Daily Hampshire Gazette

Wolff sets wisecracks to melody
By JOHN STIFLER
Thursday, September 5, 2002 -- Russell Wolff

If songwriter Russell Wolff ever has difficulty getting radio airplay, it's probably
because he's too clever.

"You've got to hear the " 'Nipple' record," said Wolff last week, referring to the
album he released a few years ago in connection with his Betchya Bite a Nipple
Tour. At concerts on that tour he and his crew gave audience members pierced
baby-bottle nipples with keychains.

"It was a fun time," Wolff recalled, but he found that it was hard to get the songs
from that tour played on radio folk shows. "I think the DJs were anti-Nipple. It's
ironic, because that was my folkiest record without a doubt."

Wry humor is never far from the center of what Wolff creates in his songs.
Listening to his newest CD, "Roadkill Amerikana," I find myself thinking of Dan
Bern, also of Dylan circa 1965, also Tom Lehrer. This stuff is very much to my
taste, a taste that seems to favor sharply enunciated lyrics, melodies that are more
vigorous than gentle and a proclivity for wisecracks.

These qualities leap forth in the first track of "Roadkill." It is titled "Atlas," as in "I
got my road atlas / I feel like Charles Atlas."

Track two sustains the highway theme with more comic-book Americana:

Batman and Robin driving through Texas in the middle of the autumn

With the top down, no one's around to see.

Batman said to Robin, " 'Brother we've got ourselves a problem

The Batmobile don't run on gas for free

I've had enough of this superhero lifestyle.

In fact I do not get my mail.'

On the phone from his office at Apple Computers in Cambridge, Wolff sounds like
any other normal, smart guy in tech support, but on the disc and onstage he has
more room to swing his considerable wit. Excerpts hardly do justice to the songs,
but you can get some idea of the general attitude with lines like "Ritalin's nice, but
take my advice: don't give it to someone you love" or "Tell me you love me, that's
what I want to hear / 'Cause my cell phone's screwed in a national forest got you
glued to my ear."

The Roadkill Amerikana Tour got its name all too directly. "We were driving through
Wyoming. A coyote ran in front of the car, and the inevitable happened." Wolff was
making a documentary of the tour, so it's all on video. "That scene will not be
edited," he added.

"Roadkill Amerikana" was nearly flattened itself. "It was erased after it was
recorded," Wolff continued. "I made a lot of drive recovery attempts, and I'm a
computer person, but I couldn't get the data. I had given up, but then I found a
CD that had the rough mixes on it, and that was close enough."

The recording, on Wolff's Cueball Records ("for bald singer-songwriters"), was done
mainly in Toronto, with guest appearances by Murray Foster and Dave Matheson of
Moxy Fruvous, whom Wolff met on tour and for whom he opened a show in Albany
with an audience of 1,200.

"Twelve hundred people who all got it," Wolff recalled. "That was the best night of
my life."

Another night he enjoyed was when he played at the Bluebird Cafe‚ in Nashville.
"After the show, some of the staff came up and thanked me. I asked them, What
for? They said, " 'Cause it wasn't country!' "

He tells more stories. Once he was arrested - for wearing a gorilla suit while
delivering a singing telegram. And he says in the office of the Paris Review there's
a photo of him and Allen Ginsberg, taken when someone threw a birthday party for
the legendary poet and hired Wolff to appear dressed as Sesame Street's Big Bird.

Born in the Bronx ("that's where I first got my attitude, although it has calmed
down over the years") and raised in central New Jersey, Wolff now lives in
Cambridge, working what he called "the inevitable day job after moving to Boston"
but also playing far and wide. He's playing several gigs in the Valley this month,
including at the Fire & Water cafe in Northampton on Sept. 14 at 8 p.m. and an
open mike showcase at the Iron Horse.

And one this weekend, in a new venue: the Maplewood Restaurant on Belchertown
Road in Amherst. Long on atmosphere, enhanced by its own brewing facilities, and
now possessed of a new chef, the Maplewood is initiating a weekly singer-
songwriter series with Wolff's appearance Saturday.

"The idea is to have a very casual listening-room atmosphere," said Valley musician
Laura Wood, who is booking the series, and who also appears on "Roadkill
Amerikana" with her excellent percussion and some vocal work.
Musicians at the Maplewood on subsequent Saturdays include the duo Queen
Bisquit (Sept. 14), Debby Weyl (Sept. 21), and Indie Girl songwriter Liz Queler,
who has performed in such vast venues as Wolf Trap in Virginia (Sept. 28).
If Wolff's edge sets the tone for other shows at the Maplewood, "casual" may not
be quite the word. He'll make you pay attention with both ears and then some. 9
p.m., no cover.

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