Joel RL Phelps / The Downer Trio

In 1999 I was going to high school in Dayton, Ohio, a town where even in the boom of the late '90s had seen its best days pass by. There was a record store in the city's designated "hipster" neighborhood, a couple blocks of cobblestone roads called the Oregon District. Gem City Records had overpriced new CDs, a couple shelves of vinyl, and an enviable used-CD selection. In fact there was a mini economy of used CDs in the Dayton area, evidenced by the now-defunct chain CD Connection. I later learned that the supply was partially fed by teens who realized the anti-theft detectors at Hot Topic were in fact just cardboard.

My favorite part about Gem City Records was that they seemed to carry every music magazine published in the known universe, though they never seemed to sell any. I'd flip through issues of The Wire and Alternative Press to get an idea of what was cool, then buy the CD at Best Buy for $9.99 (I wasn't about to drop $15 on a CD I just read about just because it was sold at an indie record store full of surly clerks). This was the late '90s, so Best Buy still had a pretty big CD section, though today it's usually no more than a couple aisles of Taylor Swift records.

I was flipping through one magazine (or maybe it was just a free saddle-stitched flyer) and read a 2- or 3- page article about a band whose singer I was vaguely familiar with, The Downer Trio. Joel RL Phelps had previously been in indie stalwarts Silkworm, which he left in 1994 after the release of their album Libertine. I had heard of Silkworm through my subscription to Guitar World, which right before the nu-metal explosion had given the editors free reign, resulting in records like Neurosis' Through Silver in Blood and Silkworm's Firewater being named some of their Records of the Year.

The article was either to promote their second full-length (but third release, depending on how you count), 3, or their forthcoming record Blackbird; they were released within a year of each other. The writer focused on how quiet the band was, and as a recent discoverer of Low, I was intrigued. But it was the description of Phelps voice that made me want to track his records down. Here was generally quiet, folk-based music, but over it was something akin to Jeff Mangum, who had just released In the Aeroplane Over the Sea the year before. However, the nascent internet was no help (we still had AOL and the actual internet was a Big Scary Place), and the multiple ways the records were credited made searching for them difficult.

• Warm Springs Night is technically a Joel RL Phleps solo record, as is the Alita Aleta 7"
• The Downer Trio EP is credited to The Downer Trio
• 3 is credited to Joel RL Phelps : The Downer Trio, though I suspect the colon is a relic of the time it was in the hipster toolkit of graphic designers. 
• Blackbird has its credits written in illegible handwriting, so attribution depends on the mood of whoever entered it into CDDB. 
• Inland Empires EP is by Joel RL Phelps ≈ The Downer Trio, where the designer discovered the glyphs window
• Customs' cover just smashes it all together, though Joel RL Phelps and The Downer Trio are on separate lines. 

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In 2000 I was at college in Bowling Green, Ohio, with a T1 line at my disposal to dig through the waning days of Napster. I finally found two MP3 by Joel RL Phelps: "Apologies Accepted", though the file cut off after a minute and a half, and "Now You Are Found", which was harrowing even before I knew it was about the death of his drug-addicted sister.

However most Napster or internet searches brought back nearly equally obscure Americana musician Kelly Joe Phelps, though the combination of RL/R.L. and the terminology that seemed to equate him equally as a solo artist and part of his own backing band usually only resulted in a (now-dead) fan page, and later his own (also dead) personal homepage.

I can't even find the old fan page on the Internet Wayback Machine; suffice it to say it was sparse, though it did have MP3s of an acoustic session on  KEXP the band had done years ago. A burned copy of that session and the Blackbird CD-R I made in the campus radio station accompanied me on the semester I spent at art school in Italy, surrounded by surly locals and the uniformly sociopath rich white students that seem to be attracted to study abroad programs. This was 2003, when the iPod was still in its infancy; I saw a student with one and I thought it was a tape player. It shows the quality of those CDs (2 of only a dozen I could bring) that I can still listen to them without that exhausting feeling you get when you've listened to a record too much.

