WESTMINSTER-Wojcicki, a group featuring longtime members of the independent music scene of Brattleboro and western Massachusetts, has just released a third album, Wetmarket Scratch.
To celebrate the six-song EP, the local three-piece band is playing an album-release party on Thursday, June 19, at the Stone Church in Brattleboro.
The band is comprised of songwriter and bandleader Matt Sharff on vocals, guitar, bass, and keyboards; Bethanie Yeakle on lap steel, guitar, and vocals; Re Sheppard, who recently joined Wojcicki, on bass; and Phil Beninson, on drums and percussion.
Wetmarket Scratch celebrates Sharff's return to vinyl. The last time he appeared on a vinyl record was in 1981, on a 7-in. single by The Raw Edge Band when he was 17 years old. All of the other albums and singles on which Sharff has appeared in the intervening 44 years have been CDs or cassette tapes.
Listening to Wetmarket Scratch challenges one's beliefs about how to define a band's sound. Is this rock or post-rock? Can you call it "roots music" if there's a jazz drummer? Can you have the catchy hooks of pop without the sunshine and lollipops? Is there a place for slide guitar in slowed-down punk rock?
Does categorization even matter when we're talking about art?
Sometimes it does, especially when one is trying to explain music for the purpose of convincing a person to listen to it. Especially when the band's name is hard to pronounce, at least for non-Polish speakers.
"Wojcicki" (pronounced Voy-CHEAT-ski) is Sharff's maternal family name and was selected, somewhat cheekily, for its challenging pronunciation and spelling.
Venturesome music-lovers, picture this: What if Townes Van Zandt and Gram Parsons wrote lyrics for Ry Cooder on the Paris, Texas soundtrack and then started a band with a modern guitar genius like Marisa Anderson or William Tyler? What if this band listened only to the Rolling Stones' saddest songs - think "Memory Motel" and "Winter"? What if they combined a hint of the anti-pedantic leftist politics of Minutemen with the multi-layered, experimental dream-pop of Galaxie 500 or This Mortal Coil?
Then, put in front a vocalist who - like Pere Ubu's and Rocket from the Tombs's David Thomas, or Gary Floyd of The Dicks, or Dead Moon's Fred Cole - seems to barely be holding back something - anger? sadness? exhaustion? - whether he's belting out a rousing tune or softly snarling the lyrics.
That might begin to explain Wojcicki.
* * *
Upon learning Sharff's history, the hard-to-define, musical polyglot situation begins to make sense.
In middle school, New York City native Sharff started hanging out in the East Village, long a locus of creative talent, musical and otherwise.
At the time, Sharff admits, he "didn't know music," other than listening to The Beatles. Then, in 1977, his older brother returned from a trip to England, toting some 7-inch records. The brother tossed a few to Sharff because he hated them, calling them "horrible, disgusting music."
But Sharff liked them.
Those singles were by punk legends The Sex Pistols and The Stranglers. "That was my first dose of punk," he said.
As he looked around his East Village hangout, Sharff made the connection: "That music. It's right here!"
Soon thereafter, Sharff formed a band, Flash Cooney & The Deans of Discipline, with two siblings and another friend. "We played a lot of early rock 'n' roll standards, then we added punk songs. And songs by The Cramps. The music I liked in my adolescence was three chords and a mallet on the head," Sharff noted.
That band is still around, albeit in a slightly different configuration. He sat in with them two years ago, as he does every 20 years or so.
By high school, Sharff had cycled in and out of bands, a practice he said continued into adulthood.
"Starting in ninth grade, I was playing at venues like CBGB and Max's Kansas City," said Sharff.
When I expressed surprise that these storied venues would allow such young people to enter, let alone take the stage, Sharff noted those were different times.
"We were all 14 or 15 years old, but the drinking age was 18, and nobody checked IDs. It was normal," said Sharff, who added, "There were a lot of caring adults [in that scene], making sure we were OK."
Were Sharff's parents OK with their young teenager being in such spaces?
"My parents were deeply concerned, but they were supportive," he said.
* * *
That support was crucial when one day, in September 1977, Sharff got a phone call from a member of The Misfits, the New Jersey band credited with starting the horror punk genre.
The Misfits were scheduled to play in Pennsylvania for a few nights and they needed an opening band. Could Sharff help?
"Yeah, I got a band," he told the Misfit, and Sharff hastily threw together a pop-up band to meet the occasion.
He had two weeks.
"That was my band, The Whorelords. [Misfits lead singer] Glenn Danzig and I then had to call all the parents and convince them to let us - all minors - go to Pennsylvania for the weekend with The Misfits. I was 15 years old, and I'd never been to Pennsylvania," Sharff recounted.
The scene began changing in the early '80s, said Sharff. There were a lot fewer gigs, "unless you were a hardcore band."
Although there were some notable female performers, the hardcore scene at the time was fairly homogeneous.
"Punk rock was diverse," Sharff noted. "There were people of color, queer people, women. After that it was all shaved-head guys wearing the same outfits."
"I got bored with punk," he said.
