Volume 18 • Issue 4 | JUNE 17-23, 20
Spike priggen
Saturday, June 18th
The Lakeside Lounge
162 Avenue B
between 10th and 11th Sts.
Power pop tribute album
New York-based musician sings cover songs
By David Chiu
Spike
Priggen may not be a recognizable name to most casual music listeners,
and that’s fine with him. “Yeah, nobody knows who I am,” deadpans the
41-year-old singer, songwriter who has been part of the alternative
rock scene for over 25 years. “I’m totally obscure. Most of the music I
like is really obscure so I can take some solace in that.”
Obscure
also best describes the NewYork-based musician’s choice of cover songs
that make up his second solo album “Stars after Stars After Stars.” It
consists of tracks originally recorded by the Ramones, Big Star, Alice
Cooper, and the Zombies, as well as songs by the Jacobites and Hot
Bodies, two local bands from Priggen’s hometown of New Haven,
Connecticut. Making the covers album started out as an excuse to
experiment and test new production techniques. “I did it for fun early
on to begin with,” he says. “It kind of grew into a record that I
wanted to release.”
Rather
than recreating the songs in their original letter-perfect form,
Priggen applied his distinct power pop melodic touch to them; one might
have thought the catchy songs were truly his own tunes. “I’ve been
doing them for so long that I can almost forget that I didn’t write
them,” he says. “I just had it in my head from the way I remember them.
I didn’t want to have them be just like the originals.”
The
songs transported him back to the ‘70s and early ‘80s during which his
musical tastes developed. One song he felt proud of interpreting on the
record is “When You Looked At Me” by singer/songwriter Jennifer
Jackson. “I think we added a pretty arrangement on that one, like what
Harry Nilsson did on the Badfinger song “Without You.” Priggen even
goes as far to cover “A Slow Soul” by the British pop group Scritti
Politti. “It’s more of a soul ballad before they used drum machines,”
he says. “It’s as far away from their later [‘80s synth pop] stuff.”
Priggen
employed several talented local musicians for “Stars after Stars After
Stars;” the biggest highlight according to him was having Cheap Trick
drummer Bun E. Carlos play on several tracks. He has been friends with
Carlos for over 25 years since meeting him backstage at a Cheap Trick
concert. “It was almost like having Ringo Starr and [Led Zeppelin’s]
John Boham playing drums on my record,” he says proudly. “I couldn’t
think of anything that comes close to that.”
Cheap
Trick were one of the bands that fostered Priggen’s love for power pop
as a kid in New Haven; one of his other influences were legendary cult
band Big Star, whose “Nightime” is on Priggen’s record. “I loved Big
Star since when I was 12 or 13,” he says. ”I’ve always been a big fan
of theirs, back when it was literally me and two other guys in New
Haven knew who Big Star were.”
Spike
(nee Michael) Priggen had been playing music since 1978 as a member of
various bands in New Haven. He was a part of the city’s underground
punk and New Wave scene (whose graduates included musician/producer Jon
Brion, and Mark Mulcahy and Ray Neal of the rock band Miracle Legion).
Priggen later moved to New York to study photography at the School of
Visual Arts; he also formed a band called Blue Period, which later
evolved into the Hello Strangers during the ‘80s. He was involved with
other ensembles including the Boston-based Dumptruck; he later launched
an independent label #1 Records and produced various projects. “I
figured out over the last couple of weeks that a band I was in, in
1980, called TV Neats is on three different power pop compilations,” he
says, indicative of his long musical resume.
After
years of playing and recording with other people, Priggen finally
released “The Very Thing You Treasure” (2001)—his first album under his
own name—to acclaimed reviews. Recording and releasing that album
proved to be a challenge when Priggen was involved in a car accident
that sidelined him for several months, and suffered a vocal ailment. “I
couldn’t sing for like a year,” he remembers, “between recording the
music and the singing—it sort of made that record take a long time to
get done.
Priggen is already busy working on a new album of his own original compositions. He doesn’t plan to go out on an extensive tour, although he will play a few local shows. Right now, he hopes that people will like and enjoy “Stars after Stars After Stars.” “I like to play and sing,” Priggen says simply. “That’s about it really. It’s like a big vanity project. I’m not making these records because somebody’s paying me. I’m making them because I’m taking money out of my own pocket and doing it.”
