PART ONE: SCHOOL
Ward was the one with a scholarship. Ward is still the smartest member of the band. Ward also had a car in 10th grade and was the most popular geek that I knew. When we went to lunch in high school I would watch as Ward went from one side of the lunch area to the other, chatting with his friends as they followed him like little disciples. He had a blue jean jacket with "the Wall" emblazoned by hand (his) on the back. He had long hair and a winning smile. Ward was everyone's favorite, and I pretended to hate him just to be different until he came over to my house one day with a chessboard. Playing chess with Ward Williams made you cool.
Evan went to the same school, too. He hung out with the skaters and was a vegetarian, much to Mom's chagrin. When he went to the North Carolina School of the Arts for the visual arts, he started wearing long scarves and floppy hats. He looked like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I didn't see him that much during school. I think that all little brothers have to go through a phase where they hide from their older siblings, and he did a good job.
I had been told at public school that the North Carolina School of the Arts was full of drug users and homosexuals. I couldn't wait to get there. I immediately began studying ballet dancers and taking clarinet classes. I was a very emotional player, but my teacher knew that I never practiced. My ear-training teacher asked me if I had ever done anything that I was exceptionally proud of, that I spent a lot of time and energy on. I told him that I loved to write my name, and he suggested that I become a scribe.
Jay was his sister Cary's brother. I didn't hear him speak until 1994. In school Jay was the one that would get in front of the entire school during an assembly and sing a James Taylor song, perfectly. And then he would simply vanish into thin air. It was an amazing act.
And then there was Chris. When his family moved across the street from Evan and me, our family went out to greet them, and we were amazed to see five Pollen children, in order of height and age, standing like soldiers on their front lawn. Chris was the youngest, and his first mission in America was to become a punk. He succeeded. Christopher was hilarious in that slightly dangerous sort of way: he'd pull fire alarms in a frenzy of excitement and scream in quiet libraries. He had a self-destructive nature, and this made him my most entertaining and most frustrating friend. Nothing would calm him down. Nothing could soothe his racing mind. At school he was the one that started playing in the snack bar, not to pick up chicks, like the other classic guitarists did, but in hopes that someone would get pissed off and try to make him leave.
But no one asked Chris to leave. There was an early mission statement of Jump, Little Children, and it is still valid today: You Cannot Deny Us Forever. We went to an art school, the kind that they made a movie of (Fame), and it is a very intense place. Art all the time. Several hours a day of practice on your individual instrument, individual and group lessons with your music teacher, lessons on ear-training and music theory, rehearsals with the school orchestra, and required attendance to classical music performances by both students and professionals. And in the rooms next door were dancers, actors, visual artists, lighting designers, all doing similar things in their fields. People were usually much more curious than they were offended. This made for lots of fun.
Ward and Jay were in a band called the Soundpainters (Ward's idea). They were the most popular band on campus, and played all the school events, like Homecoming, in which our "football team" challenged a fraternity of Wake Forest to a game of football, and the entire campus (800 students) came out into the field to cheer our team on. (Our mascot was a giant green Pickle, and we voted for a Homecoming "Queen", if you know what I mean) The Soundpainters played Simon and Garfunkel and Crosby Stills and Nash and the Humpty Dance. Their originals were about moons and mountains and rivers and suns and going to your high school graduation.
Chris and I started playing Irish music as a side project. I had a tin whistle and he had started learning tunes on his guitar. We played an open mic night at the Rose and Thistle Café and my hands were shaking so badly I could barely make a sound. Ward was in the audience that night, and asked if he could come over and "jam" with us sometime. He was a longhaired hippie.
At this point Evan was still painting.
One day after we had been "jamming" with Ward in the Snack Bar at school, Jay came in with a tin whistle that he had made. "Me Make", he grunted. The tin whistle didn't sound very good but he had already written a tune on it, called Taibhreamh. This is the first official Jump, Little Children song. Our friend Michael Bellar (of the As-Is Ensemble), another longhaired hippie, accompanied the tune on piano.
