Getting off …

… the Whompers’ Way

 by Mike Caito

Providence Phoenix

There was no way that it could have failed.  Beowulf, presented last weekend by the Real Fun Theatre Co., upstairs in the balcony of the Columbus Theater on the West Side, was originally an epic poem which has passed through the centuries as an oral tradition, so a staged reading was only natural.  What made it foolproof was the presence of a trio of performers known these days as the Whompers.  Consisting of Rachel Maloney, Chris Turner and Steven Jobe, the Whompers’ knowledge of diverse musical idioms encompasses the grit of the Mississippi Delta blues, heard through harmonica player Turner’s alternately mournful and exhilarating harpwork; the wistful melancholy of Appalachian folk tunes, as coaxed through Maloney’s violin; and the timeless, pastoral contributions of medieval music, as played on hurdy-gurdy and viola by Jobe.  Their blend of traditional and original tunes, combined with the carefully orchestrated musical breaks (flawlessly edited by Turner) almost mystically transported the captivated audience back to the heyday of the Scyldings and Danes, when tales of superhuman bravery and feats of will and strength were celebrated by minstrels in mead halls throughout the harsh European landscape.  It was simply breathtaking.  Given the wealth of experience the trio brings to each performance, one might presume that their facility with technical musicianship and their ability to evoke such emotional body blows comes as the result of years of toil and a burning desire to deliver some kind of “message.”  Fortunately for the Whompers, only the former proves true.

To backpedal at bit: the trio started jamming together informally in the late ‘70s when Jobe sat in with Maloney and Turner in a small folk club the latter duo had been running on Wickenden Street.  Maloney (a Virginian) and Turner (a Londoner) had travelled throughout the States and Europe over the years, and are perhaps best remembered in these parts for their festive gigs at the old Met Café as members of the Nee Ningy Band (which also featured Pendragon’s Mance Grady on bodhran).  They eventually put out an album of folk, blues and pub singalongs, whimsically titled Get Nung!, on New York’s Biograph Records in the early ‘80s.  Turner, Maloney and friend Ted Evans also released Harmonicas, an all-original, all-acoustic folk-and-blues effort.  During the past decade, both have been participants in Trinity’s acclaimed A Christmas Carol.  Turner has just released Trinity’s first-ever soundtrack, an all-original blues cassette for August Wilson’s Fences (Big Noise), which he recorded with fellow Leroy Hoke Band member, guitarist Rich Robeson.

Jobe, for his part, has been equally busy.  Splitting his academic career between Rhode Island and Ohio (where he eventually received a Masters in Medieval Music), he has been teaching at RISD, where he organizes cabarets (this term, the Parisian model, replete with the visions of the Aznavours and Brels of that era) and has just been awarded a RISCA grant to create an opera based on the life of the immortal Joan of Arc.  He has also just issued his own cassette, Fragments, which offers a (partial) career overview, from his work with this medieval band Melusine to a “Heavy Metal Ballade,” with its various electronic instrumentation.

They still manage to perform in one of the most unassuming and exciting trios in the Northeast – these inimitable Whompers.  Over coffee and seltzer at Café Zog (two doors down from their original folk club on Wickenden Street), they held forth on the meaning and motivation behind their enticing mingling of  folk, blues, jazz, bluegrass, English pub and ancient music as well.  You name it – you’ll probably hear it in there somewhere.

“We do improvise on the tunes, and that’s one thing we do that most of the traditional bands don’t,” Turner offered.  “We don’t think of keeping the tunes in any pure way.  We find what we think is the emotional base of the tune, which has a lot to do with tempo, time and the feel of the beat.  We’re not interested in trying to recreate an old style.”

"Our expression of something contemporary is  alive and living for us,”  continued Jobe, the medieval scholar.  “It’s just our response being alive in the 1990s…We’re not a real band in the sense of band overhead, contrivances, tours, managers, albums, things like that.”

“When you’re in a band and in your 20s, all you can think of is being famous,” Maloney said.  “It’s the reason why you do it.  We’ve all gone past that stage, without the baggage of fame, and we don’t need anything, except to get off.”

Their “getting off” concept is something that all agree on as a goal in and of itself; the trio launched into a detailed account of what it entails.

“If we’re trying to do anything, it’s to find a path into the world of magic,” Turner explained.  “And that path is through music, the same way tribal shaman use music to change the consciousness of themselves and the tribe.  Using the traditional tunes as a vehicle to change our own consciousness is why we play.  That’s what we call the “getting off” thing, though there aren’t very good words in English to describe it.”

“I think your body chemically changes,” proferred Maloney.  “You know how if you’re really afraid you get that adrenaline surge?  It’s a different chemical change in music, but you are in a different state of consciousness.  When  you play and get to that point and let go of your ego, that’s getting off.”

As far as the audience getting to share that feeling, Turner places that onus on the listener.  “We’re not entertainment,” he maintained.  “I hope we’re entertaining, but those things like audience participation aren’t as important as getting the right feeling.  Hopefully they’ll understand, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

So they eschew certain parts of the biz that seem “contrived” – press packs, albums and the like.  They’ve been down that  road and seen its rewards, as Jobe put it, as “simply suffocating.  Hence, we don’t rehearse, we don’t speculate,” he said.  “We take the long view.”

“We do have gigs, though,” Maloney laughs, but as Turner quickly pointed out, they usually occur when someone rings them up on the phone, and they frequently involve small coffeehouses and house parties.  It was at such a loft party, on the roof of downtown building a while back, that the trio, which had been performing without a “suffocating” thing like a name, organically came ‘round to one.  “There was this young guy dancing to the songs and really getting into it,” Maloney recalled with a smile.  “We’d call the tunes ‘whompers’ when they had a lot of energy.  He asked us what our name was, we said we had none, so he said we should call ourselves the Whompers.”

Simple as that.  But as a band that freely roams through many differing styles of differing eras, they realize that eclecticism and flexibility, if not based in experience and practice, gives rise to the “Jack of all trades, master of none” pitfall.  “Eclecticism poses a danger,” turner concurred, asserting that “one has to spend enough time in an idiom to understand it.  It’s hard to get a great deal of depth out of music with theatre, for example, because so often it’s just incidental music.  You can’t make a 20-second jingle deep, while the three-minute pop song can have a certain amount of depth.  A good deal of depth usually requires a massive musical work; there’s a certain time thing, and with theatre music it’s generally a peripheral thing.  We did Beowulf because the music was as important as the reading.”

“The most important thing is to retain the spirit,” Turner concluded.  “And it’s hard to do in the face of all the commercialization which happens on all levels of music.  It’s practically the history of rock music – somebody comes along with a great idea…they have spirit…and they are bought and their spirit is diluted.  It may not be anybody’s fault as such, but it happens.  Then you end up in a situation where Beatles songs sell running shoes, and any inner meaning they had is diluted to meaninglessness.  Finding the spiritual meaning – as long as you focus on that and realize that other things are peripheral, what happens is…” he said, laughing, “you never get a press pack, or make a record.  Here we are doing an interview – that’s amazing in itself!”

Jobe summed up the Whompers’ approach, reiterating his earlier take on “perspective”: “If we take the long view, it’ll get done.”