Mutinous McSkank and the Plankwalkers

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Recent article in Kodiak Daily Mirror:Mutinous McSkank plankwalks thru Kodiak Article published on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 By BRADLEY ZINT Mirror Writer_____ Once upon a time before iTunes, iPods and CDs, vinyl albums roared from turntables everywhere. Those now-vintage albums had two sides: A and B.So call Mutinous McSkank and the Plankwalkers – the local Kodiak band with John McCarthy (guitar), Jerred Williams (bass) and Mike Haffeman (drums) playing at a bar near you – the B side.“Back in the day, when there was two sides on an album, you had the A side and the B side,” said Williams. “A side was the stuff that would probably end up on the radio. The B side — there’s some great stuff on the B sides of albums that people who don’t buy albums never get to hear … we’re the B side.”But besides that, how might one also describe the musical trio McSkank? Perhaps the answer is found in their own words via their MySpace profile: “Love. A toothless guy in an alley beating on a garbage can. Like a C-130 heading down the runway … Chopping down a tree with an axe. A hummingbird’s wings. An old timey typewriter. When my batteries go dead on my delay pedal. Talking with your tongue stuck to a freezing pole.”Take what you will from that, but there seems to be no question McSkank is a local band that wants you to love them, learn from them and listen to them over a few drinks in this small corner of Alaska. Musically varied, they take on nearly all styles of music.But “we don’t play the top hits. We play the bands you know, but something you’ve never heard of,” said Williams. “It’s the same bands that you listen to, but songs that Jack FM doesn’t play 50 times a day.”Listening to McSkank is “like music appreciation class,” said McCarthy, admitting, however, that beyond B side tunes, “We try to throw some familiar music in between all our unfamiliar music.”There’s a short story of how this band got its memorable name: Mutinous (“I saw mutinous in the dictionary,” said McCarthy); Mc (the prefix of McCarthy’s last name); Skank (“Skank is a type of reggae rhythm,” said Haffeman); and the Plankwalkers (“And the rest just kinda came along,” said McCarthy).Furthermore, the band said it challenges itself and works hard to fill its instrumental gaps as a threesome.“We do a lot of music where normally there would be keyboards and horns,” McCarthy said. “Basically, I’m picking up the keyboard and horn part. Then Jerred will pick up a bass part to carry where the guitar would actually be … we’re trying to do bands that are 5, 6, 8 players in a studio.”But unlike other famous three-piece bands, which usually had a strong personality that showcased one individual, “In this band, none of us are supporting role for one person,” said Williams.McSkank’s sets are as varied as the trio’s musical backgrounds.McCarthy is an Arkansas native who works as a civilian carpenter on the Coast Guard Base. Musically, he has a heavy background in rock with some blues mixed in. He first ventured to Alaska years ago by following a friend and managed to make a living playing gigs for a few years in Juneau.But then a girl got to him. He followed her to Kodiak. The girl is now out of the picture, but Kodiak isn’t.Williams is a New Jersey native and, offstage, a Coast Guard pilot. His music days started in third grade with saxophone. The musical knack was there, and he eventually picked up bass toward high school. He got good enough to make all-state jazz band while learning from some experienced old-timer band mates in a five-piece lounge jazz group.“Sitting under the wings of those guys … it’s like the stories you hear of famous musicians growing up where all these big musicians are coming by the house and hanging out and playing with them,” Williams said. “I kinda got a little bit of that. I had to go to school because they weren’t coming by the house every day, but I’d show up every morning and we’d jam out for an hour or two before homeroom. That’s where I really learned.”After high school, Williams continued playing while attending the Coast Guard Academy. He graduated in 1998 and later put down the bass before picking it up again, quite literally, soon after stepping foot on The Rock. A Coast Guard old band mate saw his name on a list of transfers to Kodiak.“I literally stepped off the boat, he comes running up to me and he’s like, ‘Dude, you wanna join a band? I got this band and we need a bass player. You wanna join a band?’” Williams said.He said Kodiak seemed the unlikely place for him to start up again.“A place where I thought I had the least likely chance of finding a rewarding musical experience would have been Kodiak Island. It’s not the edge of the planet, but it’s close.”Haffeman is a Colorado native with an art degree from Ft. Lewis College in Durango. He owns Kodiak Printmaster and has been in Kodiak three years. Like Williams, he, too, saw Kodiak as an unlikely place to find band mates.“I almost didn’t bring my drums,” Haffeman said. “I figured it was a small town. I just didn’t figure there would be a band to play with.”Like most bands just starting out, it took some time before the three of them got into a niche they really felt good about. The trio started in 2006, though McCarthy admitted that their worst shows were among “any number of the first dozen or so.”“It’s always hardest in the beginning, trying to get some of the people to respond to you,” said Williams. “The first couple gigs we played at The Rendezvous, there were crickets.”But they said things started to come together later on toward the winter of 2007, culminating with an unusual crowd one night at The Rendezvous. While playing one of their original songs, “Wakeup Call” – a tune when “most people drift to the bar, because it’s kind of an instrumental showcase where we all take solos. Most people don’t know what to think of it,” said Williams – a young couple dressed ’50s garb started swing dancing to it.“It was hard to concentrate on the song,” Williams said. “We were all just flabbergasted because they were actually dancing to that song and doing something else … the second half of the song goes into a real fast Latin feel and it’s perfect to swing dance to, but it’s just not swing dance music.”McSkank, which usually regularly performs in town at Tony’s Bar, El Chicano Mexican Restaurant, the Rendezvous and local festivals, knows about 100 tunes, which are cover songs and a few originals. All with day jobs, they try to practice at least once a week and can, despite their different musical tastes, “find a lot in common,” McCarthy said.They know there are critics out there in the audience – as well as many fans – but they don’t seem to mind. They key is finding and locking in the defining moments.“If you brought a guitar, bass and a drum critic in to listen to our music critically, they could probably pick it apart … but it’s all about trying to find perfection,” Williams said. “You never get to it, but you’re always trying to find that road that works and having fun when it clicks. You all know (that road) and you all look at each other … that’s the beauty of music, taking off in a different direction and maybe the audience goes with it, maybe they don’t. But who cares?”But with this band, the listeners of Kodiak will always have something to look forward to.“Every night you don’t know what you’re gonna get with us,” Williams said. “One night or the next, we may not be super tight one night. We may be totally on the next night … For me, the biggest job as a bass player is following the drums. So it’s kinda like setting off on this big, wide trail with all these side trails and I have all these choices. It’s not just the same rhythms every night, the same bland songs, the same road more traveled. It’s seems like it’s always something new.”Mirror writer Bradley Zint can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].[ printable version ]