A Stealthy Portion, a Heap of Help

Cover Photo by Troy Krusenstjerna / Graphics by Cravedog

A Stealthy Portion (Acoustic Live) does not rate high in the Shipe catalog. But that’s no fault of my trio partners, nor of our producer Mike Davis, who put real life-effort & good money into the release. He did so against all dismal odds of my limited talent and limited preparation — only because he believed in the music.

At the turn of the century, I did not yet understand how to make acoustic music. No amount of Elisabeth Babcock’s sweet cello or Ehren Ebbage’s lead guitar & backup vocals could disguise that. (And come to think of it, I’m not even sure that I really knew how to sing yet! I’m not fishing for compliments here; I just can’t deny that I have come a long way in 25 years.) To describe this album as “rough-around-the-edges,” is understatement. People sometimes use that term “rough,” while describing independent music, as a trade off in favor of compelling honesty and edgy intimacy. But in this case, the “roughness” isn’t helpfyl. I can hear my “try-hard energy" as a singer, and the difficulty I had playing my acoustic guitar in the pocket. I hear myself vocalizing in “post-grunge” style and strumming along with a rock band that isn’t there.

I know. I’m my own worst critic. But it serves me well to recognize shortcomings.

And yet, something about A Stealthy Portion worked, and worked well. As much as any other release, it shifted my music career into the next gear, and propelled me forward. I’m not sure why; maybe there just wasn’t a lot of competition at the time. Not as much scaled-down Americana-leaning acoustic music to compare. I mean, this was the tail end of the 90’s, when what passed as “unplugged” music was often just the fact that the band played while sitting down. Somehow, our Trio landed in Performing Songwriter Magazine with a great review. Heck, we got reviewed nicely in a lot of places.

My friend and colleague, Mark Alan was basically my acoustic-transition mentor. He lectured me on pavement pounding in the Biz: “Shipe,” he said, “You gotta carry that thing around now, like a business card!” I was surprised and a bit baffled. The Stealthy songs were idiosyncratic and dark, too self-consciously literary — artifacts of 90’s Rock Poetry. And my execution was kinda shabby. I knew nothing about what acoustic guitars are supposed to do as structural instrumentation in an arrangement. I just moved my hands up and down across the strings while singing at the top of my lungs. No real “acousticky vibe.” And did I mention, it was a live recording? (Cafe Paradiso, in Eugene where I had been hosting weekly Songsters-in-Round.) Jagged & clumsy. You can even hear a bus tray full of dishes crashing in the middle of “Hunger Artist.”

Ah, “Hunger Artist,” that lovely little tune based on Franz Kafka’s story about a washed-up caged carnival sideshow attraction who starves himself to death ‘cause no one comes around to throw food at him anymore. And that’s one of the more uplifting of the 15 songs. Fifteen! dark forays into subject matter like junkies on film, abortion, nihilism, bad karma, getting old, infidelity, sociopathy, and loneliness. A real barrell of fun!

And still, marvelously, the album got us good work. It enhanced my reputation as real-deal artist whose work could be taken seriously. (Talk about imposter syndrome!) One review called our Trio “mesmerizing.” There’s no accounting for taste.

Okay, so now that I’ve finished trashing my own album, I got that out of my system. Taking a pause: on second thought, I get it now! There are compelling hooks in there, galore. The choruses are singalong-able and kinda triumphant. The cello is intriguing. And the songs themselves are farily distinctive. Half of them had been released a year before, in their full rockin’ glory, on Sudden & Merciless Joy. The other half would appear on the next double album Pollyanna Loves Cassandra — a return to elaborately electrified full-band arrangements. Ebbage and I were living together at the time, working on these songs day-in day-out. Consequently, I do believe I hear some of our chemistry showing up as we’re pushing it out together. When Ehren & Elisabeth are fully present in the mix, there is believability, even a modicum of authority.

But there is a whole other part of the story to “A Stealthy Portion.” The story of Dan Sause, Mike Davis and Locals Only. What I owe those two guys is a debt still unpaid. Mike the Producer, and Dan (executive producer who owned Portland’s beloved local music store) believed so much in the music that they formed a whole company in pursuit of a an entirely new vision of how the music industry would function—digitally, online. They dismantled Dan’s charming downtown Portland brick & mortar storefront, and turned “Locals Only” into “LocalsOnline,” using A Stealthy Portion as their flagship release. They basically made me a signed artist. They sunk family money into it, engineered it, manufactured it, released it on their hopeful label (Kondooit Records), promoted it. And they paid my monthly bills so I wouldn’t have to get a day job. They saw fit to use me in a prescient effort to become the first fully online distribution/retail/record label etc. It was an exciting prospect, seemingly limitless, ‘cause these guys were early adopters of the next frontier.

But then CD Baby happened — just a few doors down. Better resourced. Quicker to launch. So the LocalsOnline dream took on more humble dimensions that could no longer afford to heavy-lift me. (This was not the first time a label I was on had to pack it in.) Still, they generously gave me all the printed hard copies of the album to sell for my own profit. (Most record labels either sell these to the artists or trash them altogether.)

So, even though I affectionately, self-deprecatingly jeer Stealthy as a “warts-and-all-mostly-warts” album, this second entry into my post Renegade Saints catalog is a worthy transitional work, and a microcosm of what I have to be grateful for in my life in music. It’s a too-little celebrated and too-little credited moment in my career. I listen back to that young Trio, passionately, almost naively performing like a drumless arena rock band in that little cafe, I can’t say whether or not their earnestness is well-earned. But the people who enabled us sure made us feel like giving it all we got. And that is pretty much how I’ve felt all along these past 30 years.