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Idle Americans know how to roots-rock a crowd
Friday, Aug. 22, 2008
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
From left, Matt Kelley, drummer Mike O’Donnell and Steve ‘‘Wolf” Crescenze of Idle Americans. Not shown is guitarist Zach Sweeney. The four-piece primal blues band usually kicks off the blues jam at the Country Store in Leonardtown with a 40-minute set.
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Call it rockabilly-speed rock chased with jagged blues. Call it straight ahead blues one second; call it roots-rock with a barely detectable twist of punk the next.
Rock and country tunes come burnished with blues guitar. Blues numbers are infused with rock licks.
The band which hosts this bi-weekly Country Store blues jam goes by the Idle Americans, a name that struck the frontman and lead guitarist Matt Kelley while watching ‘‘American Idol.”
Kelley looks about 24 going on 50. He wears a houndstooth fedora hat, and yet it is not hard to imagine him leading a throwback punk outfit.
In the middle of it all stands the bassist, Steve ‘‘Wolf” Crescenze, who played with ACME Blues Company for three years. He sports a gray ponytail and a tank top which only adds to his wolfman mystique.
Guitarist Zach Sweeney met Wolf at a blues jam when he was 13. He can flip-flop between finger-picking rhythm and energetic solos. Drummer Mike O’Donnell, meanwhile, as is usually the case, was picked up during a blues jam.
These guys often sound as raw as Bob Dylan’s first electric set. The set includes Eddie Cochrane’s ‘‘Twenty Flight Rock,” Louis Jordan’s ‘‘Caledonia,” Rev. Horton Heat’s ‘‘Bad Reputation,” Hank Williams’ ‘‘Tequila Makes Your Clothes Fall Off” and the crowd favorite, Tragically Hip’s ‘‘New Orleans is Sinking.”
Out comes an Idle Americans original, with Kelly playing rich, blues guitar while he sings from his own weird and comic place. He wrote the tune a few weeks ago, and afterwards he asks if anyone wants to guess the name. ‘‘Cigarettes and Alcohol,” someone shouts. You got it.
Idle Americans play at two speeds: fast and faster, even if the song is pop-country.
During an opening 40-minute set, the Country Store fills up with musicians ranging from teenagers to wily vets. One of Wolf’s skills, as it happens, is organizing these groups into compelling, trainwreck-free ensembles.
‘‘I’d like to thank everyone for coming out to the Beach Cove,” he says.
Uh, we’re in the Country Store, dude.
The young guy makes a joke about the old guy turning 74.
But the old guy counters. He nominates the young guy as the most likely one in the band to wake up in the morning and have a tattoo and not know where it came from.
Birth of a band
About a year and a half ago, ACME Blues Company was looking to add an extra guitar player to supplant another member’s wavering commitment.
Kelley was added to the mix, and Wolf said it did not work out. Still, he did not want to pass up a chance to play with Kelley. So another band, Idle Americans, was formed with the current members plus ACME lead singer Waverly Milor.
Milor, who recently moved to Charlottesville, Va., first dropped out of Idle Americans and then dropped out of ACME. Now it looks like the well-established ACME brand of ‘‘industrial-strength blues” is history.
Wolf sat at a table at the Beach Cove on a Wednesday evening, a couple hours before the group’s other bi-weekly blues jam.
‘‘The basis of most of it would be roots music,” Wolf said, trying to explain the Idle Americans’ aesthetic. ‘‘But we’re even stretching ...” Kelley, his hair finely slicked back, sat down. ‘‘We play songs that make girls dance and I like to play,” he said. ‘‘Those are the requirements.”
While ACME had a slight rock edge, it seemed mainly to cater to fans of traditional blues.
‘‘The interesting thing is it is being accepted by a diverse group of people,” Wolf said. ‘‘Places where we play that were blues-oriented, they like it.”
Kelley, on the other hand, was once more than a little particular about his music.
‘‘I was one of the blues Nazis,” he said. ‘‘As far as I was concerned, after ‘69 when Magic Sam died, music stopped. It’s just sort of lately that I’ve been getting into more rockabilly and country stuff. I always liked newer music but I never knew how to incorporate it into what I was doing, what I was singing.”
His tale has a similar ring to that of blues guitarists from the previous generation: He was in high school. He was listening to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, read the liner notes and saw names like R. Johnson, E. Jones (Guitar Slim) and M. Morganfield (Muddy Waters). During high school and college he focused exclusively on Chicago blues from the ‘50s.
He lived in Memphis, then California, then Pennsylvania. He graduated from University of Maryland with a physics degree and taught seventh-grade science for three years.
‘‘That’s what gave him the blues,” Wolf said. ‘‘I got it because I taught for 32 years.”
Wolf, who lives near La Plata, taught shop classes at John Hanson Middle School in Waldorf.
‘‘I started playing in the garage band era. Actually,” he said, turning to Kelley, ‘‘I’m almost old enough to be your grandfather, and [Sweeney’s] grandfather is only a couple years older than me. So I am definitely the old guy in the band, by a long shot.
‘‘But you got into it because of cars and bikes,” Kelley said. ‘‘Nah,” Wolf said. ‘‘When I got into it in the ‘60s it was just because, ‘hey, girls like musicians.’”
He played for six years with a band called Sassafras T but tired of the endless cycle through which the band gathered momentum and fell apart. He sold his instruments and amps, put his stereo equipment in the attic, disconnected his car radio and did not touch an instrument for 34 years.
But in 2002, after his fourth divorce, Wolf decided to give music another try. A friend directed him to a jam; two weeks later he said he regained proficiency on bass.
‘‘The interesting thing was I actually got better,” Wolf said. ‘‘Once I got the technical part ... I could actually play more and do things I never thought about doing when I quit.” A few years later he got a job with ACME Blues, and his management skills garnered the group more gigs.
Meanwhile, Wolf, who surely once scoured the roots of popular music the same way Kelley did, recalls seeing the Idle Americans’ wiry sparkplug play for the first time at the Zoo Bar in Washington, D.C. and thinking he could be an interesting person to form a band around.
While Wolf is supplying most of the Idle Americans’ covers, Kelley, who seems to identify with the comic underpinnings which characterize most of the band’s covers, has written half-a-dozen originals in the past two months. ‘‘I don’t know how to be deep and sensitive and soulful,” he said, ‘‘but I know how to be funny sometimes.” Wolf jumped in: ‘‘He sings him the way he sings them and that’s the thing.”
‘‘And I tried singing Muddy like Muddy and Wolf like Wolf,” Kelley said, ‘‘and I hate when people try to sing Muddy like Muddy and Wolf like Wolf and can’t pull it off. If you can pull it off that’s a rare thing; you got to run with that. But I can’t, so I do what I can.”
Boston was playing softly in the background. Kelley stood up and walked away and reappeared on the stage about 10 minutes later to do a soundcheck with O’Donnell. Done with his dinner and glass of iced tea, Wolf grabbed his bass case and walked towards the stage.
Most people call him Steve, but his nickname is one that seems to define him in both obvious and subtle ways. You wonder how his life may have taken shape without it.
It was the early 1970s. ‘‘American Graffiti” had just been released.
‘‘I was reaming out a class from Hell,” Wolf said, and the most troublesome one shot back.
‘‘He just looked up at me and howled ‘ahhoo, ahhoo, Wolfman, Wolfman Jack, ahhoo’.”
