When singer/songwriter Gabe Liebowitz, from the band Dastardly, stops by Radio on Sunday, his hustling career will be in full swing.
“I decided I was finally going to try to make this band my full-time job,” he explained by cell-phone from unusually warm Chicago. The band cut into Liebowitz’s four-year career as a double-decker bus tour guide for the city and playing music on the side, without any manager or agent, has kept him busy. “It’s been really crazy juggling everything,” he said.
Now, during down time with the rest of Dastardly, Liebowitz tours as a solo artist for extra funds. “I can get out there, get the name out and not stress everyone out,” he said, adding that the other members are consumed in work and school. “This tour is the beginning of that experiment.”
So out of the double-decker business and into the musical frying pan. He joins TonyBear and Dangers of a Ghost Scorpion in the freshly minted venue.
Since Liebowitz lives a carless life, he’ll be riding Amtrak, playing three shows in New York City, then hitting Providence, Somerville and Texas. He admits the road trip will be challenging, but understands the value the road holds for a songwriter. “When you see people like Jeff Buckley or Elliot Smith,” he reflected, “These gripping, incredible songwriters first started out playing solo.”
He referenced the legendary Buckley performance at the Sin-e in Manhattan from 1993 that finds him all alone on stage, but set him up for musical gold. “Then, when [he's] thrown in front of a band, he’s already got the chops,” Liebowitz said. Chops that went on to create the classic album, Grace.
Dastardly began, like many projects, with bedroom recordings and a finite blueprint for sound. “I would listen to the entire Hank Williams discography,” he said, also citing Townes Van Sant, Roy Orbison and Harry Neilson. As the band sprouted, their music took Liebowitz’s first country-blues seedlings and gargled them with more modern influences like Dirty Projectors, Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective.
“We actually are so like-minded,” he said of the band. “We try to mesh it together in a way that isn’t necessarily trying to create an eclectic sound without seeming like we’re out of focus.” When the blender of sound grew full and the mixture poured out, a new term for the musical landscape was born: Hicksters. Impress your friends with that one.
Liebowitz returns to Chicago January 19 for the band’s record release show at Lincoln Hall. It’ll be their first release in over a year that has seen the band through some heavy evolution. “The strongest point of our band is the live show,” he championed. And that’s what they brought to Bury Me in the Country.
                They recorded at the Rumble in Chicago, “literally like a laundry room,” Liebowitz called it. When the band showed up, with them was a grueling handle of whiskey — Canadian Club — for jacked-up inspiration. “By the end of the night we got our engineer hammered,” he revealed. “He doesn’t even remember the last session.”
Blackouts aside, those woozy sessions caught Dastardly live, loose and with much to say. “A lot of imagery throws back to the Carter Family and the old time recordings from the 20s and 30s,” he said, “But, it’s filtered through this mess of jumbling, modern sounds.”
The new album’s concept is about loving city life, but still, in the back of the mind, dreaming of country life, wishing to end that life a scatter of ashes complete in pure nature. “The idea is not to just pretend that we’re from Wyoming and living in big hills, but embracing the fact that we live in the city,” he explained. “[We just don't] have the balls to leave.” Though, if this experiment is a success, they may have to.        Tickets are $5. Show at 8pm.