Oakley Hall

[July 2006]

On an ivy-covered campus, somewhere in the U.S., maybe Canada, there’s an Oakley Hall. I like to imagine it’s a private, Quaker-owned college, a green oasis in some drab East Coast city, with a strong heritage of social activism and a kick-ass student station. Decrepit and imposing, with granite Ionic columns and musty, narrow rooms, Oakley Hall is where that student station would be located, along with a bunch of forgotten little departments like Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Rhetoric.

Okay, so Oakley Hall didn’t name themselves after any old building, though the origin of their name is no less interesting. They also have an awesome new CD, Gypsum Strings, on Brah, and they’re getting ready to go back out on tour in September. While taking a breather back home in Brooklyn, singer-guitarists Pat Sullivan and Rachel Cox took time out to answer a few questions.

You named yourself after Oakley Hall, the San Francisco historical fiction writer known for his dark Westerns and Ambrose Bierce mysteries set in 1880s San Francisco. What similarities can be drawn between your music and Hall’s writing? For those of us unfamiliar with Hall, which novel would you recommend?

PAT: Although we did name ourselves after him, it wasn’t that we thought that what we did was that similar really. I liked his gritty takes on the traditional western templates - all the heroes are conflicted, all the women whores, everyone corrupt - basically Deadwood and Cormac McCarthy a few decades ahead of the curve. I guess we have a gritty, personalized take on trad music ourselves - but I dunno, ultimately, we just really liked his name. We didn’t really over think it.

Warlock is definitely the place to start. It’s killer.

Where are the various band members from, and how did you come together? I know you’ve had a variety of folks in the band. How did you know when you’d found the right combination of players?

PAT: I’m from New England. Rachel, North Carolina; Jesse is from Maryland; Fred, Mississippi; Claudia, New York; and Greg is from Florida. We’re all befriended each other over the years from various musical circles interconnecting. I met Rachel in North Carolina when I toured down there in another band. Jesse and Claudia and I all played in a previous straight country outfit called Crazee & Heaven. Jesse knew Fred, who had moved to NYC from Virginia. He was visiting when his home burned to the ground with all his belongings. He decided to stay and we’re glad he did. Greg, we all knew from his being in the Broke Revue. Plus, he runs Daddy’s, the best bar in Brooklyn.

We’re still an evolving thing. The players are definitely set in stone - all of us know our roles and can pull them off, but we also will keep stepping in and out of those roles so we keep evolving as a band. For instance, Fred used to play banjo all the time, now he plays mostly lead electric guitar. It’s what sounds better. Everyone in Oakley Hall is together in terms of commitment, which is always a major hurdle for upstart bands.

RACHEL: I just wanna clarify that Fred still plays the banjo - he strings his electric guitar like one. 5 strings, one of them a drone string. He’s basically a ROARING banjo player whereas before he meowed.

The band gets lumped in with the new freak folk scene a lot, but I actually hear more of a ’70s California country influence. I also hear a whole lot of Neil Young in Fred Wallace’s guitar and a whole lot of John Doe-Exene Cervenka in Pat and Rachel’s harmonies. Is the freak folk label inaccurate? What do you consider to be the band’s primary influences?

PAT: Yeah, I guess it’s as inaccurate or accurate as any label I guess. I don’t know any of those so-called freaks making folk and we’re not really a part of that scene, if there is one. We’ve played with Animal Collective, who are fucking great, but not quite folk music - despite the Vashti Bunyan connection. We love them though.

"Freak" as a word is like "psych" used to be. You’re really just describing a hipper take on sounds that have been around for years - a verbal spit shine. But, I guess, I understand the need to give something a more exciting name, so people know it’s folk music but it’s OK to like it. I don’t know what name really applies to us, any ideas? We just think of ourselves as electric string and harmony rock.

We love all kinds of shit. And collectively as six people with different roots, a lot of influences peak out. All the standard roots rock stuff like sixties LA & SF like Moby Grape, CCR, the Byrds, Doug Sahm; the Band, Fairport etc are certainly there. But we also love Roscoe Holcomb, Hawkwind, John Jacob Niles, Bert Jansch, Hazel Dickens, Fleetwood Mac, Cajun music, dub and Mötley Crüe. The band iPod is a many splendored thing.

In the song "Having Fun Again," you write that Sadie "expects me to be  governor." If you could be governor for one day, what would you do with your temporary powers?

PAT: Repeal the Rockefeller laws. Plant more trees in NYC. Oh, and definitely end the Nets moving to Brooklyn with the new stadium nonsense.

