FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
The Bughouse Five with Curse of Horseflesh
Wednesday, December 31
Ship & AnchorPoseur is a word that gets thrown around often in relation to music. Maybe that's because there are two categories of music fans: those that see music as fashion and those that see it as a way of life; and to those people that embrace a style or a sound in every aspect of their lives, there is nothing more infuriating than someone who buys it off the rack.
Butch Murphy can spot a poseur a mile a way. For over a decade, with his latest band The Bughouse Five or with the quietly legendary Canadian band The Nervous Fellas, he's earned a reputation as one of, if not the, authority on rockabilly in this country. Years of collecting the records, and playing the music himself in North American bars and clubs has given him the right to judge those that think a little dab - and little else - will do 'em.
"That group there," Murphy says of Calgary's small but rabid rockabilly community, "they know their stuff.
"But now that there's a bit of a trend, a resurgence if you will, in certain cities - particularly in the US - you get a lot of people who don't really know anything about the music, but they know plenty about the fashion, and that can get a bit frustrating.
"Knowing the music's more important to me than a bunch of people in white undershirts with their tattoos who have Elvis' Greatest Hits and think that's rockabilly," he says.
Murphy suffered through the rockabilly lean years, back when The Nervous Fellas and The Razorbacks were pretty much this nation's only acts bangin' out the '50s country and blues swing songs, and now he's enjoying the current - albeit still small scale - interest in the genre. According to the West Coast musician, Vancouver has more than its fair share of groups hopping on the bandwagon and staking their claim to the sound.
The could be because that, even in a city which, as a whole, is turning away from live music in favor of DJs, The Bughouse Five, with their on-fire live show and roots rock songs still pack 'em in and cause a stir. But Murphy says, like the fans, faux rockabilly bands are easy to spot.
"There's people right now who are going, 'I'm going to start a swing band or whatever.' And that's fine, but you haven't done the homework and until you do that you're not going to have a good band. That could mean years of playing that music; that should mean years of playing it.
"It's like being a painter," he says. "You don't decide, 'I'm going to be an abstract expressionist,' and not do any homework."
Perhaps it's because he's passed with such good grades that, with The Bughouse Five's first two albums and on a forthcoming one (due in February), he and his mates have stepped outside of the music's parameters and are incorporating other sounds like blues, jazz, punk, pop and a number of others. In fact, while he acknowledges his band has rockabilly roots, he's hesitant to call them rockabilly.
"I consider us roots rock," he says.
And although he knows there are people - especially a handful of Calgarians - who are as tenaciously protective of the music as he is, Murphy isn't worried that expanding his and their horizons will cause too many problems.
"I think they accept us because they know I've paid my dues. Even though we stretch the limits a bit, they accept us," Butch says of the purists.
"There are songwriters around like Dave Alvin from the Blasters - a genius, right? He's done what I've always wanted to do and still aspire to do, and that is, you can hear the sense of history and respect for that old music, but he also represents his own generation and his own time.
"That's a very hard thing to do."
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