The Plaid mine mocked music and make coarse, crunchy pop
by Mike Gibson
Backwater hamlets like Rogersville and Morristown, Tenn., are rarely known for propagating smart modern rock units. But the aforementioned burgs are indeed home to members of an especially hard-playing local trio, and it would be difficult, if not downright out of the question, to find a smarter, more adept rock 'n' roll outfit than the Plaid.
The band traffics in hook-ridden, delightfully crunchy pop-rock, a sound that wouldn't be at all out of place on commercial radio. But there's also a certain fragile indie sensibility at work in Plaid-pop, a fetching coarseness that lends intrigue and gives otherwise dismissive hipsters pause.
Most power-popsters trace their pedigree to the same tiny cadre of influences, dropping a bored litany of names like Westerberg and Chilton and Mould. Not so for the Plaid; these die-hard small-towners unabashedly draw on a decidedly un-hip milieu of Charlie Daniels concerts and AC/DC records—distilling all the right sounds from all the wrong places.
"One of my first rock albums was Rick Springfield's Working Class Dog," laughs goateed guitarist dead mark, seated at a Manhattan's barstool a couple of hours before a show. "The great bands are the ones you can't quite pin down, who don't worry about where music comes from. A good song is a good song."
The Springfield reference is telling. Never mind the snickers—there was a certain refreshing melodic ebullience in the music of that erstwhile teen idol/soap star, a delightful shamelessness that the Plaid indubitably share. Just as Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan channeled the florid pomp of Boston and early Queen into chart-topping state-of-the-alt., so the Plaid mine the guilty pleasures of classic arena rock and yesteryear radio fluff for songwriting gold.
The Plaid were a long time in the making. Lanky, Nugent-esque bassist Chad Winkle and drummer Darrin "Gladys" Hatchett ("As a joke, I told everyone his middle name was 'Gladys,' and people believed it," Winkle explains. "It got around to his mama and she got ill about it. It's a small-town thing.") were childhood buddies in Rogersville. Winkle and Morristonian mark met as teens and played together in a string of ill-fated alterna-rock bands.
When the duo asked Hatchett to round out their collaboration in the summer of last year, they found they had all reached that epiphanic stage in life where music and maturity finally and happily meet.
"We had always been the Rolling Stones in our heads—small-town heroes, partiers. There wasn't a drug we hadn't tried," says dead mark, whose own nickname makes metaphorical reference to his spiritual coming-of-age. "All of us have changed a lot. I changed when I met my wife and with the birth of my children. We're free souls, not into any kind of organized religion. But I believe now that life can have a purpose, and that you can do something meaningful with it."
What the Plaid have done is make music. Lots of it. In less than a year's time, the threesome have released two full-length CDs (including their latest, Sunday Thinking on a Monday), with two more—one of them a live recording—on the way. They've also played more than 40 shows since August, a sizable number for a relatively new (and all-original) rock band subsisting on the small-town haunts and backwater beer hovels of East Tennessee.
"We all live like sorry-ass musicians, bouncing around from job to job," says Hatchett. "What we really want to do is play. If we could make a living at it, that would be great.
"I know I don't have any future in the workforce; I know I'm a very shitty employee," adds mark, a factory hand. "They keep me around at work 'cause they feel sorry for me. This is what we really want to do. If we didn't, we'd probably all be drunk in a ditch somewhere."
If the songs on Sunday Thinking are any indication, the Plaid guys will probably stave off gutterdom, at least for a while. Gems like "Balance" and "Area Code" and "Feel Me Flow" have all the earnest luster of classic power pop, burnished as they are by the band's shambling chemistry and dead mark's endearingly ragged voice.
Whether the Plaid will realize its all-too-familiar dream of writing and playing its music for a larger audience is still an open question; innumerable other promising outfits have likewise tried and failed. But according to mark, success or failure—for these working class dogs—was never really the point.
"Right now we're losing money, but it doesn't matter," he says. "We'll still be here in 10 years, even if no one gives a shit."
May 25, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 21
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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