About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (July 13, 2011)
4 ^jr' n i 'Jr* • 706.543.4400 Live-RiverClub .com ■ ■■ ■■■■■ *\ .* v5gyL«'7,VaVt'H* r J.' v 4 *.^ ‘ 9*, •r 4V*J is a.7c.\ • ■ i-YV > ,N* .-WV;;. in ... • •••‘ L>: »• .- ..; r, •*> 1-V~ ' mm : v .n^vl PH »a /. horimom furnished ■ Rates from s 349 I ’ ■ All private b.ithrooms I j^jgjg ■ In-unit washer & eJr"yi*r M ■ Swimming pools, fitness center \ END: ■ Tennis, basketball, volleyball ** On sit*.* t.mmiKj salon ■ fVr p«*rson hsising, roomm.itt* matching ■ Athens transit bus service to UGA 10 min. rid*! here's a poster of Otis Redding, sweaty and screaming and on his knees, available on the Internet for a dollar from artist Jason Lazarus; two words are scribbled in red over the black-and- white image: "Try Harder." It's an inspirational message and especially important to bear in mind as a musician playing in a genre—rock music—that is mostly designed to look natu ral. Many lead singers risk forgetting they're on a stage in their effort to look cool. Chloe Tewksbury, lead vocalist and guitarist for Green Thrift Grocery, strikes a perfect bal ance: you can tell she's putting effort into her performance, but it never looks anything less than real. Leading her band through scrappy, verging-on-chaos, art-punk songs, she hollers, jokes, dances, shrieks, croons and bangs away on her electrified acoustic guitar. In short, she does what a frontperson is supposed to do: she actually engages the audience. The band formed upon drummer Dain Marx (formerly of self-proclaimed "evil gay space clowns" Zumm Zumm) and bassist Hana Hay's return to Athens this past Halloween after an extended stay in Portland. A reoccurring theme for Green Thrift Grocery is a certain proclivity lor the spontaneous: Dain and Hana were traveling with the Portland-based indie- pop band Foot Ox, but after a weekend ;un- ning around Athens during the late-October Next to Last Festival, they decided to let their band soldier on while they remained. "To me, the whole Portland thing seemed surreal in a sense—like it wasn't real life," recalls Marx. "It was way too safe—it's a completely different world out there, and I missed the South. I just wanted to get back here for a little bit, not [with] much inten tion of staying." The pair ended up crashing with Tewksbury at her home in Arnoldsville, where along with guitarist Ryan Donegan, the group began to navigate its way through some punky improvisation. The band shaped it$ improv into some truly catchy songs, whipped up some stylish, elven/sci-fi-themed outfits and started playing out. The colorful quartet is poised to contrib ute to what is basically Athens' legacy: the collision of art and fun. The latter comes up often while talking to the band. "I guess the fact that we have a dynamic and entertain ing frontperson takes the pressure off of me; it allows me to have a good time while doing what I'm doing," says Donegan, whom audiences may have previously spotted ring ing bells and coaxing tones from singing saws with The Music Tapes. "It's really fun; I just started playing bass when we started jamming together. I like playing and getting better at it and learning," says Hay, who also contrib utes video-making skills to the group. (Take note of her stop-motion clip for "My My My My.") Beyond the simple joys of noisemaking, Tewksbury's subtle jabs at consumer culture are a large part of what makes the band so interesting; her sense of conviction may be the source of her electric performances. Although Green Thrift Grocery nicked its name from a Flagpole article about a fictitious pro duce store as a goof, there are genuine ideas being discussed in the songs. "It kinda turned into this opportunity to create some kind of commentary on the strange consumer environ ment we live in," Tewksbury says, "which I think permeates a lot of levels of conscious ness and creates who we are in a lot of ways. "it is a set of characters in a way," she adds, referring to her band's costumed per sonas. "They're not defined characters, but his tongue cheek thing where I feel like it's turning up the volume on that part of us: the way that we just take on all these different roles, and we're forced in all these different directions with all these different messages we get through media and the way we experience culture... And it turned us into these twisted kind of beings," she says, laugh ing, "where we don't know who we are, and everything's in conflict. And the costumes are fun—we do it because it's fun to do, but it's also a way of taking our stage show out of the context of the ordinary person. I mean, everybody wears costumes to some degree in their normal life that can be changed... and you can change who you are and how you're perceived by what you're wearing. That plays into it to a certain degree." Jeff Tobias / v WHO: Green Thrifty Grocery, Dead Dog, Nucular Animals WHERE: Farm 255 WHEN: Wednesday, July 13,11 p.m. HOW MUCH: FREE! V ) 14 FLAGPOLE.COM JULY 13,2011
