During a Poi Dog Pondering concert, a moment arrives when Frank Orrall sings a line from his song “Complicated” with particular gusto and glee. Over a whomping dance beat, he’s practically busting his buttons as he declares, “And I’ve f— up so many times in my life/Gonna get it right this time/Gonna get it right this time/Gonna get it right this time!”
An expression of open-hearted optimism in the face of futility, “Complicated” could well be Orrall’s theme song. Glenn Morrow, owner of New Jersey-based Bar/None Records, hears it that way too. “Frank is a great generous spirit, and I don’t say that about too many musicians,” says Morrow, whose label has helped Chicago-based Poi Dog distribute some of its albums. “That guy has tapped into some kind of joy thing that when you see it or hear it, you say, `I’ve got to get involved.’ “
Poi Dog Pondering is a self-sustained band, record label and recording studio. At a time when bands are downsizing to survive and must narrow their sound to find a commercial niche in an increasingly formatted music industry, Poi is an 11-member musical ensemble that blends rock with Afro-pop, house, salsa and soul. In an age when only the most successful bands put on a show that verges on a spectacle, Poi routinely shows up for concerts with break dancers from the South Side House-O-Matic troupe, a gospel choir and videos. Violinist Susan Voelz laughingly describes the show as “decadent”–think of the visual dazzle of “Rent” combined with the global musical glide of the early-’80s Talking Heads.
“They’re like Christo’s `Running Fence’ in that they shouldn’t exist,” says Morrow, referring to the Bulgarian artist who put a 24-mile strip of fabric through the California countryside in 1976 after snipping through years of bureaucratic red tape. “There are so many obstacles to what they’re doing–financial and otherwise–and yet they have this vision that will not be denied.”
Seeing is believing, which is why Poi isn’t particularly well known outside of Chicago. The troupe is so large that a week-long run of East Coast dates can put the band $15,000 in debt, and so it can tour only sparingly. But in Chicago, Poi is one of the hottest entertainment tickets in town, consistently selling out everywhere from the Vic Theatre to the Aragon Ballroom and packing them in by the tens of thousands at increasingly frequent Grant Park concerts.
Last summer, the band’s appearance at Ravinia clogged highway traffic and public transportation to the outdoor music festival and left thousands of ticketholders stranded outside the gates. (Concert organizers accustomed to the modest sizes of classical and pop-lite audiences seriously underestimated the bands drawing power.) Poi Dog also has elaborate shows planned for Dec. 30-31 at the Aragon.
The band is headquartered in a four-story apartment in the South Side’s Pilsen neighborhood, more a clubhouse than a record label, where people of vastly different racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds mingle and merge their art and personalities. And it’s also a great place to stop by for a bowl of hot homemade soup and a conversation with Carolynn “Chaka” Travis, the band’s business manager, cook and de facto den mother.
The band’s story sometimes sounds as improbable as a television movie of the week: People from all walks of life overcome financial hardship and the indifference of the record industry to form a rainbow coalition of sight and sound that brings music-lovers by the tens of thousands to their concerts. But Poi Dog–which is a Hawaiian term for “mutt”–is no storybook script; it’s an oasis of racial, ethnic and musical diversity in a pop world that is still overwhelmingly segregated. In the world of Poi Dog Pondering, it’s routine to see, side-by-side on stage, inner-city dancers from the South Side, postpunk rock veterans from Britain, black gospel singers from Milwaukee, a white trumpet player from Baton Rouge and a Hispanic percussionist who moonlights in a Greek folk band.
“I don’t believe it myself sometimes,” says Arlene Newson, a mother of four children ranging in age from 15 to 25 who leads gospel choirs in Milwaukee when she isn’t lending her magnificent, multi-octave voice to the Poi wall of sound. “It is amazing to me how all these people from different backgrounds get along like a family. We’re happiest when we’re together, and not just playing music, but eating a meal or riding the bus to a show. We fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. That’s why I’m in this group; when they asked me to join I said to myself, `These are the kind of people I need to be with.’ “
It is dinner time, and the Poi family–Travis, Voelz, Orrall, Newson and fellow singers Robert Cornelius and Kornell Hargrove, multi-instrumentalist Dave Max Crawford, guitarist Dag Juhlin, reed player Paul Mertens, percussionist Leddie Garcia, drummer Steve Goulding, bassist Eddie Carlson and sound engineer Martin Stebbing–gathers around a series of tables arranged end to end to gorge on Thai takeout in an upstairs room at a North Side club. The faces around the table are white, black and brown, and the voices are lighthearted, animated and spiked with laughter–the delighted sound that a group of friends makes when resuming a conversation that has been going on for several years.
