Meeting Frank Orrall (and all the rest of the Poi Dogs)
On family, and home, and standing exactly where you're supposed to be
I first saw Poi Dog Pondering at a concert on Northwestern’s campus called ‘Dillo Day (it’s on YouTube!). It was an annual outdoor festival on the lakefront right before final exams. The show clearly changed my life. I went right from the show to a Chicago Compact Disc store and picked up “Volo Volo,” and later their other two albums at the time.
I became a fan, and the following summer Poi Dog Pondering was playing at Grant Park on the 4th of July. I was spending the summer on campus and helping edit the “summer” issue of Art+Performance by night and working in the campus computing lab by day.
I assigned myself to cover the Poi show and wrote a story. I loved writing it, and I loved how it turned out. That story (see below) would lead to both a longstanding relationship with the band and a longstanding misunderstanding.
First thing’s first.
Poi played two shows that 4th of July, 1994 including an after show show at Lounge Ax. Leddie, their percussionist at the time, walked me in because I was under age. And I met Frank there, and interviewed him and Susan in the basement.
Once the shows were over, I had a story and a bunch of photos of the band, because I talked my way into a photo pass despite only having a point-and-shoot Olympus, that my parents had bought me years before. It was called a point and shoot because that’s all you had to do. It was a fully automatic camera. I think I had one roll of black and white film.
But armed with all of this content, and a severe case of fanboy, I started building a Web site. Like most bands, Poi Dog Pondering didn’t have a site of its own at that point. This was still in the very early days of the Web, but I’d been running the Lou Reed site for a few months.
After a while, I reached out to the band and offered them a deal: if they’d pay for my hosting, I would keep doing their site as a labor of love. And thus rocknroll.net and poihq.com were born. The hosting itself is another set of stories.
Along the way I joined Poi’s email fan list, the Poi Pounders (a poi pounder is a stone used to grind taro leaves into a food called poi, which is common in Hawaii, where Frank is from) and later called Place of Refuge. On that list I met a bunch of people who are to this day very dear friends.
Poi’s bassist at the time was a tech savvy guy named Brent Olds, aka Astro. He helped me gather info from the band and even came to my dorm room to help me work on the site. How crazy is that? A rocknroller hanging out at Willard!
And through Brent, I met Chaka who managed the group and later Ken who helped us do cool Web stuff and eventually everyone who has floated through the Poi universe over the decades.
The web site I built helped foster the community growing around the band. We streamed rare music clips and videos before there was soundcloud or YouTube to make that easy. We sold out a show with online ordering, before that was a thing. We had members of the band blogging and taking pictures from the road (I gave them disposable cameras and then scanned the pics when they got back.) Basically, it was totally ahead of its time.
If you look back at CDs from that era, like Liquid White Light, you’ll see me thanked in the credits by the nickname the band gave me: webboy. Later I would shoot the covers of the 2-disk Live at Metro set.
All the while, I kept shooting. Poi has always let me shoot whatever I want, however I want and from wherever I want. Poi shows were my sandbox and my playpen. And I learned so much shooting them that I took with me for all of my other shoots. I wouldn’t be the photographer I am without Poi letting me play.
At their first Ravinia show (and the first band ever to sell out Ravinia — Google that!) the venue didn’t really know what to do with rock shows. They assigned me an escort and tried to severely limit where I should shoot from and for how long. Chaka stood up for me. “He’s allowed to practice his art with the same freedom we practice ours.” After that, I went up in the catwalks.
Part of it was fun to push things, but I also always felt an incredible responsibility to capture every moment and detail in those shows — which is hard when there are 20 people on stage, and visuals and dancers and film loops and lights and the light bulb of death swirling over your head.
But eventually they needed someone who wasn’t hand-coding it all in his spare time and moved the site to a different developer. That’s a whole different story. As the tools have gotten better and easier, I think Frank does it himself now.
I have kept shooting every show I can and have put together a couple of books and a kickstarter-funded site that archives my poi dog pondering photos.
I have so many memories of this band, its fans, and its music. With my actual family too. Gifting my mom Palm Fabric Orchestra to listen to during treatments. Or Max helped put together the First Day band to march my kids and their mates to school on the first day. Meredith joined me for a show they did at Wrigley Field and Frank played peekaboo with her from the stage. Or young me taking the purple to the red to the blue to hang out with the band at their Pilsen space and put CDs in their cases to mail out press kits, and then ride the Halsted bus all the way home with Susan. The crazy shows at Shelter. Or Rodman’s birthday party. Or the weird fundraiser at the fashion show, me shooting in a tux because it was black tie so why not.
So many real rock moments. And by “real” I mean what it’s like to be in a band that doesn’t play arenas but gets together and mails their own stuff.
This is a band that’s pretty much DIY everything. I don’t think I could live the dandy life that Frank lives – sailing the rock seas on tour busses with a guitar, a notebook and a pillow being all he needs – and wine, of course. But I have mad respect for how his life and his art revolve around themselves, and feed each other. The sustenance of art.
I can’t say enough about how just nice and genuine literally everyone associated with the band is, and has been for the 30 years I’ve now known them.
Oh right, the misunderstanding.
After the kickstarter, the band let me sell some of the books at the merch table. Frank even talked about it on stage and he told the story of that first article. He’d read it at the time and thought that I was just using my press credentials to get closer to the band.
Which was, to an extent, true. He picked that bone with me at the time and I told him I’d been reading a lot of Hunter S. Thompson and just doing some gonzo journalism writing. He smiled and he totally got it and forgave me. I was also doing it because I wanted to tell this band’s story. I wanted more people to hear them. I wanted everyone to feel what I felt when I heard that band. From that first show, and every one since. Why?
