One Shot - Singer/Songwriter Frank Brown

The following is an excerpt from articles originally found on www.mpprojects.com/tc. Originally published in 2007.

Singer/songwriter, Frank Brown, formerly of Flight of Mavis, hooked up with Tommy Conwell in 1996 and Buzz Zeemer (along with drummer Ken Buono and bassist Dave McElroy) and recorded a pop masterpiece, Plaything. Zeemer featured Brown’s witty, tuneful songcraft complimented by Conwell’s tasty hooks and grooves. Buzz Zeemer’s sophomore effort released in 1999, Delusions of Grandeur, generated a buzz with music critics. The band performed at South by Southwest in Texas along with countless gigs at their home court - Grape Street Pub in Manayunk.  After a long hiatus, Buzz Zeemer reunites and records a new song titled One Shot, featured on Record Cellar’s fifty-song compilation titled Town and Country.   

Tell me about the new song, "One Shot."

Frank Brown:  One Shot was one of five songs I sent Dave (McElroy) to choose from for Town and Country.  We recorded it on one of the hottest nights of the summer with producer/engineer Matt Muir in Manayunk.  Learned it and recorded it the same night. I like it.

Tell me a funny story from a Buzz Zeemer live gig.

Frank Brown:  I think the funniest Zeemer gig stories are when the joke is on us. When you agree to play anywhere, you never know where you will wind up. We played at a Best Buy store opening. A 40th birthday party down the shore. We played a gig where so few people showed up that we started playing any Steve Miller song we knew. "Swingtown," anyone?

You have spent time with Tommy Conwell in the recording studio. What makes Tommy a sought-after guitarist?

Frank Brown:  Tommy is an absolute blast to play with.  I had a song called Crush that was recorded with a couple different guitar players before Tommy played on it.  It was never how I heard it.  I asked Tom to play it in a certain way and in a minute, it became the song it is today. Much like the rest of the band, Tom enjoys playing all kinds of music. We can be very rock at times and very nice at times. It's nice to play with someone who can play anything you ask ...and more.

What was your reaction hearing a Flight of Mavis song on the alternative radio stations for the first time? 

Frank Brown:  I never get tired of hearing our stuff on the radio. I think the first time we were played on the radio was on XPN when Jim Moran (of the Wishniaks) played our 4-track demo. It was fun. We were extremely green. 

Who are your musical heroes?  

Frank Brown:  There's so many...Terry Adams, Lennon and McCartney, Nick Lowe, Captain Beefheart, Brian Wilson, Rick Nielsen, Bill Evans -- all the good ones.

Your songwriting has been compared to Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, and Squeeze.  How do you go about writing a song?  

Frank Brown:  All different ways! It depends on the situation. Sometimes the music is first, sometimes the lyrics. The best ones take about fifteen minutes.  The rest are much longer -- sometimes 45 minutes.

The Philadelphia press reported that you offered sleeping accommodations to former Replacement Tommy Stinson.  Tell me the story.

Frank Brown:  I had the pleasure of opening for both Tommy Stinson and Slim Dunlop (latter day guitarist of The Replacements) and actually had both of them stay at my house in West Philadelphia. I think the Westerberg story was written in the paper but wasn't actually true. I would hate to think that we opened for Westerberg and that I had no memory of it?!  Then again... our place in West Philadelphia  was host to a lot of bands on Peter Jesperson's Medium Cool label.  They were all very fine guests but I think we enjoyed Slim the most. Great character and great stories.

Buzz Zeemer’s Let Them Eat Rock is a crowd favorite.  Any chance it will ever be recorded?

Frank Brown:  I would like to think we'll have a live version of it from our reunion gig at Grape Street.  I can't imagine it ever being officially recorded by us.  We're in awe of the original by The Upper Crust.

What is in the future for Buzz Zeemer?

Frank Brown:  I would hate to think that the reunion show is the last time we will play together.....but it might be.  As of now, there are no plans to do anything together in the future.  Regardless, as long as everyone continues to have a pulse -- you never know!

Record Cellar’s Last Hurrah

The local Record Cellar label has one last offering: A three-CD set documenting the tuneful history of this champion of Philly indie music.

By Dan DeLuca
Inquirer Music Critic

Jan. 25, 2007

Back in 1989, when Neil Drucker released the first album by a jangly pop band called Flight of Mavis on cassette and LP, he was a Northeast Philadelphia record store owner with no ambition to start his own independent record label.

"There was no plan," says Drucker, whose career doing what he never intended is documented on the new three-CD, 50-song Record Cellar: Town and Country, 1989-2006 (***).

The collection brings to life a significant chapter of Philadelphia indie-music history through the songs of much-loved acts such as the Rolling Hayseeds, John Train, Frog Holler, the Low Road, and Flight of Mavis and its later incarnation, Buzz Zeemer.