Matters personal and musical intersect in the crosstalk. A financial report detailing studio expenses is handed out by Travis that shows how the money from the band’s concerts and album sales has been sifted off into buying equipment for a studio and recording gear on the Northwest Side.
Paper plates now empty, the talk turns to the next year: a tour of Europe, a new single, a new album, a possible video. “I’m having implants done in case we do one,” Juhlin announces to much laughter. Garcia makes his case for doing one, but Orrall says he thinks a video would be a waste of the band’s limited resources. Stebbing is even more vociferous: “(Video networks) VH1 and MTV have shown absolutely no interest in this band, so screw them!”
The outburst is greeted with raucous laughter. The financial report on the table shows money going out, but little in the way of money coming in to take care of matters like paying the rent. Fingers are crossed that next year will finally be the one that allows this collective of thirty- and forty-something music veterans to make a living from their art, but there are no guarantees. Still, the mood is mirthful, buoyant.
“It’s fun to play in Poi because I truly love the people in this band,” says Voelz a few days later. “When we travel on that bus, that is one of my favorite spots on the planet, absolutely loving life going down the highway. And I can’t wait to hear what those relationships, what we have each become as individuals, will translate to musically. I just can’t wait to make another record with these people.”
The band’s kaleidoscopic sound and vision is the brainchild of Orrall, a 37-year-old singer, songwriter, arranger, producer and drummer who formed Poi Dog while he was still living in Hawaii in 1984.
“Growing up in an environment that was very racially mixed, where everybody marries each other, works with each other–I’m just used to working in that,” says Orrall, serving coffee to a guest in his lime-green and yellow apartment in Pilsen. “When I’m not in that kind of environment, I feel like something’s wrong, something’s missing, something’s out of balance.”
“But it’s not like I sit down and plan this. These people are all good musicians and singers. When Max, Susan and I first moved to Chicago, we started looking for good players, but we also wanted people we could hang out with. We’d had situations before where we worked with really good players but they were a pain in the ass. To me one of the most important things is that whole experience that happens with the family of the band, the whole extended family. In terms of race, sex, sexual preference, male, female, black, white, gay, straight–we’re working together and we have to get along to do that. There’s a constant effort within this band to learn about and understand differences because that’s what makes the music interesting. That’s what makes life interesting.”
In the case of Poi, there’s much more to life than making money, because no one in the operation is getting rich–yet. Several band members must rely on other sources of income to pay the rent; Crawford tends bar at Metro on weekends; Goulding, an expatriated Briton who also plays in the Mekons, works office jobs; Mertens regularly plays on commercial jingles; South Sider Cornelius is an actor in theater groups from St. Louis to Madison.
The band’s daily business affairs are run by Travis, who, before joining Poi Dog two years ago, had no experience in the music industry, and Dave Prince, who had previously promoted local rave concerts and worked as a free-lance journalist.
The floor above Orrall’s Pilsen apartment is Ground Zero of Poi’s cottage music industry. It is here that the band conducts its business, albeit in a fashion far removed from the standards set by the major labels in their bicoastal high-rises. Prince is blasting techno music from a boom box in the window. One of the neighbors, a Hispanic grade-school student named Mercedes, sips from a bowl of homemade soup prepared by Travis, who has a chicken baking in the oven as she fields phone calls from concert promoters, record distributors and members of her extended Poi family.
“Being broke promotes creative thinking,” Prince says. “As artists working outside the mainstream, it gives you all sorts of options.”
