Daryl Fleming and The Public Domain release avant-folk album The Fable of the Bees

Pittsburgh City Paper
NOVEMBER 30, 2006

Calloused from two decades of fretting guitar strings, Daryl Fleming's fingers seem to get itchy when not poking and prodding our cultural wounds like an avant-folk Doubting Thomas. On The Fable of the Bees, Fleming and his all-star new-enlightenment string band The Public Domain set the ideas of 18th-century political philosophers and 19th-century American religious iconoclasts to music -- all with a sweet harmony and a whiskey-drinkin' beat. It's all part of Fleming's plan for The Public Domain: to go beyond anachronism, into something that's as postmodern as it is pre-modernist.

"It's that blurring of the timeline," says Fleming. "Use whatever you want, approach the material however you want, piece together [periods and genres] how you want to. It's borrowing from the past, but playing by rules I'm making up as I go along."

It's no surprise that The Fable of the Bees has the cojones to poke holes in our watered-down pop-music thought processes. Over the years, as his curriculum vitae has grown -- from out-there jazz groups Watershed 5tet and Opek to alt-country mainstays Boxstep and Crawlin' Low -- so, too, has Fleming's trans-anachronistic songwriting breadth. (This is, after all, the man who brought Pittsburgh an alt-country ode to the Founding Fathers, The Elusive Snapping Republic.)

"It's been four years since the last album," says Fleming. "It took two years for the songs to come together, and in those two years, we were playing around town a little bit more -- not that we've ever played that much. And because of that, it coalesced into more of a band sound, a band record, than a solo record with hired guns." Vince Camut's rainy-day pedal steel and dobro, Fleming's fine-tuned harmonies with co-vocalist Jesse Prentiss, anchored by Justin Brown's bass and Jim DiSpirito's drumming, all under the production guidance of John Purse -- a cast of Pittsburgh veterans providing songs skipping between the raucous and the rational.

While The Public Domain is asked to do a lot of heavy musical lifting on Fable, you might not notice on first listen. For example, the disc's opening tracks, "Travels with Charley" and "The Fable of the Bees," could just be a pleasant urban hike through a psych-Americana somewhere between the Mekons and Tom Waits' The Black Rider.

But listen closer, and there's much more going on. The flugelhorn on the band's version of "Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier" helps transform one of the most enduring folksongs of the British Isles into a desperate jazz ballad, while "(High Time To Be) Crawlin' Low" could be the rowdiest call to drop off the grid ever recorded. And if "Dagobert's Blues" -- either a lament or a guffaw for the mythology of the Merovingian dynasty -- doesn't get the freak-folk revival fans on Fleming's side, those punks just ain't weird enough.

But the thread that ties together Fable is the "Fable of the Bees" itself: Bernard de Mandeville's massive 18th-century poem, presented in two different songs on the disc. The poem hyperbolically presents the idea that the virtuous isn't necessarily culturally productive -- that selfishness is what drives mankind forward; that, as the poem is subtitled, "private vice" is the "public benefit."

"He was like a 17th-century Gordon Gekko," Fleming says, referring to Michael Douglas' Wall Street character. "You know, 'Greed is good.'

"I'd say [the Fable album] is a critique of what I perceive to be shabby critiques of consumerism in the arts -- it's supposed to play the devil's advocate. Everyone and his sister, every 30-year-old in a rock band, [has] this obvious, anti-commercial bent, and I come from that milieu," he says. "But something I've always vilified -- international commerce -- spawned the rise of the universities, it spawned education. And in a sense, the breeding of tolerance is the result of commerce itself. That's how we've been given the standard of living and position from which to critique it."

Fleming's quick to point out that, whether it's commerce, city living or rock-band superstardom, he's not taking sides, "just batting two poles up against one another." But isn't that exactly where so-called "folk" music has gone stale? There was a time when folk presented alternate views and histories. If The Public Domain has taken anything from its folk background, it's that impassioned digging. And a nice tune.

"Maybe this shit is just a little too thick," says Fleming. "Maybe they'll think it's pretentious, maybe you have to think a little bit. Well, good! But hopefully there's some nice melodies to help you on your way."

