{"id":3633,"date":"2012-07-31T09:37:30","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T13:37:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/?p=3633"},"modified":"2012-08-10T12:48:10","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T16:48:10","slug":"andy-the-doorbum-musical-reconstruction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/andy-the-doorbum-musical-reconstruction\/","title":{"rendered":"Andy the Doorbum: Musical Reconstruction"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_3649\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3649\" style=\"width: 585px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/andy-color1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3649\" title=\"andy-color\" src=\"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/wpblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/andy-color1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"585\" height=\"585\" srcset=\"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/andy-color1.jpg 585w, http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/andy-color1-150x150.jpg 150w, http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/andy-color1-580x580.jpg 580w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 585px) 100vw, 585px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-3649\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Enid Valu. Body illustrations by Kelly Keith.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>With his lawless mane of dirty-blond locks, the sort of facial kudzu familiar from photos of Civil War officers, and a penchant for posing wild-eyed with firearms in promo shots, Andy Fenstermaker has seen the looks and read the subtext:\u00a0<em>Crazy redneck<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Increasingly, that\u2019s an image that belongs with the Confederate currency of Southern stereotypes, worth more as curios: Bible beaters and bootleggers, rifle racks and pick-up trucks, good ol\u2019 boy-bigots and semi-literate hillbilly music, all stubbornly writ into America\u2019s cultural consciousness. Fenstermaker, the 27-year-old Charlotte native who plays very literate hillbilly music behind the moniker Andy the Doorbum, concedes the truth-kernels in these old reductive views. He\u2019ll even cop to one or two himself. But to his mind, the reason they won\u2019t fade into the shadows of the new South\u2019s diversity has as much to do with jealously as ignorance today.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s why people poke fun at Southern culture, because it stands out so much,\u201d he says over a restaurant plate of meat loaf and okra in Charlotte\u2019s Plaza-Midwood district. \u201cNot to say the South\u2019s better than anywhere else, but some of the pivotal American music movements come from here and are spawned out of one of the more interesting cultures in the United States. When people have those negative connotations, I feel like I\u2019m helping define what it means to be a Southerner now.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"position: relative; display: block; width: 400px; height: 100px;\" src=\"http:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/v=2\/album=3853412601\/size=venti\/bgcol=FFFFFF\/linkcol=4285BB\/transparent=true\/\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"400\" height=\"100\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Fenstermaker is too courteous in conversation to put that as he might in song, like he does on \u201cThe Farm,\u201d from his fourth and latest album, the deeply personal\u00a0<em>The Man Killed the Bird, and With the Bird He Killed the Song, and With the Song, Himself<\/em>. There, over a reeling acoustic strum and droning viola leavened by melodica, he relates in striking images the dark rural past of his \u201ctribe,\u201d railing against the shackles of traditions macro and micro. As the song concludes, he notches the tension to a feverish end and \u2014 for one of the few times on this double-LP \u2014 launches into his notorious throaty caterwaul, \u201cI\u2019ve heard tell of a thing called tradition\/Well, we don\u2019t buy that shit anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s just one of a handful of memorable moments from Andy the Doorbum\u2019s most fully realized LP. The title comes from a Pygmy proverb that he says captures how creativity inspires him to persevere through difficulties past and present \u2014 and there\u2019s plenty of persevering to do in these stories. Setting aside most of the experimental sketch-bursts and psychotropic country stomps of his previous work, the new record\u2019s 12 tracks are cut mostly from the same processional-ballad cloth. These are scaled-back acoustic folk ruminations with banjo, melodica, fiddle, horns and gang choruses that accompany tales set in the seedy underbelly of modern urban life and rural hardship. \u201cThere is symbolism, and there are scenarios from my life, and it\u2019s not always pretty,\u201d he concedes.