FROG HOLLOW: Band On the Rise

WAITSBURG - It's Wednesday night. All is quiet throughout the tree-lined streets near Waitsburg's historic Bruce Mansion, except on the corner of Fourth and Orchard.

You have to strain to hear it, but when you get closer to the home of Brian and Wendy Richards, the muffled thumps of the steady beat and bass notes emerge from somewhere underground.

The weekly practice of the Frog Hollow Band, arguably the most popular country rock group in the Walla Walla Valley, is well underway.

Down in the basement, the six members of the band are rehearsing a new song, "Love For A Six Gun." It's a piece about a man killing his wife with a six shooter for cheating on him, written by lead guitarist Ty Lane after his divorce, when he "was angry with women," the otherwise good-natured bank manager said.

The rest of the band members take the darker lyrics in stride. At least musically, it's clear from this first go-around with the entire group that everyone helps give birth to the finished product.

And it doesn't take long for the delivery to be successful. After some give and take on the best arrangement and some banter about one of the members' recently born kids, the song sounds tight - as though it has been practiced dozens of times before: witty, energetic and contagiously danceable.

Drummer Brian Richards comes in with a George of the Jungle tribal beat, reinforced by Jim Pearson's riffy bass slaps and underscored by Lane's AC/ DC power chords in a gritty Texas-style rocking country tune.

That intuitive talent and mélange of musical styles are the main reasons Berg, Ty, his dad Kit Lane (rhythm guitar), Richards (drums), Jim Pearson (bass) and Jerry Yokel (harmonica, mandolin and fiddle) always draw big crowds when they play at local venues from Waitsburg's Town Hall to Pendleton's Wildhorse Casino.

Two of the band's members, Berg and the younger Lane, will be performing at the Coppei Café this Saturday, April 28, starting at 7 p.m.

"I can see us doing this as long as everybody lets us," said Berg, who was interviewed recently by the local Fox affiliate KNDU for a possible appearance on the "X Factor" television music competition.

Let them? Heck, nobody can get enough, if recent publicity is any indication.

The Frog Hollow Band, named after a street near the Washington-Oregon state line where founding drummer John Spain lived when the band was formed a decade ago, was voted Best Local Band in the Walla

Walla Union-Bulletin's "Best Of The Best" readers' poll earlier this year.

The popular designation took the band by surprise.

"I was shocked to hear it," Richards said. "That's a cool piece of recognition."

Echoed Berg: "It's surreal when you get something like that. We're just six normal guys making music and having fun."

Hopping Back In Time

To learn how it all started on the state line, all you need to do is visit with the oldest member of the band, 50ssomething Kit Lane, whose musical roots are firmly planted in central Oregon grange hall and Elks clubs dances where he played bass with his dad and sister growing up.

He and Spain formed Frog Hollow Band in the 1990s and his son Ty played trombone for the house band in junior high, remembering how that was hardly a country music instrument.

But then neither was the group itself, which the younger Lane described as a "Frankenstein" of garage bands, playing cheesy hits like "Tequila" and so on.

"They'd get together once a year for Christmas Eve and they weren't very good," said Ty Lane, who claims he was "just along for the ride."

The Lane men descend from several generations of musicians. Ty Lane's great grandfather and his grandfather played guitar. Family legend has it that Lane's grandfather, a guitar player, once played in the backup band for a Johnny Cash performance in the Dalles.

Ty himself got a toy drum set as a two-year-old and beat the living daylights out of it, then got himself in trouble getting caught messing with his dad's good guitar at age 4. But if nothing else, it stimulated the youngster's interest in music and before long he was in the grade school orchestra at Sharpstein Elementary in Walla Walla.

He grew up on country music, steeped in the sound of Hank Williams Jr., Alan Jackson and Garth Brooks. He didn't discover rock-n-roll until he was a freshman in high school, after being introduced by a friend to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven." That changed everything.

"I was rock-n-roll all the way, but still love the country I grew up with

He took his musical pursuits into high school, but he and his sports buddy Berg didn't discover each other's musical interests until they went to a graduation party to which Ty brought his guitar and Berg his voice "with a good underage buzz."

Shortly after their discovery, the two young guns formed a band called Straight Shot with other high school-aged musicians. One of them, lead guitarist Trevor Larkin, later went on to study at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music and now makes appearances on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," the Seattle Symphony and the musical credits for the movie "Mirror, Mirror" starring Julia Roberts. This summer, Larkin is opening with singer Allen Stone for the Dave Matthews Band.

After noting Ty and Berg's emerging strengths as musicians, Spain and the older Lane decided it was time to join forces with the young guns and Frog Hollow got new life.

"We thought 'why don't we grab these kids and start a band,''' Kit Lane said.

With the young musicians on board, Frog Hollow began playing at rodeos and fairs in the area, including Walla Walla's Frontier Days. The group, which besides the Lanes, Berg and Spain also included Yokel, Chris Anderson, Dwight Yokum and Gary D'Agostino on piano, even made it to the Country Showdown Finals in Spokane.

The band played more straight country in those days, doing covers like George Straight, Merle Haggard and Hank Snow.

