PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY 11/8/00

INTERSTELLAR OVERBITE

HOW RICK HENDERSON MADE SPACE-FOLK SUITABLE FOR DANCING

BY JOEY SWEENEY

In the world of indie-rock, there's a prescribed route of artistic completion, and it goes something like this: You're personally involved with some kind of musical project. You feel the need, sooner or later, to document your chosen form of expression. You decide to record your songs in hopes of getting signed, thereby making your music more widely available. So after playing tons of gigs in a vain and futile effort to offset the recording costs you're about to incur, you find a kindred spirit or two and set about recording your music. This is usually done in some variation on the sweaty-smelling basement studio, with some dude in a sweatshirt and sneakers telling you how "warm" and "good" everything sounds.

After you run out of money twice and the CD plant fucks up your order at least once, you receive boxes upon boxes of your very own CDs, usually in increments of 500 or 1,000. After the initial rush of distribution at your "CD release party," up to 90 of the leftover CDs go to friends, another 50 get placed in local shops and the rest are to be "sold" at "shows." It's a grueling process, usually a six-to-nine-month staring contest with you and your own self-confidence, and most of the time you're not even allowed to call it "art."

This sounds all too familiar to Rick Henderson. As a veteran and current member of more musical outfits than anyone can probably name, the road described above seems as ritualized as the daily routine of waking up in the morning. So, after three and a half years of on-again, off-again toil on his solo opus as the Wayward Wind, he stuck his feet deep in the cold and unforgiving soil of the rock republic and said "No way."

"I wanted to do something for the record that wasn't a typical CD listening party," he says. "You know, 40-year-old industry vultures lining up with their paper plates for the chicken wings, crowding five-deep around the open bar before the 10 o'clock time limit."

Instead, Henderson went right off the deep end of where even the most self-serving singer/songwriters would fear to tread: He decided that when the time came for his record, Drenched & Drained, to be unleashed on the world-just one more voice heaped upon the teeming morass, one more hat in the ring of the transcendent poetry of modern American music-he would step up to the plate and deem his record a bona fide Artistic Event.

He would do this by sending out each of Drenched & Drained's 12 tracks to some of the area's most formidable dancers, companies and choreographers to be interpreted and-for one time only this weekend-acted out. No wings.

It is to Henderson's eternal credit that Drenched & Drained is just the kind of album that can stand up to such a treatment. For as much as Emma, the smart and dirty rock band he's been fronting since the mid-'90s, is just that, Henderson in his Wayward Wind hat is something else altogether-an artist. On Drenched & Drained, he's Thomas Dolby with a fancy for sea chanties, Brian Eno on a folk jones, Tiny Tim plucking out a New Order tune on a ukelele from space.

And in a time when most records of this stature revel in stony stares and powerful brooding, Henderson's biggest selling point here is a knowing sense of humor, bolstered by a playfulness that makes whatever arty conceits the album may have do-able. These songs-character studies, really-have a literate strength and irresistible affability.

"The original idea was to make a record where sound effects played a prominent role in the songs," says Henderson. "I had been listening to a lot of Mystic Moods Orchestra albums at the time and wanted to make songs [like theirs] that existed in their own sound environment. So recordings of environmental sounds were laid down on tape first-trains, ocean, rain, the sounds a baby hears in the womb-and the songs were built up from that."

All of which is to say that, stripped down and built up again, Drenched & Drained is interstellar folk music. Acoustic guitars bump up against discarded boom boxes, bongos keep time with cloud formations, and Henderson's low, raspy voice narrates while his souped-up DeLorean with the plutonium battery hangs around all the old galaxy haunts. It's such a piece of work that, when it comes to a visual complement, interpretive dance seems pretty much the only way to go.

"I've been working with Headlong Dance Theater and Moxie [Dance Collective] for several years now on a number of projects-our biggest collaboration so far was Ulysses, which premiered in 1999-and four members of Headlong have already made dance pieces to songs from the Emma records on their own initiative," he says. From there, it was just a short series of steps before members of both companies, as well as New Paradise Laboratories, light designer Mark O'Maley and Henderson's partner in music and life, D. Nicholas, anted up their own contributions. To say nothing of Henderson's own interpretation of his tune "The Second Man."

"My main inspirations for the piece are as follows," he says. "a.) The politics of being a musician in a collective ensemble; b.) the way wedding bands play rock 'n' roll numbers; and c.) what would it look like if aliens attempted to reconstruct a musical performance using only the evidence they could gather from still photographs of rock shows."

Because, aliens be damned, Henderson's already showed us what that sounds like. And it is nothing short of sublime.

Members of Headlong Dance Theater and Moxie Dance Collective will perform to the music of the Wayward Wind's Drenched & Drained, Sat. Nov. 11, 8pm. $7. Christ Church's Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street