<\/p>\n<p>The music, though, often is. Known for his gruff bellow and roar, his voice here retreats to suit the tenor of minor keys and slower tempos, though it remains scruffy, wounded and off-key in all the right places. He insists that the songs\u2019 somber tones are ultimately optimistic, their calm an entry point \u2014 and balm \u2014 to the unraveling sanity in the narratives. \u201cCreating nice songs about weird nasty things\u201d was the goal, he says, and the post-apocalyptic scenarios, imploding families, rampant over-indulgence, and death obsessions drive the point home.<\/p>\n<p>But this is no nihilist\u2019s screed or black-and-white sloganeering. The people that populate these stories live in emotionally and morally complicated grey scales; writing from an early age has sharpened his eye for human frailty and helped trim the fat from his prose. He calls these lyrics the best he\u2019s ever done: \u201cThe Orgy\u201d condemns those \u201crotten with ambition\u201d to a life where longing \u201cis all that there will be;\u201d \u201cThe Favor\u201d begins as an anti-suicide homily until the person who steps in as savior has their own self-serving motives uncovered; the mass-gravedigger in \u201cThe Ditch\u201d offers comfort as he goes about his work readying people for the worms; and \u201cThe Sisters\u201d is a slow, super-creepy tale of closeted dead siblings, an Appalachian cousin to Nirvana\u2019s serial killer tale \u201cPolly.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Grim stuff, but Fenstermaker insists all those \u201cnasty and horrible things\u201d are essential to making the world the \u201camazing place that it is.\u201d Anyone who\u2019s met him for five minutes, he adds, can see he\u2019s a \u201cfeel-good kind of dude\u201d (Author\u2019s Note: This is true). For that, he credits the dark songs for their therapeutic quality.<\/p>\n<p>But it goes beyond catharsis. As far as he is concerned, what\u2019s happening now is all gravy. Writing songs, touring and playing music across America, traveling the globe, making art and cohabitating with his artist girlfriend (the talented NC painter Kelly Keith) \u2014 for much of his life, all of that was \u201cpie in the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs a kid, I didn\u2019t think it was possible \u2014 it was a waste of time to even imagine it would happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7<\/p>\n<p>Like a lot of today\u2019s Southerners, Fenstermaker comes from somewhere else. He was born in the Pennsylvania town of Titusville, tucked away in the northwest corner of the state closer to Eerie, N.Y. than Pittsburgh. It\u2019s the birthplace of the oil industry, and the place where, years later, his father would add to his cumulative jail time by drunk-driving his pickup truck into town hall.<\/p>\n<p>Andy is mostly mum on the details of a difficult childhood, and insists that he and his old man have patched things up. At the age of 1, his parents, before their divorce, piled Andy, his older brother and all the furnishings and clothing that would fit into a \u201952 International pickup and moved to the N.C. Piedmont. Until he graduated from East Gaston County High, his world consisted almost entirely of rural Gaston County and his family\u2019s farm in Pennsylvania where he spent summers with his dad. \u201cI\u2019d lived in the country all my life,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t even know\u00a0<em>how<\/em>to move to the city.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Before he tackled that, though, he had a decision to make after graduation when his grandmother passed away and left him $2,000. He thought about getting his first car, but stumbled on an old travel guide of Iceland that was a year his senior. Seduced by the photos, he spent a month camping and hitchhiking across the island during its near-endless days. \u201cIt was the stupidest, scariest thing I\u2019ve ever done,\u201d he laughs, \u201cbut I got the travel bug bad.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Less than a decade later, he\u2019s been to 46 of 50 states, and his passport bears entry stamps from 15 foreign countries. Travel is now the prime mover behind most everything he does, whether it\u2019s riding his 100-mpg scooter or working the door at Snug Harbor and the Milestone Club in Charlotte six nights a week. It\u2019s still done on the cheap, too, a tent his hostel and a thumb his transport. It\u2019s inspiring to experience other topographies and cultures, but the purpose is just as much to step out of the comfort zones he\u2019s so wary of. He\u2019s not beyond putting himself in \u201cseedy little situations\u201d on the road just to court new adventures.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s like doing piles of hallucinogenic drugs without any of the crazy and horrible stuff,\u201d he says, though quickly amending; \u201cWell, I\u2019ve had some crazy and horrible stuff happen to me while traveling, but I love it \u2014 it\u2019s still part of the experience.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s also taken live Doorbum music to some interesting places. He\u2019s played Amsterdam clubs and jammed on a Spanish stage with Nigerian Touareg group Etran Finatawa in front of 3,000 fans. He\u2019s played dance recitals and library openings, barns, basements and illegal warehouse shows in Los Angeles. Wherever he goes, he finds himself in the role of unofficial ambassador for the South.