Travis left her job as a party planner for Schubas tavern on the North Side and took a 75 percent pay cut to work for Poi, simply because she was so smitten by the band’s music and the warmth of the band members, particularly Orrall.
“I’ve been in the music business only a couple of years, but this business has only been around for a few generations, so why does it have to be done a certain way?” Travis asks. “For the first year, I was constantly asking myself and other people, `Am I doing this right?’ And now I think, `How can I do this better?’ Dave and I try to think of ways around those rules.”
Which is why Poi Dog is investing in its own studio on the Northwest Side, has formed its own record label (Plate.tec.tonic) and is self-managed. The band doesn’t have the big promotional budget that a major-label contract would allow; Poi members had to borrow money from friends just to record and release its first album, the 1995 “Pomegranate,” on its own label. But the payoff has been considerable: The record has sold more than 70,000 copies, nearly as many as the band’s best-selling release when it was affiliated with a major label, Columbia Records, from 1990 to 1992. And because the band does not have the high overhead it had with Columbia, more revenue from record sales gets poured back into the band, enabling it to buy the studio and plan better shows.
Would Poi Dog consider going back to a major label, should the offer materialize? Not likely.
“We were down about being dropped from Columbia for all of about two seconds,” Crawford insists. “The problem with Columbia is there are more people in line ahead of you at a major label. Here you can choose who you want to work with.”
It’s the kind of freedom that allows the band members to create at their leisure, and Orrall gives them the leeway. “People stick with this band because of Frank’s generosity as a leader,” Crawford says. “The creative license and input he gives everyone means more than anything, more than any amount of money. As the band evolves, so do people as individuals.”
Orrall hired Travis as his business manager, even though she had no experience in the record industry.
“I just had a gut feeling that her heart was in the right place,” he says. “And I was right.” He recruited Cornelius as a singer after seeing him perform at Brigid Murphy’s loopy variety-show parody, “Milly’s Orchid Show.” Orrall’s philosophy: “Give good people responsibility and respect and they step right up to it.”
Cornelius is a prime example of a Poi member who did.
“Frank is not the guy in the chair on the other side of the desk–he talks a lot about what he wants and we collaborate because he’s one of us,” says the singer, who has the long, slender build of a basketball player and the demeanor of a stand-up comedian. As Cornelius’ onstage role expanded from a backup singer to part-time lead vocalist, so too did his behind-the-scenes role: He did everything from lick stamps to call journalists when the band released its double-CD “Liquid White Light” last summer.
“You’re not just a cog in a band but a part of making it happen, making it grow,” says Cornelius. “My first show with this band was in front of 10,000 people on Earth Day in 1993–anyone with enough confidence to hand me a microphone and say, `Sing!’ in that kind of situation is gonna inspire you to go the extra mile.”
On a recent weekday morning, Voelz climbed the rickety fire-escape stairs to the band’s studio off Western Avenue and cranked up the electric space heater to melt the chill from her fingertips. Then she wrote out a three-part string orchestration she had composed for Poi’s remake of Ten City’s house classic, “That’s the Way Love Is,” which will be released as a single to tide the band over until it can record its next album, due next year. A couple of Voelz’s pals–violinist Anne Harris and violist Stacia Spencer–showed up with their instruments, learned their parts and, a few hours later, the trio had finished weaving a beautiful countermelody through the song’s rhythmic contours.
“Going to the studio used to be like visiting the dentist’s office,” Crawford says, watching the session from the mixing board. “This is more like part of our lives, something we do when we want instead of paying attention to someone else’s clock.”
Finding that freedom has been the key to Poi’s survival, and fueled the collective’s desire to keep investing in a future that holds no financial guarantees. A slender, charismatic figure of European and American Indian extraction, Orrall grew up in Hawaii, where he formed the first version of Poi in 1984 and eventually brought it to the mainland, where it settled for several years in Austin, Texas, before moving to Chicago in 1992.
“At the start, I was recording songs on four-track, copying them on cassette, making a cover, xeroxing it at Kinko’s, then watercoloring it in because that was cheaper than making a color copy, and selling them while playing on the street,” he says. “I was doing it because no one was stopping me. I sensed from the start that the idea of making things and then searching for approval or validation was the wrong approach. So I didn’t get into the trap of making demos, sending them out to record companies and waiting for someone to pass judgment.”
