For this week’s Here Comes Your Fan column, I spoke with one Andy Giegerich, the organizer of an upcoming event called Tried Tried Again and frontman for local indie pop band the Honus Huffhines. Tried Tried Again—an eve of local songwriters playing their earliest, most embarrassing and naive tunes—celebrates just what the name indicates: the fact that sometimes it takes a few attempts to get something right. In preview of the show, Giegerich and I discussed (via email) the comfort of our favorite songwriters’ early material and why it’s fun, encouraging and educational to share artistic misses with peers and fans alike.

WW: Can you describe briefly who you got into music and why it’s remained a part of your life even though you’re, as they say, “settled,” for the most part?
Giegerich: Music, listening: My older brothers are 13 and 10 years older than I and when I was four, would generously let me play their 45s on a Sears turntable. They’d, wisely, hide their albums from me: I did quite a scratch job to their Lovin Spoonful’s Greatest Hits and Association Birthday LPs. Then I started buying my own 45s (first one with my own money, I believe, was the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”).

Music, playing: Had played trumpet in the high school band, then my brother Dave bought me a guitar as a high school graduation present. I didn’t really play it much for a couple of years, then, with a bunch of college friends, realized that, yeah, making music with other people is pretty fun.

Music, remaining: I don’t know, I guess that because it’s still a sideline, a hobby, makes it more palatable than if I were to try to make money at it. And, like those people who keep painting their little dashed-off watercolors at art fairs even when they’re, like, 85, I guess I still want to be doing this. It’s something to do.

How would you describe your own early material? Can you offer a particularly naive, funny or telling lyric ?
Heh, yeah. [From] “Blonde Young Fascists” (listen to it here): “Listen to Reagan, he knows the score/ He’ll shoot off some missiles, then he’ll buy more.” Pretty cringe-y, and there are plenty more tortured lyrics within. I took lots of grammatical liberties, crammed too many syllables into one beat and wrote for about ten years before I tried creating a vocal melody that floated around the chords’ root notes, as opposed to essentially singing the one root note. Yet, even though the songs reek of social naivety and verbal clumsiness, some of the lines are kind of funny. Musically, I think I was going for early Talking Heads or Aztec Camera but landed closer to a one-shot new wave band, like the Vapors or Off Broadway.

Did you ever reach a point where you thought, “Now, I’ve got it (my musical identity or sound or whatever) figured out; now I’m good” and then realize as you grew as a musician and/or got older how wrong you were?
Ha! Yeah, all the time. It usually happens during recording, no, make that, it always happens during recording, like when a part of a song doesn’t work as intended or I shank the vocals. But it also tends to happen, I think, when you play out more and play with ever-more
talented bands. I’m trying to think of an example… Oh yeah: The Huffhines played two nights with a Portland band called Lucky Tiger a few weeks ago that plays almost all covers—including a lot of Tin Pan Alley-type stuff—and they’re amazing musicians and excellent pop-punk arrangers. Listening to them made me rethink arrangements and playing styles. It also made me want to play with them over and over, just to hear them. So, yeah, music is a non-static medium, or some claptrap like that.

What gave you the idea for the event?
I’d been dubbing some old stuff from cassettes onto CDs and started thinking about what various peoples’ early stuff might have sounded like. I bounced it off two Daves—Sullivan, from the Huffhines, and Klopfenstein, from Sauvie Island Moon Rocket Factory. They thought it sounded pretty fun. We originally thought we could record the event itself and get Jack Tuftee, from Love Harder, to put it out on his label. Then Jack came up with a better idea, to give away CDs containing some of the songs being performed at the show. I love Love Harder.

Why did you decide to invite the performers you did? Do you consider the event’s performers to be on the more developed, mature end of things at this point in their careers? In addition, were any of them reluctant to record/release such material for the Tried Tried Again CD-R?
It’s probably more a matter of function than anything else: These are all friends of ours. And most are pretty developed and relatively mature, which is helpful for an exercise like this. If this gets any traction, it’d be great to diversify and welcome other people into the fold. Of the 14 people scheduled to play (and there might be pop-ins, as well), 11 turned in songs for the disc. I think the others were too busy to either find their old stuff or (as I did) re-record it.

