George Usher creates vivid characters in ambitious ‘Stevensonville’ project

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Thirty years ago, New York-based singer-songwriter George Usher and artist Laurie Webber created a 12-part illustrated song cycle, Stevensonville, which depicts a complicated, troubled fictional town. It has been performed live twice over the years, but has never been recorded. Until now.

And it is worth the wait.

On March 21, Usher’s spectacular album Stevensonville will be celebrated at Hoboken’s 503 Social Club. The album’s producer, Tony Shanahan (of Patti Smith’s band), gathered a skilled crew to record Usher’s songs, including Andy York on guitar, Brian Griffin on drums, Andy Burton on keyboards and David Mansfield on strings. The album will available on Bandcamp on March 20.

This is a profound album that exposes the light and darkness of small-town life in the fictional Stevonsonville. Its stirring, gorgeous songs focus on 12 of the town’s residents; I could see these catchy tunes with poetic descriptions on a large stage with full band, like a folk-rock opera. Meanwhile, the colorful 28-page booklet of illustrations adds a cinematic quality to the project.

Usher is releasing a limited edition of 200 vinyl albums, with the booklet included. Webber’s 12 large original Stevensonville paintings, which have been in storage for 30 years, will be displayed at 503 Social Club for one week, starting on March 15, and prints will be available for purchase.

Usher has been part of the New York/New Jersey music scene since the 1970s as a member of several bands, including The Decoys, Beat Rodeo, The Schramms and House of Usher. He has co-written “River to River” and “Clouds Over Eden” with Bongos frontman Richard Barone, and Laura Cantrell recorded his song “Not the Tremblin’ Kind” and titled her first album after it.

In addition, Usher has released seven solo albums, including the 2-CD anthology The End and the Beginning: 1990-2009, and recorded with artists such as Edward Rogers and Lisa Burns.

The cover of George Usher’s “Stevensonville” album.

I spoke with Usher recently about Stevensonville.

Q: Can you tell me about the creation of Stevensonville?

A: I’d been a performing songwriter in NYC since the late ’70s/early ’80s in a variety of bands and solo configurations. By the 1990s, it was still a struggle to get any attention from the press or the labels and it was always a challenge to expand my following. I’d always been intrigued by multimedia work I’d seen in the ’60s and ’70s and I teamed up with Laurie Webber, who illustrated a number of my songs. We threw them up on a screen beside my live group or solo performances at CBGB, The Bitter End, Mercury Lounge, everywhere. It set me apart from what other singer-songwriters were doing.

My plan was to eventually guide my audience into accepting a full-blown song cycle that would bridge rock ‘n’ roll, theater and poetry as a large conceptual project. I wanted to zero in on a small town, where I could address a lot of my lyrical ideas and this small town became Stevensonville. Unfortunately, my music publishing people were dead set against the entire concept of combining my music with art and were very negative and resistant.

By the time the paintings and the music for Stevensonville had been completed, I’d lost my publishing deal and the whole project seemed too large and impossibly expensive to do properly. So after a half-hearted effort, it was more or less abandoned for three decades.

Q: What inspired it? Also, you mentioned that it resembles (Thornton Wilder’s) “Our Town”? In what way?

A: Growing up in Cleveland, I remember being entertained by The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” film. Other longer works like The Who’s Tommy or The Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society albums brought playful and exciting images into my young mind.

“Our Town” investigates larger themes through its homegrown characters. This could also be said about (Edgar Lee Masters’) “Spoon River Anthology,” where part of its format is naming all of its poems after characters in Spoon River. I borrowed that conceit and most of the songs and the paintings are simply named for townsfolk in Stevensonville. And like “Spoon River,” the characters sometimes address one another across the songs.

My father had been an orphan, raised by a family named Stevenson in a kind of “Oliver Twist”-ian world. I imagined him growing up as a boy and his hometown became Stevensonville. The work visually starts in the outskirts of one part of town and takes you through to the other side, where it’s suggested maybe you should gain the strength to leave.

There are a couple characters based on actual people I only heard stories about. Most are vague representations of others I’ve come across here and there.

One of the characters was Marjorie Hayes, a devastating, mean-spirited “church lady,” not like the humorous one portrayed on television. She held a lifelong, evil fascination for James Strothard, but even then, is accorded a certain understanding and empathy by the end of Stevensonville.

Q: Do the characters still resonate with you?

A: Yes, after I ran through the material, 30 years later, I was happy and excited to find the songs still held their own. I didn’t change a lyric or a note of music. We changed some of the arrangements in the studio, but that was it.

Laurie Webber’s painting of Annie Dunn.

Q: Has the meaning changed over time?