I was kind of disappointed to find out you guys live in Brooklyn. Just by listening to you, I had these visions of you guys living together in some Big Pink-like compound, growing organic food and writing songs together. How do you maintain that rural element while living in the city?

RACHEL: Not to sound critical, but that rosy communal vision you’ve described above is just what you might expect when you hear buzzwords like "psych" or "freak folk" (hippies, anyone?).... Which leads us to the key of why we don’t really fit into a box. The rural element comes from all of us sharing a love of folk, old-time, bluegrass, etc… You don’t actually have to be rural or Southern to appreciate it and draw inspiration from it. Funny thing is, I actually grew up in the boondocks of the Smokey Mountains in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t really develop an appreciation for the old country tunes until I became an adult. In fact I hated country music! When I was a kid, I listened to a lot of pop, rock and soul. And we definitely don’t all live together... we each have our separate lives going on. Going on tour in the van for 7 weeks is about as communal as it gets.

But back to the rural element in our music - It’s firmly mixed in with urban tastes, lifestyle, etc… It’s my opinion that the two are irrevocably joined in this day and age. You can’t really experience one without needing to draw from the other or having to deal with the other whether you want to or not. New York has the "country" creeping in through the crevices... walk down any Brooklyn sidewalk and you’ll see weeds popping through the cracks. The decrepit state of some NYC roads rivals those of any poor Southern town. In North Carolina, you are required by law to treat your water source, even if you live in a remote country location. So our sound is truly a melting pot of our musical influences ranging far and wide, our own urban/rural histories, and the current environment that we live in; all this gets filtered through our own creative vision. We write and play about what’s happening in our lives now, and the influences are puzzled over later.

How long did you spend busking in New York’s subway stations, and what’s the strangest thing that ever happened to you while doing so?

RACHEL: Pat and I hung out together playing music for about 5 or 6 months before I joined the band, and once we had some songs worked up we visited the parks and subway platforms several times. Pat was unemployed at the time from a work injury and I was working at a low-paying job, so we were bored and broke (still am!!). After doing it a while, we discovered that even though the noise level in the subway was louder, you only had to play 2 or 3 songs cuz the turn around of people was faster. The park playing was a little exhausting cuz people would actually stop and listen for a while and we wanted to keep them interested and entertained. We’d run through a full set of songs and then be pulling less rehearsed ones out of our hats hoping they’d sound OK. I’m glad we finally moved it down to the trains. People are more in a hurry and the faces constantly change which keeps it fresh and you make more money!

Nothing terribly strange ever happened that I recall except once there was a man that wanted to make sure we weren’t dope fiends. I was wearing these long blue dress gloves with the fingers cut out so I could play guitar and the man assumed I was shooting up, but really they were just for fun. He finally gave us his tip after we convinced him that we were just sweet harmony singers!

What is your current affiliation with Oneida?

PAT: Oneida and Oakley Hall are a mutual admiration society. We run in the same circles here and have done shows together, fed off each other, etc. They run the label that put out Gypsum Strings (Brah) so I guess they’re the suits as well. Though they haven’t tried to wrest creative control from us... yet.

If you were to add another person to your line-up, what instruments would you want that person to play?

PAT: No new members. Six is enough! We used to be 8, so we’re definitely into keeping it "simple". One of us is going to learn pedal steel though, one of these days. And we’re waiting for the majors to line up, so I can buy a frigging harpsichord, once and for all.

Tell us about Maya Hayuk, the artist who created all the artwork for "Gypsum Strings." Is that coffee stains in the background of her drawings? 

PAT: Maya is an artist friend in our circle who has an enormously inventive gift, a great hand - and a burgeoning national profile. Her work on previous album covers (Jackie-O Motherfucker and somebody else) was actually honored two years in a row in your pages for best album art! So you clearly have a thing for her. So do we! She takes a lot of simple, rootsy ideas and makes them dizzingly beautiful. check out the website: http://www.mayahayuk.com for more. And yes, those are coffee stains on the paper.

Rachel sings a very haunting song "House Carpenter," with which I’m unfamiliar. What exactly is it, and what drew you to it?

PAT: It’s an old British Isles ballad. The most famous version is probably Clarence Ashley’s off the Harry Smith anthology. Dylan did it too in the early years. It’s basically a great ghost story about this woman’s former love who returns to her as a phantom and she doesn’t know it. She agrees to leave her simple husband and children to go with this guy and then he takes her to hell! Sweet! I’ve sung it ever since I’ve been playing guitar and have always loved it - ghosts, hell, adultery - all the heavy shit. Works well with our dronier tendencies too.

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