October 29th, 2007Music: Family RIFF
For most brothers who start a band, the advantage of growing up in the same house is usually also growing up on the same musical path — same records, same instruments, same posters on the wall.
, however, might as well have grown up in different countries.
“I’d be in one room with my friends trying to make rap music,” Teague recalled of their teen years, “and he’d be in the other room with loud, out-of-tune guitars playing metal and later grunge.”
Even now that they’ve outgrown the flavors of their youth, the Alexys still aren’t on exactly the same musical page. But they’re close enough to have created something special.
Their duo is called the(more on the name later), and it has nothing to do with either rap or hard rock. It’s an all-acoustic act that bounces around in rootsy folk and blues territory, with a heavy dose of Dylan and “American Beauty”-fied Dead.
As evidenced by the brothers’ rousing sophomore album “Sing!” the floppy-hatted, hemp-jewelry-wearing Teague is more the bluesman in the group, while the cleaner-cut Ian delivers most of the folkier, twangier stuff. Somehow, they strike a perfect balance on the new CD, which they’re promoting tonight at the 400 Bar.
“Teague wanted the record to be more like the music he’s been listening to lately, like Sonny Boy Williamson and old Muddy Waters,” Ian recalled, “but I’d been playing a lot of Gram Parsons and Willie Nelson and country-ballad kind of records. So we each sort of did our own thing.”
Said Teague, “I needed his guitar playing for what I wanted to do — he’s one of the best guitarists I know — and he needed me to sing harmony. It’s a good tradeoff.”
Mostly by coincidence, the Alexy brothers took a trajectory opposite to Dylan’s, moving from the East Coast to the North Shore. They grew up in a tourist town near Atlantic City, N.J., called Somer’s Point (where, to add to the Dylan linkage,was playing when Bob picked them to be his backing band in 1966).
Ian, 31, left to study music at Goddard College in Vermont and (for just one year) Berklee College of Music. Teague, 35, bounced around the country a bit before settling down with his wife, Michelle, and their two daughters in the town of Holyoke, Minn., 30 minutes southeast of Duluth.
After trying his hand at playing jazz with “all the other overly academic musicians” around Vermont, Ian said, he moved to Duluth to be nearer to Teague — and to the kind of town that would foster, but he jumped at the chance to form the Hobo Nephews of Uncle Frank with Ian three years ago.
The name was a joke that stuck, for better or worse. The hobo part isn’t really true. (”We’re both traveling musicians,” Teague said with a laugh, “but we travel by car, not freight train.”) But there really is an Uncle Frank, who, for one, gets a kick out of the band moniker.
“When we were kids, he’d sleep on our couch if he needed a place to stay,” Ian recalled. “When Teague and I got older, there were different times when either of us needed a little help and stayed at Frank’s place, almost like repaying the favor.”
Not only does Frank get a nod in the band name, he’s also the subject of the CD’s foot-tapping, harp-blown opening tune, “Uncle Frank’s Basement.” Teague brings to life the ol’ down-but-not-out lifestyle, singing, “So I slept in a crooked bed/ And I woke with a crooked grin/ To one familiar face saying, ‘Baby, how you been?’”
Teague’s rollicking grit gives way to Ian’s lonesome harmonies in the second song, “Go on Back Home,” and the two continue to trade off like that throughout the 11-track collection. Ian’s shining moment is the Dylanesque downer “Love Don’t Kill.” Teague lights up a great duet with
