Nick Urata steps to the vintage microphone, a ruffled tuxedo shirt unbuttoned to reveal a shag rug of a chest straight out of ’70s Hollywood. An acoustic guitar is slung behind his back and a half-empty bottle of red wine is gripped loosely in his left hand, which rises into the smoky bar air.
For once, the singer’s lips don’t move. His eyes scan the crowd. As Tom Hagerman, Jeanie Schroder and Shawn King adjust their instruments around him, Urata keeps his left hand raised. He’s toasting the sweaty, exuberant, sardine-packed crowd at Austin’s Copa, made up of fans and industry cats gathered for Texas’ South by Southwest Music Festival. And they’re toasting him, and his band, DeVotchKa, right back.
“Thank you,” he says quietly before setting down the bottle, locking eyes with his bandmates and launching into a vulnerable rendition of “How It Ends,” a song that would mark their next 12 months with a dumbfounding resonance.
In March 2005, DeVotchKa played its first South by Southwest showcase. It was an overdue rite of passage for a band that formed a decade ago in Denver and already had intoxicated listeners the world over. A few weeks later it hitched onto M. Ward’s national tour for 20 days that melted into a road-heavy 2005.
The Post caught up with the group in Austin and various stops around the country during the past 12 months. Now, as DeVotchKa prepares for another SXSW sojourn Thursday, we look back on a year in the life of a band on the verge of breaking out.
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DeVotchKa is Colorado’s most relevant, if not most successful, musical export at the moment. That doesn’t mean massive sales or attendance figures. Creativity, individuality and talent have little to do with large-scale success in a music industry plagued with sameness and sound-alikes – and neither word comes close to describing DeVotchKa.
The quartet’s music sounds like a drunk mariachi’s midnight serenade, a gypsy patriarch’s funeral, the overlap from neighboring bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras, a soundtrack to a Mexican Western, a Vegas crooner’s quiet and contemplative final words before passing out on a Bucharest bar stool.
It’s more Eastern European balladeering than world music. DeVotchKa’s songs, spanning three albums, are potent blasts of emotion and awe, an enthralling blend of accordion, guitars, theremin, violin, sousaphone, percussion, stand-up bass and trumpet.
In the early albums, Urata came off like a blend of The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne and Talking Heads’ David Byrne. Since then he has developed his own distinct vocal stylings that bounce, frolic, lollygag and meander.
New York: The label call
After SXSW ’05, Urata got a promising and perplexing call from Seymour Stein, founder of Sire Records. Stein, a 2005 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, signed the Ramones and Talking Heads in the ’70s. He had seen DeVotchKa. He loved the band. And he wanted to give it carte blanche at Sire.
“I sat there and had him look me in the eye and tell me how great the record was,” said Urata. His mates were skeptical.
“We didn’t really get as caught up in it as Nick, because we weren’t on the front lines,” said Schroder, who plays stand-up bass and sousaphone.
But the band was poised to have that major-versus-indie label conversation. By then the members were all full-time working musicians, and ready to live above the poverty line.
“We don’t have time to have other jobs,” Urata said. “Do you know how hard it is to get to this point? My biggest fear – more than AIDS, anthrax, nuclear war – is having to go back into the job market.”
A couple of weeks after returning from its April tour with M. Ward, DeVotchKa traveled east for a May show at New York’s famed Irving Plaza. The band shared the bill with Slavic punk rockers Gogol Bordello, with whom they had become friends. The two bands shared influences and instruments, and Gogol’s Ukrainian-born frontman, Eugene Hutz, was a sloppier, manic version of Urata.
“They’re our friends,” Urata said. “We love them.”
Los Angeles: The script
About that time Urata was mailed a film script titled “Little Miss Sunshine.” Los Angeles filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Farris had spent five years developing their first full-length script. And after hearing “You Love Me” on Los Angeles’ famed KCRW radio station one morning, “they looked at each other and said, ‘This is the sound of our movie,”‘ Urata said. The dark comedy was to star Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Greg Kinnear and Alan Arkin. They wanted DeVotchKa to create the score.
