Like Gin and Tonic
The Bellrays prove that punk and soul are a perfect combination
Mike Warkentin

“The point is you shouldn’t rely on assholes like me to tell you what music sounds like!”

So says the bio on The BellRays’ website — and it’s sound advice.

Besides, the California rock ’n’ soul outfit is pretty difficult to classify. They play what they want and they rock. That’s about it.

Search the Internet and you’ll find a lot of people saying the band — singer Lisa Kekaula, guitarist Tony Fate, bassist Bob Vennum and drummer Craig Waters — sounds like MC5 crossed with Aretha Franklin. It’s a lazy comparison — and the band is sick of it.
“Not that that’s not saying a lot, but there’s still so much more,” Kekaula says. “They got a whole bunch of words and whole bunch of descriptions out there that aren’t even related to music that you could use.”

Then she offers her own description: “Dangerous. Exciting.”

“It (the MC5-Franklin comparison) also makes it sound deliberate…” Kekaula continues, “like what we came up with was a deliberate act, which if anybody listens to it you can tell that it was a very organic situation that came out because of the types of songs that were written and the type of people that are playing them.”

What The BellRays do is tear shit down. Mixing an R&B/jazz mentality with indie-rock and punk aggression, the quartet plays a wicked genre-bending blend of music that makes people say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

Because the band is rooted in genres that encourage improvisation and experimentation, its albums are mostly recorded live to capture the hurricane that is a BellRays performance.

“We like doing (it) that way because... we realized while we’re practising we’re trying different things and doing stuff, and some of it sounds really good,” Vennum says. “And by the end of the day you don’t remember what it is you’re doing because it was an in-the-moment type of thing, and you realize that you’re leaving a lot of stuff in the practice room that would probably sound pretty good on a record.”

That loose attitude is much in evidence on The BellRays’ fourth full-length, 2004’s The Red, White & Black, an album allmusic.com calls “another batch of searing soul-punk moments.” That album contained the track Revolution Get Down, which is now featured on TV as part of an SUV advertising campaign.

Kekaula says the band’s previous label, Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles, wasn’t impressed that the song is featured on an ad, but the band has since parted ways with AT and plans to release a new album in 2006 on Cheap Lullaby Records. In the meantime, fans will have to content themselves with the just-released The BellRays at the Barfly live DVD.

None of the band members have seen the DVD, but they do remember the show was quite a rocker.
“We have a jazz esthetic,” Fate says of the live mayhem. “We don’t play everything the same all the time. We take a lot of chances... To go out there (live) and to reproduce our record, I think it would be physically impossible, because even on the recorded versions we’re improvising on a lot of that stuff.”

“That’s the whole thing about taking a chance,” Kekaula adds. “Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes it’s ugly.”

That may be true, but with The BellRays it’s beautiful a helluva lot more often than it’s ugly.