Arts & Leisure
Musician comes home with Sweet Crude Bill & the Nautical Lighthouse Society
By Melissa Wood
York High School graduate Anne Bacon returns to the local area next week with her band, Sweet Crude Bill & the Nautical Lighthouse Society. The band’s live shows have been described as inciting “fervor and ecstasy in their audience, like a drunken big tent revival in the venerated tradition of raucous American folk gatherings.”
Courtesy photo
YORK - Although Anne Bacon, who graduated from York High School in 1997 and lives in San Francisco, didn't make it to her class reunion this year, she's returning to the area as a member of the band, Sweet Crude Bill & the Lighthouse Nautical Society.
Bacon, who plays the bass and sings, will be making stops next week in Portland, Portsmouth, N.H., and Somerville, Mass., as her band tours cities around the country this summer.
"The band itself is renegade country," said Bacon. "Think godless southern revival - take away the tent, leave the sweat and take a swig of whiskey. That's us."
According to its website, the band was first formed in Charlottesville, Va., "as a series of rum-soaked porch songs about oil, honor and nautical adventure" and Sweet Crude describes their music as "part American folklore, part San-Fran-Psycho, and just enough wild-west rockabilly to keep you dancing for one drink more."
As part of the band's tall tale, she's known as "Anne Can Anne," a character from a small town in Oklahoma, who supported five children on the income from a motorcycle repair shop, before Sweet Crude Bill & the Lighthouse Society came to town on an unusually windy day.
However, her real story is also pretty interesting.
After Bacon graduated from York High School she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics and legal studies from Ithaca College in upstate New York, where she said she had the opportunity to listen to a lot of incredible classical music, which the school is famous for, and spent a semester in Switzerland studying international relations.
She moved to California about six years ago, after her deceased maternal grandfather told her to do so in a dream, and has lived in Oakland, Berkeley and now San Francisco, where she works as a program coordinator at a nonprofit called Health Through Art, putting community artwork on billboards to counteract racism, substance abuse and violence.
She also puts together a quarterly magazine with art and writing on different themes by friends, local poets, writers and visual artists, and, like her character Anne Can Anne, has recently found a new affection for repairing and rebuilding old motorcycles.
Bacon said she got back into music after a four-year break when she first moved to California by singing weekly at a bar in Berkeley. Two years ago she started playing bass, and one month later she was asked to join Sweet Crude Bill & the Lighthouse Nautical Society.
"Bill's story won me over so completely that I forgot I didn't ‘really' know how to play the bass," said Bacon. "Many lessons, practices, shows and many, many long hours of sitting alone with my sweet Fender P-bass (it's a vintage 1976 piece), and the bass is like an extension of my own hands and voice."
She said the band has been over-ambitious since the beginning, playing its first gig less than a month after forming, with two hours of original music at that first show. It recorded its first EP, "Sweet Crude Bill & the Nautical Lighthouse Society vs. The Press Gang," in the fall of 2006 and immediately started planning this tour to promote it.
Bacon said the band is using Myspace as its primary booking tool by contacting bands in the cities where they want to play and putting together bills for different venues.
"It's worked out great for us," said Bacon. "We have a total of 26 shows lined up right now in our seven-week tour. We'll be hitting the outer edges of the country all the way around."
There are three chances to catch Sweet Crude Bill & the Nautical Lighthouse Society next week when they play at the Red Door in Portsmouth, N.H., on Monday, July 23; at Geno's Rock Club in Portland on Tuesday, July 24, and at the Abbey Lounge in Somerville, Mass., on Wednesday, July 25.
To find out more about the Sweet Bill story or to hear their music, visit their website at http://www.sweetcrudebill.com/ or their Myspace page at www.myspace.com/SweetCrudeBill.
