D.B.B. Plays Cups

It’s a small wonder we caught wind of D.B.B Plays Cups. David Baker Benson, the man behind the stage name, is “so deep in Charlottesville,” that he refuses to even set up a MySpace. Educated in Heidelberg, Germany, and currently working as a Charlottesville preschool teacher, he creates music based on a straightforward rock and roll foundation but which evolves and changes from show to show so drastically that it defies any characterization. On the recommendation of recently-interviewed Charlottesville locals Birdlips, we sought him out to discover exactly what all the clamor was about.

Tell us exactly what you would say DBB Plays Cups is.

I had always wanted to write songs consistently and play them. It was a goal that I never completely realized. I had just done really minor things in the past. I had just turned 29, and I was finally starting to write songs that worked, and I didn’t really know what I was going to do with them. Some of my friends who I had played with in the past, who I went to college with in San Francisco, were in town. I played them my songs. At first, they were surprised that I could put two chords together. They remembered me playing guitar in college. So as soon as I put two chords together they were like "Whoa!"

That was in March, and their band was on tour, and they were like, “Let’s go play open mic nights.” So we went down to Fellini’s on Wednesday night, open mic night. That was our real first show. The songs were called “Cups.” That was the concept. They had a good sound system and my friends were good, so it was fun. Then we played The Mud House open mic the next night. That kind of got the ball rolling. Then John Ruscher [Former webmaster of Nailgun media], he was one of my best friends right then and he introduced me to one of his good friends from town. He was really good at recording, so we started recording right then. It was sort of a recording project, then we played the Tea Bazaar. At that point we were a real band, but now they are both in Brooklyn.

Now, I’m still writing songs, but the format is really determined by the mood I’m in right then, and the musicians I’m playing with. I would definitely be happy if two people who saw two different shows put their heads together and came to the conclusion that they saw two different bands.

Is that why you don’t have a MySpace?

I guess it’s just sort of hard for me to put the music up there. I’m really into being local. Just getting to know people from shows and from my friends is the best way for me to spread my music. MySpace makes sense if you are touring a lot and you want to show your music to people in different parts of the country. I’m so deep in Charlottesville right now that it seems kind of silly to do that.

Is there any reason you like Charlottesville in particular? Is there any reason you’re here rather than anywhere else?

Yeah. I lived here in the early eighties and have really good childhood memories of it. My wife is a grad student here. She got into various universities, and she chose U.Va. for her own reasons but I’m really glad it worked out like it did. I hadn’t been back here for twenty years, so I was a little unsure about what it was going to be like here. That there is good music here was a big surprise. The fact that I already liked the town and that it turned out to be a good music place for a small town was inspiring to me. I saw a lot of really good bands when I first moved here, and it seems like bringing bands from out of town has lagged slightly in the last year and a half, but in the void…I should say… I’ve paid more attention to the local scene.

How would you describe your music?

Well until now I’ve been working with just guitar playing and singing just because that’s my limitation presently. I’m sort of interested in really basic rock and roll as a concept to expand outward from. Rock is sort of like a cul de sac, or even a sort of cesspool of different cultural things that came before it. Since the glory days of rock and roll, whenever you personally would say that was, it has kind of expanded outward in different directions. I’ve tried to start back in sort of a really simple place and see where it went. That’s just my starting point, and we’ve only been dong this since March.

Who are the main people in Charlottesville you’ve been collaborating with?

I’ve talked to people here and there and when I’ve asked them, “Do you have any interest in playing?” I didn’t want to come across as someone who wanted them to duplicate what they already heard. I want to go in another musical direction. I would be really happy with noisy music that just happened to have my same lyrics. I always want to go the other way.

Is it weird to you to have to confine a single sound to a record?

Yeah, and that’s where time is sort of an important thing. It’s one of my goals to go really hard towards one direction or idea and max it out on record, just so I can use it up and learn from it to achieve a different sound in the future.

So is it safe to say that if someone listened to your album, then saw you live, it would sound fairly different?

It might, yeah. There are still certain limitations. For instance, the last recording we did had a lot of saxophone on it, but you’re definitely not going to see sax at the next show. People may hear it and think, oh that’s what they’re about, but it isn’t necessarily consistent.

We’ve also heard you have a tendency to assemble the band the day of the show, practice once, and then attempt to go free-form during the performance. Is that accurate?

Yes, that’s pretty much been the case for the last few shows, since the original collaborators moved away. It’s sort of a reaction against the idea that to make music, you have to find the right people, get a similar vision, get the right recording, the right agent, promotion, etc. A lot of that pressure can prevent people from doing what they need to do to make music, and I’m attempting to just hang out in the basic realm of making music because I want to.

Would you say that you’re album has that organized chaos quality?

Not at all, actually. The tracks are simple, but it’s really as structured as I possibly could have made it. When I was recording last spring, I was really motivated to record something as put-together as possible. People who heard us and wanted to see us live would be in for something completely different, so it seemed logical to pursue the other side.

I probably would have made a noise record if I’d had a really tight, Las Vegas style band.

Do you teach music at all in your preschool class?

Well, I’m inclined to give you an answer like “Everything is connected,” but I’d hate for that to be the final answer. Yeah, I was playing “She’ll Be Coming Around The Mountain” today, but I don’t play a lot of music. That job has been good for me in terms of the fact that, working with children, you have to be very organized and planned out in what you’re doing, but if you don’t have spontaneity within that structure, you’re bound to fail. It’s a good connection to music, but I should also say that a lot of the people who have influenced me were avant-garde composers who made chaotic music, but chaos that came from a structured, straightforward background, like Elliott Carter, or Coltrane in the 60’s. People who had a solid background in something, then chose to take it somewhere else, just to try to cover the whole range. I wish I could say that Charlottesville has affected my music, and I know it has, but I can’t really pin-point the words.

Cliff and Lindsay [of Birdlips] were saying that they couldn’t pick one thing in Charlottesville as a town, such as the landscape, that had affected them, but they felt the general acceptance in the music scene here was definitely beneficial.

Yeah, I feel like Charlottesville is kind of a portrait of Americana. I was coming down Rugby one day, I saw these two perfectly manicured young Americans wearing boat shoes and Ray Bans, playing catch. One of the really colonial, plantation style fraternity houses there had a gigantic American flag hanging off the front of it, and then in the frat house next door, they were playing this crazy, psychedelic music. I’m going to give them credit for representing the counter-culture right next to the huge American flag, it’s a great image. I lived in Germany for 5 years, where there is good music, but they’re not all on the same page. Then I moved back to Charlottesville, so I've come back to somewhere I lived as a child. Before that, I lived in San Francisco, where there are specific, divided scenes that are full of hyper-informed people. Before I moved here, I had expected the East Coast stereotype of hippie jam bands, which don’t really exist in California, but there is a really cool niche here for anything.

D.B.B. Plays Cups is playing live in Charlottesville at Gravity Lounge on Febuary 12th.