Ward and Jay grew tired of the Soundpainters. They wanted to play with Chris and me. So we took our Snack Bar art school "happenings" and tried to get some shows. We had great success at first: our first official gigs happened on January 1st, 1992, in various shops of downtown Winston-Salem, NC-- we were the "First Night Band" for a festival celebrating New Year's Eve. Chris managed to break several hundred dollars worth of handmade pottery.
But we still didn't have a name! Our friend Rosemary McCarthy suggested that we drink a lot of eggnog that very night and sit around and brainstorm for a good name. Her suggestion was "The Four Motherf*!@rs". That was my favorite, but "Jump, Little Children" got the most votes. "Jump, Little Children" was the name of a song that we played by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee (found on the album "Brownie's Blues"). The song speaks of the jubilation one feels when one suddenly finds oneself ungoverned by rules and regulations. The name fit us well.
PART TWO: LEAVING SCHOOL
Ward didn't want to leave school. We didn't want Ward in the band. I had the job of telling him that we were kicking him out, so I invited him to lunch at the Rainbow Café in Winston. I was very nervous. When he sat down I didn't know what to say, but luckily he started. "I think that I need to leave the band," he said, straightforwardly. "I know that you guys want to leave school to go to Ireland, and I just can't do that. I want my degree. You should go on without me." So we did. No hard feelings and I didn't look like a jerk.
We spent the summer of '92 traveling and learning and saving money to go to Ireland. There were just three of us: Jay, Chris and Me. Evan was getting tired of painting but we wouldn't let him join. What would he play? we wondered. He didn't know how to play anything. (He bought a drum that summer.) We played festivals, public radio stations, coffeehouses, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Taibhreamh, Leave Behind it All, Forget My Loss) with friends in home studios. We started dreaming of having our own tape. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn.
We had quit school with the pretense of going to Ireland, and finally made it in the winter of '92. We stayed in hostels and with Christopher's many relatives, who were usually Franciscan Monks (brown robes, monasteries, the whole bit). We spent our nights in pubs, hoping that a kind old soul would teach us a tune at the end of the evening. We had our own gig, for a full week, in Delores Keane's Pub of Galway (don't bother looking, it's gone now) and were some sort of freak show--the posters read "All the Way from North Carolina! Young Lads Jump, Little Children!" and we had people come to see the Americans play Irish music badly but energetically. We busked on Grafton Street and saw a foxhunt in Co. Wexford and nearly fell off of the Cliffs of Mohr.
When we returned we realized two things. 1. We had to leave North Carolina if we were going to continue to learn Irish music, and 2. Evan had learned how to play the Irish frame drum AND the hammered dulcimer, and could sing in Irish Gaelic. So we started talking about moving to Boston immediately, and asked Evan to go with us.
We spent the summer of '93 trying to make the money to move to Boston. We played more festivals and coffeehouses and public radio stations. We recorded a few more songs (Sean O' Flaherty's Accordion, Lannigan's Ball, Jump, Little Children). We were still dreaming of having our own tape.
Our father offered us a job restoring damaged pews at St. Michael's Church, in Charleston, SC. The money was good and it was only for a few months. (We didn't know that the job was going to be a nightmare. We used a chemical called "Zylene" which stripped the old dirty paint from the pews but also stripped us of the use of our minds.) We spent our evenings playing in the local café's and bars of the Charleston music scene. We fell in love with the city. Most people do there is something magical about "the Holy City" that you just can't feel until you visit. The Spanish Moss, the restaurants, the people. One person that we especially liked was Jonathan Gray, a local bass player, who came to see us almost every night. We played a few shows with him (and recorded songs like "Jonny Jump Up" and "Trip to Aulander" with him) and even asked him to join the band. But he was finishing school. We had to get to Boston. We promised him that he'd be welcome any time, and we left for Beantown with hope in our little hearts.
PART THREE: BOSTON
Every band has a few dark periods in their history. Boston was a black hole for us. For many years after leaving it, really until we have started playing the city recently, I had blocked out much of the worst parts of being there. It wasn't Boston, exactly. It was just circumstance. To tell the story properly I actually have to start from New York City. Jay, Evan and Christopher went early to find an apartment in Boston, and stopped over in New York. While they were there Christopher had a tragic accident involving the recreational use of LSD. His normally mildly psychotic demeanor became an extremely psychotic one. For the full story listen to the song "Opium". When I saw my friends next they were shells of human beings. This was not a great start to a new adventure.