Not many bands can command reverent respect from an unfamiliar audience. And it’s almost impossible for a band to negotiate that careful line of dramatic, moody aesthetics while displaying a crystalline vision, one that never will be confused with kitsch or shtick.
“Amazing, right?” the band’s beaming manager, Rob Thomas, said after last year’s Austin show.
The fan comments on DeVotchKa’s MySpace.com page aren’t of the typically illiterate variety often found on rock ‘n’ roll websites. “This band makes me happy to be alive,” a 23-
year-old California woman recently posted. “You guys are truly the most original and most talented band making music today,” a 20-year-old from Arizona added. Both chose DeVotchKa songs to automatically play whenever anyone accesses their profiles.
After the Gogol Bordello gig in Manhattan came a series of tours. Two were destination outings to share the love with indie radio darlings that had adopted DeVotchKa as their own. Also came the news that “How It Ends” would be featured on the movie trailer for Elijah Wood’s “Everything Is Illuminated.” Gogol Bordello frontman Hutz co-starred in the movie and introduced the filmmakers to DeVotchKa.
L.A.: Radio daze
The first tour was a mid-July out-and-back to California, anchored by a “Balkan Beats” date for 2,000 at L.A.’s Getty Museum. It was also a chance to say thanks, in person, to supporters KCRW and “Morning Becomes Eclectic” host Nic Harcourt.
“There’s a lot of different stuff going on in there,” Harcourt told the band on-air before it launched into its signature cover of the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs.” “There’s mariachi music. There’s Eastern European music. It’s a mix I haven’t heard anywhere before, and it’s something that makes you guys so unique.”
But before DeVotchKa set off on the second tour, a trip to Seattle’s popular Bumbershoot festival in early September, it became apparent that Seymour Stein was now unreachable – “on a beach in France or something,” Urata said, deflated. “That first day with Seymour, I was walking on air, and it was beautiful and sunny.”
But Urata’s mid-August return trip to New York for his brother’s wedding and a DeVotchKa gig with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah wasn’t as fruitful.
“It was devastating. … I was supposed to meet with those guys, and they canceled the meeting,” he said. “It was dark and rainy, and I wanted to kill myself. It took me a while to get over it, and I wanted to hang my guitar up. I thought, ‘Is this some sort of cosmic joke?”‘
Seattle: The festival
DeVotchKa persevered, and the Seattle trip gave the band the opportunity to say hello to 5,000 more fans and another media supporter – something that’s rare for an underground, niche group. KEXP, the tastemaking Seattle radio station, was presenting one of the band’s shows a few weeks later in New York.
Manhattan in September means the CMJ Music Marathon, the largest music festival on the East Coast and one Urata played in 1999 with a completely different DeVotchKa. Violinist-accordionist Hagerman lived in New York in 1999 and played with Urata. This time around the band was solid, cemented by history, sweat and love. The current quartet has been together since 2001.
N.Y.: The endurance test
By the time the CMJ festival arrived, the band looked road-weary. They went from Seattle to New York in less than two weeks with three stops in between, including an unforgettable Sept. 9 show at Denver’s Bluebird Theatre.
In New York, the band opened for Regina Spektor at a sold-out Irving Plaza. It provided a study in how a band preps for a show.
As the venue’s crew readied for a sound check, band members took on the roles that came naturally to them.
Hagerman is methodical, studied and quiet with a neatly trimmed beard and a scholar’s glasses. Schroder, in her pre-show garb of pink shorts and a black T-shirt, is sweet, elegant, good-natured and keeps tabs on her bandmates. King is the most active and sociable of the group. When he’s not adjusting something on his drum kit, he’s talking with Spektor and introducing himself to her band.
At this gig, Urata anxiously paced the floor, making call after call on his cell.
