This story about the Headlocks was first posted on my own blog in September, shortly before the band’s album-launch concert at a big old theater in outer-borough New York City. As it turned out, the show was a one-of-a-kind event in which the Headlocks communed with their appreciative local audience all the way through two full sets of covers and original tunes. What follows is a look at the long strange trip that got them there. Please read on, and check out “Me or You,” a Headlocks track currently featured in the player on the homepage of NoDepression.com.
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Instead of Cuckoo Bird, maybe the Headlocks should have called their debut album The Phoenix. The self-produced CD rose from the ashes of two aborted attempts to freeze the frame on this high-energy, rock ’n roots ensemble. But then, nothing seems to come all that easily to the Headlocks, a rowdy yet disciplined band of seasoned players from blue-collar Staten Island.
Nothing, that is, except an authentic ’60s vibe of collective creativity and pure musical joy.
Full disclosure: I am a Headlocks partisan. I know most of the group’s ten members, play in another band with a couple of them and have been to dozens of their shows. So call me biased. Yet by any objective standard, I would still submit that the Headlocks rock.
As a quintessential bar band, they’ve made a name for themselves in late-night venues around New York. But their home base is Staten Island – especially its North Shore. The area is perennially touted as the next bohemian paradise for artists and musicians gentrified out of the Lower East Side and Williamsburg. Some of those inner-borough hipsters might be surprised to learn that it’s already home to a vibrant alternative music scene. The Headlocks are both a product of that scene and, at this point, a driving force behind it.
They’re also exceptionally dedicated musicians, many of whom are a bit older and wiser than your average suburban rock-star wannabe. On the roster are a longshoreman, an underemployed Teamster and a couple of public school teachers, among other working stiffs. Most of the group are in their thirties and married or shacked up, and two of them have kids. Their work ethic keeps them gigging and rehearsing several times a week, even as they balance grown-up work and family obligations.
The Headlocks, in short, come by the blues honestly.
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The Cuckoo Bird CD finally takes flight on September 26, with a celebratory concert in the Music Hall at Snug Harbor Cultural Center. Built in the 1890s, the venerable, 850-seat auditorium is a far cry from the cozier local haunts where the Headlocks usually pack them in – like the magic-box back room at the Martini Red bar, or the amiable clutter of The Cup, a coffeehouse nearby. And the Music Hall show is on the verge of selling out.
The launch of the album has all the earmarks of a hometown triumph. But no matter where it leads, Cuckoo Bird is a milestone for the Headlocks. With its release, they will at last overcome a legacy of false starts that would be funny if it wasn’t so frustrating.
The first attempt at a full-scale recording came more than two years ago. That’s when Headlocks co-founders Rob Carey and Frank Duffy arranged for a session at a studio on Sand Street in Staten Island’s gritty Stapleton section. The session was captured on a heavy-duty, 20-year-old tape deck. “The same thing that Madonna recorded on in the ’80s,” kibitzes Duffy, the band’s hard-charging rhythm guitarist.
The Sand Street set featured many of the Headlocks originals that would ultimately turn up on Cuckoo Bird. Carey – the lead singer, whose vocals combine Dylanesque phrasing with blissful abandon – recalls the session sounding tight. Before the tape could be mastered, however, the vintage equipment seized up, apparently beyond repair. The recording was lost.
“We listened to it, literally, once, and never heard it again,” says Carey, still clearly stung by the loss. It’s probably just as well that he and the rest of the band had no way of knowing the sad truth: Their dream was destined to crash and burn one mo’ time.
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Carey and Duffy had first crossed paths about five years before the Sand Street debacle. At the time, they were both writing music in a folk-rock milieu, albeit from different angles. Carey is influenced most by roots music, naming Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly as important influences. Duffy favors R&B, stating flatly: “Sam Cooke is where I’m coming from.” Yet when the two began collaborating, they clicked immediately.
Their creative connection was effortless, even startling. “We always felt a sense of, ‘Wow, what just happened?’ The songs would just come together,” Carey says. The set of music that emerged was very much in the spirit and style of the Headlocks-to-be, and the two men started building a group around it.
Drummer Frank Cavallo was one early adopter who stayed on. Cavallo hauls cargo at the Howland Hook container port on Newark Bay when he’s not pummeling his kit. At Headlocks gigs he pounds relentlessly, just behind the beat, chasing the groove like it’s a union buster on the docks.
Organist and unofficial music director Steve Pepe signed on in 2006, when Carey enticed him with a Roland VK-7 he’d bought second-hand in Brooklyn. “I figured if I get an organ, I can get an organ player,” Carey says. He figured right. Though Pepe is a guitarist and composer by training, he took to the Roland with pouncing, keyboard-punishing riffs that were soon a Headlocks signature.
Steve Goffin arrived in 2007, armed with a meaty, hammering bass technique and unbridled physicality on the bandstand. A bear of a man, Goffin also happens to be a former student from Pepe’s days as a music teacher at Port Richmond High School. He still tends to address his slightly older and considerably less burly bandmate as “Mr. Pepe.”
Finally, about a year ago, Nick Purpura rounded out the current instrumental lineup as lead guitarist. He looks the part, too, with shoulder-length hair hanging down over his eyes when he crouches into the finely tuned electric anarchy of his solo work. Before he joined the Headlocks, Purpura had been playing with both Pepe and Cavallo in Tryptophan, a psychedelic quartet fronted by local musician and producer Ron Hill.
“Let’s get it out on the table. We wanted to take Ron Hill’s band away from him,” Duffy jokes.
