RedHeaded Stepchild: Deep, Wide & Forever
(Natural Ear Music's Stepchild Records)

BYLINE: JC
DATE: April 1999
PUBLICATION: Third Coast Music
EDITION: #27

Put this on without knowing anything about Redheaded Stepchild and you'd figure they're a pretty good little roots-rock bar band, nothing special perhaps but I guarantee you've paid money to hear lots worse. However, as I imagine the cover picture has already tipped you off, there is something special about them. When this album was recorded, two members of the band were 13, and other two 14 and even now the eldest is still only 15. This provides a whole new perspective, especially when you find that they're dismissive of their debut, and are already planning the kickass follow-up, using studio time they won in a Battle of the Bands at Westlake High School -- which they're too young to attend!

Guitarist Will Knaak, second lead and rhythm guitarist Chris McQueen (who "has to be weaned off alternative pop"), bassplayer Rachel Bullion and drummer Nick Bartkowiak are all graduates of Michele Murphy's Natural Ear music camps. Summa cum laude, as Redheaded Stepchild has been Murphy's vehicle for encouraging her outstanding students for much of the camp's nine year history, though this third incarnation is far and away the best, certainly the most precocious. Together now for almost 18 months, the band, all union members, has a schedule that would be the envy of many of their elders, and some of their gigs even pay scale.

Conceived by Murphy and, though only Knaak and Bartkowiak have any musical family background, financed by the band's parents, the album was recorded last July, half a lifetime ago when you're those ages. It does actually have some internal clues to the band's youth, age and life experience-specific songs such as Bad Girl, cowritten by Jimmie Dale Gilmore's daughter Kathryn and Murphy, Louis and Burn Down The House by Knaak and Murphy. For the most part though, it's fairly standard, if neatly varied, fare, Texas Flood, Earl Hooker's Swing Thing, Sonny Curtis' I Fought The Law, Buck Owens' Buck's Polka, Stevie Ray Vaughan's Pride and Joy, Chuck Willis' Love Struck, Boudleaux Bryant's Bird Dog, Memphis Slim's Everyday and Floyd Cramer's Last Date, all well executed with Knaak shining, like a young John Reed, on I Fought The Law and Bullion belying her tender years on the vocals of Love Struck.

As their material indicates, these kids are pretty evolved. In Burn Down the House, Knaak sings, "We can kick your alternative butt anyday," and one of Murphy's proudest claims is, as she told an audience clamoring for Nirvana and Green Day at Bullion's scool (Westridge MS), that Redheaded Stepchild can play that stuff but don't, "because it's too easy."

Now the band says the album was "good for then, but we can do a lot better now. We sound a lot better live." Curiously, Knaak, round whom the band was originally built, is the most ambivalent about music as a career. Bartkowiak is already looking into scholarships, McQueen's ambition is to not just play but write music and Bullion wants to be a singer, "and a bassplayer, but my Dad would hate that. He says a monkey could play bass." Knaak, however, worries about the future, both the band's, once the novelty of their youth has worn off, and his own, seeing little security in being a guitar player and worrying he's not good enough to make a decent living at it. At the same time, he says he's getting into classical music, "Most styles come pretty easy, but classical is more fun, more complicated." I wonder if I ought to tell him most adult guitarists couldn't play classical music if their lives depended on it.

I draw two morals from Redheaded Stepchild. One is that some, at least, of the kids are alright. To be honest, I know very little about today's youth, in fact I avoid them assiduously, and I'll freely admit to finding it hard to avoid that generation gap thing of being judgemenetal about their poxy music. At the same time, however, I'm married to a woman who loves teaching but had to quit because she couldn't take another day in a roomful of the modern eighth graders who'd been making her life miserable, so my impression of 13 and 14-year olds isn't all that favorable. Redheaded Stepchild, therefore, does much to counter my pessimism about the future of real music. Up to now, the only kids I'd heard who seemed to have their heads on right, musically at least, were all from Louisiana.

The other moral is much simpler: every musician past drinking age should listen to this record and if they're not yet as good as these youngsters, they should do all of us, including themselves, a favor by hanging it up. If they don't, pretty soon they'll be sharing a stagewith Redheaded Stepchild and getting beaten like the family mule by a band that can't even drive themselves to the show.