Eccentricity on parade

Sea Krowns still crazy after 13 years

Scott Hall

Tom Burris and Alix Cain of the Sea Krowns are playing with several other local and national bands at Big Car Gallery in Fountain Square on April 30. The show starts at 7 p.m. with doors at 6 p.m.

Tanakh (Italy), Kamikaze Hearts (New York), Zelienople (Chicago), Kelli Shay Hicks (Nashville, Tenn.), Born Again Floozies (Indianapolis), Sea Krowns (Indianapolis)
Sunday, April 30, 7 p.m.
Big Car Gallery in the Murphy Art Center,
Fountain Square
$5 donation

A common beef about Central Indiana bands is that they play live shows ad nauseam but don’t record enough new material.

Not so with the Sea Krowns.

The eccentric songwriting duo of Tom Burris and Alix Cain have just completed their 13th independent album in as many years, another collection of basic three- and four-chord tunes with demented lyrics and random arrangements.

“A lot of guys watch sports or play poker,” Burris says. “We sit down and write songs together. We actually produce an end product.”

On the other hand, they haven’t performed in public since 1999, as best they can recollect.

“We’re not lazy; we’re just disinterested,” Burris jokes. “It was fun, but when it ceased to be fun, we stopped.”

The drought will end Sunday, when the Krowns join an extended lineup of local and international acts at the Big Car art and performance space in Fountain Square’s Murphy Art Center. The bill includes Tanakh, an acoustic quintet hailing from Florence, Italy, but fronted by Midwestern singer-songwriter Jesse Poe; Kamikaze Hearts, a roots quintet from Albany, N.Y.; Zelienople, a Chicago-based ambient music trio with jazz and rock influences; Kelli Shay Hicks, a Nashville songstress who accompanies herself on guitar and autoharp; and the Born Again Floozies, the local tap dance-driven combo that puts a vaudeville spin on the timeless songs of bandleader Joe Welch.

The Krowns were lured out of hiding by promoter Nick Ohler of the not-for-profit arts organization Mythopeic. He challenged Burris after booking the Kamikaze Hearts, who, like the Krowns themselves, use the term “porch rock” to describe their semi-acoustic psych-Americana sound. The prospect of a porch rock smackdown proved too seductive to resist, especially in light of the constant pressure the Krowns face from family and friends to play their music in public.

“People are on me about this all the time,” Burris says. “Nick calls us about once a year.”

Burris and Cain met in the late ’80s while working at an Anderson record shop, and they began writing and recording together. They had different tastes — Cain preferring acoustic sounds, Burris leaning toward noisier material — but they shared a love of artists who push American music to its surreal extremes: Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and the Stones. Their experiments in home recording taught them to trust the magic of randomness.

“The good stuff would always happen when we would detune the guitars and just make things up,” says Burris, who works in IT at an accounting firm. “We hand it out to about 20 friends, and then we move on to the next thing.”

The pair made a concerted effort to perform regularly in the mid to late ’90s, but the process was complicated by the fact that Cain has multiple sclerosis, a condition that makes it pretty tough, for example, to haul a PA speaker up a stairway.

More recently, he has been unable to strum a guitar for extended periods of time. For Sunday’s gig, he’ll stick to vocals while Burris plays guitar and bass drum and Burris’ teen daughter, Natalie, plays snare drum.

“It will be even more minimal than it was before,” Burris says. “It will still be loud.”
Family participation is not unusual for the Sea Krowns. Cain’s son Andrew, for example, played some drums on the new album, Three.

“If you come in the room when we’re recording, you have to pick something up and play it,” Burris says.

Culled from two hours of completed new material, Three appears to be the Krowns’ 13th full-length release. Burris declined to elaborate on the significance of the title.

“We came up with a lot of reasons, but I’ll just say it’s ‘the magic number’ and leave it at that,” he says.