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Petunia and the Vipers will be in town February 16 at the Shakedown with Exene Cervenka and Phil Alvin. The band will be featured this week in the print edition as an Of Note for which Petunia and I spoke for over an hour. The rest of the interview was too interesting to discard for reasons of space; here it is in full.
It sounds at first like familiar territory. The pedal steel on the “Cricket Song” takes you right to the doorstep of country and western but at the same time you notice this guitar going off in the background with the reverb maxed out. And then, the yodeling begins.
Why, the crickets are calling me on this moon-lit Canadian niiiight / And I’m far away from home and I’m on the roam and I’m singing a song.
It’s Petunia and the Vipers, a Canadian band and when they perform in San Diego later this month it will be with Exene Cervenka. In years past she was a perennial Street Scene favorite with her band X.
But about that yodeling: “I just could. I heard it,” Petunia says by phone from his home in British Columbia, “and a second later, I tried it. I really can’t explain it any better than that,” a shame, really, considering that true yodeling is a lost art.
Petunia is 42 and lives in British Columbia. He has that Canadian way of shaping vowels when he speaks such that out sounds a little like oot, house sounds a little like hoose, and so on. But the way he sings is another thing entirely. He can be rock-steady or country-mellifluous or fluid and jazzy, scatting lyrics against a standard 4/4.
Or, he can grind it out like Jerry Lee Lewis, of whom it turns out both of us are major fans.
“Part of that whole thing to me was the strictures of the time,” he says in explanation of Lewis’, ahh, notoriety. “There was way more rules, way more possibilities for wildness. Social conventions were like panes of glass to break through.”
Jerry Lee Lewis from Louisiana broke through lots of them. He played piano standing up, often with a foot propped on the instrument, even kicked at the thing. At one time Lewis sold more records than Elvis, and he became the first performer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“When he was sitting at the piano and his hair flopped over, that was a wild thing back then. Now, it’s a total punk rock thing to do.”
Lewis took his third wife in the form of his own cousin, three times removed, who at the time was 13. He was 22. The year was 1957. This, it turns out was fairly commonplace down in Louisiana back then but the rest of the world took offense. The cultural yardstick in the day, says Petunia was “white-skinned things. British rules. There was a proper way to do things.”
But to really understand the entire musical complex that is Jerry Lee Lewis Petunia says “You gotta look at who he was listening to.” And the answer to that is Jimmie Rodgers. By the time Rodgers passed in 1933 he was being called the Father of Country Music. Rodgers, too, could yodel with the best of them.
And there’s a whisper in the willows and she’s calling me / Left my baby on a flat front step / Left her reelin’ and rockin’ cause we ain’t dead yet.
You get the sense that Petunia is both edgy and Zen calm and vastly comfortable in his own skin. How else to explain a man named after a flower? “I’ve been Petunia ever since I started playing music. The lady who taught me and inspired me, she named me that the first night we met.” He prefers otherwise to keep his real name out of print.
For seven years Petunia performed solo in the theater of close and immediate feedback: on the street. He thinks this is where his act was honed to perfection.
“I’ve hitchhiked all over Canada. Hitchhiking and playing music is just a natural. I’ve played every major street corner. I know safe spaces to pitch a tent.” He says he stayed out on the street corner tour, if you will, from mid-April to October. “After that, you gotta be careful.” It gets killing-cold up North, but Petunia was experienced, had tent camped in 30-below weather, says his feet would go numb from the cold and that his boots ignited once when he propped his feet over a camp fire in a vain attempt to get warm.
Busking led to a write up in the New York Post. “I was playing outside the subway and this guy said he wanted yodeling lessons.” The guy turned out to be a reporter, and what he really wanted was not so much to yodel but to land an interview with Petunia. “That was pretty cool. I played in Canada all the time,” he says, “and I never got a write up.”
The Vipers have now been a unit for two and a half years. He’d performed with each of the members individually over the years and in different combinations and bands before bringing them all together.
“I do know that I sing jazz, and I do know that I scat. I change things, and to that extent, I’m conscious. It’s not gonna be the same each time,” which is a constant for the Vipers. “They know that if they’re gonna be in my band that they gotta be on their toes. The best musicians are ones that enjoy improvisation, that are constantly looking to better themselves.”
Good to know that we ain’t dead yet, he sings. Good to know that we ain’t dead yet.
