The room goes dark, and after a few moments of quiet anticipation comes the sound of a mournful banjo. Gently, almost quietly plucking the strings, Curtis Eller, knees bent, almost lurching, steps into the soft spotlight. He cuts a striking figure in a black suit and tie, high-gloss white shoes and curly reddish hair and moustache, and if that doesn't get your attention, the way he moves will.

Eller ducks, bobs, weaves, and struts slowly across the stage, legs lifting comically high with each step, a move he picked up from one of his favorite sources of inspiration: silent movies. Such a unique, well-crafted stage personae could probably bring some measure of attention to any decent artist, but when the song begins, it becomes clear that everything else is secondary to his exquisite music.

His songs tell stories, and if they're not often happy stories, they're undeniably fascinating and historically accurate stories filled with long deceased characters like Fatty Arbuckle, Abraham Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Buster Keaton, Stephen Foster and Charles Lindbergh. Like the artist himself, the songs seem at once to be of another era and firmly rooted in this one.

Where does music like this come from? From someone who hasn't had the standard issue life, for starters. From someone who draws from life experiences most of us can only imagine. But he tells about that much better than I could, so come meet the the man known as New York City's angriest yodeling banjo player.

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Cosmik: We'll start from the beginning, because in your case it's even more necessary than it usually is in interviews, I think. We always ask the "influences" question, because cliché or not, it's fairly important. What I want to know is... not necessarily about your top few influences, but what was your overall musical atmosphere like when you were a child? What was the music you were exposed to?

Curtis: Well, my dad played rockabilly guitar and bluegrass banjo, so that's an obvious first influence. He also ran a small local circus, and that made a big impression on me as a kid. I grew up in the Detroit area, which is a fantastic musical town. Everything from Smokey Robinson to Iggy Pop to Son House. Detroit's still one of my favorite towns to play. The crowds are loose.

Cosmik: I'm still soaking up the idea of growing up with a circus in the family. Wow. How many kids get that kind of life experience? Did you get to spend a lot of time around the circus?

Curtis: I was quite young when my dad was doing it, maybe about 7, but it really stuck with me. I had to juggle for a half hour everyday. It seemed like a chore at the time, but now it seems pretty cool. I guess it's like suffering through piano lessons.

Cosmik: Circus people are such definitive show people. Did you pick up a lot from them?

Curtis: This circus was a very small, local circus for kids, but it seemed to have had a good reputation. My dad got to meet some of the greats when they'd pass through Detroit. People like Karl and Herman Wallenda, the wire walkers. I think they liked the idea of my dad turning a younger generation on to these things.

Cosmik: What's your favorite story from the circus days? You must have quite a few great stories from those days, but give us a personal favorite?

Curtis: It's not like I was raised by crazy circus folk...

Cosmik: (Laughs) Right, but you've still got memories that the average person isn't going to say "Oh yeah, my childhood was just like that." You were raised by a unique person, first of all.

Curtis: He was a gym teacher for a living. I just grew up with a basement full of tightropes, unicycles, juggling clubs and other circus debris. One day my dad decided he'd had enough and it all just disappeared.

Beside that there's just little things... Practicing back-flips in the front yard, doing handstands on my dad's arm, and once I lit a piece of my hair on fire while learning to juggle torches.

Cosmik: Wow. See? Not the usual thing. What was it that made music elevate to the top thing for you? Was there a big, thunder-crash moment?

Curtis: Hmmm...I've been doing it so long now I don't really remember when I decided there was no way out. It took me a while to get the nerve up to sing my own songs.

Cosmik: Did you first go through a phase of playing the things other kids played, the usual suspects like the Beatles, Stones and whatever?

Curtis: I learned to play by writing my own tunes. I got my start writing music for a theatre troupe and always worked with better singers. Once I did work up the guts to start singing, I figured I'd throw in some yodeling; there's not a lot of that going around these days.

Cosmik: Well, that's just the beginning of what you do that isn't too common. There are a lot of references in your music that the average person might not get. Things from another time. Fatty Arbuckle's a good example. How many people today know who Fatty Arbuckle was or what his story was? What I've been wondering is where you learned all of these things, and what led you there.

Curtis: I'm just a silent film fanatic. I love the physical performances... totally universal, no language required. I steal a lot from those guys, especially in my stage show.

