Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
Troy, NY
Friday October 25, 1996
Articles were shamelessly stolen from Terra Incognita, a now-defunct Happy Rhodes fanzine.
Reprinted from Terra Incognita (paper 'zine) issue #10--
After years of Indie Releases and Rare Live Performances, Happy Rhodes is Singing a Different Tune.
By Mike Goudreau (Albany Metroland, 10/24/96)
When we last left Happy Rhodes, she was content to let her career simmer along at a medium pace. An indie label, a slowly growing base of loyal fans and scant live performances were just her speed.
Well, no more.
Not that Rhodes plans to betray herself, her fans or her music anytime soon, but the vocalist-composer-producer with 13 years of recording and nine albums under her belt finds that she has changed--and that means her goals have, too.
“There comes a point,” says Rhodes, “when you’ve been doing it 10 years and your career is exactly the same. I don’t need to be huge. I just need it to change.”
For years, Rhodes toiled in relative obscurity in Albany, recording albums on the independent Aural Gratification label that gained her fans around the world and adult alternative radio airplay but did little to build name recognition locally, mostly because she rarely performed live. Recently, after relocating to Woodstock a few years ago, Rhodes began to reassess her career, and she’s making two major changes. First, she won’t be releasing her next studio album on Aural Gratification, the indie she’s run for years with co-producer and collaborator Kevin Bartlett, and she’s currently searching for a major-label deal. Second, she has been and will continue to play out a lot more. Tomorrow (Friday), Rhodes performs for the first time in the Capital Region proper since 1992 when her quartet take the stage at the Troy Saving Bank Music Hall.
Rhodes has had interest from major labels for years, though her music, an often-ethereal style reminiscent of Kate Bush’s which showcases her striking vocal range and the Rhodes-Bartlett team’s lush arrangements, was never exactly Top 40 stuff. But Rhodes always resisted the more mainstream forces of the industry, and that, she believes, was because she wasn’t ready to deal with them.
“For years I kept my career at a level I felt I could handle,” she says. “Now I’ve grown as an artist and a human being. For most of my life, I was pretty unsure as to what I could deal with with regard to people’s expectations of me.
“Dealing with people is not really my problem. The problem lies in people in some type of authority position telling you what you’re supposed to do. When 10 people have to go have a meeting to decide what style your hair is going to be on the Letterman show, that’s intense. When you have people placing that many demands on you, it’s like being Miss America. I don’t know that I can deal with it now, but at least I’m ready to try it now.”
When Rhodes first walked into Rensselaer’s Cathedral Sound Studios as an 18-year-old, she was painfully shy, still essentially the young girl who saw herself as “too ugly, too tomboyish, too weird” to be liked by peers. She didn’t want anybody to look at her while she sang. The hesitance to expose herself more or less stayed with Rhodes through the years, whether it came to her vow not to be objectified as other women in music are or her reluctance to perform live. You get the feeling that the walls, at least some of them, are coming down now.
Rhodes has been working on her next album mostly by herself, and she plans to, for the first time, produce it herself. She’s found a live band configuration that does justice to her sound without requiring a giant posse of musicians. Rhodes used to have a guitarist, bassist, drummer, keyboardist and backing vocalists--an approach that not only was hard to coordinate in order to replicate her studio sound but was expensive. In Troy, Rhodes will sing and play acoustic guitar, accompanied only by Bartlett on electric guitar and effects, bassist Carl Adami and backing vocalist Kelly Bird.
Ironically, though she’s performing live more frequently, Rhodes has left behind the idea that she somehow deserves more from the local music scene.
“I didn’t perform an awful lot, and I expected an awful lot in return,” she says. “I think I’m done whining about that. But I hope, just for remembrance’s sake, people will consider coming to my show. Anybody who saw me before wouldn’t have ever seen me like this.”
The coming months will bring more shows and a lot of work in the studio for Rhodes as she goes through the long, frustrating process of courting labels. She’s trying to do as much as she can on the album before someone comes knocking, but Rhodes still must wait until that day comes to have the resources to complete the project. Her frustration is understandable when you consider that she’s pretty much put out an album a year for a long time now, and her last studio record was Building The Colossus in ‘94. (Rhodes did release The Keep, a collection of live and unreleased tracks last year.) But she believes that this approach will eventually yield the things that Rhodes is now finding that she wants. Rhodes doesn’t so much want to be a household name--though she jokes about people stopping her in the grocery store and saying, “Hey, aren’t you Happy Rhodes?” instead of, “Hey, aren’t you Blossom?” She wants to do film scores and work with prestigious musicians. In some ways, Rhodes has come to the realization that she and her music simply deserve more.
“On the grand scale, nobody knows I exist,” she says. “I’d really like to feel that . . . I have this intense yearning for something more than what I have right now. I don’t know. I’d like to find the answer to that. In the meantime, I know I’m in need of something. I think it might have everything to do with respect and nothing to do with fame.”