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPeople seem to be really excited about that \u2014 \u2018You\u2019re from the South? What you\u2019re doing musically must be very interesting,\u2019\u201d he says, citing this as the other stereotype he typically encounters. \u201cI feel fortunate people would make that assumption. I hope I follow through on it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He has, and showed early signs he would. He formed his first band at the age of nine \u2014 a quartet of stuffed animals he\u2019d give different voices to while he banged on kitchenware for accompaniment. (He still has cassettes of The Scruples, as he dubbed them.) His dad gave him his first guitar at14, and he soon matriculated to 4-track recordings; before the Doorbum years, he estimates he recorded 10 LPs worth of original material, but kept them to himself.<\/p>\n<p>He soon started playing in punk bands, the most notable being Charlotte\u2019s IYF PoRK. In the early aughts, they played Queen City Underground gigs, where he met Neal Harper, one of the venue owners. As IYF PoRK wound down, and in need of a job, he began pestering Harper to let him work the door at the Milestone, which Harper rescued from obscurity in 2004.<\/p>\n<p>Working at the club seven nights a week, he wound up living there with Harper for eight months rather than driving back and forth to Stanley. After shows, they\u2019d talk and party and play music \u2014 and on at least one drunken night take target practice inside the Milestone after it closed. (The two were shot at shortly after Harper reclaimed the club from the sketchy, drug-riddled neighborhood.) Eventually, he let Harper hear the tapes he\u2019d made, and the 2013 Wolves guitarist\/songwriter loved them. Out of that confidence builder, and buoyed by some successful solo gigs, 2005\u2019s\u00a0<em>The Doorbooth Album<\/em>\u00a0eventually emerged: 25 below-lo-fi tracks recorded to 4-track entirely in the closet-sized space of the club\u2019s doorbooth.<\/p>\n<p>The music was the promising mess of an eccentric Southern voice, the songs peppered with references to bird flu, Yetis, drugs and death. It struck a chord with friends and patrons \u2014 who\u2019d taken to calling him the \u2018doorbum\u2019 guy for his vagrant-friendly fashion sense. Some of the out-of-town bands took note, too, lobbying him to join them on tour after catching his act.<\/p>\n<p>He picked up his playing and recording pace, and soon began touring the Southeast and Midwest on his own.\u00a0<em>The Mt. Holly Sessions<\/em>\u00a0followed in 2007, a (relative) step up in fidelity that was recorded to computer with frequent collaborator Robert Childers. Songs like \u201cAlamissibamassippi,\u201d \u201cOde to Extinction\u201d and \u201cHorace Wells &amp; the Chloroform Addicts\u201d \u2014 about the nitrous oxide inventor who got addicted and during a deranged episode poured sulfuric acid on two prostitutes, then killed himself when he came out of it \u2014 only confirmed the bizarre rabbit hole he was heading down. If a tweaker Johnny Cash and rural Hubert Selby, Jr. collaborated, and occasionally let Tom Waits or David Yow sing, it might sound like this.<\/p>\n<p>Then came 2009\u2019s\u00a0<em>Art Is Shit<\/em>, which by his own account is when Andy the Doorbum began to flesh out on record what he heard in his fertile imagination. Recorded on a 24-track recorder, it\u2019s a dizzying 67-minute sonic whirlwind through a gritty, poignant and often hilarious world of crack-whores and hobos, brutal 17th century executioners and a Pennsylvania ghost-mining town that\u2019s been burning for 50 years. Though it may suffer from \u2018let\u2019s see what else I can track on here\u2019 over-exuberance, it also marks the spot where his dark urban visions, foreign travels and rural past gel into a coherent aesthetic. The imagery feels alive, even feral, drawing cogent parallels between fucked-up city streets and a farm where death and decay are often an everyday harvest.<\/p>\n<p>More and more, those summers spent on his family\u2019s farm weed their way into his narratives as he comes to terms with his past, culminating now in one of the main settings for\u00a0<em>The Man Killed the Bird<\/em>. Once stretching over an entire valley, the farm has been in his family since shortly after the Fenstermachers immigrated from Germany in 1737 and dropped the \u201cch\u201d for a \u201ck\u201d in their name. It\u2019s a wild, off-the-grid 100 acres where animals get slaughtered for food, cable TV and cell-phone reception don\u2019t exist, past-generation relatives have frozen to death, and a schizophrenic uncle lives electricity-free in a trailer. It\u2019s a harsh existence, but he insists it\u2019s not all that different from Gaston County.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWestern Pennsylvania, with the exception of the accent, (is) culturally almost identical,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re country mountain folk. The Alleghenies are part of the Appalachian Mountains. And I always think that Appalachia and Southern culture are kind of synonymous. Bluegrass, moonshine stillin\u2019, bootlegging \u2014 all of that.