Tyler Deneau remembers it like it was yesterday.
It was the spring of 1994. Deneau and Molly Magwire, his partner in life as well as the band Rhudabega, were having a barbecue at a friend’s house in their native Detroit when an inspiration struck him. “I just said, ‘Man, let’s move to New Orleans,’” Deneau recalls. “Four months later, we sold everything we owned except our instruments, jumped in a van and drove down here.”
If Rhudabega’s divine calling resonates with a little New Orleans mythology, that’s only fitting. So does Rhudabega. Even if the band’s sound—a volatile mix of punk energy, eccentric experimentalism and surprising pop hooks—doesn’t owe any obvious debts to their adopted home, Deneau and Magwire themselves have fully assimilated the nuances of life in the Crescent City. For Deneau and Magwire, the romance of New Orleans is as real living here as it was visiting for Jazz Fest.
“We eat breakfast at the Clover Grill,” Magwire says. “We go to Donna’s, to Little People’s Place on Wednesdays, Vaughan’s on Thursday. I mean it is Jazz Fest, there just aren’t a billion people in the city.”
The year 1997, their third in New Orleans, was a big one for Rhudabega. While some local bands never ventured farther than the Industrial Canal, Rhudabega played over 100 dates, hitting New York four times and solidifying a fan base that stretches from Texas to Florida and up the East Coast. They toured with Dash Rip Rock and opened up for Better than Ezra in Baton Rouge. Their mailing list ballooned to almost 1,000.
They’ve even gotten to the point where Rhudabega has become their career, which still leaves Magwire, an accomplished artist with a long list of gallery shows to her name, time to work on her paintings and sculptures, many of which decorate their Lower 9th Ward shotgun.
Next year promises to be even bigger for the duo. In February, Rhudabega issues its first CD. Recorded at the Jim Ford Clinic in New Orleans with producer Ryan Jade Dufrene and in New York with producer Gene Holder, the CD will be available in some local stores, but don’t expect to find it at every Blockbuster Music in town. “It’s something for us to sell on the road,” the pragmatic Deneau says. “You learn the hard way, merchandise is the way to stay alive on the road as a band that’s coming out of nowhere. We were thinking of calling the CD Gas Money, because that’s literally what it is.”
Deneau and Magwire are both relative newcomers to their instruments. Deneau picked up the drums in 1991 to jam with his cousin’s band. When that trio’s bass player lost interest, he turned the bass duties over to his sister, Molly, who had never played note before.
Deneau and Magwire eventually learned to play, and the new band was initially dubbed Tacklebox, until they discovered that another band was already using that name.
What made the discovery worse was that they had just mailed out boxes of tapes with the Tacklebox name. Not long after that, Deneau and Magwire happened to run into a friend who had promised to distribute some tapes in Detroit. “We said, ‘What did you do with those tapes?’” Deneau recalls. “‘Don’t send them out because we can’t use that name anymore!’
“He goes, ‘Oh, don’t worry. I didn’t do anything with them. They’re just sitting in my house
on a rutabaga box.’”
And so Rhudabega had their name, or at least the homonym of their name. The “stylized” spelling carne about when another friend designed a poster to promote an upcoming gig and inexplicably spelled their name Rhudabega.
“They made up their own font and it was just so cool,” Molly says. “We changed our name on the spot.”
Rhudabega became a part of the New Orleans music scene from the moment they arrived. Literally. After ducking into Checkpoint Charlie’s for a beer—it was their very first stop in New Orleans—Molly spotted a flyer on the wall by the door, “drummer wanted.”
“I said to Tyler, “Just call them. You never know,” Molly says. “He’s like, ‘Ah, they don’t want me. I don’t even have a drum kit or anything.’”
Inspired by another beer, Deneau called the number on the flyer. It turned out to be that of Sue Ford, guitarist and vocalist with rock band the Desires.
“The next thing I know, he’s like, ‘Uh, I guess I need to go to rehearsal tonight.’ He took the van and left me alone toasting marshmallows at the campsite. He was in a band before we even had a band.”
The phone call turned out to be lucky for a number of reasons. Besides hooking Deneau into the club scene, he also met Ford’s husband, Jim Ford, the longtime New Orleans manager who had previously worked with the dB’s, Dash Rip Rock and Cowboy Mouth.
Molly was eager to play again as well, so she accepted Ford’s invitation to join the notorious Gnarltones, an occasional garage cowpunk band that Ford plays drums for.
While gigging around New Orleans with various bands (Deneau and Magwire also were members of Myshkin: Impossible), the couple was more interested in playing their own music. They had a notebook full of songs that they’d written but were missing something: a guitarist.
“We kind of wanted to have a guitar player because, frankly, it’s hard being a two-piece,” Molly explains. “When you make a mistake, there’s really nothing to hide behind. If I hit a wrong note that’s all you hear.”
When Rhudabega was offered a gig at the Saturn Bar, Deneau and Magwire decided to try it on their own. June 7, 1995, was the date of their New Orleans debut, and it was a hit. Ford was so enthusiastic, in fact, he offered to manage them on the spot.
“We were like, ‘Well, we were thinking of getting a guitar player,’” Magwire recalls. “Jim said, ‘No! It’s great! The two-piece thing is beautiful.’”
The “two-piece thing,” as well as sonic novelties such as Deneau’s static-producing short wave radio, might lead you to believe that Rhudabega harbors some avant-garde pretenses. Not so, says Magwire.
“It just come really naturally,” Magwire says. “We learned our instruments together, we’ve always rehearsed as a two-piece and we’ve always written as a two-piece.”
“As far as being avant garde,” Deneau adds, “I don’t think we had any conscious thought of it. You could say avant garde or you could say they suck. That’s a very fine line.”
The two-piece instrumentation might sound limiting at first, but Deneau and Magwire have spent so much time honing their sound, it’s become second nature. Magwire strums two-note chords with a thumbpick and plays through a distortion pedal to boost the sound of her bass. Deneau plays ferocious drums and sometimes harmonica as well. They harmonize on choruses and sing through diverse sounding mics. The effect is like that of a band twice their size.
“There’s different textures you can give it to make it seem like there’s more than there really is,” Deneau says.
So do Deneau and Magwire foresee a time when two pieces is not enough? “Maybe,” says Magwire. “But we’ve got, like, 40 instrumentals that are just waiting for lyrics, so as a two-piece, we’ve got about five more albums of material.”
“We’re not closing our minds to anything,” adds Deneau. “I think we’ll know when we’ve done it all and need to add something. But it won’t necessarily be a guitar. Maybe it will be a trombone or a banjo. Who knows?”
