Digging in the Dirt

Shreveport Times

March 12, 2004
Section: Preview
Page: 12E

JD Ventura
Staff

Local band Dirtfoot experiments with sound and music
By J.D. Ventura The Times
A mosaic of sound. The soundtrack to mental collapse. A celebration of noise. This is what the band Dirtfoot is.
They are not jazz, rock, punk, bluegrass, blues, gospel, soul, R&B, country or hip-hop. (Definitely, definitely not hip-hop).
They are here in Shreveport, which is very, very strange.
Strange because they are good enough to succeed somewhere else. At least the few people who have heard them in Shreveport think so. Strange in that something so strange could come from a city that seems unlikely soil from which such absolute strangeness could grow. But it did.
There is Matt Hazelton. Lead singer. A sort of Christ figure, his hair long, his eyes intelligent. A man who is the nucleus of this musical family. The others, like brothers, gather round him, to jam, disciples who get his groove. He holds his guitar lovingly, resting his arms on it, like it's a part of him, a finely tuned prosthetic device.
There is Jason Bratile, the married guy, the white collar dude from Tulsa, Okla., who plays the banjo like a man who never has used a fax machine. He's doing something with Web sites for a living, for the paycheck, for his family: a beautiful, black-haired wife and their little girl. He shows up for practice in his business clothes, burgundy leather shoes shining. His pressed slacks and dry-cleaned shirt are possibly hiding something dark, maybe the part of him that longs to howl, like Matt does.
And Eric Gardner, somewhat shy, a bit serious, quiet, a thinker. His stand-up bass, a big curvy thing, like two wooden question marks pressed together, leans slightly back in his arms, like a dance partner being dipped. He's a new member, hopeful, excited, but reserved, perhaps not willing to acknowledge he's hit on something good, pure, this band. By day he makes signs. By night he is all ears and eyes. His heart beats for music, and photography, another love.
The drummer: Lane Bayliss. An Audi man. A slight guy with a sleek car. Older than the others, but a seasoned musician. A bit jaded. A seen-it-all percussionist who settled down to sell things. Sales. A steady paycheck. Strictly commission, he says. These kids can rock and that's why he has joined them. Their youthful energy is infectious.
Lastly, there is Scotty Gerardy. He loves to cook, and to jam. Sometimes he does both in the cafe where he works. Smelling of food and sweating the music. For years he had put his sax away, until he met Matt, the pied piper, the music man. But first the tornado came through town.
Kitchen chopped in half
That's how it all began. Four years ago when a tornado blew through Shreveport, Jason found Matt, standing on his porch, shortly after a tree decided to test the landlord's homeowner's policy. "He looked like a good time," remembers Jason, after spotting Matt immediately following the disaster. Amidst cracked countertops and scattered shingles, conversation ensued and the two musicians became friends.
It's more than a bit ironic that a powerful, hard-to-predict weather system in some sense marks the creation of Dirtfoot. Their music can be as dizzying as a twister, volatile and uproarious.
One night, not long ago: here they are, jamming in the basement of a friend's loft. Eric and Lane are new to the band - which Matt says has been "a revolving door" with regard to its membership - and they are "learning" their parts to the group's 20 plus song list. Not learning in the way most people think about music, though. This process is more subtle than that. They improvise their way through the songs as only some musicians can. They feel each other. Some call it experimental music. It is, in that they are each experimenting with each others sounds, feeling their way through, like a blind man through a new room. And in that way, every song is fresh and original, as unique as a snowflake, or a tornado.
"It's not like we are taking a saxophone and making it sound like a toilet," says Matt, during another practice session (he's chewing furiously on sunflower seeds in an earnest - but possibly futile - attempt to quit smoking). "It's experimental in that there aren't any rules. It's freedom. If you feel like growling, growl. Feel like barking, bark. Just do it."
There is some structure. It's not musical anarchy. Like the black and white pictures in a new coloring book, Dirtfoot's repetoire consists of solid outlines. If you knew their songs, you could request them. But when it comes time to color those pictures in, all bets are off as to what you'll get. It could be neat, dark magic markers or finger painting in the psyche ward rec room.
It is their lack of restraint, their raw musical impulsiveness that can be so arresting to the handful of people in town who have heard them play. It's also what is so off-putting to bars and nightclubs in town that tend to only book acts that either play covers or can appeal to a wider audience through clearly definable (and marketable) musical styles. They stomp their feet. Matt makes primal noises and intentionally mumbles his lyrics. They let otherwise well-rehearsed songs meander off the beaten path, or right off an auditory cliff, its finale laughably lost, the structure sacrificed for the sheer playfulness of it all.
The soulfulness of silly
Matt's lyrics have the sing-song quality of a nursery rhyme, only with his gruff, grumbling voice, they somehow aren't so innocent. In fact, as much as his words are an infantile excursion into absurdism, they are thoughtful, if not abstract, introspection, too:
Turn off your TV and listen to me
I've got stories and a little pony
I'm gonna ride it from California to the Gulf of Mexico
My teeth are shiny and they squeak
I'm covered in dirt from my head to my feet
I think that stink bugs really stink
When they climb on the bathroom sink
They mean something or maybe they don't. But, at its most elemental level, Matt's lyrics sound a certain way. To hear him perform is to know that he knows a thing or two about noise. When he was a school kid Matt would study with headphones on, each earpiece hooked up to a different radio. In one ear, music, in the other, NPR. Sound was the sugar of his youth.
Growing up in Sonora, Texas, ("I hate saying it because I'm afraid I'll have to go back," he says.), Matt's songs were not hits with the girls in school because they hated his "cussing." And his musicianship, by his own admission, was not all that striking (Hazelton: "I'm really not that good").
But as he got older his muses matured. "There is this other side of me that is extremely flowery and romantic," he says. "There was this hardened side, but it also was passionate. I wrote about how I loved women and how I hated them." In some sense it is probably that kind of dichotomy, that yin and yang, that sense of emotional conflict in his work that makes the raw sewage of his psyche so fun to build a musical score around. The members of Dirtfoot seem to all secretly delight in how different they are, in how something so oddball and outlandish can still be appreciated, if not entirely understood.
Sitting around a loft they rehearse in, drinking beers and sipping wine, the band talks about exactly what they are. Of course, they are exactly nothing. Each one chooses interesting words and phrases. Eric says "carefree." Jason is a bit more ambitious: "Our goal is to take over Shreveport." Lane likes how they all "mesh" together musically. Matt says when they play it's "like a good conversation."
That "conversation" is likely to continue. They hope to keep getting gigs, to perform in front of more people. They are taking it day by day, living in Shreveport, lost, for now, in the alluring ambiguity of their music, but open to helping each other grow as artists. They are a family in which no song idea is stupid, all sounds have a place somewhere and creativity leads to creation. With regard to the experimental conceptions of his peers, Scotty says, "Whatever you got, just bring it to the table and we will sort it out."