It seems near-protocol among musicians nowadays (especially those who started out in the bedroom-recording, 4-track, DIY scene) to release comps of early work when they gain more success/fans. Are any such works among your favorite recordings?
AG: Allen Clapp’s Something Strange Happens: Four-Track Forecasts (1990-2000) is revealing. For one thing, he really knew his way around a Fostex [a type of mulit-track recorder]. For another, he could always write a great hook. Also, Barbara Manning’s One Perfect Green Blanket box set has some great acoustic versions of her early solo stuff. Martin Phillips, from the
Chills, has put out some of his earlier material on Sketchbook and Secret Box. It’s just like listening to those great Chills albums.

What strikes you, or what do you find appealing, about these recordings?
“Sketchbook” is the perfect term for this whole concept: It’s like studying an early and rudimentary series of an artist’s sketches to see how he or she arrived at their best-known or most compelling paintings—or at least develop[ed] their signature style. Jesus, didn’t mean to sound that pretentious but, hell, I’ll stick with it. With first songs, though, I’m guessing 98% of writers still remember them…I’m not sure whether Julian Schnabel still has his first stick figure drawings.

One reason I like them is that they give me hope. The first time I heard such recordings I thought, “Oh, these people weren’t always brilliant; they had to work at it like everyone else.” Can you relate to that at all?
Totally. That’s why it would be all the more dramatic to see this done on a broader level, like with mainstream people. Like, David Bowie’s early recordings, from the mid-1960s, are horrendous: What must his very first songs have sounded like?

Whose early material are you most looking forward to hearing at Tried Tried Again? Why?
Dave Klopfenstein has a great storyteller’s knack that’s nicely honed: I’m wondering if that’s always been there. Ross Beach played with bands in the Elephant 6 collective: Could that have rubbed off on him early on? And, at least compared to my own first songs, Josh Mayer, from Metropolitan, was practically writing symphonies. And my old editor, Dan Cook, is playing a song he wrote on the back of some college or high-school syllabus in 1967. It’s called “Spiritual Union,” and he still has the original copy. It’s brilliant, Bringing It All Back Home-Dylan meets Arthur Lee. There’s also Jacob Anderson, who’s a singular performer and fantastic songwriter. I think one of the first songs he’s performing is called “Grade School Sex Queen.” [And] Adrienne Hatkin from Autopilot [Ed note: At post-time, Giegerich was unable to confirm Hatkin’s appearance] is one of Portland’s most interesting musicians and a great songwriter. I can’t wait to hear her early material.

As mentioned earlier, a lot of more famous musicians release this type of material when they have enough fans that there’s interest/demand for it. Do you think anyone (besides yourself and the performers) is interested in hearing less-known local songwriters’ early work?
There’s certainly not the cache we’d have if Sam Coomes [Quasi] or Martyn Leaper [The Minders] were in there. Perhaps we’re unintentionally addressing the “Who’s the draw?” issue through volume: With 14 people, we’ll have, well, 14 people there. But, hey, talk about a quality audience…

Is there an acknowledged, some-of-this-is-gonna-be-bad/ embarrassing tone to the event, or are you taking it more seriously than that?
Well, one serious thing first: In the past couple of weeks, it hit me that maybe there might be people whose first songs might reveal deep unhappiness or issues at home. And maybe that’s why a few people turned this down. Which, that’s good because this isn’t about opening old wounds (and I hadn’t considered that possibility because my own early stuff was either politically driven or vignettes about fictional characters). That said, yeah, we’re all kind of laughing about it. Josh said it’s “interesting and cruel,” which indicates to me that it could be pretty damn entertaining.

Tried Tried Again, featuring performances by Jacob Anderson, Ross Beach, Dave Klopfenstein, Jack Tuftee, Abigail Adams, Dave Sullivan, Dan Cook, Josh Mayer, Chris Piuma, Sean Mersereau, Alison Dennis, Andy Giegerich & more, takes place Friday, Feb. 1, at the Red Room. 8 pm. Free. 21+.

Links:
HonusSpace
The Honus Huffhines on the web
Love Harder
“Blonde Young Fascists” Cut of the Day
The print story on Tried Tried Again

Photo: The Honus Huffhines (Giegerich is the blonde guy with glasses), taken by Cameron Browne.