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“The fence that makes good neighbors needs a gate to make good friends”
The power of pop Jamestown transplant traveled the globe in search of good tunes
By Greg Glasgow, Camera Music Writer
October 13, 2006Tim Rose's musical journey has taken him all over the world: from St. Louis, where he and his brother, Ken, started psychedelic power-pop band the Sun Sawed in 1/2 in 1990, to California, Ukraine, Italy, Austria and most recently to Jamestown, where Rose moved last year shortly after recording a new album in Vienna under the moniker Fresh Mowed Lawn.
Released on Fort Collins-based power-pop outpost Not Lame Records, the album is a lush, melodic affair influenced by the likes of Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson — and the musicians Rose met during his journeys abroad.
"I went around to some jazz clubs (in Vienna) because I had this idea that I was going to make this Burt Bacharach jazz album and find a vocalist who sounded like Dionne Warwick. I was going to make this really lush album; something that my dad would like," says Rose, who works at Sterling-Rice Group, a Boulder ad agency. "And I found all these great jazz players — the pianist was a professor in the Vienna Conservatory; the drummer went to Berklee but was Austrian and toured with some of the top jazz players in New York; the bass player is one of most famous jazz bass players in Europe."
The direction of the album changed at an Austrian falafel stand, where Rose happened to meet Hector McDonald, director of the horn section for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
"I ended up being friends with him, and it turned out his wife was one of the stars of the Greek Opera House," Rose says. "And so she gave me vocal lessons and he hooked me up with other members of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. So I had all of this talent and I said, 'I've got to put this on the record.' I brought them in the studio, and over 14 months we recorded this album, throwing on pieces, taking off pieces. I had never had anything so difficult to mix in my life."
Promoted heavily by Not Lame, the self-titled disc has sold well to fans of the Sun Sawed in 1/2, a band that played the same St. Louis clubs as Uncle Tupelo in the early '90s. After winning a national battle of the bands contest sponsored by Ticketmaster and Billboard magazine, SS1/2 toured the country, recorded two albums with producer Keith Olsen (Grateful Dead, Santana) and became darlings of the power-pop underground in America, Europe and Japan.
"We got the ears of the underground power-pop movement, which I wasn't even aware there was one, but they're almost like Trekkies in their devotion to everything that sounds remotely like the Beatles," Rose says. "Bruce Brodeen from Not Lame came to see us play and he started to push us. He put out the Mindflip album, just distributing it, and then signed us up to his label and was able to get us all over the world and get us into the hands of the power-pop aficionados, and it was really great.
"Everything took off; we spent a lot of time playing in L.A. and everything was fantastic, then our drummer quit and I said, 'I've had enough.' We'd been on the road from '92 to '98, for six years, playing about nine months out of the year throughout Europe and the States, and I was exhausted.
"When he quit we tried to get another drummer, and it just lost everything. It was kind of like the Who losing Keith Moon."
Coincidentally, that drummer, Matt Martin, had moved to Nederland, and he now plays in a stripped-down Fresh Mowed Lawn along with keyboardist John Gustke and bass player Jeff Davis. Rose is the only holdover from the Vienna sessions; he says Fresh Mowed Lawn plays a mix of its own songs, covers and Sun Sawed in 1/2 songs. When the band performs Saturday at the Jamestown Mercantile it will have a special guest — Sun Sawed in 1/2 vocalist Doug Bobenhouse.
Rose has written 12 new songs for a future Fresh Mowed Lawn album. They'll be more stripped-down than the songs on the album, he says, but they'll definitely reflect Rose's love of good pop music, from Elvis Costello and Squeeze to XTC and Todd Rundgren.
"It's about the songwriting. I can listen to bands in any genre if their songs are good," he says. "So much about songwriting is finding your voice and finding something that people can relate to and finding a melodic line that sounds simple but is actually complicated.
"It's something that you have to write a thousand songs before you get a good one. And you have to keep going and going and going and listening to the masters and analyzing it. I think it has everything to do with the songwriting, because you can have pop music in any genre. Def Leppard is a pop band; Bon Jovi is a pop band; a lot of the country artists are playing pop music. It's all about the songs."