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“Tink says we are country prison music and early British Invasion. Hillbilly-ish, as well,” Joziah Longo said while taking a break from rehearsals last week. The music veteran from Second and Wolf streets is gearing up for his debut at the Theater of Living Arts, 334 South St., with his band, Gandalf Murphy & the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, which includes cello, accordion and flute player Tink Lloyd, guitarist/mandolin player Sharkey McEwen, percussionist Tony Zuzulo and Chen and Orien Longo.
The New York-based band is not new on the music scene, having played together since the 1990s, but the April 16 Philadelphia performance is something never-before-done by the self-proclaimed “industry-avoiders.”
“When [Live Nation] asked if we would do the TLA venue, we thought we’d make it an event. Let’s just reveal the stuff we are working on in this album,” Longo said of the band’s intention to play the works-in-progress to be released on their new album, “The Grand Slambovians,” dropping summer 2010. “You always want to make a show special, so that’s what we are doing.”
Coming together as a band in the late-90s, the group skirted playing in cities, preferring to do things its own way by self-producing quirky performances just about anywhere.
“We did it in very obscure places. We’ve done it all over the place, in very obscure old theaters, and managed to have it be a sellout gig,” Longo said of the Circus’ shows that also have been staged in the middle of Pennsylvania’s woods and occasionally featured aerial performances. “We did bring it in to the city and that went really well.”
The Slambovians are back in the cities, as its lead singer/songwriter put it, and enjoying the new vibe. Though they travel to Philly at least once a year for the New Year’s Eve-Eve event — played at World Café Live the day before NYE as a nod to the Mummers, who are prepping for the New Year’s Day parade and could not attend a New Year’s Eve show — the TLA performance is out-of-the-box even for them.
“The last show I saw [at the TLA] was Arcade Fire,” Longo said of a performance he caught a couple years back. “It’s intimate enough, it’s a nice-size venue. That was a cool show.
“Philly will kick your ass if they don’t like it. They are honest. They are discerning. So we thought, ‘Let’s just do the whole shebang.’”
Coming back to his old stomping grounds is a treat for the local boy who left the area at age 17 to pursue a career in music.
“It’s funny for me in Philly ’cause people show up that I grew up with — you remember these people. It’s kind of a gaffe to play for these people that you think you are playing for some kid that went to high school with you,” Longo said.
The Slambovian Circus normally shies away from the press, as it does with most mainstream or typical approaches to a music career. However, the formula has proved successful and, true to form, next week’s performance was the result of going against the grain.
“We usually play our hands close to our vests,” Longo said. “[Playing new material] seems like not the thing to do, so we are trying it out.”
Every Friday Night at the Longo’s Pennsport home was a basement party hosted by Longo’s father and grandfather.
“They played guitar and they sang. They would play clubs and bars on the weekends, both were factory workers from South Philly,” Longo said of his same-named paternal line. “It was a party every Friday, all my aunts and uncles came over and it was tradition.”
As he absorbed the rhythms and notes his family strummed, an innate musical sensibility was activated.
“My dad taught me when I was really small, even when I was too small to play I would sit in the basement and strum. From the beginning they would try and teach me guitar,” Longo said, adding with a laugh, “They bought me a guitar and hung it over my crib.”
After grade school at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, 2319 S. Third St., Longo became a student at Bishop Neumann High School, formerly at 26th and Moore streets, but the strict Catholic conventions didn’t mesh with his music bent.
“I was 16 when I moved out of my family home. I went to Pine and Quince streets. It was a musician area. Daryl Hall and John Oates were around there, and I played music with those guys,” Longo said.
Eventually the aspiring musician settled on an artists’ commune in Bucks County, which didn’t sit well with the higher-ups at Neumann, though, to please his mother, he still commuted into South Philly daily to attend high school.
While playing coffeehouses to get an audience for his material, Longo was heard by a New York City theater and asked to do a tour of North America of Jacques Brel, which he accepted.
A brief stint in California ensued, followed by the forming of the seminal band, The Ancestors, which put Longo on track to finding his music groove.
“We would do the punk clubs,” Longo said of The Ancestors, who had a similar sound to the Slambovian Circus. “A lot of the industry was buzzing around us. The Orchestra asked us to do Carnegie Hall, but we were a band that wouldn’t sign with anybody.
“Who gets to do Carnegie Hall with a 70-piece orchestra with no label?!”
The Carnegie stint was one in a line of unexplainable opportunities that fell to The Ancestors, including being the first western band to play the decade-long sealed-off China in the early ’90s.
“When all the big buzz was happening about The Ancestors we let that whole band disappear,” Longo said. “We stopped playing and all and went back to college and studied everything we needed to study and came up with how to put everything together.”
What emerged from the academic hiatus is the Slambovian Circus, a self-producing, no label band that continues to churn out music they love instead of music they are told to make. With age — which, by the way, they do not like to disclose — has come assurance and security, though not temperance.
“As you grow and you age you get a little more confident about what you are trying to do and say,” Longo, whose twin sons, Orien and Chen, often play with the band keyboards/percussion/vocals and bass/vocals, respectively, said. “And our band is very ornery and independent, we keep the creativity flowing all these years.”
Flowing it is, and what is to be unveiled next week at the TLA is anybody’s guess. What it is sure to be, however, is fresh, exciting and from the heart.
“I was a poor kid from South Philly … I appreciate it more now that I’ve been away. I developed such a love for Philly, being away and coming back,” Longo said. “And that accent that I haven’t been able to shake.”
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