Screw Music Forever Presents: Come The Freak OnFeat. Home/Dumbwaiters/Leels/Jarvic 7/Nut Tank/The Unrequited Loves/Baby Robots/Shittalker/Bound/The Errant Strike6 p.m. Sat., Feb. 5. New World Brewery, Ybor City. $7. 21 & UpThis is a story about Dumbwaiters.
Now, you old-school local scenesters are sitting there, on the can or at lunch or in the car waiting for somebody to get done doing something, and you're thinking that you know Dumbwaiters. That you saw one of their first shows with Home, their friends and eventual underground darlings, back in, like, '96. That one of your friends, maybe even a roommate, was in Dumbwaiters for a while, and weren't they the band where the dude had a meltdown at the end of Tropical Heatwave in 2001?
You think you know Dumbwaiters.
But you don't.
Because, in a lot of ways, Dumbwaiters are fundamentally unknowable.
Case in point: I'm sitting at the bar in downtown Tampa watering hole/eternal musicians' hangout/gateway to half-remembered sins The Hub with Brian Repetto. Across the bar, 'tender Mark Bustin – himself a former Dumbwaiter – is on the phone with one Stefanie Kalem, former Planet music critic and longtime Dumbwaiters friend/fan. The young blonde woman directly to Repetto's left overhears part of a four-way conversation about Kalem coming to town for a big show two weekends hence.
Blonde: Stefanie Kalem? I love Stefanie Kalem!
Me: That's who he's on the phone with.
Blonde: Mark! Tell Stefanie I love her.
Me (to Repetto): So she'll be here for the Come The Freak On show.
Blonde: What show?
Repetto: There's a big show at New World next Saturday.
Blonde: Saturday? Who's playing?
Repetto: Not this Saturday, next Saturday. Let's see, Home, Dumbwaiters-
Blonde: The Dumbwaiters are playing? (To companion on her left) The Dumbwaiters are playing next Saturday! (To Repetto) I love The Dumbwaiters!
She and Repetto hold eye contact, maybe a foot apart, for five or six seconds. At no time does the woman give any indication that she recognizes Repetto as the lead singer and sole remaining original member of Dumbwaiters. Finally, Repetto turns to me, arches his eyebrow, shrugs and smiles.
You can't really blame her – Repetto is one of very few constants in a band that's seen more lineup, format and style shifts over the course of its nearly decade-long run than seem possible. Remember when they were a three-piece, with Repetto pounding and screaming out the idiosyncratic rock from behind an electric piano? Not anymore – they're a quartet, and he's playing guitar. Remember when sideman (and Dumbwaiters recording engineer) James Bess was the guitarist? Yeah, he's been out of the band and back in twice since then, and currently handles bass and keyboard noise. If you don't see Dumbwaiters for a while, you're bound to be a little disoriented when you see them again.
And impressed, as well – none of the volatility seems to keep the band from making continually better music.
Rather than viewing his group's past as a series of stops and starts, Repetto sees it as the foundation upon which today's comparatively stable Dumbwaiters rests and depends, an eclectic back story of which every chapter informs the band's ever-evolving sound.
They wouldn't be what they are right now if all that shit (and all those people) hadn't happened then.
"We're not doing the same thing we were doing 10 years ago, and I think that's good," he says. "I personally don't mind exploring some of the ideas we've had before, but it's obviously going to be different.
"I don't like it when [lineup changes] happen, but at the same time, I think it's healthy, it keeps the band moving in new directions. I don't want to see anybody that's in the band now go, but if they do, I'm not going to say Dumbwaiters is over. If it was that way, it would've been over a long time ago."
Most bands operate in one of two ways. They either progress glacially within a certain genre, slowly adding new songs while always playing the ones they like or consider crowd pleasers; or they're extremely prolific, writing, playing and discarding whole set lists over short periods of time.
The Dumbwaiters procedure appears to exist completely apart from either methodology, allowing everything – lineup changes, shifting personal tastes, revisiting of old material with a new perspective – to shape what's coming out at any given time. The result is almost a living thing, a singular sound that's both always changing and always Dumbwaiters.
When Bess joins the rest of the foursome – Repetto, drummer Kevin Pytlak and guitarist Mat Bowman – at the table, I ask him whether the times he rejoined Dumbwaiters were more like joining a whole new act.
"It wasn't ever like I quit in a big hissy fit, then came back and rediscovered it," he replies. "I was always close to it, so I was always there for the evolution. I never saw a big shift."
There probably wasn't one, really. The band's enthralling new full-length, Musick, is easily the most rocking and generally accessible of their three albums and various singles, but it's still readily reconcilable with that body of work. Steadfast elements of "the Dumbwaiters sound" – krautrock-inspired repetition, broken disco, dub flirtations, Zeppelin's oceanic throb – complement and contrast one another in new and conspicuously more focused ways.
"The band's gotten more practical," says Repetto. "You learn what works and what doesn't. There was a time not long ago when we were just sort of barreling along, and I always wanted to work on arrangements, work on structure."
By their next recordings, Dumbwaiters will doubtless be in yet another place, musically if (hopefully) not in terms of lineup. While Repetto confirms that, like most musicians, some part of him is always trying to write "that song," he and his bandmates seem more interested in the means than they are the end; for them, the payoff lies simply in making music, and then using what they learned while doing so to make some more, constantly refining and reinventing variations on the theme of Dumbwaiters.
"I don't think like I did when I was 20, but I still have the same ambitions and aspirations," Repetto says. "I want to see the same things, but I know they're not going to fall out of the sky. I've gotten wiser, maybe. I just try to stick to my guns, do what I want to do. And I'm lucky I have good people to play with."
scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2005.