March 20th, 2014
Well Rounded
Posted: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 12:00 am
By:Bert Patterns
September 23rd may be the most resonant date on the calendar, musically speaking. John Coltrane, Bruce Springsteen and Ray Charles all were born that day, not to mention Les McCann, Albert Ammons, and vocalist Norma Winstone. This year, Sunday September 23rd will do the tradition proud when Danny Speer and Dee Specker throw a dual CD release concert at the Rongo. Speer and Specker’s new recording just out now is called The Curve, and they are issuing for the first time on CD 1993’s Black Hats by their Circle D Band, a more traditional country music outfit.
When I heard there was a new recording of Speer’s songs, sung by Danny and Dee, I expected to like it. After all, I’ve been listening to his music for over a quarter of a century. The Peabody Band, for which Speer was lead vocalist, guitarist, cellist and most prolific song writer, was part of the great music scene in Ithaca in the ’70s. Nights at the Chariot, the Straight, the old-but-then-newish Haunt, maybe the Arcade, and days outdoors listening and dancing to Peabodies (and others) was what kept me in town. Why leave a place with so much good music that could not be heard anywhere else?
“Danny is never at a loss for songs,” Dee Specker said in a recent phone interview. After the Peabody Band, Speer was major writer through the ’80s for Sinbad, the Pirates (with Dee), and one-offs like the Guardian Angels. Although not performing so much in the ’90s, Speer wrote songs and sometimes he and Specker would get together and sing. As Speer explained, “Harmony singing is a reason for living.” Specker agreed, saying this project got started when they were getting together once a week, but admitting she had it in mind that “we should record these songs…I had my favorite Peabody songs picked out.”
If choosing a baker’s dozen songs for the disc was difficult, it was because the musical tandem had to winnow down both the number of songs and, in some cases, the number of verses. Some Peabody songs were heroic in conception and duration. Song cycles, like “Going Around the Curve”, received a grant from Meet the Composer. Specker was set on “The Girls in France,” a scurrying swinger with a stomping chorus, “Pretty Smart Cookie,” which has a hook as irresistible as the treat of the title, and “How to Marry A Millionaire,” a song that may never go out of style.
Other gems are the rewritten “Power of Suggestion,” which kept its 12/8 groove but has a funkier bass line and the once-performed “Insomnia,” which, after a couple choruses addressing listeners suffering from the sleeping disorder, switches game-show style to “famous people with insomnia,” leading off implausibly (yet inevitably in retrospect) with George Washington. “Underwater” is stately and gorgeous, like sunlight filtered through waves far above.
Speer’s songs, the songs of the music-school-trained son of a music professor, have featured many musical genres over the years, such as blues, zoot suitish, Renaissance and psychedelic, but the lyrics share a consistent vision of romantic outsiders, pioneers, desperados and lovers true and false. That’s where the more urban The Curve intersects the rustic Americana of Black Hats. This is a pure country set, from Bob Carlucci’s lively pedal steel guitar to the “aw shucks” rhythms. The title track is the plot of a Hollywood oater set to music. “Ferry Boat in the Rain” is an example of Speer catching the tragic yet undaunted commonplace with the line, “Someday we’re gonna fix that pulley.”
Many Circle D songs, like “Dottie’s Cafe,” “Girl of the Golden West,” and “Tonight We Fell in Love Again” with its melting chorus, showcase the clear and expressive soprano of Dee Specker, who came to Ithaca in 1978 with the Jubilee String Band. She’s from a musical family, her father having studied viola with Adelbert Purga in Wellsville, and is raising one herself. Far from a tag-along in the duo, Dee has the higher musical profile at present. She’s been featured with departed Ithaca fave Moxie and currently performs with Swingsation and in country-bluegrass Cornerstone alongside Bobbie Henrie. Her vocals and violin cover the range from country to jigs to swing to funk required by Speer’s songs. She even moonlights in a private-party-only R&B band called the Usual Suspects.
The matinee at the Rongo on the 23rd will feature the fine musicians who worked on The Curve, Bill King, Geoff Sacco, Brian Earle and others. And as The Curve is even better than I expected, fresh and seductive, this should be a fine afternoon affair, for people who have never enjoyed either Dee or Danny’s music as well as those who want to catch up on the newest tunes. It’s like they say, creative people must be stopped: they won’t stop on their own.
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Danny Speer and Dee Specker will hold a release party for their new CD, The Curve, at 1pm on Sunday at the Rongovian Embassy. Call 387-3334 for more information.