“I’m the only one who freaks out anymore,” he said, “and usually that’s over technical stuff.”
Lance Talon, Urata’s friend of 14 years and DeVotchKa’s unofficial road manager, handles the band’s equipment with expert efficiency and fields questions from venue staffers. Because the band was not touring with a Hammond B3 organ, Talon coordinated with the soundman to loop a CD with the sound with the live feed.
After Spektor took more than an hour sound-checking her piano, the stage manager thoughtlessly yelled in Urata’s direction: “We got like 15 minutes, so let’s be quick.” Schroder played ditties on her sousaphone and double bass as the others plucked and banged away. Urata wasn’t happy, but he cooperated with the ominous voice coming from the monitors.
A few minutes later, the band members were all in the dressing room, bathed in red lights and the scent of stale cigarettes. The band’s management, Thomas and his New York partner Mat Hall, tried to talk the band into not opening with “How It Ends.” They eventually agreed.
“I’m just trying to make sure everything’s copacetic,” Urata cooed.
King stretched as Schroder applied her makeup in the wall mirror. Hagerman looked like he was falling asleep on the striped couch, but was jostled awake when Hall asked the band about its show in Minneapolis a few days earlier. “The sound guy was great,” King said. “He was actually paying attention.”
“It’s been a good year,” Hall said, toasting the room with a can of Corona.
The show was a success, which is to say the scenesters at the back-balcony bar veered from their banter long enough to notice the music. The youngish crowd took to DeVotchKa, especially Urata (That voice! That chest!) and Schroder’s oddball instrumentation.
To date, the 16-month-old “How It Ends” record has made an impression – for an indie band. More than 18,000 copies have been sold, and it was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
“That is huge – because I listen to ‘All Things Considered,”‘ said Urata.
“‘How It Ends’ was like a bolt of lightning, from wherever that comes,” Urata said of his band’s third full-length album. “I did go through the ringer romantically for that one … but I thought it was my opus.”
Boston: Halloween treat
The band scored big when it opened on the Dresden Dolls’ tour for three weeks in October, playing the Dolls’ Boston homecoming show on Halloween. Urata and the band spent the last three months of 2005 alternatingly touring and writing the “Little Miss Sunshine” score, which was a harder task than first imagined.
“For months, I’d be writing (material), and 95 percent of it would get rejected,” Urata said with a laugh. Then the producers hired Michael Danna, who had scored “Capote,” to write, with Urata, material based on DeVotchKa songs.
L.A.: California dreaming
“I don’t think another band could have pulled it off,” Urata said, noting that DeVotchKa played a sold-out New Year’s Eve show at Denver’s Oriental Theatre and departed on Jan. 2 for Los Angeles, where it recorded the soundtrack. “We finished recording on Saturday and it premiered at Sundance on the following Friday.”
Meanwhile, the Dresden Dolls did not forget their friends in Denver. They have asked DeVotchKa to open for them in Europe for all of May.
“I’m really excited for Europe,” Schroder said. “That’s going to be really cool.”
Denver: Home again
Not only does 2006 promise the band’s first European tour and first Bonnaroo appearance – that’s the Tennessee mega-
festival headlined by Radiohead, Tom Petty, Phil Lesh, Beck and Elvis Costello – but the May 4 release of “Curse Your Little Heart,” an all-covers EP on Ace Fu Records. July 28 brings the nationwide release of “Little Miss Sunshine,” which was bought by Miramax for $10.5 million – the highest price tag in festival history.
On the heels of 2005, these are busy and profitable times for the band. Yes, there were jolts and setbacks, including the death of drummer Shawn King’s father just days before that 2005 SXSW showcase.
The band seesawed between launches and takedowns, film deals and Seymour Steins, but as DeVotchKa drives south on I-25 this week to Austin, the group is in a better place than it was a year ago – even though it will also be in the same place: a smoky Austin nightclub.
Raise a toast of red wine.
Pop music critic Ricardo Baca can be reached at 303-820-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com.
