Turning Cartwheels

Somehow, in the last several weeks, I’ve become Mr. Folk Music.

Friday night, May 2, I was back at The Ugly Mug Café to see the first performance of a new group, Cartwheels. Of the five performers, I’d seen three in other groups or situations: guitarist and singer Brenda McMorrow in solo performance and with ex-Julia Propeller-bandmate Samantha Wells at the former StudiOK location on Richmond Street; singer/guitarist Eric Uren (aka Eric James) playing Celtic music with a fiddler (whose name I can’t remember) at the now-vanished Dick O’Dow’s pub (coincidentally across the street from StudiOK); and ubiquitous keyboard player Dean Harrison just about everywhere else in the city. Rounding out the group were James Cummins on mandolin and Colin Couch on (believe it or not) washtub bass.

One of the nice things about the Ugly Mug is that it’s a very relaxed atmosphere, ideal for a casual show like this one. (Other nice things about the Mug: the staff, enthusiastic owner Peter Dennett, the Italian sodas and other beverages, and the desserts that I can’t savour long enough before they’re gone. I’m told they make mean coffees too, but that’s one addiction I don’t suffer from.) The first thing Eric did was to introduce the band… not only to the packed house but to each other as well! The group quickly got into full folk mode with familiar songs; Eric sang lead on something like eight in a row, then passed the baton to Brenda for quite a few of her own. Early standouts were Woody Guthrie and Billy Bragg’s Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key (words by Guthrie, music by Bragg), the Beatles’ Dear Prudence, and JJ Cale’s Old Blue.

Most of the later tunes I made notes on were those I want to get copies of: John Prine’s Spanish Pipedream/Blow Up Your TV, the traditional Dreadful Wind and Rain (famously recorded by The Grateful Dead), and Lucinda Williams‘/Randy Weeks’ Can’t Let Go, which Brenda’s performed for a while and gets better each time I hear it.

Before finishing up their second of two hour-long sets with Alfred Brumley’s I’ll Fly Away (Brenda and James’ version of which was played earlier in the week on For the Folk) the Cartwheels experimented a bit with a decidedly non-folky song: the Talking Heads‘ Road to Nowhere. I hope they keep it in the repertoire, even though it was a little rough, because it translates quite well to the different style; proves once again my theory that defining musical genres is meaningless.

Need it be said that I’m looking forward to hearing Cartwheels again? I just hope it won’t take until their Home County Folk Festival performance in July.