C-Ville
The Daily Progress Entertainment Magazine
Friday, August 15, 2003
Coming Full Circle: Big Circle moves forward with new songs and pays tribute to the Deal
By Jane Dunlap Norris
Daily Progress staff writer
When power-pop fans file into Outback Lodge tonight, they’ll hear Big Circle play some music by the Deal. What they might not realize is that a dream is coming full circle, and it’s a big deal indeed.
Big Circle has been performing power pop for two years now, said electric guitarist and vocalist Charlie Pastorfield. He performs with acoustic guitarist and vocalist Mark Roebuck, electric guitarist and vocalist Rusty Speidel, bassist and vocalist Tim Anderson and drummer Jim Ralston.
Although the band is writing and performing its own music – enough for a debut CD, actually, which the band hopes to release later this year – the musicians originally got together in part to play songs by the Deal, an influential Charlottesville-based power-pop band that broke up 15 years ago.
From 1980 to 1988, the Deal performed up and down the East Coast, but its first nationally released album didn’t come out until July. Not Lame Records, an independent label focusing mainly on power-pop bands, is behind “Goodbye September,” an anthology of music by the Deal.
Big Circle’s Roebuck, a founding member of the Deal, appreciates his new band’s role in keeping what made the Deal special alive – and finds sweet validation in the enthusiasm the CD has generated.
“It’s so small, but it’s so unbelievably gratifying to me,” Roebuck said. “The whole Deal thing crashed and burned so badly back in the day.”
Roebuck said the Deal, which was on the brink of making a national name for itself, suffered from a combination of “really great good luck and really bizarre bad luck.”
The Deal’s history includes brush after brush with national prominence. The band signed with Premier Talent Agency – home to such big-name acts as the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads and the Who – and Bearsville Records, a label tied to Warner Brothers. Impressed impresario Albert Grossman, former manager of Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan, committed to releasing the band’s recordings.
A promising EP for Bearsville never got released after Warner Brothers severed ties with the label. In January 1986, during his Concorde flight to Europe to market the Deal there, Grossman died of a heart attack. Layers of legal tangles kept the Deal’s breakthrough tapes in limbo.
And then there’s another glimpse of what might have been, another swish-and-spit taste of the big time. Roebuck co-wrote a song, “The Song that Jane Likes,” with another Charlottesville resident and watched the album launch an influential national band. The co-writer was Dave Matthews; the CD was “Remember Two Things.”
Enough Deal fans, and member of other bands who credit the Deal as an influence, remain that “Goodbye September” was Not Lame’s biggest seller last month and is its fourth biggest seller so far this month, Roebuck said.
“They’re not going to regret having believed in us,” Roebuck said of the label.
Roebuck is gratified to see fans of the Deal show up for Big Circle gigs.
There’s a handful of really supportive old fans who are coming out to the shows,” he said.
But Roebuck isn’t living in the past. Rather, he is pleased to find himself in Big Circle, a band that offers so many of the enriching facets of the band experience that he’d craved.
He said that two of Big Circle’s originals, “Heaven Eleven” and “Diamond,” are the real deal – genuine group efforts.
“I’ve never enjoyed playing with anybody more than these guys,” Roebuck said of his Big Circle cohorts. “We are loving playing together. It’s the most positive musical experience I’ve ever had.
“No head games. Everybody contributes. This has been an incredible couple of years since this process started.”
If you’re not sure what “power pop” is, consider Not Lame’s definition of “essentially a cross between the melodic sound of the Beatles and the crunch of the Who.”
Pastorfield characterizes Big Circle’s sound by saying, “The great majority of it is power pop – as in the Beatles, the Raspberries, Matthew Sweet, with heavier guitars than usual.”
The guitar-rich sound benefits from the contrast in his and Speidel’s playing styles by avoiding the muddy, heavy effects of duplicated parts, Pastorfield said.
“It’s very fortunate that my style and Rusty’s are so totally different,” Pastorfield said.
Pastorfield’s also impressed by the band members’ dedication to each other. The musicians juggle busy lives filled with work and family obligations, and yet they meet every week to rehearse.
“It’s like Monday night poker, but no cards and no whisky,” Pastorfield said with a chuckle. “We’re doing it once a week and that’s pretty astonishing.”
Pastorfield said the professionalism of the band has been educational even for experienced musicians, adding that Roebuck and Speidel “are taking us to school.”
Vocals are also important. “Mark does the lion’s share of the singing,” Pastorfield said. “Everybody takes a swipe at it. It’s usually obvious who’s right for a song.”
“There’s a whole science to arranging the vocals for the right sound. If you can’t blend your voices, it just sounds like five people wailing away.”
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