A: It’s amazing how much the meaning hasn’t changed over time. The Rev. Thomas Pardee delivers a rollicking sermon that sounds like it could be someone raving and complaining about the recent Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance. Martin Godfrey worries about soldiers coming down his hallway to possibly arrest him, when he doesn’t even know what crime he’s committed. Judge John Bailey laments how the town’s teenagers are all delinquents. Mary Beth Merriwether worries if her small-town existence has been a waste of her life. Annie Dunn is obsessed with fat Elvis Presley; even the photo from “Jailhouse Rock” is painted (by Webber) as fat Elvis. But her complete love and devotion is unshakable, represented by the rats pictured along the bottom of the painting. This is like the love some folks have for their celebrities, no matter what they say and do.

Q: These characters are dark and troubled. Do their journeys relate to your experiences when you left your hometown?

A: They’re grappling with the world they’ve been born into, where the rules they’ve been given don’t make sense. They can either work toward changing the rules or move somewhere else. This is life.

There was a point in the mid-’70s where I knew I either had to move to The East Coast or The West Coast to pursue my musical work. I always had an affinity for The East Coast, so New York it was. But I was advised by lots of my friends and other adults in Ohio that I’d be shot on a street corner in no time.

Life is frightening. It’s more frightening if you’re afraid to live it.

Q: You dedicated this album to your dad. Tell me about him and your connection.

A: My dad was an orphan raised in a small Ohio town by a Canadian family of Stevensons. They had him work in the local onion fields to “pay for his keep,” he was told. If neighbors came to visit, they sent him to the basement. But they gave him a home, right? So, Stevensonville is a home. But it is sometimes important to leave home, just to stay alive, to grow, to be who you were meant to be. He came out of nowhere and did well for himself and for our family.

He was my baseball coach and sponsored baseball and entire softball leagues in town for decades. At one time, there were George J. Usher Softball T-shirts spotted in all 50 states. I’m serious. As a city councilman, he was always championing youth activities, probably because his youth had been bereft of them. There’s a baseball field in my hometown named for him.

My dad and my mom both inspired my interest in literature. My mom had written a beloved children’s book, “Little Bitty Raindrop,” in the 1940s, that people still clamor for. It’s out of print, but someone actually reads it page by page on YouTube! Look it up!

Q: Who mentored or inspired you as a songwriter?

A: Nobody mentored me. I started composing back in the ’60s. I have recordings going back that far, and as you can  imagine, it took years and years for me to write anything worthy. But from the get-go, it was The Beatles, Dylan, Stones, Kinks, etc. Later, I studied artists like Neil Young and Warren Zevon, who always operated from their own vision.

Laurie Webber’s painting of Mary Beth Merriwether.

Q: Tell me about the recording process with your very talented band. Have you worked with any of them before?

A: When I first moved to NYC in the late ’70s, I worked in a record store on The Upper East Side. A teenager would come in after school each day and hang out. We’d talk about music, any problems he had, life. I was kind of an older brother. As decades passed, we stayed in touch. He did well in finance. I was always the poor songwriter. A couple years ago, we were having dinner together and he asked, ‘If you could do one project before you died, what would it be?’ I thought for a moment and answered “Stevensonville. But it would take a lot of money to do it.” “How much?” he asked. I wrote a small figure on a scrap of paper and held it up to him. He took the paper, wrote on it and showed it back to me. He had added to my figure.

Thus began the resurrection of Stevensonville. I’ve recorded and released 12 albums in my life. This was the first time I ever had any budget at the beginning.

I decided I wanted to have a producer who had his own studio. I wanted to begin and end the recording at the same studio with the same people. I’d always cobbled together my projects before. I ran into Tony Shanahan at a NYC bar. We compared notes and began making plans to work at his studio, Hobo Sound in Weehawken.

He brought in the band and I brought my old comrade Mark Sidgwick to play acoustic guitar. I knew (lead guitarist) Andy York from the New York scene and I’d worked with (keyboardist) Andy Burton on an Edward Rogers album. I had never worked with drummer Brian Griffin before, but James Mastro had given him the thumbs up. I knew David Mansfield’s work going back to The Alpha Band and lots of other recordings, but we’d never met. I’ve known Tony for years and he doubled on bass and producer. For each song, we hung a large print of the Stevensonville character in question in the studio for inspiration and worked out the parts. Each character is different, so each song is very different.

KARJAKA

GEORGE USHER

Q: Will they perform with you at your Hoboken show?

A: I’m keeping the Hoboken performance small and intimate, like the venue. The walls will be covered in Laurie Webber’s beautiful Stevensonville paintings and it will just be Mark Sidgwick and me delivering a performance of the song cycle. We will also hand out a program with all the lyrics to follow along.

Q: Your apartment in The West Village is filled with so many books, records, poetry and lyrics. What treasures are hidden there?