Petunia and the Vipers will be in town February 16 at the Shakedown with Exene Cervenka and Phil Alvin. The band will be featured this week in the print edition as an Of Note for which Petunia and I spoke for over an hour. The rest of the interview was too interesting to discard for reasons of space; here it is in full.
It sounds at first like familiar territory. The pedal steel on the “Cricket Song” takes you right to the doorstep of country and western but at the same time you notice this guitar going off in the background with the reverb maxed out. And then, the yodeling begins.
Why, the crickets are calling me on this moon-lit Canadian niiiight / And I’m far away from home and I’m on the roam and I’m singing a song.
It’s Petunia and the Vipers, a Canadian band and when they perform in San Diego later this month it will be with Exene Cervenka. In years past she was a perennial Street Scene favorite with her band X.
But about that yodeling: “I just could. I heard it,” Petunia says by phone from his home in British Columbia, “and a second later, I tried it. I really can’t explain it any better than that,” a shame, really, considering that true yodeling is a lost art.
Petunia is 42 and lives in British Columbia. He has that Canadian way of shaping vowels when he speaks such that out sounds a little like oot, house sounds a little like hoose, and so on. But the way he sings is another thing entirely. He can be rock-steady or country-mellifluous or fluid and jazzy, scatting lyrics against a standard 4/4.
Or, he can grind it out like Jerry Lee Lewis, of whom it turns out both of us are major fans.
“Part of that whole thing to me was the strictures of the time,” he says in explanation of Lewis’, ahh, notoriety. “There was way more rules, way more possibilities for wildness. Social conventions were like panes of glass to break through.”
Jerry Lee Lewis from Louisiana broke through lots of them. He played piano standing up, often with a foot propped on the instrument, even kicked at the thing. At one time Lewis sold more records than Elvis, and he became the first performer inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
“When he was sitting at the piano and his hair flopped over, that was a wild thing back then. Now, it’s a total punk rock thing to do.”
Lewis took his third wife in the form of his own cousin, three times removed, who at the time was 13. He was 22. The year was 1957. This, it turns out was fairly commonplace down in Louisiana back then but the rest of the world took offense. The cultural yardstick in the day, says Petunia was “white-skinned things. British rules. There was a proper way to do things.”
But to really understand the entire musical complex that is Jerry Lee Lewis Petunia says “You gotta look at who he was listening to.” And the answer to that is Jimmie Rodgers. By the time Rodgers passed in 1933 he was being called the Father of Country Music. Rodgers, too, could yodel with the best of them.
And there’s a whisper in the willows and she’s calling me / Left my baby on a flat front step / Left her reelin’ and rockin’ cause we ain’t dead yet.
You get the sense that Petunia is both edgy and Zen calm and vastly comfortable in his own skin. How else to explain a man named after a flower? “I’ve been Petunia ever since I started playing music. The lady who taught me and inspired me, she named me that the first night we met.” He prefers otherwise to keep his real name out of print.
For seven years Petunia performed solo in the theater of close and immediate feedback: on the street. He thinks this is where his act was honed to perfection.
“I’ve hitchhiked all over Canada. Hitchhiking and playing music is just a natural. I’ve played every major street corner. I know safe spaces to pitch a tent.” He says he stayed out on the street corner tour, if you will, from mid-April to October. “After that, you gotta be careful.” It gets killing-cold up North, but Petunia was experienced, had tent camped in 30-below weather, says his feet would go numb from the cold and that his boots ignited once when he propped his feet over a camp fire in a vain attempt to get warm.
Busking led to a write up in the New York Post. “I was playing outside the subway and this guy said he wanted yodeling lessons.” The guy turned out to be a reporter, and what he really wanted was not so much to yodel but to land an interview with Petunia. “That was pretty cool. I played in Canada all the time,” he says, “and I never got a write up.”
The Vipers have now been a unit for two and a half years. He’d performed with each of the members individually over the years and in different combinations and bands before bringing them all together.
“I do know that I sing jazz, and I do know that I scat. I change things, and to that extent, I’m conscious. It’s not gonna be the same each time,” which is a constant for the Vipers. “They know that if they’re gonna be in my band that they gotta be on their toes. The best musicians are ones that enjoy improvisation, that are constantly looking to better themselves.”
Good to know that we ain’t dead yet, he sings. Good to know that we ain’t dead yet.