Better the Parcel than the Post, Pittsburgh Pulp, 10/17/2002

For 10 years, Daryl Leroi Fleming's guitar was the electric foil to Ben Opie's saxophone in Water Shed 5tet, adding a rock element to their jazzy compositions. The late, great Crawlin' Low Band -- a hodgepodge of local musicians who released two brilliant CDs despite their dysfunctional tendencies -- gave Fleming the opportunity to reveal his prowess as a mutant singer-songwriter. His first solo release continues in the vein of the latter group, pulling together ragged-but-right music that nevertheless chugs along with authority. Focusing on the subjects of God and country, the songs include reworked election campaign songs from both the 19th and 20th centuries, along with some insightful originals.

The history of Daryl LeRoi Fleming, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 10/18/2002

On the eve of releasing his debut album as a solo artist, local guitarist's guitarist Daryl LeRoi Fleming, who's worked with everyone from Watershed 5tet to Boxstep, says, "I don't know if this bears out on the album, but I think, for me, the pivotal time in U.S. history is the Federalist era of 1789-1800."

And the weird thing is, it does bear out -- on one or two songs anyway.

One is an actual campaign victory song for Thomas Jefferson, written in 1802 with dark new lyrics added as an afterthought by Fleming. The other, "Motherthumb," contrasts the sexual dalliances of Thomas Jefferson (who liked his slave girls young and slim), Ben Franklin and Aaron Burr with "mama's boy" George Washington, concluding, "While these men were out there getting hot and bothered, the country was the only thing that Washington ever fathered." more...

HIGHEST HONOR - Local musicians turn 2002 into banner year, PittsburghLive.com, 12/8/2002

"Better the Parcel Than the Post," Daryl Fleming. One of Pittsburgh's most eclectic guitarists (Watershed 5Tet, OPEK, Boxstep), stepped out with an album that is different from anything else released in town, and maybe anywhere. Who would have believed that political folk songs the ilk of "Jefferson and Liberty" or "Jimmy Carter Says Yes" could be so entertaining? more...

Fleming takes CD release party to the 'Post', PittsburghLive.com, 10/18/2002

If he had been born in another era, Daryl Fleming might have been a traveling musician, hopping freight trains and traveling from town to town with a guitar slung across his back.

That's the image one gets listening to "Better the Parcel Than the Post," a record that sounds like the ghost of Tom Joad filtered through The Band and Tom Waits, with lyrics that reference Richard Burton, political campaign slogans and the Holy Trinity. "I've been kind of bored with pop music lyrics," Fleming says. more...

Reunited band plays music of Towner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/5/2002

Watershed guitarist Daryl Fleming is back with a supergroup of sorts whose sound he describes as quietly frenetic, acoustic and "not really jazz." They're not even using "the j-word," he says. In fact, "If you played blues or jazz licks over this music, it wouldn't even sound right."

The group, Blackwater Draw (which also features Watershed's Ben Opie on soprano sax and clarinet; Jim DiSpirito of Rusted Root on tabla, percussion and drums; and New York transplant Lindsey Horner on acoustic bass), is focusing for now on compositions by Ralph Towner and a handful of originals in the Towner style. more...

Dylan influences generations of artists, PittsburghLive.com, 11/5/2002

Put down my robe/picked up my diploma/took ahold of my sweetheart/and away we did drive, Dylan sings of surviving a plague of locusts on "New Morning," (1970). Despite the biblical reference, this is not an album of gothic myths, as found in the earlier "John Wesley Harding." It is personal ‹ he has weathered and slain the 1960s, returned home as the prodigal son and is so happy just to be alive underneath this sky of blue. Rabbits and groundhogs scurry by a stream. This is Dylan's gentleman farmer period. His voice is more gravelly than usual, to good effect; his piano and electric guitar playing also fair well. This is a great record. more...

Cloud Chamber unites in name of esoteric jazz , PittsburghLive.com, 10/17/2001

"There's just something about the jazz that came out on that label, that 1970s ECM style," DiSpirito says. "I've heard Darryl explain it as almost chamber music: really sweet compositions, a small amount of instrumentation, and it's improvisational, like jazz, but it's not swing. It's much more film score-ish and atmospheric." more...

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