Little Lippi

by Matt Lynch

I've followed Little Lippi since they first began playing at the Crazy Loon on Wednesday and Thursday nights. The first time I heard them, I was amazed. "These guys don't sound like anybody else." I walked towards the house downtown late in the evening to interview them, excited to talk with them about their music.

I found them packing up after a long night of practice, "We have to stop at ten in the evening so that the neighbors don't complain" Jim Frank (singer and rhythm guitarist) told me.

The first thing on my agenda was discovering where their name came from, and I happily discovered that it was as interesting a story as I had hoped. It was taken from a poem entitled Fra Lippo Lippi by Robert Browning. The poem is about a man who became a priest when he was a young boy in order to escape a life of starvation on the streets of medieval Europe. As a priest he was hardly a pristine example; he gambled, slept with whores, drank often, chased nuns, and eventually he must have caught one because he got one pregnant. His superiors decided however to do nothing about the outcry concerning these activities as he was also a painter and a very good one at that.

According to Jim the appeal of the poem to him is the idea of breaking the rules and yet being excused for it by being a phenomenal artist. This seems to be part of the philosophy behind Little Lippi or at least what it is that they want to do. Well enough of me, Little Lippi, I think can tell who they are and what they do best in their own words.

Little Lippi on Musical Influences

Jim: "...The Feelies, The Cure....one of the bands that changed my life was The Buzzcocks, I heard them in the 9th grade and it was just like, THANK YOU!"
Darryl: (bass) "One of the bands that changed my life was Daniel Johnston. He's totally wacky. When I heard this guy I thought 'That's what music is really about'. He's so honest about his feelings and what he's doing. There's something really lovable about the guy because he's horrible. Talent wise, he's terrible, especially his early stuff. He can't sing at the same time he's playing, but the passion's there."
Pat: (drummer) "I really like The Who. I was 5 years old when Tommy came out, I thought it was incredible. My brothers had it, they were 10 years older then me and I used to listen to it whenever I could. I like a lot of the British bands like Led Zeppelin and The Stones. I listened to Rush a whole bunch, I had every single album I could get ahold of. I still like them and appreciate their drummer."

Little Lippi on Why They Do What They Do

Darryl: "For me, growing up here in town and seeing bands have to disintegrate into people playing cover tunes like 'Wooly Bully'. Good musicians just disintegrate because that's the only venue they have. If we can become proficient enough and write well enough and stick together long enough that we can write things that are successful to a degree of reaching the population of Fairbanks and hopefully further, then that I hope, will put more trust into new music. Definitely we want to experiment.....I don't see this band as making money or anything like that."
King: (lead guitar) "Personally I don't want to change the world. I want people to be sitting at home listening to our music saying 'I can do that! I can do better then that!' then actually go out and do it"
Darryl: "We all did that with punk. We were listening to that and it got us moving and you were really into it and you think 'Fuck, I can do that, I can do that better, I'm more angry.', that's what keeps things going....As soon as you lose angst you lose art. We really want to prove that in this town you can live off angst (laughs). I don't think you can ever exorcise it. You can rediscover it, but you can never exorcise it. If you do, you die and you end up like Phil Collins."
King: "My whole life is about art. I don't want to become obsolete."

Little Lippi on What they do when they do

Jim: "When I sit down and try to play something I don't play anything that I knew beforehand. I don't know what it's gonna sound like and a lot of times I'm just sitting around making chord progressions, I can play a G, a C, a D, it's just link, link, link and suddenly it'll sound really cool and I'll just keep playing that......I try to in some way or another, and I can't say this for all the songs but for most of the songs, I try to kinda somehow or another, whether it's directly dealing with or showing, something that's kinda opposite from it, and showing the faults with the opposite from it to promote some idea."
King: "I think that things come out of me sometimes that I don't have a clue about, if it sounds like something else then it's only incidental."
Pat: "There's parts and things that I play and I don't even know where they come from and I think 'Wow! That's cool!' but it's not every day."
Darrel: "I've never hocked anything before I started with this band. I've hocked a lot of stuff."

Little Lippi on clubs

Darryl: "It's not about making money [for us]. In general all the Fairbanks club owners care about is a band to play covers so people will drink and spend money and they'll just give the band whatever."
Jim: "Our favorite 'p' word, 'pittance'."
King: "I don't like the way we're treated. I think there's a myth that people look at us and think, yeah, we're havin' a great time when we're playing and that's all they see. 'It must be nice not to work and get paid for it'. And some people hate musicians. Musicians are treated like shit because they think that we're having a great time getting all the money and going home with all the women. Club owners think they're getting revenge on musicians. They don't realize we have to get together here all the time and these songs have to be written, they have to be practiced, we have to get equipment around, we have to find places to play, half the time we have to rent places to play and then when we finally get the gig...."
Darryl: "..a guy comes in and says he doesn't want to play a cover of $2. We did all this and they want to woo all the women and dance all night and argue about having to pay a cover of $2...."
King: "This is about supporting the arts, first hand entertainment, they see immediately what they're getting."
Darryl: "It's OK to spend 5$ on a pint of beer, but you don't want to pay a buck after all the work we've done. Bar owners tell the door people to tell the customers that the door money's going toward the band, but when you add up the people in the place and that's just not the case."

Does Little Lippi have an image ?

Jim: "I think people are smarter then that."
Pat: "There are people who are influenced by images. Green Day, that No Doubt band have their images, it's all kind of cartoony. Some people are working with images as part of their art."

Little Lippi on where now

King: "We were thinking about going down to Portland, but when we went down to Girdwood to play at the Extreme Snowboarding there were all these bands from Anchorage that we really HATE and they we're all going there [to Portland] and we started thinking more and more that that didn't make it exciting anymore, we don't want to see them on the street. And if it's not exciting, it's not gonna work, it's gotta be exciting, it's gotta make us scared. It's gotta be an adrenaline thing.....We'd rather go to England."
Darryl: "Our best musical contact is the BBC. We were filmed last year and we've kept in touch since."

Little Lippi on What else they do

Pat: "Sound production...play drums and sleep...I ride my bike a lot...I like to make cartoon voices.."
King: "Painting, jewelry..."
Jim: "I spend a lot of time looking through my poetry for lyrics....I work at Bishop's Attic."
Darryl: "I'm really into this idea of an artists co-op. A place for musicians to hold as their own. So they don't have to put up with shit from the club owners. With sound equipment and stuff for recording, and a place to practice. The template I'm using is this small art gallery in Philadelphia, which is now this huge co-op to support art that's not mainstream. True native art, experimental music, a forum to do that."