Distracted by conversation as we entered the club, I barely even glanced at the stage, where four musicians were playing. My companions and I claimed an empty booth toward the front of the bar, and began studying the menu.
It's not clear in my mind when, exactly, I started noticing the music.
I had an inkling, but I couldn't quite believe that what I was hearing matched who was playing. But there he was, behind the drumset. The face more gaunt than I remembered, the hair still long, the playing style far less extroverted: Ric Parnell, aka Mick Shrimpton, aka the drummer from the movie "This is Spinal Tap." Playing blues. At Sean Kelly's. Stranger things have happened, maybe. But not recently, not around here.
I had heard that Parnell had moved to town awhile back, and was even aware that he was playing with the Grand Poobahs every Thursday at Sean Kelly's. Still, nothing in my imagination had prepared me for the seeming incongruity of this icon of my teenage years, this colorful character from a brilliant movie about an awful band, now contentedly plying a subtle swing in the back of a small bar in the mountains of Montana.
"Spinal Taaaap!" whooped a 20-something guy in a baseball cap, sitting behind me as I watched the band. A slight smile creased Ric Parnell's mouth as he played on.
"Yeah, I'm pretty used to that," said Parnell when I talked with him later. I asked him if he ever felt annoyed that people still look at him as "the Spinal Tap guy," rather than as a drummer who has enjoyed a storied and multifaceted professional career. After all, he has performed and recorded with a parade of legends, including Bette Midler, Toni Basil, Joe Houston, Atomic Rooster, and even Ravi Shankar.
"No, not really," he said cheerily in his native British accent. "Really it's quite nice, to be a part of such a legendary thing."
That Parnell lives in Missoula now probably seems strange; and to be sure, it wasn't really planned. As of a year and a half ago, Parnell was living in Los Angeles, working as a professional studio and session drummer. One of his regular gigs involved touring with bluesman Joe Houston. Houston's typical itinerary brought him through Missoula for a few nights at the Top Hat before heading north to Canada.
After a string of dates at the Top Hat in late summer 2003, the band headed toward the border as usual. But when they arrived, they discovered that all their customs paperwork had been left in California.
"So I said, why don't you just drop me in Missoula on your way back home," recalls Parnell. "That's what happened, and I've been here ever since."
Shortly after settling here, Parnell met guitarist Ron Meissner, while performing at the 2003 Testicle Festival. Though Parnell and Meissner had before never met, they played together at the event, and were mutually impressed with each other's chops.
"I guess I didn't know a lot of his past when I first played with him," recalls Meissner. "I was just impressed with how he played that night."
Meissner eventually tapped Parnell to join him in the Grand Poobahs, which also includes bassist Mike Freemole. Keyboardist Jim Rogers also occasionally plays with the band.
"I have to admit, I wasn't really that familiar with the movie before I met him," says Meissner. "It's kind of strange ... ("Spinal Tap") is basically a parody, and yet he's such a good drummer."
The Grand Poobahs perform most Thursday nights (including tonight) at Sean Kelly's. There is no cover charge. Catch 'em before the drummer explodes.
THIS IS A PROCESS OF AN EVOLUTION
In creating a still life, the challenge to the artist is to create a sense of vitality and dynamics utilizing clearly inanimate objects. In the band This is a Process of a Still Life, the challenge lately has been to create a sense of consistency and continuity out of clearly moving parts. That's because the Missoula-based band, which has built a devoted local following for its ambitiously exploratory instrumental music, has recently undergone a fairly major change in personnel.In the past two months, the group has parted ways with its founding drummer, reconnected with an exiled keyboardist, and added a new drummer. The group is still called This is a Process of a Still Life; but lately it's looked more like a Whirlwind of Change.
The changes were made official when the band returned from an October tour.
"Before we left on tour, there were definitely some tensions going on, and they were exacerbated on tour," says Ben Rounder, who plays guitar and samplers in the band.
Mainly those tensions had to do with how the band's songs were developed, says Rounder. The group is organized largely as a collective, with each member contributing to songwriting and arranging duties. Such an approach demands a shared vision of the band's identity, its "sound."
According to Rounder, that vision had grown increasingly crosseyed in recent months, with founding drummer Gary Jimmerson often disagreeing with other band members about the group's musical direction.
After the October tour ended, Jimmerson left the band, and was replaced by drummer Baine Craft, a longtime friend of the band. Craft had already worked with some members of the band before, and had appeared on guitarist/keyboardist Burke Jam's record.
Keyboardist Grier Phillips, a former member of the group, also returned to the band's lineup.
The result, asserts Rounder, is a band that is more clearly on the same page.
"It just feels like everyone's a little more free to create the music they're interested in and the emotions we're trying to generate," says Rounder.
"We're a six-piece now, so all of us can play a little bit less, not try to fill every possible space."
The biggest challenge now, Rounder notes, is applying those changes to the group's older material.
"It's sometimes difficult to listen to this stuff that we've known so well and played so many times, and be able to hear it in new ways," says Rounder.
So the band has been writing a lot of new material, some of which will be debuted this weekend, when the band returns to the stage for the first time with its new lineup.
The performance will also feature Salt Lake City's On Vibrato, a band cut from similar aesthetic cloth; and the debut of (my.akz.nak) b, a side-project of This is a Process of a Still Life member Grier Phillips.
Local filmmaker Ryer Banta will contribute visuals to the performance.
The whole thing goes off at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at the Roxy Theater. Tickets are $5.
Reach Joe Nickell at 523-5358 or jnickell@missoulian.com.
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