In fact, Tryptophan is alive and well, with Cavallo, Pepe and Purpura still on board. What’s more, one of the tracks on Cuckoo Bird, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” was produced in Hill’s cramped basement studio. This musical and interpersonal comingling reflects a small-town atmosphere that manages to persist on Staten Island even as the borough’s population explodes. It signifies, as well, the bonds forged by years of shared experience among a cadre of like-minded players.
Duffy cites that close-knit quality as a major reason for the Headlocks’ creative growth, even if it hasn’t yet translated into a viable business model. “Nobody has it in their pocket that if this, now, doesn’t work out, I’m outta here,” he says. “We love each other. We’re family.”
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In November of 2008, the Headlocks took their second stab at pressing an album. This time, they carted their own recording equipment to a studio at the Snug Harbor complex. Many of the tracks they churned out there – including “Freeze the Frame” and “Driving in the Dark” – were already established favorites on the bar circuit.
But the Snug Harbor session, like the one at Sand Street, proved ill-fated.
“Something happened,” Carey recalls, still sounding incredulous. “A fight broke out in the house of the guy that recorded it, and his computer was stolen.” The machine’s hard drive held the only digital copies of more than half a dozen final takes. “That would have been the album, or a good chunk of it,” Carey laments.
The tanking of yet another finished session drove him close to the edge. “How many times is this going to happen?” he remembers asking himself.
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But given the quicksilver character of the Headlocks’ songbook, maybe the difficulty of capturing it on disc isn’t so surprising after all.
Most of the tunes begin with a rhythmic hook supplied by Duffy. Then Carey fills in a melodic line and, eventually, lyrics. “Sometimes I feel like Rob is looking for the poem to come – an emotional match to something I’m playing on the guitar,” Duffy says. And the poems do come, inspired by everyday experience.
“Driving in the Dark,” for example, is based on a misadventure in the Deep South, where a hurricane-chasing roofer with a complicated past hitched a ride in Carey’s car one night. “Low on gas and miles from home,” the song begins, setting the scene with typically edgy brevity. Another Cuckoo Bird selection, “I Freak Out Too,” originated with a casual conversation over beers after practice. A meditation on anxiety, the lyric takes the form of a prayer to a Higher Power that may be as unhinged as Its supplicant.
Although there’s darkness at the center of many Headlocks songs, there’s also an implicit resilience. Carey the lyricist and storyteller never quite loses hope. As Pepe puts it: “There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel.” This is an admirable trait for any artist – not least for a member of a Teamsters local that services New York City’s recession-ravaged trade show industry. Carey says he’s worked just 15 or 20 days this year, and the light at the end of that particular tunnel is none too bright. Even so, he exudes confidence and optimism onstage.
If Carey is the Headlocks’ resident poet, Duffy is their philosopher – perhaps even their metaphysician. In the middle of a conversation about songwriting, Duffy, who teaches high school English, refers to the Victorian writer Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the 1870s, Hopkins converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit priest. He renounced the worldly pursuit of rhyme and meter for a few years, but the pull of poetry was too strong. He returned to writing and cranked out formally adventurous verse for the rest of his days.
Duffy sees something heroic in that kind of calling, as well as something inevitable. He attributes tremendous agency to the songs, likening them to sentient, willful collaborators in their own creation. “The songs intrude upon our lives,” he says, explaining how they often mutate radically in the hothouse of the Headlocks’ live shows. “They’re just unruly. But you have to listen to them. They tell you where they want you to go.”
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After the theft of the files from their second recording session, the Headlocks resolved to put themselves in more capable hands. They juggled schedules, raised some cash and committed to three days of recording time at a top professional studio in Williamsburg last spring.
Third time’s a charm, of course. Nevertheless, the Headlocks must have had some doubts about their third effort to produce a CD. Even the name of the recording venue – Hard Luck Studios – was fraught with exactly the wrong symbolism. But they were determined not to be derailed again.
“I felt like, we gotta get this done,” Carey says.
Despite any trepidations they had going in, the Headlocks prevailed at the Hard Luck sessions, warming up to their surroundings in the course of the marathon jam. The band’s full complement recorded most of Cuckoo Bird’s 13 tracks live in the studio, with some overdubbing later on. Jazz trumpeter Jesse Blum laid down brass accompaniment for many of the songs – notably the neo-Dixieland barn burner, “Amen Good Charles” – while Pepe shouldered double keyboard duties on organ and piano. Percussionists Joe Brancato and Ezra Donellan shored up the groove with a grab bag of shakes, gourds, washboards and rhythm sticks.
Also featured on the recording are a trio of backup singers – Julia Blatt-Coyne, Gena Mimozo and Rachel Somma – who provide a welcome feminine counterpoint to the Headlocks’ pantheon of regular guydom.
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The title of Cuckoo Bird derives from “The Cuckoo,” a traditional English folk song. The tune was famously adapted and performed by the Appalachian banjo and guitar legend Clarence Ashley on the Anthology of American Folk Music. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the Headlocks pay homage to the old song. “You say I’m a cuckoo bird, but I never sing on time,” Carey croons. “I’m no pushover, but I like to be kind.”
In the end, though, it looks like the Headlocks will sing on time. True, it has taken them a couple of years to get to Sung Harbor Music Hall for the launch of their album. But by getting there at all, in spite of complicated lives and, yes, a healthy dose of hard luck, they vindicate the essential hopefulness that informs and elevates their music.
Duffy calls the new CD “a snapshot” of where the songs were at the time of the recording. “I’m proud of the album, but the songs keep going,” he adds. Carey, too, is looking ahead as the band builds momentum. “This is what I’m noticing more and more,” he says. “The bad days are good, and the good days are great.”