Because music isn’t just music. Music is the thing that holds us all together. Music heals, as they say on KEXP. Music can lead us to a community. You are not alone, as they say on KEXP. Music can bind us to our friends. Music is how we measure the moments. As they say, it’s the soundtrack of our lives.
For me all of that exists with Poi Dog Pondering and knowing that when I’m moving along the photo pit at the front of the Vic, camera in hand, that I am standing exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Here’s the piece from that 4th of July show.
Clearly I don't belong here. I am at Grant Park. And I am taking part in the American Dream which Dr. Hunter S. Thompson fought so long to find. Yep, you know it. I was shamelessly dropping names. lyin'. cheating. finagling. All in the name of self-fulfillment and self enjoyment. It was, after all, the Fourth of July.
I did have an air of legitimacy though. I was, as always, there to cover the story. The story was simple it seemed. Three great bands at different stages of their careers playing on the same stage for tens of thousands of hot and bothered people out for a good time on a national holiday. Hell, The national holiday. Squeeze. Past their prime. Poi Dog Pondering. Will they ever reach a peak? Lemonheads. A grungy band that gained fame through a Simon and Garfunkle cover.
Then the show began. Squeeze played and I don't feel like commenting further except to say that Aimee Mann joined them for a couple songs...
Now for those of who you have never been part of a Poi Dog show, you can't fully understand. You can't know the energy. You can't feel the passion. You can't fathom the beauty. You have never seen a band composed of Frank who occasionally sings into a miked megaphone; Susan, who plays electric violin; Dave who tends bar at the Metro, plays keyboard, a Korg organ older than I, as well as trumpet, trombone and Flugelhorn; Paul who plays alto/tenor/soprano/baritone saxophones as well as piccolo, flute, clarinet, and keyboards, Leddie on percussion playing with incessant zest, crashing the cymbals with a bare backhand, as well as your standard drum kit, guitar, two to three backing vocalists and a bassist who stands farther back on stage than any musician should.
Now when Poi Dog opened their set with Jack Ass Ginger it was like someone had supplanted the original hundred thousand people from the Squeeze show with crazed Poi fans. The entire psyche of the crowd changed to a throbbing bouncing mass. That's the magic of Poi Dog. No matter what kind of mood you are in, no matter how tired you are, you can't help but dance and smile (did Frank ever stop smiling? Did any of them?) when you pop in a Poi Dog disc or better yet catch them live. This would become even more obvious later. Oh my, would it.
I will state this for the record right now. In my professional (that's a key word here, I am a professional...) opinion, Poi Dog gives the best live shows of any band I have ever seen. They know how to draw you in from the start and how to keep you there.
So anyway, in the middle of the show at some point, Frank says, Oh yeah, everybody, we're having a release party tonight at Lounge Ax you all should come.
Earlier in the day I had made a crucial error which I now realized. I had chosen a direction for the story I thought I had to cover. I would write about the Taste of Chicago Festival. About the hordes of people there. About how I found myself in the photo pit with a point-and-shoot camera. About all the freaks like the security guard who was dressed in a red windbreaker and a Marine baseball cap that was obviously earned rather than bought at K-Mart and who was wearing shorts and white socks pulled up to show only the scars on his knees and who was at once taking his job seriously and at the same time somehow not caring and who had to go off to give a note to the Lemonheads' drummer saying that his mom had flown in from Texas to surprise him... That's where I'd thought the story would go.
However when the Lounge Ax show was announced, I now knew where it was headed. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Evan Dando. Nor a bunch of young Chicagoans eating expensive food. No. The story was headed into yet another round of name dropping and a quick flight on the el to Fullerton. It was a moral imperative. It had to be done. I was on assignment.
Failing to get on a guest list I resorted to being first in a rain-soaked line at the club. I still managed to work a little magic to get into the club (thanks again, Leddie) as everything continued to go right for a change. And I leaned over the tiny stage which would soon hold 11 wondrous players. And I knew even as I bent over, weary, that Poi could bring me back from this edge of sleep even though the show wouldn't start until 11. That Poi could drive an audience to any length at any hour. And that they would.
No disappointment this evening.
This was exactly where I supposed to be.
The party was celebrating the release of a new record by selected members of Poi past-and-present calling themselves Palm Fabric Orchestra. The album evolved out of Poi's Volo Volo sessions. Taking a favorite strand of song here and there and expanding it. Their label hated it. "It was an unsatisfying joint venture," explained Frank as we sat in the basement at 1:45. How I had come to be there I could not rightly explain for it wasn't right. This evening could not be happening.
I had no idea what to make of the album going in. So I stopped a couple members of Poi who were milling about (so surreal, the night) before the show and asked them.
Susan described the project as "Beauty" Not as in the harmonies being "beautiful" which they are. Nor as in the beauty of the ideal where a group cares so much about their art that they are willing to blow off a major label. Nor as in the Beauty of the harp or the violin, or the sly and oh so shy smiles that Poi exchange as they build off one another. Although all are worthy of the word.
No, Susan speaks of the concept of "Beauty" The very idea of the word. She told me "just listen and write what you hear," and I'm sorry, Susan, but I can not do that. I can not write well enough to put into words what you all have put so gracefully into the music of Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream.
So in that sense I fail as a writer, which is a hard thing to put into print. I have covered the event but only glanced at the story. Palm Fabric Orchestra must be heard. They can not be written about. If you don't find the album the first place you look, try another, then a third. Don't give up, what ever you do. Then sit in the dark, or in the light, put it on head phones and see what happens. See if a band with a harp, violin, piccolo, acoustic guitar, can move you. Close your eyes and smile--or try not to--and describe what you feel when you fail.
See if you do better than I did.