I often ask the crowd if they know who I'm singing about, and at a gig in Nottingham I said, "Do you guys know who Buster Keaton is?" I got a room of silent stares until one guy said "Wasn't he Batman?" Definitely a film that needs to get made.

I don't know if people know what the Hell I'm singing about half the time, but they seem to think it's funny. They sometimes even track down the references, especially in the UK. I get a lot of e-mail from people wanting to know where they can read about this stuff. My friend in Leeds says my show can be like an American History lesson.

Cosmik: I don't know if everyone has the same listening experience, but when I hear you sing about these things like it's all part of the current daily life, it's disorienting in this really intoxicating, cool way. It's almost like stepping into another time.

Curtis: I try to sing about these things as if everybody already knows. I sort of put myself in the shoes of somebody who was there....to give it some immediacy. I don't want to be a history professor. I wanna be a rock & roll singer...with a banjo. I just sometimes read these stories and think "Jesus...can you imagine being there?"... and then I do.

A lot of the tunes are really more about my own life, and current political events and I just seem to express myself better with antique references. "Sugar In My Coffin" isn't really about Abe Lincoln or Elvis Presley. It's about being fed up with these lying sons of bitches in Washington. I guess it's my way of saying things have always been the same.

Cosmik: Yeah, that frustration comes out in "Taking Up Serpents Again," too. But I wouldn't really say it was a heavily political album. Just out of curiosity, do you keep up on all the weirdness happening in Washington these days?

Curtis: Like a lot of people, I got pretty wrapped up in things prior to the big election. It kinda blind sided me. I spend a lot of time trying figure out what's great about this country, and sometimes you've gotta dig down pretty deep. But any place that gave the world Buddy Holly and P.T. Barnum's gotta have something going for it, right? Hell, we invented the blues and the banjo.

Cosmik: Is it sometimes kind of hard not to say more than you do in your songs about that? Is there a line you don't go past into the "protest music" world?

Curtis: I don't really want to be a protest singer in a Phil Ochs kinda way. I'm just more concerned with singing about America... and sometimes that means sounding kinda pissed off. Not many great Americans get voted into their jobs. Nobody ever cast a vote for Jimmie Rodgers: District Yodeler.

Cosmik: But if he ran, I would have voted for him, that's for sure. Another great story song is "Amelia Earhart." You talk about Charles Lindbergh living his life in fear. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but you say "they" when you sing about who slipped in to kidnap the Lindbergh baby. Is that a nebulous "they," or a bit of a comment on Bruno Hauptmen's guilt or innocence?

Curtis: The Lindbergh line in that song is the idea that maybe you'd be better off like Amelia: just disappearing. Charles had to live through a whole life of crap, and Amelia got to stay young and heroic. America's sweetheart. I guess it's a nebulous "they." No matter how together you are, somebody's gonna sneak in and screw things up. Just the price you pay for sticking around, I guess. I hope that answers the question.

Cosmik: Earhart's another romantic historic figure... I mean in terms of how she lived and how she died, and how we imagine her life. What brought you to write that song?

Curtis: I wrote that tune when I was reading some Amelia Earhart myths. You know... the things people think happened when she disappeared. Some of them are unbelievably weird. My favorite is the one that says she was captured by the Japanese, brainwashed, trained as a radio personality and eventually turned up broadcasting propaganda to the GI's in World War II under the name "Tokyo Rose."

Cosmik: Wait, seriously? That's too weird. I've read a lot of theories, like she and Noonan were killed by headhunters on Howland Island, but this one's new to me.

Curtis: I wish it could be true; it's just so cracked and perfect.

Cosmik: There's something amazingly powerful about just one voice and one guitar, or in your case one banjo. Something immediate and intimate. Did you write "Stagecoach" and "Buster Keaton" to be like that from the beginning, or were they tried with the full band first?

Curtis: I tried "Buster Keaton" with the band, but it kept turning into a country song. "Stagecoach" was always lonesome.

Cosmik: Well, I'm glad you didn't go with the country thing on "Buster Keaton." It's perfect like it is. I think my single favorite recording - not necessarily my single favorite song, but recording - is "Two of Us." It sounds enormous, and you did that with unusual instrumentation. Accordion, huge drums that sound like tympani and what I THINK is bass guitar, but I swear it sounds like tuba in places.

