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Article published Sep 21, 2007 Holiday Childress may be solo, but he's still a Goodies man
By Steve Wildsmith Of The Daily Times Staff
There’s always a bit of squeamishness on the part of fans when a member of a beloved band like The Goodies decides to do some solo shows.
Is he leaving the group? Is he doing something completely different? Will it sound like the music so beloved by Goodies loyalists?
Those fans can breathe a sigh of relief, however. Goodies singer-songwriter Holiday Childress wants to assure them that what he’s doing at Saturday night’s solo show at Preservation Pub in Knoxville will be remarkably similar to the music made by The Goodies.
“It’s going to be the same thing, pretty much,” Childress told The Daily Times this week. “I’ve done these shows before, and the difference is usually when it’s in more of an intimate environment and people are listening, there’s a certain feeling of when you can hear a pin drop. There’s all this tension that doesn’t get released with a cymbal crash or a kick drum. It’s a different feeling, and that’s just as important in a different way.
“For somebody that loves The Goodies, it’s not going to be that different. It’s not going to be me sitting up there with an acoustic guitar singing Elton John songs, in jeans and a baseball hat saying, ‘I’m doing my own thing now!’ It’s just that in this context, you can get into more of the storytelling. We get into a lot of the storytelling with The Goodies, but it seems more so when it’s paired down like this. It’ll sort of be like The Goodies unplugged.”
Which means that the ingredients Goodies fans are so fond of — the period clothing, the showmanship, the vaudevillian aspect of the stage show — will be present when Childress takes the stage; he just won’t have his two bandmates to take some of the spotlight off of himself.
Childress and drummer Michael Allen go back to junior high, when they started working together musically. In high school, they hooked up with famed guitarist Robin Finck (of Nine Inch Nails and Guns N’ Roses) and started the band Sik Dik, which, in 1993, transformed to The Goodies when bassist Patrick Kelly joined the band and Finck departed.
After conquering the Southeastern tour circuit, Atlantic Records took notice, signing the group to a demo deal. But in 1999, the band called it quits for a while, waiting until late 2000 to come together again for a one-off reunion show in Asheville, N.C. The trio had so much fun they reformed the band, with Kelly and Allen living and working in Atlanta and Childress settling in Asheville.
Since then, they’ve released “The Postcard EP” in 2001 and a live effort in 2004. As always, The Goodies are working from a variety of styles and influences, drawing from rock, jazz, soul, funk and cabaret. At times, the band sounds like everything from Radiohead to Morphine to the Mississippi pop-rockers Young Agent Jones.
And even if Childress wanted to get away from what he does with The Goodies, he couldn’t. It’s so intricate to who he is that it might as well be part of his DNA.
“When I was thinking about doing a solo thing and going off and doing something on my own, all of the sudden, what I was writing sounded like everything I’d written before,” he said. “I was going to make my own Myspace site and do my own record, but then Patrick came to play bass, so we just advertised a show on The Goodies site. We noticed there’s not much of a distinction, so really there’s no need for me to branch out and do some kind of solo thing because I’m already doing it.
“The difference is me just looking for more opportunities to get out there and do what I do, and not just do a Goodies show five times a year. Basically, it’s me just kind of throwing myself out to the universe, trying something new and getting out there and playing more often. And when I do these acoustic shows, I can feel something. It’s just as exciting in a different way.”
The biggest constraint on The Goodies performing more often is time and distance. Allen and Kelly live in work in Atlanta, and with Childress calling Asheville home with his wife and two children, the band ends up playing whenever the members’ schedules will allow. There are always dates that Goodies fans count on to come together and party on — St. Patrick’s Day, for one, and Halloween (the band plays at the Preservation Pub on Halloween this year) for another.
In fact, Childress said, one of the reasons for Saturday’s appearance at the Pub is to hype The Goodies Halloween show. And even though more and more bands are concentrating on the spectacle side of performance these days (such as the Dresden Dolls), The Goodies are banner-carriers of such tradition, and it’ll be hard to top them when Childress takes the stage like a maddened ringmaster at some sort of carnival of the damned.
“A lot of stuff I gravitated toward when I started the band in 1993 has been done by other bands in different ways, but no matter how hard you push it, it’s always going to be an underground thing,” he said. “There’s just not a mainstream audience for things like what we do. I think the most mainstream it got was with Tom Waits, because he’s not one-dimensional — he does jazz, blues and carnival-style stuff, and he totally comes across as being sincere.
“I never wanted to do or intended on doing any kind of vaudeville for any kind of novelty reason. That’s why the comparisons over the years to the Squirrel Nut Zippers is not really accurate to me. There was a time with The Goodies where I felt like we got stuck in a corner and got labeled as vaudeville or quirky when some of my favorite bands are not that — I mean, I don’t sit around and listen to that all day long — but we got past that.”
Currently, Childress is working on new material. Whether it ends up on a solo album or stoking up the repertoire of the band that’s closest to his heart remains to be seen.
“Right now, I’m basically writing because that’s what I want to do,” he said. “I’m wondering if it’s going to be a Holiday Childress record or a Goodies record. Sometimes, I’m on the fence and don’t know which way it’s going to go. I’ll just have to see where it leads me — there are no preconceived ideas. I never sat down and planned out a mission statement or said, ‘We need to target the vaudeville people in our market,’ because there is no market for vaudeville.”