By Emma Downs
The Journal Gazette
The hosts of “Stage Banter” are huddled around a rickety card table inside Monastic Chambers Recording Studio in New Haven. Surrounding them are the hallmarks of a DIY radio show – microphones, a rattling air vent, piles of CDs, three cats brushing against the table legs. Tonight, the Stage Banterers – Matt Kelley, Sean Smith and Greg Locke – are recording the ninth episode of their local Web-based radio show. The topic: Jeff Tweedy’s indie country rock outfit Wilco.
“Don’t worry about making noise,” Kelley tells me. “It’s not a problem. And that vent over there isn’t a problem. The cats’ meowing isn’t a problem…”
Before the three can begin recording (and, indeed, arguing the superiority of Wilco’s “Being There” over “Summer Teeth”), they’ve got to hammer out the details of the show – which song excerpts to play, when to read listener mail, when to introduce special guest (and Wilco “uber-fan”) Jen Reinking. As is typical in the radio business, everything seems thrown together in a matter of minutes. To the casual observer, it resembles a live performance of “Who’s On First.”
“Wait – we’re doing a song intro and then an intro to the song intro?” Smith asks.
“No,” Kelley says. “A song to intro Wilco. How about ‘Spiders?’ ”
“Ohhh… Let’s pick something that people actually like,” Smith says.
This is what fans of the cult biweekly podcast have come to expect from Kelley, Smith and Locke: an hour of unrestrained opinions and arguments – no apologies, thank you very much – and a thorough discussion of music ranging from Bob Dylan to Sonic Youth. As the Stage Banterers say: “God gave us the music to rock, not to talk about it. But here we go.”
“Matt’s very concrete in his theories and opinions,” Smith says. “I’m not. I have no filter. I wear my heart on my sleeve. So, we decided to bring Greg in to balance us out.”
“Stage Banter” averages 250 listeners per episode, some tuning in from as far away as Bulgaria, Las Vegas, Nashville, Tenn., and the Netherlands. Since its inception in May, the show has seen a steady increase in subscribers via iTunes, thanks to online networking by Kelley (the owner of One Lucky Guitar) and Smith and Locke (both music writers for local alt-weeklies).
“The three of us all participate in different message boards for music nerds,” Kelley says. “We get a lot of positive feedback from that. And episodes that deal with particular artists – like the Bob Dylan episode – have given us a big bump as well.”
Hard-core music geeks won’t be disappointed in “Stage Banter.” The guys prove their indie music mettle in the first seconds of every show. (Their theme song is “Useless Information” by You Am I, a track taken from a bonus CD that originally came with the first pressing of You Am I’s album “Saturday Night, ’Round Ten.”) The show – which has featured guest spots by local musicians Matthew Sturm and John Minton (of the Possum Trot Orchestra) and visual artist David Birkey – was originally inspired by “Sound Opinions,” a rock ’n’ roll talk show on Chicago Public Radio. The two shows are similar, each pitting educated, opinionated music fans and critics against one another – in a good-natured, I-Can’t-Believe-You-Actually-Like-That-Album kind of way.
“The three of us are friends that have argued about music for a long time,” Kelley says. “So, eventually a co-worker of mine said we should be doing it on the radio, and we thought, well, we don’t have the voices for radio. But we do have the voices for a podcast. So here we are.”
edowns@jg.net
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Stage Banterers Smith, left, and Kelley share a laugh while recording the podcast, which has earned a cult following of fans who even tune in from Las Vegas and Nashville, Tenn.
Photos by Clint Keller/The Journal Gazette
From right, Matt Kelley, Sean Smith and Greg Locke record their podcast, “Stage Banter,” with guest Jen Reinking, left, last month at New Haven’s Monastic Chambers Recording Studio.