In moving to Boston we managed to hit one of the worst winters in the city's history. It was snowing when I arrived, and it snowed to the end of May, and I never saw the front steps of our apartment. In our front yard was a sign that read "Dangerous Intersection" and I knew that it was an omen. Everything was cold that winter-- our house, the streets, the people in the streets, our hearts. We had saved some money but it started to go fast, and we had to get jobs. Sad little day jobs. We missed home immediately.
Christopher's chosen job was to play in the subways. There he met some long- haired bearded men that took him home and fed him. They were members of a religious community and had extreme beliefs. At first Chris thought they were crazy. He would laugh at the things that they had told him (women should be subservient to men, homosexuality was wrong, Jesus is coming at the end of the world and saving men with long hair and beards and their subservient wives). But he kept going back to see them, to talk to them and eat their food. And one day he didn't come back to us. He left us all his possessions and was basically out of our lives forever. Losing a friend like that can be worse than losing a friend to death. We knew that he was still alive but that he had become someone else, and he would never be the same crazy Chris that pulled fire alarms and screamed in libraries. At the same time, we let him go. He was, and still is, happier there, and safer than he would be elsewhere. He found peace how could we argue with that?
Besides, we had our own cult to deal with, the cult of Jump, Little Children. When Chris left we almost gave up. We certainly didn't know what to do. A friend of ours, Tim Connell fought for us to stay together. He got us a few gigs by helping us to put together our first tape, self-titled, which featured songs that we had recorded in the past, like "Ocean Grace" and "Mountains so Grand". It was a shoddy little piece of work but it proved to us that we could still be a band without Christopher, so we immediately started selling it at the ridiculous price of $10. If you own this tape, thank you for being so understanding.
We ran out of money in the summer of 1994. We were poor, depressed, and hated Boston. We packed our little Subaru full of our instruments and possessions and left the city with our tails between our legs. We waved goodbye to Tim. He was mad that we were leaving, and we didn't blame him. We owed him a lot of rent. The Subaru literally made it as far as Charleston, SC, and stopped dead. We had called Jonathan Gray the night before and asked him if we could crash at his place. He knew that we'd be back, and gladly let us stay. Little did he know that we were actually moving in with he and his two other roommates, for nearly a month. We thought we were on our way to Atlanta. But we're glad we didn't make it.
PART FOUR: CHARLESTON
We spent the summer of '94 busking on the streets of Charleston. Busk (busk), v.i.
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Chiefly Brit. to entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting on the street or in a public place. We had made a few Summer Resolutions when we crash-landed in Jonathan's driveway:
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We would never take day jobs again. 2. We were not going to play Irish music any more, and 3. We wanted to Rock. The first one wasn't too hard. By selling our little tape for it's ungodly sum and making noise we were able to pay the rent. Quitting Irish music was hard until we had enough original songs to play, and Rocking is an art form that folk musicians have a hard time grasping at first. But everything was wonderful in Charleston. The stifling muggy heat felt glorious to us and it took us a long time to thaw out from the icy winter of Boston. Jay hadn't written many songs since his Soundpainters days, and with all his new experiences he was a regular song-writing factory, penning "Smiling Down" and "Dancing Virginia" about cities and the people in them, and "Matchbox Whistler" about long lost friends. We felt so good we called our old college graduate friend Ward Williams and asked him if he would re-join the band. He had nothing better to do with a cello performance degree, so he came right away.
Things moved very quickly. We played a few festivals, and coffeehouses, and bars, anywhere people would take us. We recorded a few songs (Lamplight, Dancing Virginia) in the home of our good friend, the genius Henry Dorn. A local rock and roll radio station had even started playing a song of ours, "Quiet" and people were asking for a CD in record stores. . By the fall of 1994 we had our first manager, an old family friend of Evan's and mine that worked as a publisher in Nashville, TN, and with his connections we were able to get into a real studio and make some quick demos. Jay drank a lot of Licorice Tea in those days. It's good for your throat. So we named the first CD "the Licorice Tea Demos". It had songs like "Someone's in the Kitchen" and "U can Look but U can't Touch".
