The local quartet Palliard loves the Band. “They worked so well as a unit,” says bassist Anthony Burton. “There wasn’t this emphasis on a single front man or flashy solos. Each guy would just step up to do whatever it took to make the song work.”
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Hamsher and Brown were the first members of the group to cross paths, meeting in early 2003 through their office jobs at the Art Institute. In 2000 Hamsher had moved to Chicago from Duluth, Minnesota, where his high school band had opened a few shows for an early version of Low. Brown, a native of northern California, had arrived here in 1999, after spending years teaching himself keyboard, lap slide, and pedal steel in a string of offbeat jazz combos and fatback blues bands. In summer 2003 Brown’s girlfriend introduced him to Burton, who’d played guitar with local postpunk outfit Forty One Rivers, and in July the three of them started meeting in Brown’s attic apartment to play. At first they just did covers, sticking mostly to pre-rock material–from Tin Pan Alley standards like “When You’re Smiling” and “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” to lesser-known tunes by revered folk artists like the Carter Family and Elizabeth Cotten.
“The whole thing started out as something to do on a hot evening drinking some wine or beer,” says Burton. “Chris would whip out some old song out and say, ‘Try this.’ Then Brown would add all these great harmonies. It seemed like the band developed pretty organically out of this shared appreciation for a different era of songcraft. Then it got to the point where Chris would play something and I’d ask, ‘What’s that?’ He’d say, ‘Oh, just something I’ve been working on.’”
Panall, a self-described studio geek–“I like reading about the mike placement on old Led Zeppelin records,” he admits–engineered Palliard’s first recordings within a few weeks of his onstage debut with the band, capturing them live on a two-track reel-to-reel in the rehearsal space. In August he recorded a second batch of tunes in a more traditional session, with band members adding instruments one at a time to the rhythm tracks; the EP draws from both sets.
Lesser Birds of Paradise, Palliard, Manatella
