By Fred Mills

Sometimes, just sometimes, you catch a band at precisely that early point in its career when forces both internal and external have come together to propel it towards greatness. Almost by definition, you only discover this in hindsight; it’s safe to say that in the summer of 1980, when I saw R.E.M. perform at its first gig outside Georgia, I had no sense of the history that was in the making. Just the same, any dedicated music fan, weathered and torn from years of collecting records, attending concerts and scrutinizing bands, eventually begins to develop, if not a sixth sense, at least a fourth or fifth sense about these things. Such is the case with Asheville sextet Suttree, who after just a little over a year and a half of gigging has become one of the city’s most respected outfits.

Suttree is Chad McRorie, guitars/vocals; Rebeccah Mark, vocals; Paul Parsons, lead and slide guitar; Lauren Davis, keyboards; Christian Riel, bass; and Miles George, drums. (Fun Fact: anyone who saw Mary Weiss in Austin last year at SXSW also saw Mark, who was one of Weiss' backup singers.) To date the band has two 45s to its name, issued on its own Genderless label: the Cartwright-produced “Dark Hollow” b/w “Agave Blues,” and the just-issued “In Ill Repair” b/w “Long Goodbye” (featuring Cartwright on guitar). Tonight’s show was billed as the official release party for the new single, so there was no shortage of friends and family in the audience, which lent a nice communal feel to the proceedings.

***

First though, a note on the opening act. Reigning Sound bandleader, erstwhile Oblivian/Compulsive Gambler, honorary Detroit Cobra, producer of the Shangri-La’s Mary Weiss’ comeback record last year—Cartwright kicked off the evening at the Grey Eagle with a 30-minute set comprising assorted gems from his estimable back catalog. These songs of shattered romance, personal dissolution and recovery-from-heartbreak of necessity took on a more intimate vibe with it just being Cartwright and his guitar, alone at the mic. “You Don’t Hear the Music,” for example, originally a smoldering slab of garage ‘n’ soul from the Reigning Sound’s 2001 album Break Up… Break Down, was here an utterly poignant paean to the emptiness we’ve all felt at some point in the aftermath of a love affair. Another high point was “Break It One More Time,” which Weiss recorded for Dangerous Game: with Suttree singer Rebeccah Mark joining Cartwright onstage, the tune’s twinned vocal line gave the music a piercing quality impossible to ignore. The emotional transfer was palpable.

Many years ago Peter Holsapple of the dB’s once told me, of his decision to do a solo acoustic tour even though the dB’s were still very much extant, that he needed to remind himself from time to time that these were actually his songs he was singing, words that still had relevance to him as an individual and not merely as “the guy in a band.” He added that if you can take an electric rock song and strip it back and play it on an acoustic guitar and it still makes you feel something, then you’ve got a song that will stay with you no matter where your path takes you. Cartwright was playing his left-handed electric Friday evening, and in some of the songs he worked up a head full of his trademark, er, head-shaking steam familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a Reigning Sound show. He’s a charismatic performer. But sans that powerhouse quartet and with his tunes stripped to the core, there was an additional, compelling vulnerability that attached itself to the charisma.

***

Back to Suttree. A couple of years ago McRorie, who for some time has also fronted skronky psych outfit The Labiators (they opened for Dinosaur Jr in Asheville not long ago), told me about his “country death rock” side project he was hatching, and he wasn’t kidding, for a deep, mournful twang, abetted by wails of slide guitar, infuses his band’s material. At times this evening there was a distinctive Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds vibe, thanks in no small part to Davis’ funereal organ lines; with Mark’s rich, honeyed vocals at the forefront of the mix, it was hard not to imagine another NC—Neko Case—fronting those Bad Seeds. (Mark was also attired in all black, so she would be eminently suited for stepping in for Cave should he ever require a distaff pinch-hitter.) Other bands who’ve deftly wielded the “T” word also came to mind while listening to Suttree, including Case’s partners-in-crime the Sadies, the late, great Canyon, and the even later and greater Gun Club.

Yet with McRorie and Parsons serving up a thick mélange of echo, reverb and wah-wah and often tilting in the direction of vintage West Coast psychedelia—Quicksilver, Airplane, etc.—Suttree can’t really be classified as alt-country. There’s a lot of rock ‘n’ roll history that comes through in the band’s sound, including the Velvet Underground (drummer George employs a highly effective Moe Tucker less-is-more approach, and the band isn’t afraid to launch into a patented Velvets-style drone-choogle), Mazzy Star (fans of opiated, shoegazey dreampop will not be disappointed) and Southwestern desert rock as deployed by Giant Sand, Naked Prey and the Sidewinders/Sand Rubies (the Suttree folks may or may not have spent time gobbling peyote in the desert, but their music sounds at times like it was baked under the bad, crazy Sonoran sun and not the mossy western North Carolina skies. And just to toss out one last comparison: when McRorie and Mark swapped off on lead vocals in certain tunes, the Lee Hazlewood-Nancy Sinatra overtones were unmistakable.

From the dirgelike, waltzing-with-ghosts “Agave Blues” and the dusty, dreamy, whiskey-and-cigarettes “In Ill Repair” to a fire-and-brimstone, Crazy Horsian raveup and a couple of punkabilly thrashers, Suttree ensured that their 70-minute set was thick in dynamics and heavy with atmosphere. The audience was gradually drawn forward, tugged slowly but surely into the band’s sonic womb, and no one was looking for a way out anytime soon.

Towards the end Cartwright came up to reproduce his guitar part for “Long Goodbye.” With two other axes in the mix and a thick organ motif to boot, the song took on a delicious wall of sound quality. Cartwright remained onstage and the expanded ensemble then catapulted full-tilt into a jaw-dropping cover of ‘60s Connecticut combo The Squires’ Nuggets nugget “Going All The Way”—the searing garage-psych number was perfectly suited to the Suttree aesthetic, and Cartwright made the most of it too, roaring the lyrics and shuddering like he was being shocked by a defibrillator. They followed that up with an old Cartwright-penned Oblivians tune, the R&B-flavored “You Better Behave,” further suggesting that this Cartwright-Suttree summit will continue to bear fruit whenever they choose to hook up together.

A high-velocity version of Love’s “A House Is Not A Motel” brought things to a rousing close, and as the band walked off at the song’s conclusion and the crowd started shouting for more, Parsons stepped over to the mic and quipped, “That was the encore.” A few people groaned, but nobody booed. By that point, everyone had gotten a pretty fine fill.

Suttree’s still young, career- and longevity-wise, and they don’t even have a full-length out yet (although I’m told it’ll be in the works before too long). But what I saw Friday night made me glad to be alive, and that’s all I need to know. They’re going all the way.

[Photo Credit: Liz Elzey]