat” are both about “the only girl I was ever in love with in my life,” the front man says. She, of course, played a big part of the long series of sorry events during that bad year, and Earley’s more comfortable talking about tough-guy subjects like the protagonist of “Black River Killer” from the album “Furr,” which he says is based on a criminal uncle.
“He was in jail for a long time and then he escaped and stole a car and ended up in my dad’s care,” he recalls. “Occasionally the cops would come around our house looking for him.”
Strangers he can handle — onstage or no. “It’s harder to sing for people you know,” Earley drawls. “Singing for strangers is no problem — that’s easy. You’re just entertaining them.”