Curtis: That was an old song I wrote for a puppet show. There's just banjo, accordion, upright bass and a regular drum kit. It's funny, 'cause we originally tried it with tuba, but I replaced it with the upright at the last minute. Banjo's all bones and accordion's all meat so it fills things out while still leaving lots of space. The tympani is just Chris on the floor tom.

Cosmik: We've talked a little about subject matter, and some of the great people from the past, like Keaton, being inspirational. I want to ask you about the feel of the music itself. There's such a traditional feeling and, at the same time, you also end up with something that sounds like it fits right in today. Traditional feel, modern sound. How do you attain that? How do you approach things in the studio?

Curtis: I think the sound of the banjo goes a long way toward making things sound old. The song structures are pretty basic rock & roll... I think. The only thing I do real different is that there's no guitar and no snare drum. In the studio, we stood in a circle and played the tunes until they sounded right. No overdubbing except for a couple harmony vocals. Also the band was really new. We only practiced a few times. I wanted to capture the moment when we first nailed the tunes; that moment only comes once and you can't get it back later.

Cosmik: I never would have guessed that. It's such a relaxed vibe, and it's played so well I assumed you'd been playing together forever. Do you use the same people when you go on the road?

Curtis: Sadly, I tour solo most of the time. I don't have a driver's license so I tour by bus and train. I often hook up with local musicians for collaboration on the road to keep things interesting. I seem to attract accordionists everywhere I go, and there's even a tuba player who sits in with me in Leeds.

All the folks in the current American Circus have wonderful bands of their own, so it's rare that I can get them all in the same room. I think I got real lucky with this group; they're all songwriters and we just clicked so well right away. If I could keep 'em full-time I'd be a very happy banjo player.

Cosmik: I'd think putting a band together to play your music must have been a much different experience than it is to get a rock and roll band together. Was it a challenge to find the right people?

Curtis: A lot of people think of my music as being kind of old fashioned, but I like to think it has a lot more in common with bands like the Kinks and the Band. It's modern music, I just happen to be singing about old things and dead people. So when I had to put together the band for this record I made like I was putting together a rock & roll band. I chose people because they were my friends. Folks I thought would have fun hanging around in the basement banging out some tunes. I know plenty of more technically accomplished instrumentalist, but these are my best friends, and it was a real treat to introduce them to each other.

Cosmik: By the way, the cover art on the CD is fantastic. I love the time period feel of it. Where did you find the artist?

Curtis: Well... I didn't have to look too far. The cover was done by my wife, Jamie B. Wolcott [www.jamiebwolcott.com]. She's an Illustrator and poster designer here in New York City, and I guess I don't need to say that I'm nuts about her work. She does all my album covers, posters, my website. Basically, if it needs to look great she does it. We even collaborated on a couple illustrated lyric books. There's something real mysterious about her best stuff... like finding some weird antique but not being able to figure out how old it really is. It's like having a really good set designer for the music.

Cosmik: Speaking of which, do you have a stage show that goes along with the themes in the music?

Curtis: My stage show is pretty rowdy and pretty physical. In fact, at the moment, I'm recovering from a badly sprained ankle acquired at a gig in Detroit. I keep forgetting that I'm not 18 years old anymore. As I said before, I'm a silent film nut, and I steal a lot of moves from those guys... especially Buster. And I wear my pants too big.

Cosmik: And it's about time someone really studied Keaton and those guys and applied it to a rock show. Do you have any plans for the immediate future, for bringing something else like that into the show and seeing if it flies?

Curtis: I'd like to do something new in the live show. Something with more musicians. I'm writing a new batch of tunes at the moment, and when I put out the next album I want to do some more performances with a full band. I want more collaboration in my life. It gets a bit lonesome out there. Once in a while Joe DeJarnette, the upright bassist, will join me onstage, and I love having a foil. He's really loose and willing to go along with any cracked notion I have onstage. It's real exciting and it gives me ideas.

Cosmik: I assume you get to spend some time with the people who come to your shows, talking afterward and hanging out a bit. Do you get a sense of what it is that attracts most people to your music? Do a lot of people tell you specific things that drew them in?

