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Friday, June 06, 2003

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

Mike Bonello was tired of seeing all his favorite local records gather dust in local basements while the world outside of Pittsburgh -- and by Pittsburgh, what we really mean is the people who hang out at Gooski's on Saturday nights -- was free to go about its business unaware that Local Honey, the Viragos or the Dirty Faces had a record out.

	Rickety Rides Again WHEN: Tomorrow: The Viragos, The Cuff and special guest Matt Marcus. June 14: The Working Poor, Oakley Hall (Brooklyn, N.Y.) and Alexei & the Justins. June 21: Dirty Faces, Lorelei and Local Honey. June 28: Johnsons Big Band CD Release Party, with Oneida (Brooklyn) and Midnite Snake. All shows feature films by Mulekicked Visions. WHERE: Brew House IAC Performance Garage, 2100 Mary St., South Side. ADMISSION: $8 the first three, $10 for the Johnsons Big Band show.

But rather than get drunk and whine about it Pittsburgh-style, Bonello -- who, it should be noted, is a member of the Dirty Faces and Viragos -- decided to take a stab at fixing what was clearly broken, reviving a label he admits to having failed miserably at in the '90s.

The Rickety Records revival begins Saturday at the Brew House IAC Performance Garage in the South Side with the first of four consecutive Saturday concerts featuring a number of the better bands in town, from those already mentioned to The Johnsons Big Band and The Cuff.

"I'm trying to get some startup money," he says, "to actually run Rickety Records as a little indie label and to be able to actually pay for promotional mailings."

The money he makes from T-shirt sales will go toward paying off the debt the Dirty Faces' former label owes Plus/Minus Studios.

"The thing that really kicked me into gear," Bonello says, "is that Andy [Wright], who's a friend of mine, didn't get paid for that stuff. And I never would have gone into the studio if I had known he wasn't getting paid for it."

The Rickety concept has its roots in Albuquerque, where Bonello and the rest of Tiny Little Help had relocated in the early '90s.

"We had a couple records out," he says, "on our own label, Rickety, that we didn't do anything with. We failed miserably with. I still have a bunch of those records. But we didn't do a good job of promoting them at all or trying to sell them particularly hard."

After moving back to town in 1995, Tiny Little Help broke up, but not before its members had begun to infiltrate the ranks of other local bands -- the Johnsons, the Viragos, Dead at 24.

"And that," Bonello says, "is when the Rickety thing started here. We started doing those shows at Tobacco Roadhouse in the fall of '96, for maybe four months. And then we did Rickety Thursdays at the [31st Street] Pub starting in the spring of '97. And that was kind of a continuation of what we had done in Albuquerque, where for a while we were hosting an open-stage thing at a little coffee shop. It was mostly acoustic stuff, but it was fun to do shows with a bunch of people because then you get to see what people in the town are doing, you know?"

The Pub shows ended in 2000. And while pulling the plug on the series wasn't Bonello's idea, he didn't mind taking a break at the time.

"I was kind of burnt out on booking shows, frankly," he says.

Even when Rickety wasn't promoting a weekly series, though, the scene survived. It just moved up the hill to Gooski's on Polish Hill.

"I don't know if everyone agrees with me," Bonello says, "but in my mind, I count Rickety bands as bands that have some kind of Tiny Little Help lineage."

It was earlier this year that he decided to reactivate the label in a big way.

"For a long time," he admits, "I wasn't really interested into putting out new recordings on Rickety, basically because I couldn't afford that whole process. I didn't have the seed money. But I just kind of snapped earlier this year because there's all this good stuff going on now and a lot of good recordings being made and it would really be a shame for it all to sit around in people's houses just in Pittsburgh, which is what has been the case for a while now."

The first band he'll be helping is The Johnsons Big Band, whose CD on Rickety hits the streets on the final night of the Rickety series, June 28. The Johnsons will be joined that night by Brooklyn's own Oneida, whose set will be filmed and recorded for release on Rickety.

The final night also features something called a film phantasmagoria.

As Bonello, who also works at Pittsburgh Filmmakers explains, "There will be films or different kinds of light shows at all of the shows. But for the 28th, we'll hang the giant screen and there will be a big crew of filmmakers down there projecting all kinds of different stuff. That's why that last one is more expensive, because there's gonna be a whole army of film people there with a lot of projectors and whatnot. And we hang up a 48-by-14-foot screen. So that's gonna be a big multimedia explosion and we're gonna try to catch it for release on DVD."

Running in conjunction with the Rickety series at 1 each afternoon is a series of workshops run by Pittsburgh Music Works, many featuring members of Rickety bands.

Bonello is also on the board of Pittsburgh Music Works.

"We're trying to get something that would be like Filmmakers started," he says, "only it would be for music -- pretty much trying to translate the whole program that Filmmakers has straight across the board, switching media from visual things to audio. We've been doing workshops for over a year now."

When Rickety Rides Again, as the series is billed, has run its course, Bonello hopes to do an average of one show a month.

"I want to keep doing some shows to get the other bands involved," he says. "The Human Brains should be on there. Plus, there's gonna be new bands. I know that there's new bands in Pittsburgh that I haven't even heard yet that are good. So I'm gonna try to get it going and do it right this time."