Boat Is Topps
When your SAK West Coast Correspondent was but a wee boy in heavily starched Catholic school uniform, he spent his numerous detentions clapping erasers and wishing to someone else’s god that his teachers were just a little bit cooler. Does chewing gum in class really hurt anyone? And what exactly was wrong with engraving “AC/DC” on one’s desktop with the pointed edge of a compass? Had that graffito not righteously usurped the erroneous “Styx Rulz!” that some other student had so stridently etched on the same polished fiberboard?
It took a few years, but those after hours wishes have been answered in the form of Boat. D. Crane, who sings and plays guitar in the Seattle four-piece, makes his living as a junior high school English teacher, is happily married, and had to hire a substitute to watch his class while he and the band roadtripped down to Portland, San Francisco and Davis last week. Mild mannered teacher by day, mild mannered indie rocker by night, Crane’s creative outlets are the quirky, living room-recorded songs that he keeps secret from his students–and their potentially uncool parents.
“When I need the sick days for SXSW–or a trip out of town–I like to pretend I’m at a teaching conference. Parents might not be super excited to know their kid’s teacher is drinking Pabst at Bottom of the Hill and creating massive amounts of shrieking feedback,” Crane said.
Boat’s easy, oddball charm translates well to the stage. Their exhuberent set at Bottom of the Hill last Thursday provided a close to an hour of pretenseless fun. His froggy voice often climbing to comically quivering falsetto, Crane belted out squeaky clean pop vignettes about baseball, reptiles, ninjas, the failures of the Chicago public school system. Bassist M. McKenzie (their thinly veiled anonymity is among the band’s cheekier details) bobbed around comically, providing back up vocals and boundless enthusiasm.
“McKenzie’s our Ozzie Smith,” Crane explained, referring to the Gold Glove winning St. Louis Cardinals shortstop. “A fan favorite… although I’ve never seen him complete a flip.”
If baseball is a theme, here, there’s a reason. In an unlikely marriage of indie rock and professional sports, Boat will release (on Portland’s Magic Marker Records) their upcoming seven inch, appropriately entitled Topps, with a set of Crane’s hand-drawn likenesses of 1980s Major League Baseball stars–and a stick of the same cardboard-like bubblegum that helped land your West Coast Correspondent in detention so many years ago.
“Topps is about growing up a baseball fanatic, Saturday mornings spent watching the Mets with my baseball cards spread out on the floor. I loved everything about baseball. I begged anybody and everybody to play wiffleball with me. Many summer afternoons were spent convincing my sister that she was Kirby Puckett and I was Dwight Gooden. The song was born out of those memories. Hopefully, it will be out by July, in time for the All Star Game.”
(All photos by Desmond Miller)