A: I’ve been writing and recording since the ’60s and I have recordings going back to 1968. I don’t throw anything away. So there are dusty little reel-to-reels, cassettes, DAT tapes, homemade demos on CD-Rs, notebooks and folders of every shape and size. Projects began and abandoned. Projects began in one place, finished in another. Lyrics, poetry, etc. etc. I’m not sure how many are treasures, ha ha!

I started writing little stories as soon as I could, imitating Dr. Seuss. The Beatles hit and I turned to songwriting. And everything is here in my little Hobbit-sized apartment on West 4th Street. And any book I’ve ever read is here, too. I don’t give them away, because I always think I might need them for reference at some point! My apartment is kind of like a museum. Although I’m aware that if/when I pass, it’ll probably all just be swept away by a bulldozer!

Q: Are you working on anything else now?

A: I’m always writing new songs. I just never know what to do next, until I finish what I’m doing now. I can move in a number of directions with my work. We’ll see.

Q: How does it feel to bring this town and these songs back after 30 years?

A: It is like an out-of-body experience. Very liberating. The material is mine and Laurie’s. But we pored over it and sweated over it 30 years ago. Now I’m more relaxed about whatever happens. I’m both confident and at peace. I’m not so precious about it.

Q: Let’s talk about some of your songs.

“Stevensonville” is a gorgeous, dreamy poetic song. What does “Love is hiding here beneath a dull disguise and under all the lies that bury Stevensonville” mean to you?

A: Even if you’re living somewhere that seems impossible, love is there if you look for it. If you can’t find it, look inside yourself. But it’s always there.

Laurie Webber’s painting of The Rev. Thomas Pardee.

Q: In “Reverend Thomas Pardee,” a very danceable tune, there’s a warning. You sing, “What’s the menace marching down the street”? So what is the menace?

A: That’s kind of the point. There is always a new menace of some kind to be pointed out, to control us. It’s usually nothing to worry about, though. It’ll be replaced by a different menace next week! The song is presented as a sermon, with the congregation reciting their part as the chorus.

Q: “James Strothard” is a powerful, visceral rock ‘n’ rock tune about a woman who preys on children, or how religion preys on innocence. What does it mean to you? Who is James?

A: This song takes you deeper into the church, to Marjorie Hayes, who was an actual church-lady power tripper I heard stories about. She made going to church a political nightmare for a child. James is reliving what she was like in his youth. She shows up later and has been abandoned. That said, there is still room for empathy. As always in Stevensonville, love is hiding here.

Q: “Mitch Kunkel” is another great song about Judge Bailey, a rich, nasty man. It feels like revenge when Mitch brags about dating another woman.

A: Mitch has sex with the judge’s daughter, steals money from the judge’s mother, and has a history of being one of the local boys who kisses up to the judge. He leaves Stevensonville, but on the arm of a woman who has a rich daddy, so he’s still a scoundrel. As one of Stevensonville’s native sons, he sets the stage for Judge John Bailey’s rumination about the town’s children, in general.

Laurie Webber’s painting of Mitch Kunkel.

Q: “Judge John Bailey” has an ominous beginning with poetic lyrics: “They water the City Hall flowers with piss/They write on the walls with blood from a kiss.” In this song, you ponder what Judge Bailey is going to do about the world’s evil.

A: He’s the Judge, but he can’t do anything about Mitch Kunkel abusing his very own family, so how can he do anything about the town’s children in general?

Q: “Annie Dunn” is a song of sweet relief from the darker tunes. The gentleness of this song reminds me of Ian Hunter’s “I Wish I Was Your Mother.” Do you agree?

A: I understand what you mean, songwise. Of course, Stevensonville is a work where the illustrations inform the song, just as the songs inform the illustrations. In this case, it is a true, honest, heartfelt love song. But the love in the song is somewhat belied by the relentless images of Fat Elvis — even in “Jailhouse Rock,” when he wasn’t fat — and the rats suggest there is rot to be had along with the honest but misplaced love. But yes, I consider it a beautiful love song. If it was anything less than beautiful, it wouldn’t work.

“Town Elders” and “Benny Weed” are the last two songs of Stevensonville and offer up the final test for a citizen. “Town Elders” is a driving piece that warns the listener about giving in to the “miser’s eyes”: giving in to the stagnant way things are in Stevensonville. It will leave you trapped there. “Benny Weed” is a victory march for the individual, stating “It’s time to gamble on losing what I have.” The illustration has him on the other side of town, looking hopefully in the opposite direction, toward a future he can’t count on, but one he’s ready to invest in.

Q: Have you enjoyed taking the Stevensonville illustrations out of storage?

A: I’ve enjoyed working with Laurie on this project again. It’s been very wonderful for both of us to finally see the album finally come out with the full 28-page illustrated booklet, like we’d imagined it 30 years ago.

For more information about George Usher, visit georgeusher.com. Tickets for the 503 Social Club show are available at Eventbrite.com.

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