A little old-fashioned, a little racy
By MATT ELLIOTT World Scene Writer
11/11/2006

Three Penny Upright celebrates new disc with release party at Mercury

Lock up your sons. Three Penny Upright has an EP out and will soon hit the clubs to promote it.

Amy Amatucci and Mary Perisho joined forces four years ago after meeting while working at a health food store. They got a backing band and started making some bluegrass- tinged alt-country -- you know, what country used to be.

They played a few shows. They got their break through sheer luck one night in December last year, opening for Loretta Lynn at the Cain's Ballroom.

Now with a seven-song EP in the bag, they feel like celebrating. The band's CD release party is Saturday at the Mercury Lounge, 1747 S. Boston Ave., with a little help from opening act Electric Rag Band.

"There's a sexist tradition in male-dominated music, and we're really interested in turning that on its head," Amatucci said. "It's been done, but it still needs to be done."

The band features guitarist John Lanford, Don Geesling on upright bass and Bob "Pacemaker" Newham on drums. Lanford also plays banjo, while Geesling handles organ and electric piano duty. Producer Jared Tyler plays the mandolin and dobro, a kind of acoustic guitar with a part metal body.



The EP, recorded in Tulsa at Blue Alleluia Studios, doesn't mince words, although it is a little tongue-in-cheek. Long melodies, sweet harmonies, eloquent strings and a subtle shuffle from Newham drive it home.

Amatucci and Perisho sing. Amatucci plays guitar while Perisho handles harmonica and some percussion. The group started recording in the spring and came out with more material than anticipated, Perisho said.

"We're just completely thrilled because we were thinking maybe, you know, a four-song demo to send out to play some festivals, get gigs," Perisho said.

Every song on the EP is written so anyone can relate, bassist Don Geesling said. So what's up with "Party All Night?" It seems ironic or something. The first verse goes a little something like this:

"Don't tell me about the headlines/I don't like to watch the news/All those people fighting and dying/just make me feel so blue/Let's go out and fuss and fight/And heels are high/skirts are tight/Lick your lips for the boys who act like fools."

They were in a bar on St. Patrick's Day around the time President Bush declared war on Iraq in 2003, Amatucci said. A mob of people were at the bar, acting drunk and stupid, while Amatucci was horrified by the war's developments.

"Just the absurdity of the whole thing struck me. It's like, we've got just the most terrifying, serious, grotesque news going on and then at the same time, people are just going nuts," she said.

Other songs have stories behind them, as well. Perisho wrote "Lipstick and Nylons" for her 13-year-old daughter. The song is a slow ballad on which Perisho urges her daughter to keep skinning up her knees while shunning boys, high-heeled shoes and makeup.

When the band started, the duo "felt like we had something to say," Amatucci said. "We wanted to write our lives but also the perspective of a lot of women."

Amatucci came up with the band's name while perusing books for a suitable title.

"'Three penny upright' was something I found in a reference book up in the research center, and it has great connotations if you don't know what it means," Amatucci said. "You know because 'upright,' we've got an upright bass. And three pennies, that's so obscure.

Nothing costs three pennies. It evokes a definite older time period, and it's totally racy when you know what it means. "It's basically an upright sex act in an alleyway for three pennies."

The EP's cover art was culled from photographs by a local artist, Michelle Firment Reid, whose studio is in a former bordello at 326 1/2 E. First St., the "May Rooms," Perisho said.

The CD's cover shows a creaky spring mattress and the door to room No. 5, Amatucci said. The back side has peeling pink wallpaper.

"It's dilapidated and it's oldtimey and it's feminine," she said. "And it's, you know, kind of racy, and that's everything about us and what we aspire to be."

Perisho said the band's CD can be found through its Web site, www.threepennyupright.com, at Borders Books, the Bead Merchant, Starship Records and Tapes and Under the Mooch.

Don't think the EP is all Three Penny Upright has got. The band has about 20 songs written, Geesling said, and Amatucci said she's burning to record more.

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Matt Elliott 581-8366
matt.elliott@tulsaworld.com



Review: Country matriarch entertains at Cain's
By JOHN WOOLEY Tulsa World Scene Writer
12/5/2005

Loretta Lynn's performance echoes a simpler time.
Probably the biggest question preceding Loretta Lynn's appearance at the Cain's Ballroom on Friday concerned what kind of show she'd do. After all, the septuagenarian singer-songwriter had her biggest album in many years with 2004's Grammy-winning "Van Lear Rose," produced by rocker Jack White of the White Stripes and featuring radical musical arrangements that fell somewhere between cowpunk and really hard country.

