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Zen Guerrilla comes from a long line of bands that fuse down-home, kitchen-sink blues with delinquent 'n' dirty rock 'n' roll. On the Bay Area quartet's latest album, Positronic Raygun (Alternative Tentacles), singer Marcus Durant hollers out the blues like a charismatic preacher holding a revival on a hot summer's evening, while the other band members--guitarist Rich Millman, bassist Carl Horne and drummer Andy Duvall--dance around his rantings and ravings like a gospel choir. Like Zen Guerrilla's other albums, Positronic Raygun was recorded at Philadelphia's 20-year-old Third Story studio, and its sound was affected by the studio's atmosphere. "The guy we worked with, Scott Herzog, recorded a lot of late-'70s and early '80s R&B and worked with a lot of session musicians for artists like Curtis Mayfield, Wilson Pickett and that whole Stax Detroit scene," Durant says. "So over the six years that we recorded at Third Story, some of these musicians were always poking their heads in." The spirit of the old R&B musicians must have gotten into Zen Guerrilla. Starting from the raucous instrumental hardcore opener "Saucerships to Ragtime," the band's latest album is all down-home. Durant's earth-rattling vocals hearken back through time, an effect he achieves by singing through the speaker of an old Bell and Howell movie projector, which he found on a junk hunt in a Philadelphia ghetto. On the roadhouse stomp "Tomato Cup," he uses the device to evoke the spirit of soulful blues masters like Leadbelly and Robert Johnson. Durant's time-traveling vocals and his band's soulful punk performances took years to perfect. After forming in 1991 in Newark, Del., where the band members attended the state university, Zen Guerrilla settled in nearby Philadelphia for a spell. In 1994, the musicians and their accumulated companions--wives, girlfriends and others--made a sort of pilgrimage to San Francisco. "To have a big group of people that could pool resources, not only monetary resources, but friends and contacts, just made it easier," Durant says. "It was a mass exodus, about 12 of us, and it worked out." The San Francisco music community embraced Zen Guerrilla with open arms; punk-rock hero Jello Biafra sealed the move, signing the band to his Alternative Tentacles label, rereleasing its first two records and entering the studio with Durant and friends. Though Durant likes the sense of community his band found on the West Coast, he says the music scene here is homogeneous compared with what he experienced back East. "We played with a lot of hip-hop bands in Philadelphia, like the Goats and bands on Ruffhouse, so it was very common to have a mixed audience," Durant says. "It's always been that way in Philadelphia--the black community just merged with the white community, and of course different forms of art merged, especially music." After seven years of crisscrossing the country in a traveling revival show, the band still considers touring fun. That's partly due to the acquaintances the band members have made over the years. "We've watched people grow and get married and have kids and start small businesses," Durant says. "We know so many people all over the country now, so it's just like stopping in on old friends--kind of a family almost." |
