(This article was originally published Aug. 31. Wooster appears again tonight, this time at Saint Rocke)
The story of the band called Wooster has a couple radically different starting points, one shrouded in murkiness and mystery and another that is all sunshine and song.
Technically it all began in the back of a limousine on a New York City street 28 years ago. The details are a little unclear, but we know this much – there was a gunfight, a young painter and his extremely pregnant wife raced to a hospital, and a boy named Brian Gallagher was born.
Gallagher, the lead singer and songwriter for Wooster, confirms this much.
“I was born in New York, there was definitely a gunfight in the street…took a limo to the hospital, popped out early,” Gallagher said. “Yeah. And I got narcolepsy and I got a lazy eye…It’s all true but I help myself with some of the latest Natural Remedies for Narcolepsy.”
His father is the painter Michael Gallagher, which explains something about his son’s abstract beginnings. Gallagher is one of the leading lights of Abstract Illusionism and held court for several years in a SoHo loft in New York City before heading west to California.
And so this brings us to a beach in Santa Cruz ten years ago. Young Brian Gallagher had taken to California in a big way, becoming a star volleyball player who would eventually play for the University of California Santa Cruz. At 18, he’d also already begun coaching volleyball. At a team event on the beach one day, he pulled out his guitar and started playing. One of his players, a 13-year-old named Caroline Kuspa, unexpectedly raised her voice in song and sang along.
Everybody on the beach stopped in their tracks.
“It was one of those jaw-dropping moments,” Gallagher recalled. “She is really good – the kind of voice that attracts people like bugs to a light. People can’t get enough of it.”
Thus, in a sense, was Wooster born. Formally, the band wouldn’t come together for another eight years or so. Kuspa and Gallagher sang together off and on even after she left Santa Cruz to study classical music and vocals at UC Davis. In 2006, Gallagher decided to make a record, and somewhere along the line he and Kuspa were joined in the studio by Santa Cruz’s premier rhythm section, bassist Bobby Hanson and drummer Nate Fredericks. Guitarist Zack Donahue rounded out the posse, and suddenly Wooster had risen.
“Bobby and Nate were the big guns in Santa Cruz,” Gallagher said. “They played every band. Now they are just playing in Wooster…All five of us had one magical recording studio moment and everyone was like, ‘Alright, we are a band now.’”
The band’s debut album, The Heights of Things, was released in 2009. A buzz about the band has been steadily building ever since. Several things set Wooster apart. Gallagher’s writing is infused with a hip-hop sense of rhythm and story, and he sings with a coolness and ease that somehow combines the urgency of his New York beginnings with the more laid-back vibe of Santa Cruz. Kuspa, on the other hand, sings like the wind. As a whole, the band swings with an almost jazz-like intensity while crossing musical terrains that include reggae, soul, and straight-up infectious pop.
Critics have struggled to place Wooster in a particular genre. They play jazz festivals and have been described variously as reggae rock and neo-soul.
“We’ve had a really hard time with that, for sure,” Gallagher said. “So many times people come up and say, ‘So what kind of music is this?’ Usually we just say, ‘Loud.’”
Their new single, “Take It Easy,” encapsulates the band’s emerging sound. Kuspa’s languid lash of a voice is front and center, horns billow in the background, an organ surges underneath, and suddenly the entire song lurches joyously into dancehall ska beat before rounding back into rock n’ roll territory.
“It’s kind of a crazy track in that it goes through three different phases and has all those different sections to it,” Gallagher said. “It’s cool to have Caroline singing lead, too…if you listen to the first album, Caroline comes across as kind of a background singer or someone who pokes through occasionally. But nowadays she is definitely taking a much bigger role, singing leads and doing at least half of the singing.”
“Some songs that I write I love and really want to play, but then once I hear her take a shot at it and sing it, I’m like, ‘Alright, it’s yours. I can’t do that.’”
What he can do is write. Gallagher gets things into songs that don’t normally get sung. Take the song “Three Legged Dog”, which includes one of the great lines of modern times: “I got a heart like a three legged dog/and no, it don’t sleep/ unless it’s laying in the street/on that cold concrete.” The song, it turns out, was inspired by a real three-legged dog and heartbreak.
“I work construction up here. I am a carpenter,” Gallagher said. “I drive to work every day, so I was on the same job site and the neighbor’s dog had three legs but it only would sleep in the street – like, he only wanted to be in the street. He would be in front of their house every single morning laying in the street. And I was just like ‘Dude, you are going to lose another leg. You gotta get over there – once you get down to two legs you are totally hosed.’ At the time, I was kind of going through relationship ups and downs and I was like, ‘Dude, I am that three legged dog. I have to be out in the mix. I can’t just be content and happy in the backyard.’ That was my little moment of realization.”
Gallagher also knows the fading art of the sugary sweet pop song. Any writer who writes a song called “Ooh Girl” and pulls it off is a songwriter to reckon with. He does it by simply reporting, with an eye for detail, the events of a wine-drinking house party: “That girl that caught my eye/It was time to move into position/she had dark hair and a green tank top/tight blue jeans and sandy flip-flops/She was sweeter than sweet/Sweeter than the sweetest lollipop.”
Something unusual is happening here. This is band that includes a classically trained singer whose career began as a singing volleyball player, a soft-hearted carpenter with an eye for pretty girls and sleeping dogs, a drummer who is also an educated psychologist, a bassist who recently married into British royalty, and a future that certainly seems bright.
“You know, we are pretty cool,” Gallagher said. “But when it comes down to it, we are a bunch of weirdos. Once you’ve been in the van with us for three or four hours, you’ll understand that.”
See woosterband.com for more information and a free download of “Take It Easy.” Wooster plays 12th and Highland in Manhattan Beach Sept. 2. ER