I remember that the first dozen or so times we played the Music Farm in Charleston, SC, something was always wrong with the sound. We'd come out to cheers and applause (or not) and gesture dramatically to the crowd, pick up our instruments, and a horrible wave of feedback would shake the entire building, nearly killing everyone in the audience. We dreamed of having a great rock show. But we were still learning. We had a lot to learn. Our theme nights were based on little puppet shows that Evan and I would do as children. I would write the screenplays (spoofs of Simon and Simon and James Bond movies) and our stuffed animals would act them out. We would force our mother, a professional actress, to watch these plays. She couldn't imagine that we would grow up to do rock shows where we dressed as Cowboys or 50's Greasers or characters from 'the Wizard of Oz'. I have never seen "Tommy" but the video for U2's "Zooropa" tour changed my life. Bono is the ultimate rock star. No one has done it better, in my opinion.
watched the "Zooropa" tape a lot during the recording of "Buzz", our live EP, finished in the fall of 1996. We recorded in our favorite venues in Charleston, Winston-Salem, and Athens, GA. We were writing very quirky pop songs then, like "Easter Parade", "I Can Feel You" and "Innocent Kiss". 1996 was a quirky year.
And so was 1997. We toured a lot. We were on the road most all of the time. At some point we decided that traveling around in a little blue van and trailer wasn't going to cut it. So we bought the first of our two Park n' Flys--and became known as the Band that Drives Around in an Airport Shuttle Bus. We went on the road with the both bands Rusted Root, and 7 Mary 3. We loved Rusted Root, we were afraid that touring with them would be like one big hippie-fest but we loved their music. And they taught us a lot about being a touring band in general; what to expect if we were to ever achieve their success.
On that tour Jonathan and our then-sound engineer Anthony Alvarez decided to see what it was like to ride in Rusted Root's large tour bus. They left us in Texas, I believe, and went on to places West with the band. We were to meet them at the next show, but on the way our vehicle completely died, and we had to stop in Nashville. There was nothing we could do. We couldn't follow them out West. We had to rent other vans, but we couldn't do it in time, and Jonny and Anthony had to walk to our next show, back on the east coast.
We did some shows with 7 Mary 3, at the height of their fame. The boys in the band were very nice to us. They were gentle, sweet souls. But their fans nearly killed us. We've never had such a heckling in all of our lives. In New York City they actually threw things at us. Bananas, I believe. I don't know where they got bananas.
Life on the road can be wonderful. No one would ever admit that it's fun all the time. It can be downright evil. But it is extremely necessary to a band's livelihood. It isn't easy making friends, but you adapt. It isn't easy keeping your girlish figure, but you adapt. It isn't easy feeling sane but you do adapt. I would never give up all the experiences.
We're a boring rock band, as rock bands go. We don't drink to excess every night, and do lots of drugs and trash hotel rooms full of whores. Our favorite thing on the road is to have a day off in a run-down redneck town with only a Days Inn and a shopping mall. We'll watch movies all night and hang out at Orange Julius all day. Our assistant manager Vance McNabb can't believe what nerds we are. He's used to managing a rock club, where he was always chasing down miscreant rock stars -in- training. We're always wishing that we were more rock and roll, but it just doesn't happen. We'll try to do better in the future.
PART FIVE: NOT A LOCAL BAND ANYMORE Early on we decided that our goal was to make it to David Letterman. This would involve getting signed to a major label. We didn't know about these labels but carefully set about trying to find one that was cool. There were a few that were nice. But most of them didn't feel right. We needed a label that would allow us to keep doing what we were doing: play live shows with symphony orchestras and ballet dancers, tour the country on our own, and write music that we liked. And give us lots of money. We didn't think that this would be asking too much. We then found Breaking Records, run by John Caldwell and Rusty Harmon, and owned by Atlantic Records. They weren't sure about the "lots of money" part but they liked what we did and wanted us to keep doing it, and have done just that so far. They wanted us to have an album out by the end of 1998, so we went into the studio in early May of that year.