Curtis: I'm touring at a pretty grassroots level. No label, no manager, no radio...just me. Usually my first time through a town I'll be opening for a local band. Then when I end up coming back people bring their friends out. A lot of word of mouth about the live show. First timers can be skeptical. A solo banjo player is a pretty hard sell, but a lot of 'em come back. And everybody wants to talk a lot after the shows. I love it.

Cosmik: I'm wondering if there's a difference between your American and European fans in that way. If almost no one in, say, Rotterdam knows about Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton or Stephen Foster are, or what the Lindbergh baby kidnapping was all about, for example, what is it that reaches them on the level it does for them to actually become fans?

Curtis: It's funny... I do a lot better in the UK and Europe than in the US. Maybe it's mysterious to them. Maybe they recognize some of the references from old records and movies. Maybe they just like to see a banjo player jumping around like an idiot. They seem to think it's very funny.

Cosmik: You say you don't want to be a history teacher, but you must know you open up a window to the past for a lot of people. Tell me there isn't some gratification in knowing you turn a number of people on to something great like Keaton films, or that you get people reading up on things.

Curtis: Yeah, that feels pretty cool. It's nice to find a few sympathetic ears out there. I'm amazed how interested people are.

Cosmik: The first time I heard your music, it was because I got hold of a DVD called What Goes On! (www.whatgoeson.tv), which was a sans-audience performance by a handful of artists in New York. How did you get involved with that?

Curtis: My good friend Lee Chabowski came up with that one, and he really threw everything he had into it. Out of all the self-proclaimed film makers I've met floating around New York, he's the only one who actually finished a film... and he's really a guitar player.

Cosmik: Are some of those people on your album?

Curtis: Yeah, the first performer on the disc is Chris Moore (www.mooresong.com), a fantastic songwriter, singer and a bit of an inspiration to me. He started life as the drummer for a punk rock band in Detroit, and I was lucky enough to have him beating on the trapkit on my record.

Cosmik: He's all over the DVD, too, playing with everyone. Seriously talented. That DVD was really unique. Great musicians, amazing look to the footage, the presentation was very nice. Are there plans for more, and are you on board?

Curtis: They're planning to make a series out of it. I think it's just the old budgetary woes that are stalling it out. I really hope they get to do more.

Cosmik: A DVD of your own show would be a lot of fun. Have you thought about doing that? Or at least maybe a video bonus track on your next CD?

Curtis: I'm interested in it for sure. One of the cinematographers and I went out to Pittsburgh last January and made a little film of me singing the tune "Stephen Foster" at Stephen Foster's gravestone. It was during a little blizzard, and there were hawks flying around. I haven't seen the film since we made it, but I remember thinking it looked real cool.

I also got to act in a silent film called "The Black Balloon" by a director in Providence, RI named Anthony Penta (www.pentaworks.org/blackballoon/). It's all fun and I'd like to do more. Maybe something for the next CD.

Cosmik: Banjo is obviously not the usual thing people see and hear in rock music, and at the moment, outside of Bela Fleck, which is more about jazz, I can't think of anyone leading a band with banjo. Do you feel a sort of... I don't want to say responsibility, but maybe an opportunity to show what it can do? How it can fit in?

Curtis: Absolutely! This is an ax I spend a lot of time grinding. The banjo got buttoned into such a tight jacket. When you pick up a banjo, people think they know what they're gonna hear. Sometimes they're happy to be surprised and sometime they act like I'm a traitor. Nobody's that uptight about guitar or piano or fiddle.

Doc Boggs said he wanted to play banjo like a blues piano player 'cause that's what he was listening to. A lot of the early banjo players were wildmen and show business lunatics. The punk rockers of the 19th century. I think Eddie Cochran probably would've played banjo if he'd started in 1840. I started out playing bluegrass, but I spent all my time listening to rock & roll records. It took me a long time to figure out how to do it.. The big leap for me was just slowing down. I don't know why everybody wants to play the banjo so damn fast.

A lot of banjo players can be kinda snobby about purity...especially some of the bluegrassers. But Earl Scruggs was great because he didn't sound like anybody else. On the upside, I think things are loosening up these days. The banjo seems to be turning up in some pretty weird places. I think people are discovering some pre-bluegrass banjo players and it feels a lot like rock & roll. I often get people saying that they're gonna take up the banjo after seeing my show and that makes me real happy. I hope they do it.

© 2005 - DJ Johnson