"We were all big-time horse people," said Kit Lane, who was a steer wrestler on the rodeo circuit for some 25 years and whose wife, Cindy, is a professional barrel racer. He now runs a shooting preserve outside Prescott.

It was Berg's near- deaf mother who introduced him to music, repeatedly playing her vinyl version of Hoyt Axton's "Joy To The World," which, ironically in retrospect, opens with the words "Jeremiah was a bullfrog." She would crank up the volume just to hear it.

"Man, oh, man, she would blast that thing so loud," said Berg, who went on to date a girl whose father was a pastor and recruited him for the choir and still loves "the cry of a steel guitar" echoing from the country and Western songs his mother used to enjoy.

Of course it helped that his stepdad was a long-haul trucker and the family lived in southern named Dixie. Despite Frog Hollow's evolution away from straight country, the unmistakable twang in Berg's voice keeps the band's vocal aspect firmly planted on the range.

After several of the musicians left the band (Ty, among others, went to look for work in Portland), the band struggled and didn't really get back together as a viable entity until about 2008, after Ty returned and first Richards, then Pearson joined the group and brought entirely different backgrounds to its repertoire.

Urban Cowboys

Ty and Berg credit Richards and Pearson with giving Frog Hollow new energy, direction and popularity.

"I think we probably have the most talented drummer and bass player in the region," Ty Lane said about the new musicians, whose top musical genre wasn't country by a long shot.

That's not to underplay the role Yokel makes to the band's sound, which gets its spice and flavor from his fiddle, mandolin and harmonica virtuosity. But when it comes to giving Frog Hollow its harder edge, Yokel and the others are riding shot gun to Richards and Pearson, with the younger Lane and Berg generating the initial compositions and the elder Lane all too happy to sit back and enjoy the ride, playing rhythm guitar in the backseat.

Richards, who has played in bands for the majority of his adult life and joined Frog Hollow after an audition, hails from Kingston on the wet side of the mountains, from where he and Wendy, who grew up in the Walla Walla area, moved five years ago.

Being more of an urban musician, Richards was inspired by drummers who played for Lynyrd Skynyrd, AC/DC, the Eagles and the Steve Miller Band. He loves Americana and prefers to add a level of complexity well beyond the traditional "boom chuck" of traditional country rhythms.

And although Frog Hollow's genre isn't necessarily his first choice as a music lover, he said he enjoys playing with the band for because of its talented musicians and the other members' openness to new directions.

"I feel very blessed to be playing in a band that cares so much about music," he said.

He admits the other band members say he's the loudest drummer with whom they've ever played, but Frog Hollow's new signature sound takes full advantage of Richards' technical strength as a drummer.

As it does of Pearson's creativity as a bass player. His musical influences are different yet again, rooted in death metal and heavy metal music. Pearson is the kind of guy who pigeonholes Metallica, Van Halen and Iron Maiden on the lighter side of these genres.

Pearson's dad Randy introduced him to music, playing piano, trombone, key boards and drums in the school band, but also helped out the Waitsburg dentist at weddings and funerals. Because there were only six students in band when Pearson was in junior high, he got to try a variety of instruments but ultimately gravitated to the bass.

Since he formed his first heavy metal band in high school (he graduated from WHS in 1995), he has played with at least eight groups, including an alternative rock group at Whitworth College called Duck Butter.

He knew Richards through the drummer's band in Seattle, where Pearson ran a driver's education outfit before returning to Eastern Washington. After Richards joined the band, he pestered Pearson for half a year before the bass player decided to become a Frog Hollow-er.

"Outside of the band, I get as far away from country music as I can," said Pearson, who currently listens to a genre he calls "technical death metal" from such bands as the German Obscura and the French Gojira.

But that's precisely the pull away from traditional country the other band members welcome and precisely what makes Frog Hollow popular with younger country music lovers and urban rock fans alike, not to mention its danceability.

"The rock edge makes the music more palatable, so we're taking the twang and boom chuck out of the songs," Pearson said about the creative reconstruction of Frog Hollow's music. "That's a conscious effort from the rhythm section."

Where Next?

Summer is a busy time for the band with bookings around the region. But there's still time to work on the group's development, the Hollow-ers said.

They recently met with a sound engineer to explore the recording of a handful of songs from among the band's 15 original compositions. The short CD would be named after "Love For A Six Gun."

"It will be fun to go through the formal recording process," said Pearson, who hopes the albums will sell at concerts and perhaps online.

To commercial ize the band's music beyond that may be a stretch for the members, several of whom have families and wouldn't be able to tour to help expand Frog Hollow's audience, the band members said.

But you never know where things can go from here, they said, leaving the door open for something really big to come along.

Having a following on Facebook has helped the band's popularity a lot. With more than 1,000 "likes," it's effective for the men to get the word out about upcoming gigs and by now, almost everyone in the area has either attended one of their concerts or heard good things about them.

"The creative juices are flowing," Pearson said about the band's current activity and productivity. "I hope we can ride that wave. I'm excited about our prospects. It's the right group of guys at the right time."

Frog Hollow Acoustic

7 p.m. April 28 Coppei Cafe