Crawford remembers seeing the band on the streets in Baton Rouge and being impressed enough to want to join. After moving to Austin, he ran into Orrall at a party, and was invited to join the band provided he could play accordion. “I said, `Sure!’ even though I had never played it before,” the trumpet player says. “I went home, looked in the Yellow Pages under `accordion’ and found this old German lady. I went to her house and she told me how not to break it. Literally two days later I was on the road with Poi Dog. People figured out I couldn’t play accordion, but it didn’t matter, because we were playing on the street. It was low pressure and a great way to learn.”
The motley collective got better in a hurry. It cut two inexpensive acoustic records for the small Texas Hotel label, then got a big break when it was booked at the New Music Seminar in New York City in the summer of 1989 to open for a band that included the sister of R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe.
“Everybody was there to see Michael Stipe’s sister and they accidentally saw us,” Crawford says. “Michael Stipe, Frank Riley–who became our future booking agent–saw us, and that led directly to opening a tour for Camper Van Beethoven in the fall and then getting signed to Columbia.”
The major-label deal with Columbia Records nearly ruined the band. Though Poi was quickly becoming a top live act, it was evolving at a pace quicker than the label was able to understand. What started out as an acoustic street band with a vaguely hippie-ish attitude had become a polyrhythmic juggernaut heavily influenced by world music by the time its tenure ended after three albums in 1992.
“We got dropped by the label and I did the unthinkable and dismantled the band, moved to Chicago and started to make a record,” Orrall says. “It was the end of the cycle and I felt stifled. There were people from the old band like Max and Susan that I still wanted to work with. But I knew otherwise I had to start over again and refocus.”
Chicago had always been friendly to the band: Club owners such as Susan Miller and Julia Adams of Lounge Ax and graphics designer Sheila Sachs had become friends, WXRT was one of the few commercial stations in the country that consistently played the band’s songs and Poi was selling out club shows in town long before it moved north. Once here, Orrall found his musical future in the house clubs of the city’s South and West Sides.
“That’s where Chicago cracked open for me–house music is a much more racially mixed environment and it’s a place where people come to dance and get into a deeper, subconscious place because the music is just taking them over,” he says. “Whereas there’s a different vibe you get at rock clubs: people standing around drinking and talking while a band is beating its brains out on stage. I wanted to get away from that and into that dream-state, subconscious world that dance music can take you.”
And that’s where the band is increasingly headed, a hybrid of dance and rock with lush orchestral colors filled in by Voelz’s virtuoso violin, Mertens’ saxophone and Crawford’s armada of keyboards and horns.
“Frank’s curiosity for new things is just insatiable,” Crawford says. “He’s dedicated himself to being open and inspired by life.” It’s not just the music that drives the band anymore, it’s the people and the relationships within it that give that music its richness. Instead of some more material sign of “success”–a big record deal, a million-selling album, a Rolling Stone cover story–the process has become this band’s reward.
Orrall doesn’t disagree. He shows a visitor a picture of himself as a blond boy squinting into the sun in Hawaii, a lei draped around his neck, palm trees in the background.
“Sometimes when I look at this I can sense my original person, the person that came into this world,” he says. “I look at him and think, `What did that person want to do before circumstances led him a certain way?’
“In a way, a few years ago I started to question whether music was leading my life in a certain way. Music is one of the most valuable things that ever happened to me, and I’ve done it for years and the focus has always been on the next album, the next tour. So I’m sort of curious about what else is in here,” tapping his chest.
“I would like to do other things, and have music be a part of my life instead of my whole life. I’m gonna get on that horse when I want to get on that horse. I don’t want anybody telling me, `Faster! Harder! Drive longer!’ No. That ultimately has allowed me to think about music in a much realer way.
“Music was once a way of defining my self-worth, which had very much to do with people saying, `You’re good. What you’re doing is worthwhile.’ I’m flinching back from that. What we’re trying to do here is no longer part of that scheme. Now it’s about enjoying the exploration.”