The website had some song lyrics, but those (and some guitar tabs) were removed by the site owner because he thought they ruined people's interpretations. I agree: the one thing all of my favorite records have in common is a lack of a lyric sheet.

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By 2002 I had made a couple friends who were DJs at the campus radio station. It was a small room full of stale air in one of the buildings I never had a class in, but the walls were lined with the station's CD library. Me and my friends would cram ourselves into what amounted to a closet to hang out during someone's shift, trying to figure out how to use the high-end CD replicator that sat in the equipment rack. The most recent acquisitions were stored next to the DJ's chair, but in the far corner were dusty relics not touched since the days Pizzicato Five were popular. Scanning the spines I see one that looks like a handwritten CD-R liner, though someone was thoughtful enough to use a sharpie to write Downer Trio Blackbird on the front of the jewel case.  It sounds so cheesy, but I literally had to catch my breath when I saw that. There was no way it could hold up to what I thought it sounded like in my head, but I managed to figure out the CD replicator and made a copy that night.

Side note: This practice of CD copying was generally accepted in moderation, though if you're a fan of one man band Juffage, you should know he pretty much camped out in the radio station for days on end and ripped most of their CDs to his laptop. 

Blackbird sounded exactly how I envisioned it. After years of that article rattling around in my head, I could finally see if my thoughts would match up with the concrete reality of a band barely written about and almost impossible to find. If it had sucked, I guess I wouldn't be able to go back to that mysterious pocket of memories as I transitioned into adulthood. But instead everything sounded perfect: the band was so in sync that the songs seemed to nearly topple over before righting themselves at the last moment. Despite the initial three-song blast, the rest of the album was exactly as quiet and forlorn as the sound in my head that the article had planted.

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In 2004 I had an off-campus studio apartment 100 yards from the railroad tracks when I heard there was a new album on the way. I eventually found the one-page website of Moneyshot records, a name the owner must have been sure would return mostly porn if you Googled it. The single page had a release date and instructions for ordering direct, so I sent a check to an apartment in Washington State and hoped for the best.

A couple weeks later the CD arrived: 2 CD set with two bonus CD-Rs for ordering direct: a radio show (in WMV to thwart piracy) and some MPEGs of a show from 2000. Here's the only one I can find online.

Unlike the recorded version, which rests on a throbbing beat and palm-muted guitars, this rendition of "Kelly Grand Forks" ditches percussion altogether and replaces distorted chords with fingerpicking and slide guitar. Whether this is an embryonic version or just what they decided to do that night, I'm always happy when a band tries out a different arrangement live. Bands complaining they can't do a song live need to remember that The Who used to do Tommy with just bass/drums/guitar/voice.

Of course Moneyshot Records seems to have disappeared not long after this album came out. I wish someone like Merge would step up to the plate and reissue all of his stuff; then again, there's probably not too many people clamoring for it.

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In 2006 I had a full time job and enough money to foolishly label some of it as "discretionary", so instead of trying to find new copies of the rest of his catalog, I just bought them used on Amazon. A previous attempt to buy new copies resulted in Forced Exposure sending me one that I already owned (they were really nice about giving me a refund though). A week later and I had the rest of his discography. No more waiting, no more thinking about a sound for years before I can hear it. The resulting binge was nice, but I can't help but think I would have savored each one more if I'd had to wait a couple years in between.

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So late last year I'm listening to an interview with Karl Hendricks on Low Times. Curious to read more about the Karl Hendricks Trio, I went to one of his labels site. The first news listing was that they had a couple vinyl copies of 3 ready to ship. I'm normally not a completest in that sense, but it was only like $10 and besides, if nothing else the art would look really good in the 12" format.

When I first listened to it I noticed a LOT of high-end crackle; whether it's the mastering or my stereo, it was kind of a bummer, but I still have the CD.