St. Phillip’s Escalator plays Thursday, September 21, at The Penny Arcade, 4758 Lake Avenue, 621-ROCK, at 7 p.m. www.stphillipsescalator.com.
Get on St. Phillip’s
Escalator, Rochester’s
garage-busting rock trio
With a sonic level
that could be rivaled only on an airport runway, St. Phillip’s Escalator is not
only loud, but huge. The band churns out heavy blues-tinged rock ‘n’ roll with
doses of swirling psychedelia and a savage beat.
Within the Rochester
garage scene this young threesome is undoubtedly the heaviest. With a new
record and smoldering shows around town, the band is rapidly outgrowing the
genre and its suburban namesake.
“I’ve always thought
we were more than a garage band,” says bassist Noel Wilfeard.
It’s 2006 and at this
point there are definitely more garage bands than garages. Hell, even the
basements are getting crowded. And yet when a band cops a classic look and
sound, that’s precisely where it gets parked.
At first glance, at
first listen, St. Phillip’s Escalator is a garage band — albeit a heavy garage band. The members look and play the
part: the hair’s shaggy, the boots Beatle-y, and the
pants tight. Their music comes from the tail end of classic ’60s garage rock
‘n’ roll, when post-British invasion bands set their
sights on bigger sounds, bigger venues, and bigger drugs.
At least the first
two apply to St. Phillip’s Escalator. The band’s volume and intensity seem to
always register a couple clicks over the limits of whatever venue they play.
It’s a no-frills show; the band feels and expresses the music physically, but
is too busy playing to go out of its way to kick in the freak out.
St. Phillip’s Escalator attacks this 40-year-old sound with a 20-year-old’s freshness and
perspective. Traditionalists dig all the Amboy Dukes, Blue Cheer, Band Of Gypsies largesse. Kids with no clue
where the music came from lap up its irresistible power and unrelenting,
in-your-face-sound. Listening to a musician play his face off never gets
old.
The band’s
just-released debut disc, Endless Trip, oughta further the band’s voyage out of the garage and into
its own.
“I think we’ve
actually kind of broken away,” says guitarist and vocalist Ryan Moore. “You
don’t really listen to the record and [think], like, ‘Oh, it’s a garage band.'”
The Irondequoit trio’s endless trip started seven
years ago with the band of teens as a quartet. Creative differences popped up
when the band’s singer had other ideas. The other three gave him the boot.”We were heading this way,
where we are now,” says Wilfeard. “And he was going
into, like, jam band shit.”
“We were doing, like,
Hendrix and he wanted to be a Rastafarian,” Moore adds.
All three credit
their parents’ records as their introduction into rock music, but it was The
Chesterfield Kings’ Greg Prevost and Andy Babiuk who
turned them on and turned them out when Moore and Wilfeard
worked with them at The House of Guitars.
“It really got
serious when we hooked up with Andy and Greg around 11th grade,” drummer
Zachary Koch says. With all these psychedelic/garage influences the band
adopted its name by mashing up two Amboy Dukes tunes.
Babiuk and Prevost taunted, tested, and teased them to see what
they were made of.
“They would bust our
balls all the time,” says Moore.
“When we first started working there we were just a coupla
creeps they didn’t give a shit about. After a while they started to notice we
were actually pretty good, halfways decent, that we
could do something.”
That something, along
with the Babiuk and Prevost’s something legendary,
resulted in Endless Trip being
released on Babiuk and Prevost’s own Living Eye
Records. The band already had a great sound, but the producing duo’s
experience, attention to detail, and production skills were the goose the band
needed to make such a fantastic, cohesive recording.
Babiuk and Prevost’s fingerprints are all over the project. St.
Phillip’s Escalator’s sound was right up their alley. In fact, this album could
be a page ripped out of Chesterfield Kings history — except the band never
really went quite this heavy, or ventured quite this far out of bounds.
Even though the band professes to measure beyond the standard garage-rock yardstick, some of the
songs outside that bailiwick got the axe during pre-recording.
“We have fairly
complicated music,” says Koch. “It’s not just your straight Standells’
‘Dirty Water.'”
“We’ve had countless
songs we’ve had to drop because they just didn’t work,” Moore says.
Still, Moore says they don’t aim
to stick to garage rules.
“No,” he says. “We
write what we write.”
“Music comes first,”
Koch says. “Not in importance, but that’s our easiest way to write music.”
“When I write words
it usually doesn’t mean shit at all,” Moore
says. “It doesn’t mean anything. I can’t speak for the other guys, but when I
write words it’s usually about sex and drugs and that’s usually about it.”
So if the message is
meaningless or unclear there’s always the music…and the volume. It’s the first
thing that hits you and it’s the last thing to leave your head hours after.
“Yeah,” says Moore. “We’re
super-loud.”
This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2006.