Brad Jones is one of the most Zen people I have ever met. I don't even know what the word "Zen" means. But Brad should be included in the definition. He's in his thirties, very good looking, produces some records (Jill Sobule, Imperial Drag), plays with some bands (Jill Sobule, Matthew Sweet) and never gets angry. And he loves pie. Needless to say he did a great job producing our first major label release, Magazine. People wondered whether it was the label's doing that the songs on Magazine were much heavier and faster, much more pop and rock. Fans wondered where the heavy distortion and racing tempos came from. They came from Brad. And we loved it. I wish that everyone could have been in the studio with Evan Bivins when Brad started cracking the whip on him--"faster! Louder! Heavier!" Evan was dissolving into a wall of sweat. And the stench! I've never smelled so much hard work before in my life. Brad brought the plodding song "Come Out Clean" to life, but stripped down the delicate "Cathedrals" to simple guitar and strings and vocal. We enjoyed our time in the big studio.
We had a grand party when Magazine came out. It was fun. We all went to a friend's house at the beach and sipped martinis. We wore tuxedos. I wore traditional formal Scottish wear, including the kilt, and excluding the underwear. The very next day we went on a month-long tour with Hootie and the Blowfish. They had just released their third album. The gentlemen in the Blowfish (no, Darius Rucker's name is not "Hootie") are the nicest guys in the world. They have helped us and supported us for years. And they took us for the first time to the West Coast, a dream of ours. We had never been. For that tour we had to fly from NYC to LA, while our good friend and sometime bodyguard Nathan Baerreis drove the 3500+ miles with our beloved Park n' Fly to the west, where we were to meet him. He became rather upset halfway through his trek because he hit an elk driving late one night. He was upset because he didn't like killing animals and he put a nasty dent in the vehicle, but when we met up with him in LA he offered us days and days worth of elk burgers. So we forgave him.
In the winter of 1999 we flew to Paris, France, and did a two-week long stint in a club called Chesterfield's Café. It was a French club that served "American" foods like hamburgers avec chornicons and burritos avec crème fraise. The waitstaff grew to love us almost as much as we grew to love them. We were warned that the French crowds would not listen to us play, that we were there to be background music, but every night our little Parisian crowds grew. We had them dancing, even. Our correspondent Ward Williams spoke beautiful French but he was shy most of the time, so I was forced to make remarks like "We love ourselves very much!" and "our Meat is lovely!" to our new fans. For the first week we enjoyed the company of a temporary road manager in Michael Winger, an old friend of Ward's and mine, who acted as liaison and helped us get things done. One night we went dancing with the beautiful Lebanese girls Dana and Muriel, to a "gay soiree" that was very steamy and French, but after that night the girls had to leave and we haven't seen them since. If anyone knows how to find those beautiful Lebanese girls, please tell us.
In France we stayed just down the street from the Moulin Rouge. Always close to those whores, we always say. But also close to the Sacre Coeur, one of the loveliest churches where we attended Mass sung in French and played on a zither. We were photographed by a Paris rock and roll magazine, and generally fell in love with the city. We cannot wait to return.
The rest of 1999 brought us farther and farther from South Carolina, and closer and closer to being a "national band", which we've always wanted. But home is where the heart is, oui? And many times our home has been an airport shuttle bus, and our fans have been the extended family. We do lead charmed lives.
Even now you might have looked for this webpage because you heard the song "Cathedrals" in your local IKEA. Or you may have seen us on tour with your favorite band Guster, or 7Mary3, or Rusted Root, or the Marvelous 3, or even Hootie. We're glad to have you here. We're a band that's been together for more than six years now, a band that calls Charleston, SC, it's home. You'll find us playing at festivals and rock clubs and hear us on radio stations. We dream of being your favorite rock and roll band but we know that it might take a little while. We're still learning. We still have lots to learn.