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Religion is a key songwriting inspiration in that culture, and now a favorite target of his. Growing up, he wrote his first poem for Jesus and says he adopted the trappings of Southern Christianity of his own accord. It didn\u2019t stick, though. \u201cI got older, asked too many questions, and there weren\u2019t suitable answers for any of them.\u201d He now believes that our energy goes on after us, though, we\u2019re not conscious of it anymore. That\u2019s haunted him since childhood comes from, and it pervades his music today. \u201cEven if I was a vaporous mist,\u201d he says, \u201cI would enjoy\u00a0<em>knowing<\/em>\u00a0I was a vaporous mist.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The answer as he sees it is to experience everything you can before they turn out the lights. That explains the lust for travel, and also his fondness for drugs. He calls himself an advocate for responsible drug use, but \u201cto get as much reality as I can,\u201d not to escape it. Drugs aren\u2019t bad, he insists, only dangerous, and no more so than driving a car or growing obese and stupefied in front of a television. He captures that fine line between addiction and enjoyment on \u201cMedicamentum,\u201d perhaps his finest song to date and the A-side of a split 7\u201d he did with Charlotte\u2019s Yardwork early in 2011. \u201cIt says to take one, so I take 10\/It don\u2019t seem wrong until I fall\/For 13 years I couldn\u2019t remember anything\/Suddenly I can see it all,\u201d he sings over a galloping guitar and gang vocals until a hymnal organ shows up to escort the outro.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou just have to be as responsible as you can about the decisions you\u2019re making,\u201d he says, \u201cand try to make those that will enrich your life with experiences that you would not otherwise have.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00b7 \u00b7 \u00b7<\/p>\n<p>When\u00a0<em>Shuffle<\/em>\u00a0first caught up with Andy this summer, he was in the forests of Maine on his way to play a mountaintop house show near the town of Peru, and touring with spaz-core dude Emotron. That gig with his frequent touring mate turned out to be in an appropriately named venue \u2014 the Passout House. Midway through the Emotron\u2019s set, as the two exchanged turkey calls, he slid from his stool to the floor in what for all the world looks like an epileptic seizure (you can watch it on YouTube). He says the heat \u2014 it was 105 degrees that day, the hottest ever recorded in Maine \u2014 and a lack of water and AC contributed.<\/p>\n<p>But what left a bigger impression that night, never having played the state before, was finding 50 kids at a house show on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere Maine bellowing along to his strange ode to smoking and addiction, \u201cLove Song for Cigarettes.\u201d That\u2019s one measure of success for which he\u2019s grateful. But when you compare his music to the great folk art traditions of the South, he gets to the nub of what\u2019s truly driving him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe only success I ultimately care to attain is of artistic integrity,\u201d he says. \u201cIf art pours out of you, it\u2019s all you know \u2014 you can\u2019t compromise that and remain genuine. The best thing I have to offer as a human being is doing my art.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s true, and getting truer. But he\u2019s offering us something else as well: a very good reason to alter our notions about crazy rednecks.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p><em>This story was originally published in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.shufflemag.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Shuffle Magazine<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With his lawless mane of dirty-blond locks, the sort of facial kudzu familiar from photos of Civil War officers, and a penchant for posing wild-eyed with firearms in promo shots, Andy Fenstermaker has seen the looks and read the subtext: Crazy redneck.<\/p>\n<p>Increasingly, that\u2019s an image that belongs with the Confederate currency of Southern stereotypes, worth more as curios: Bible beaters and bootleggers, rifle racks and pick-up trucks, good ol\u2019 boy-bigots and semi-literate hillbilly music, all stubbornly writ into America\u2019s cultural consciousness. Fenstermaker, the 27-year-old Charlotte native who plays very literate hillbilly music behind the moniker Andy the Doorbum, concedes the truth-kernels in these old reductive views. He\u2019ll even cop to one or two himself. But to his mind, the reason they won\u2019t fade into the shadows of the new South\u2019s diversity has as much to do with jealously as ignorance today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":94,"featured_media":3648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/94"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3633"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3642,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3633\/revisions\/3642"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}