On Friday, October 16th, the Fitzkee Brothers brought their guitar-centered trio to Dharma Bums, the New Hope room upstairs from the best vegan restaurant you’ve probably never patronized. Drew Fitzkee (bass, vocals) and his younger brother Alex (drums, vocals) hail from Lewes, Delaware, and with guitarist Will Bart have spent the last few years serving as Melody Trucks’ rhythm section. Trucks’ father Butch, founding drummer of the Allman Brothers Band, co-founded Roots Rock Revival, the music education-oriented retreat that served as the foundation for the trio to grow into the musicians they are today, and at Dharma Bums, it was clear just how far they’ve come.
Alex writes the majority of the band’s originals, and they opened with a trio of them strung together: “I’ll Be There” into “Came a Little Closer” into “Never Works Out.” They went on to perform a series of excellent covers, including Funkadelic’s “Standing on the Verge of Getting It On,” a pair of Little Feat tunes in “Spanish Moon” and “Skin It Back,” and the Allman Brothers’ “Southbound,” without a full stop anywhere in the set. In a performance owing as much to Ginger Baker as an octopus, Alex is constantly hitting something and does so in such a way that Bart and Drew, the older of the brothers, can lean into or out of lead vs. rhythm-oriented playing, with each of the players somehow – simultaneously and smoothly – covering down on both.
During the jams, it took a while to sort out who was doing what, because they were all kind of playing rhythm – very Cream-esque, where everybody is playing equal parts rhythm section and soloist. Alex makes do on a relatively skinny kit – I both shudder to think (and crave to see!) what he’d do on an Alex Van Halen/Neil Peart-style rig. He plays with a quiet power, and the big-brother/little-brother dynamics are right there on stage. Drew is as likely to walk a bassline as he is to smash out chords on his vintage ‘74 Fender Precision bass, leaving Bart to alternate fluidly among riffs, lead lines, and rhythmic fills, an acolyte of John Frusciante as he is Dickey Betts and Binky Griptite.
Meaning no disrespect to any of the excellent four- and five-piece bands out there, I think the trio may be the ideal format for improvisational rock. Bigger bands tend to play the head, then trade leads, then groove, then trade off again. A good three-piece doesn’t have to take turns, and you never know when a jam is going to drop from half time to a crawl. Maybe that’s a trio thing, or maybe it’s a brother thing, but either way, the Fitzkees’ trio played very much as one.
“Memphis,” another original, stood on its own before they went back under. “The Money” ran into Funkadelic’s “Red Hot Mama,” a good call in a town that loves its P-Funk. (Michael “Kidd Funkadelic” Hampton played John & Peter’s regularly for years.). From there they teased Weather Report’s “Birdland” and “Midnight Rider,” went into the original “Listen to Me,” and came back around to play “Midnight Rider” in full. (Surprisingly, this was the first time they’d done so as a band, though clearly they all knew their way around the tune.) The last segment is where song and jam got the hardest to tell apart. The theme from Barney Miller led into original “Two Left Feet,” then Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman,” the original “Moonlit Eyes,” and Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” Then came “Help on the Way” into “Slipknot!,” and where a Dead band would land in “Franklin’s Tower,” they landed in “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” instead. (They managed to sneak in a little of Miles Davis’ “So What” and the Beatles’ “Hey Bulldog.”)
See the Fitzkees live when you can — and long live the power trio!