Its release - which Drucker says is the label's last - will be celebrated with a show at the Tin Angel on Saturday, with four Town and Country songwriters - Darren Schlappich of Frog Holler, Richard Kaufmann (of the Hayseeds and, now, Foxycontin), Jon Houlon (of John Train), and Steve Yutzy-Burkey - joined by multi-instrumentalist Mike Brenner of the Low Road and Slo-Mo. "It's a funny thing," recalls Drucker, 52. He says Pat Feeny, then his partner, now the owner of Main Street Music in Manayunk, "always said we started the label so we could have the record in our collection."

The record in question was Flight of Mavis' self-titled debut, whose infectious "On My Mind" is included on Town and Country. It became the first of 21 full-length discs that Drucker would release on the Record Cellar label, which took its name from his Bustleton Avenue shop, which closed in 1996.

The album was the work of three guys who grew up down the street from one another in Horsham - bass player Dave McElroy, drummer Ken Buono, and singer-guitarist and melodious tunesmith Frank Brown. Together, they'd make the drive to the Cellar (the store once was in one, but had by then moved above ground) to hang out and buy Replacements and NRBQ records.

"We really wanted him to like it," remembers Brown, who handed over a tape made by the trio. The band was in step with the Byrds-influenced guitar-pop of R.E.M., and diametrically opposed to that decade's glossy sound identified with marquee 1980s Philadelphia acts like the Hooters. "Neil was the guy who knew about all the cool bands."

Drucker liked it, all right. "We started playing it, and we couldn't stop playing it. The pull was so strong that we couldn't resist. It was just something we believed in."

That divining principle guided Drucker, a music-head raised on Neil Young and John Prine and Elvis Costello. Drucker opened his first store on Ridge Avenue in Roxborough in the '70s and called it Geezer's Record Shop, after the nickname of Villanova basketball great Howard Porter, Drucker's favorite player.

Flight of Mavis was immediately greeted by critical praise (The Inquirer said that the album glowed "with honest love for the whole wide world of rock 'n' roll") and modest success. The album sold 5,000 copies, and the band had a string of gigs opening for Sinead O'Connor. But Drucker was reticent to go all-in, partly "because I saw how many good bands don't succeed."

Even so, "sometimes I would get a tape" from a band, says Drucker, who lives in Bala Cynwyd and earns a living selling CDs and LPs at record shows like the Allentown Music Fair in March. And sometimes, he would hear "songs that I couldn't deny."

He was smitten by the songs of Gerry McGoldrick, the songwriter behind Napalm Sunday, Emily Valentine and Solid for Sixty. And those of Kaufmann, the savvy pop songsmith and former leader of the storied '80s Philly punk band Electric Love Muffin, who co-fronted the Hayseeds. Drucker says his goal "was to have a good local label for Philadelphia artists that deserved a larger audience, like Twin/Tone in Minnesota and Sub Pop in Seattle." "There's always been this incredible independent music scene in Philadelphia, going all the way back to doo-wop in the '50s," says Bruce Warren, the music director at WXPN-FM (88.5), where Record Cellar acts like Buzz Zeemer and the Hayseeds have found themselves in heavy rotation. "After the Hooters in the '80s, these bands were more organic, and less produced, and they put out good records. And Neil was the guy who pulled it all together."

Nobody got rich, and most everybody kept his day job. Town and Country, which consists of two 20-song discs of previously released material, plus a third with 10 new songs, can cause a listener to wonder how it was that the Gin Blossoms, say, managed to score Top 10 hits, while equally catchy tunes like Buzz Zeemer's "This Town" never found a mainstream audience.

Or how sticks-in-the-mud like Son Volt achieved a national profile, while the more sprightly and multifaceted Hayseeds, who were alt-country before alt-country was cool, couldn't break out nationally.

The biggest Cellar seller was the first Flight of Mavis record, and a typical label performance was Frog Holler's, whose three releases sold a combined 10,000 copies.

Blame it on the unforgiving music business, but don't expect anybody involved with the Record Cellar to be too bummed about it.

"I can't say that any record that Neil put out was ever all that fashionable," says Houlon, 38, who works as a lawyer for the Philadelphia Department of Human Services as well as leading John Train. "All of us came by this music honestly." He credits Drucker for the collection's consistent catchiness: "His ears really tend to pop sounds and melody."

"You always think if you had some stupid piece of luck and had a hit, it would have been great," says Brown, 41, of Buzz Zeemer, who teaches second grade at Independence Charter School in Center City. "But people said nice things about us, and we had fun. That's enough."

Drucker says he'll keep the Record Cellar catalog in print, but can't operate the label successfully "with the resources I was willing to put in. I just couldn't sell enough to keep it going." He admits, though, that if, say, Buzz Zeemer, which recently re-formed for a reunion show, were to record a new CD, releasing it "would be difficult to resist."

With Town and Country, he's ready to close the book on the Record Cellar chapter of Philadelphia indie-music history with pride. "I was always the one saying, 'If we can put out a good record, let's do it.' I know the value that records can have for people, because I know how much it meant to me.

"People came out to see these bands play, and they sang along to the songs and listened to the messages in the songs. And for me to be a part of that is a very rewarding thing." 

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