She appeared on the Bay area scene about four years ago, an exotically pretty, shy girl with an acoustic guitar and a mysterious name:
Geri X.
She had a nebulous backstory: A Bulgarian immigrant, it was said, with some kind of trauma in her childhood. Even her age was up for debate; rumors spread that she could be as young as 15 or as old as 30 (a very young-looking 30). She wouldn't tell. Nor would she reveal much about her past. It was as if a talented kid had been dropped into the scene by a spaceship. She played countless local gigs and was amiable enough, but remained somehow remote.
And then she was gone, or mostly gone — relocated to Wisconsin with her new boyfriend and bassist/guitarist, Greg Roteik. She returned sporadically for gigs.
Now she's back.
On a blustery Tuesday afternoon, the new Geri X sits in the tiny courtyard of the small St. Petersburg home she shares with Roteik, who's attentively at her side. A stiff wind rustles through the canopy of trees overhead. Geri X laughs easily, talks openly, sharing anecdotes and observations while occasionally smoking an American Spirit. Her hair, pulled back on top, is black save for shocks of Kelly green that fall down each side. Tattoos snake
along her upper chest and arms.
Turns out she did have a tough childhood. She says her father, a renowned painter in Bulgaria, was abusive. She seriously contemplated suicide in her teens, once taking a gun from her father's collection and holding it to her head. When she began performing in Tampa, the cool remove that audiences saw was a defense, and the songs she wrote served to salve her pain.
Then in August 2006 she met Greg and it all changed. Today, Geri X is not what you'd call a sunny gal, and she admits to still carrying around considerable emotional baggage, but, she says, "The cloud has lifted."
The singer/songwriter now performs in a three-piece that also includes drummer Matthew Bennett. She insists she's not the boss, that it's a collaborative effort. Her music — to oversimplify it, an edgy brand of neo-folk with confessional, at times achingly intimate, lyrics — has matured. Her new album, her sixth full-length, the aptly titled Anthems of a Mended Heart, came out Jan. 13 on the Tampa-based 24 Hour Service Station label. The music will be available on all the major digital-download sites, and CDs will find shelf space in select retail stores.
Everything's just about in place for Geri X's next move: making a serious career out of making music. "I want to pay my rent and my bills without having to fall back on working at a pet store or Starbucks or selling cosmetics [her current day job]," she says. "If I have a show, I want to think of it as going to work: 'I'm working at New World Brewery at 8 p.m.' To me, that's success. I don't have to be world-famous. It's not about major popularity. I want to do this for a living."
Eight months on the road, four months at home, give or take, is part of the plan. She has a legitimate shot at the kind of success she seeks, and you could argue that it should've happened already. Her ardent fan base is what drew Marshall Dickson, owner of 24 Hour Service Station, to Geri X.
"Matt [Bennett] brought the story to me," he explains. "She sold in the neighborhood of 20,000 CD-Rs on her own, with a coffeehouse fan base. I've seen the receipts. That is something real. I think she'd reached the point where her business knowhow had peaked. I want to make a bigger story out of it. If you've sold 20,000 copies of CD-Rs and you're still working a full-time job, something's wrong."
Dickson says that if Anthems of a Mended Heart moves 5,000 units it will turn a profit, and he'd be ecstatic if the album sold 20,000. He won't project numbers but believes Geri X has the goods. "She connects with her audience in a way that's very raw," he says. "They find something in her lyrics and her delivery — it's totally genuine."
Geri X's ace asset is her voice. It's a nail file to the heart, unsettling, captivating. While she has solid pitch, the singer embraces her imperfections. She's sublimely undisciplined, more concerned with pure expression than craft. Geri X inhabits her lyrics, and has a knack for making her vocals conversational even while carrying a tune. You can hear her hurt. She's by turns brash and tender, volatile and vulnerable.
On Anthems, that voice is pushed way out in front of strummed acoustic guitars, basic bass lines and distant drumming. The boys don't harmonize on the choruses, but then the choruses can be hard to determine in her intuitively penned, elliptical songs — songs that can take a couple of listens to catch onto, songs that don't sweat rhyme schemes or follow expected chord changes.
Though the music can be opaque, even difficult at times, it has resonated profoundly with a wide array of fans from, literally, around the world.
How do we know that? Not long ago, Geri X put up a survey on her website (gerixmusic.com) asking a few basic questions, among them: Where are you located? Tell us some cool venues you'd like to see us play. What local radio station would you like to hear us on? In return, she offered respondents two albums for free download.
To Geri X's abundant surprise, the surveys flooded in, many of them from places she'd never been, many of them accompanied by personal e-mails professing love of her music. She estimates she has as many as 5,000 surveys in a database, sorted by zip code. "We have enough names to book a small European tour and some regional American tours," she says. "What we created was essentially our own street team without having to send out posters to kids. I can hit up these people, tell them I'm coming into town and have them bring all their friends to the show."