* * *
From there, Sharff made his way into pop, power pop, prog, old-school funk, and new wave, the latter with his band Chit-Chat. That band played at Max's Kansas City, which happened to employ a former Brattleboro resident, Peter Crowley, as its booking agent.
"Peter liked having kids play," said Sharff. "He's really sweet."
In his early 20s, when Sharff began dating Collin Leech, "I was in four or five bands. Collin would say, 'When are you not rehearsing?'"
But, 38 years later, "we're still together," said Sharff. He and Leech have two daughters: Magda, a music major planning to get a master's degree in library science, and Abby, who is very involved in musical theater.
How many bands is Sharff in now?
"I'm only in two bands, but...," Sharff said, trailing off as he thought about this for a minute, then admitted, "Well, I'm doing a gig on July 11 at Fire Arts Café on Route 30, accompanying Bethanie [Yeakle]. Then on Aug. 8, I'm doing a 25-year reunion gig with Ware River Club at the Iron Horse in Northampton."
With Jim Roberto and Ed Powers, Sharff also plays in The Vermen, which will release an album later this year.
"So now I'm in four bands," Sharff said with a sheepish sort of laugh.
"I've never not played music with other people. My social abilities are limited. I find it very easy to communicate musically with people," he said. "It's my way of comfortably socializing."
* * *
In 1994, Sharff and Leech moved from New York City to Brattleboro.
"Leaving the city, I rediscovered country music. Old, outlaw, Americana. When I was little, staying with my dad in Cornish, New Hampshire, we had one television station, but only if we positioned the clothes hanger antenna right," said Sharff. "I watched a lot of Hee Haw."
In their first Brattleboro apartment, Sharff made friends with his neighbor a few doors down: "That was Chad [Leitz], and Clem [née Sean Adams] was sleeping on his couch," he said. The trio began playing music together and quickly added a drummer. Thus Sharff's first Vermont band, The Johnson Boys, was formed.
"It was a lot of psychedelic punk country-rock," he said.
The Brattleboro area in the mid-to-late 1990s was a great place to make and enjoy music, said Sharff. Enthusiastic attendees could find numerous venues, often accessible: McNeill's, the Mole's Eye, the Common Ground, out in a field, in a chicken barn.
"In New York City, you have to rent hourly studio space to rehearse," said Sharff. "And then you have to carry your gear around on the subway. In Brattleboro, you can rehearse in a basement at a house, the gig is down the street, and you park out front to unload your gear. This is unheard of in New York."
The seeds of Wojcicki were born in the latter-day Johnson Boys, when guitarist and singer Yeakle and drummer Garth Tichy joined the band. Around this time, Sharff met western Massachusetts drummer Don McAulay, who introduced him to his soon-to-be bandmates in the Ware River Club.
When Sharff joined as bassist, Ware River Club had already released one album. The band went on to record two more and toured numerous times.
"We did several trips down the East Coast, we played at SXSW in 2002, and we got to play an outdoor show at Battery Park, opening for Emmylou Harris in front of 4,000 people on July 4, 2001 - in the shadow of the [World Trade Center], two months before 9/11," he said.
* * *
In 2011, after playing music with Yeakle and Tichy, Sharff began forming Wojcicki.
"I was pushing 50, and I was writing all this music and not putting it out," said Sharff. The band's first album, After Birther, which had Beninson on drums because Tichy was not available, came out in July 2016, and it was "a very homemade affair," said Sharff.
The next LP, 2022's Failure to Illuminate, which Sharff described as "me trying to be a little less fussy," was recorded at Dave Snyder's Guilford Sound recording studio, and saw Tichy's return to the drums.
For Wetmarket Scratch, also recorded at the studio, Sharff tried writing songs without starting with guitar chords. "Otherwise, it just always sounds the same," he said. "I like to find things the guitar can do. It's an untrained approach: forgetting what you know, to see what happens.
"I've been writing music for a long time," Sharff reflected. "I was a little afraid of it as a teen, but in the late 1980s, I began skirting the internal editor, which is the biggest obstacle."
For Sharff, words "are first the rhythm, then the tone and texture. Last of all, the meaning."
"I always start with the musical idea," he said. "I try to find things that sound new and different, within the realm of pop accessibility. The lyrics are whatever my unconscious mind will release, then I'll massage that until I'm not embarrassed by it," he said.
"Some subject matter comes from my unhealthy social media habits," Sharff observed. "There's political stuff, but also what politics hath wrought in our modern world.
"Well, more to the point: what money hath wrought," he said.
* * *
Wojcicki's new EP, Wetmarket Scratch, is available in a digital or vinyl version at wojcicki.bandcamp.com. Locally, the EP can be found at Turn It Up! in Brattleboro and Northampton. It will also be available at Wojcicki's album-release party on Thursday, June 19 at The Stone Church in Brattleboro. Tickets can also be purchased at Turn It Up! or via stonechurchvt.com.
Wendy M. Levy, a former staff reporter for this newspaper, is an at-large writer and columnist for municipal news and arts.
This Arts column by Wendy M. Levy was written for The Commons.