Pit report

At odds with the modern rock-and-roll landscape

by Don Fluckinger

What the heck is the "Boston sound"? Aerosmith and J. Geils Band? Certain people who hung around Cambridge and Boston clubs like the Rat 15 years ago swear it's smart, punky pop-rock à la Human Sexual Response, the Cars, and Mission of Burma. It's funny, but one of today's practitioners of the sound, the Gravel Pit, hail from Hartford.

"It's late-'70s punk rock with elements of everything we've enjoyed," says Jedediah Parish, lead singer of the quartet who play the Lucky Dog Music Hall Saturday night. "I've never come up with a real serious adjective or description. We sound like Elvis Costello, the Ramones, the Untertones," he adds laughing, "the Beatles. It's melodic hard rock."

The Gravel Pit started in Hartford while Parish was still in high school. Five years ago, they relocated to Boston. Last year, the group released their second full-length CD, Silver Gorilla, to critical acclaim. Its catchy pop bears a hard guitar edge, sometimes unexpectedly discordant harmonies, and lyrics telling peculiar stories. Although the Gravel Pit's sound is alterna-pop, the band occasionally foray into synth-pop ("Bolt of Light") and even into jangly country-folk ("When Will Our Bucket Come Up Dry").

The centerpiece of Silver Gorilla is "An American Trilogy," a macabre three-song cycle that relays the tale of Ezra Messenger, a rich, old, crusty Yankee who is shunned by his extended family until close to his death. Then the family becomes concerned with whom will inherit his fortune. So he invites them all to a reading of the will -- and he promptly kills them. Yet there are also the "boy meets girl" musings of the murderously addictive "Favorite," and the cryptic wordplay of the closer "Get Tangled!". Silver Gorilla runs the gamut from cheeky three-minute radio ditties to "Stairway to Heaven." That's not a coincidence, either: Parish plans it that way.

"I write all the songs, I write all the lyrics," he says. "My angle is always to have a variety. It's at odds with the modern rock-and-roll landscape where people try to do just the opposite. They try to have just one sound, one song, one type of lyric and subject matter. . . . I always want there to be songs about different things."

This summer, the band will record their next album, laying down tracks soon after label Q Division finishes setting up a new studio in Cambridge. Several songs are already written and stage-tested; others, Parish says, will be written and recorded pretty much on the spot. That's a change from previous recording sessions, when the group went in and played songs directly from their live set.

"It's actually a nice combination," he says. "There were points where an album would come out with a song that we were sick of, or at least certain people in the band would already be sick of it. So it'd be a little tough to hear it on the album -- they wished we could have recorded something new."

Although it took until the late 1990s for the band to release their two CDs, the Gravel Pit have played together a dozen years now -- with several West Coast tours under their belts and an audience all along the eastern seaboard. Parish recently released a solo CD, Bloodsucker Blues, a project that grew out of a cassette compilation he's recorded with friends in the past decade. There's also the Gentlemen, a side project for the other Gravel Pit members who play with Mike Gent of the Figgs.

Do the group pine for greater fame and fortune? Or as members move into middle age, could their achievements so far be enough? For Parish, there was definitely a time in the group's history when being on a big label would have been nice, having someone else pay for their tours and promote the albums. Now, he says, "making records that sound exactly as we want for as long as we want to" is the most important thing, which is exactly what the Gravel Pit are doing now.

"In the last year, I've decided -- I don't even know if the other guys in the band know this -- if a major label came up to us and, let's say, were going to offer us a million dollars for free and we were obligated to nothing, I wouldn't even do it. They are a dinosaur, and they are in the tar pit, and I'm doing all I can to throw heavy things on them so they sink to the bottom of that pit and die forever."

The Gravel Pit play on June 17 with Joe Rockhead, Head Rental, and Miss Fortune at the Lucky Dog Music Hall. Call (508) 363-1888.