 "Photo: Ryan Littman-Quinn, Matt Grover, Ryan Killany / Heights Photo Illustration")
Oneside is living the dream. As eager disciples of The Band, the members of this Boston-based quartet have smuggled their icon's rustic swagger into the 21st century, stopping off at each bluegrass joint along the way to grab a drink and ask for directions. Oneside's sound lingers with experience and echoes of humility and at times feels more local to the beat up front porches of backwoods West Virginia than the sweaty bars that feature Pabst Blue Ribbon specials in the Northeast. But Oneside really has no limits - both in leveraging its diverse batch of influences across a broad canvas, and casually choosing how to deliver the mix in a tightly packaged, accessible groove. The band has toured the nation, played established festivals like South By Southwest (SXSW), Floyd Fest in Virginia, High Sierra in California, and Austin City Limits, and even once had a true rock-star moment at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.; but the members of Oneside still have day jobs.
"We work from Monday to Wednesday and a half," said banjo player Chris Hersch as the other members of the band laughed.
Settling into his Harpoon I.P.A. and working his way through a plate of pancakes (keep in mind it is about 3 p.m. on a Friday), bassist Grafton Pease admitted, "We have day jobs that understand what we are doing; and a sort of prerequisite for finding a day job was that they have to be flexible with our flexible schedule."
Onside's first full-length album, First, To Last, was recorded earlier this year on a tight budget, mostly between the honest hours of 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. "We are paying back some debt from getting everything pressed and being on the road for two months. Once we do that we will hopefully start to make a little money from touring around," said lead singer and guitarist Ned deBary. To keep the cost of production down, Oneside relied on a connection with a friend from Boston University. "We recorded it with a friend of ours who went to the BU Center for Digital Imaging and Arts. They had just built a $1 million studio ... we were able to set up a thing that we could go in after school was done and use the facilities all night long," deBary said. This opportunity gave Oneside access to top-notch equipment, and during the six-month process, the band trimmed 15 working songs into 11 concise yet refreshingly diverse numbers. When realizing that BU was Boston College's Commonwealth Ave. rival, Pease changed the story a bit and offered this advice: "You could just write down another Boston school with the name Boston in it."
With deBary's rustic howl keenly offset by Hersch's playful banjo sprints, which are both kept in place by drummer Jake Brooks' careful phrases and Pease's lazy low-end gait, First, To Last is a laid-back journey that drips with a brash, carefree spirit. It is a slow burn at times but never misses an opportunity to take off with a friendly jog. On the surface, Oneside's sound adheres to a simple diet of Jack Daniels and late nights of hazy moral discovery that generally beget lazy mornings to follow. But underneath it grows increasingly complex. Hersch's acoustic banjo comfortably treads water in a sea of tone-hungry sharks - unafraid to toss in some melodic bait for his band members to prey on. "It can be frustrating sometimes. It's hard to keep the pureness of the sound without making it too tinty," Hersch admitted. "For me it's a balance between trying to keep the natural tone and turn the volume up loud enough. The other half is just as rewarding because when it does work, it's very different," he added. Originally a jazz musician, Hersch is content with his new place. "One of the reasons why I switched to banjo is because jazz music can be very intellectual, sometimes too cerebral, so I think the banjo is pretty down to earth," he said.
"The banjo shouldn't be confined to bluegrass. It shouldn't be just a happy instrument. It can be in a rock band. It's more versatile than people give it credit for. The guitar went through the same discrimination in its early days. The banjo is going through the same process right now," Hersch said as Pease and Brooks made fun of him for his passionate and sensitive answer.
Pease immediately jumped in with the suggestion: "All right let's go get a beer." He even went as far as coyly equating the banjo's presence to this simile: "It's like a Sunday-morning-breakfast-and-coffee mellow as opposed to rainy-Saturday-night-alone-with-no-date mellow."
To this point, Brooks remained relatively silent, focusing on his plate of pancakes and often drumming on his thigh to the beat of the background music. This is fitting because to the untrained ear, his role in Oneside's framework could be easily overlooked. "It's been really nice to learn how to become a softer, more intellectual drummer as opposed to a loud and fast, smash and grab style. It takes more skill to learn how to play with a lot of intensity while still being quiet," Brooks said as the other guys joked that this is the most that he has said to anyone in four years.
"It wouldn't be possible with a different drummer. The acoustic banjo would not work without Jake's drumming," Hersch added.
Oneside's van was packed and a four-hour drive to a gig in Maine lay ahead of them. Shortly before storming the Middle East in Cambridge for a record-release party on Oct. 3, the band finished up a two-month tour. Packed into a sweaty van, Oneside got a fresh look at what "The Dream" entails. DeBary admits, "You sort of have to take it day by day because, when you start out, you have grand plans and you slowly realize what it's going to be." But Oneside grew as a band and built up its confidence. "Just going to big crowds that we had no friends in to cheer for us, it seemed like we were in over our heads. But having 1,000 people in a field watching us and just knowing that we can keep their attention and make people dance and get them into it gave us a lot of confidence," deBary said.
In the commercial sense, Oneside still has not made it. But they undoubtedly have the skill, possess the workmanlike assertion that they belong, and carry a certain intangible uniqueness in sound. Living and playing on their own terms, they are not afraid of the future. "When we face a challenging audience, we are psyched to win these people over," deBary said. Oneside has already won over a small devout following, now the rest lies in the hands of luck.
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