Easier said than done? Maybe. But that's a lot of fans for an artist who was, until recently, totally independent. With that kind of an online response, it certainly doesn't seem as if eight months a year on the road is a pipe dream. Geri X and the fellas hope to be touring by spring.
Geri X's favorite memory from childhood happened when she was 3 or 4. Her father came home late, she says, and roughed up her, her sister and mother. "He said, 'I'll kill you if you're not out of here in 20 minutes,'" Geri X recounts. "So we packed up and spent two days away in a tiny town. We had pizza, went to the zoo. It was the greatest time."
She pauses and shrugs. "Then he apologized and we went back."
Peter Mitchev has long been a popular, well-connected painter in Bulgaria, where he currently lives. The well-off family split time between Plevan, Bulgaria and Versailles, France, with shorter stops in European cities where Mitchev was exhibiting his work. For 13 years, Geri X studied classical piano and hated it. To this day, she wants nothing to do with a keyboard.
She attributes her long spell under dark clouds, and much of the impetus for her music, to the "terror" her father perpetrated on his wife and daughters.
The family relocated to Tampa when Geri X was 17. She came under the thrall of Mariah Carey's "My All," which she now calls "embarrassing." "I'd belt out that tune," she says with a chuckle, "and that really got me wanting to be a singer."
She came down for lunch one day and announced her intentions. "My mom was really excited, but my father said, 'You can't do it; you're not good enough,'" Geri X remembers. "I decided then and there I would be a singer. For real."
Milena Mateev, Geri X's mother, who lives in St. Petersburg, says that Peter Mitchev made no attempts to assimilate into American culture, never even made an effort to learn English. She confirms that Mitchev was verbally and physically abusive to Geri and her younger sister Marina. He showed his work at Brad Cooper Gallery in Ybor City, but never gained much career traction in the States. This made him angrier.
After about a year, "all three of us told him he had to go," Mateev says. "For about a week, he tried different techniques to get back in, but I told him he couldn't. I bought him a [plane] ticket and drove him to the airport."
Her father out of the picture, it wasn't long before Geri X toted her guitar into Javatropolis on north Dale Mabry and started playing open mics. After that coffeehouse closed, she moved over to Sacred Grounds on Busch Boulevard, where she played every Thursday night for two years. The budding artist worked for free, but pocketed tips and whatever she sold in CD-Rs. She landed on the radar of several local bands, which recruited her to open shows with 20-minute solo sets. Starting about two years ago, Geri X did a six-month stint during which she was performing seven nights a week — often in restaurants — and had two other jobs. "It was the hardest thing I ever did as a musician; I was really spreading myself thin," she says. "But it did me a lot of good. It was probably the turning point when people started realizing that I existed."
In the late summer of '06, Greg Roteik was days away from returning to his home near Milwaukee to make some fast loot as a chimney sweep, then head back to Florida in December and beat the real cold. He had seen Geri X in a Pabst Blue Ribbon ad in Creative Loafing, thought she was cute, and checked out her music. Impressed, he e-mailed her two days before he was scheduled to depart. Would she like to get together and jam? She just happened to be online and e-mailed him back. "At that point, I figured nothing else in my life could go wrong, so why not?" Geri X says.
A small smile creeps onto Greg's pleasant, scruffy-bearded face as he says, "I'm glad I made such a powerful impression."
"No, I thought you were cute," Geri X murmurs, patting him on the leg.
She drove from her place in St. Pete Beach to his in Palm Harbor. The chemistry was instantaneous, and it transcended music. While Greg was in Wisconsin, the two stayed in touch on the phone and by actual written letters sent via snail mail.
It didn't take long before the two became a couple. They decided to change headquarters to Wisconsin. Although the pair played a few cool festival gigs up north, Geri X did not find the Milwaukee-area scene to her liking. "I was so used to being part of a [musicians'] family down here," she says. "It doesn't matter if [acts] even know each other, it's an unwritten rule that we help each other. Up there it's a huge competition."
"People that I considered close friends wouldn't even let us hop on a bill," Greg adds.
Geri X, her voice turning conspiratorial, follows, "And it's weird. They're not even … that good. The music down here is so good, the bands are incredible."
Geri X and Greg Roteik have been musical partners and soulmates since. She tells me that Greg essentially saved her life. Sitting in the courtyard, I ask him how it feels to be someone's salvation?
"Well, I was at loose ends. She was my salvation, too," he says quietly. "At the time I didn't realize I was hers. We kind of put each other on pedestals, which has turned out pretty well."
It's patently obvious that he's her biggest fan. "I like to watch people watch her while I'm playing with her," he says. "She touches people more than anyone I've ever seen."
Geri X looks down and says softly, "Thanks."
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2009.