As Cain's general manager Chad Rodgers noted just before the show, he'd fielded calls asking if White was coming with her, and other calls expressing hope that "she doesn't do any of that rock crap."

Both of those demographics were well-represented in the crowd of a thousand or so Friday, as young hipsters mingled easily with baby boomers -- who sometimes had their folks along. And the doubt about what kind of concert Lynn was going to do was dispelled even before she took the stage, when her daughter Patsy came out onto the stage to push Loretta's cookbook and her new 72-track cut boxed CD set from MCA, with 25 signed copies just made available for sale at the merchandise table. It was a charming throwback to country's less-sophisticated

-- and, many would say, more fun -- days, a direct commercial pitch that you don't get from country-music acts anymore.

Patsy's patter on stage, as well as the appearance of the six-man Coal Miners band, all dressed in matching light-colored suits, quickly let the crowd know that this was going to be the kind of show Lynn's done pretty much all of her performing life. A man outside the Cain's mentioned to me that he'd seen Lynn when she first played the Cain's in 1966 -- her Oklahoma debut, he said. Certainly, he came away from Friday's show with a nice, nostalgic sense of deja vu.

Of course, she had a far wider range of material to choose from 39 years later, including the songs on "Van Lear Rose." She did exactly one from that disc, the duet "Portland Oregon," with one of her three male backup singers filling in for the album's Jack White.

But the bulk of the Friday set was made up of her '60s and '70s material, especially take-no-guff working-class anthems like "Your Squaw Is on the Warpath," "Fist City," "You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man)" and "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (With Lovin' on Your Mind)." She also used the bemusedly resigned "One's on the Way" to segue into "The Pill," which celebrated sexual freedom minus the crushing responsibility expressed in the first number. Revolutionary and daring when it hit in 1975, the song has lost little of its power.

Lynn, who's just now back on the road after breaking her foot, sang most of her songs from an overstuffed chair in the center of the stage, giving the impression of a feisty matriarch entertaining a big family gathering. That feeling was further heightened when her twin daughters, Peggy and Patsy, came onstage toward the end of the set to perform and talk with her -- or, more accurately, to listen to her.

Like any good matriarch, Lynn may have been older than anyone else on stage, but she was clearly in charge, even given the fact that she seemed to depend on her piano player -- and, later, Peggy and Patsy, who'd done their own three-song set prior to Loretta's appearance -- for a lot of her musical cues. She stopped the band a couple of times and started songs over, she occasionally ordered her daughters or band members around a little bit, she talked about whatever popped into her head between songs, and she did it all with such good humor and unpretentiousness that you really did feel like a slightly eccentric, highly entertaining and beloved older relative had brought you into her living room for a celebration with the extended family.

A few times, Lynn -- who, by most reports, is in her early seventies -- simply forgot the words to her songs. But instead of letting it fluster her, she simply waited until someone cued her and then took off again. Loretta Lynn can get away with something like that, because it all seems to go along with who she is and what she is, with her frank, warts-and-all approach.

As she sang in a hit she didn't do Friday night, "When you're lookin' at me, you're lookin' at country," and when you're looking at Lynn in 2005, you're looking again at a time when country music was rural and real, down-home and honest, about simple folks with complex feelings. More than four decades after her first hit, that's still what Loretta Lynn means.

The Tulsa-based Three Penny Upright, featuring vocalists Amy Amatucci and Mary Perisho, was a good choice for opening act. With their tight two-voice vocals and acoustic rockabilly vibe anchored by Don Geesling's standup-bass work and Bob "Pacemaker" Newham's straight-ahead drumming, they often evoked an earlier country-music era themselves.

Guitarist John Lanford played some understated but inventive leads on his hollow-body guitar, and fiddler Karen Naifeh joined them for a few numbers to good effect.

Amatucci and Perisho, fronting the band, seemed a little abashed between numbers, and understandably so, given the stature of the act they were opening for. But their vocalizing was first-rate, especially on the opening tune, Wanda Jackson's "Mean, Mean Man," on which they sang alternating lines; Elvis' "But Love Me," and a thumping honky-tonk rocker I think was original, called "Let's Lose Our Minds Together."

A nice job by all concerned.