When he’s on the West Coast, Jim Campilongo feels something like a stranger in his own home. His latest record pays tribute to the city he misses when he’s there, and the one where he built most of his career.
He did this largely in his adopted home of New York City, where, for most of the 2000s, he was a mainstay—and, for music fans in the know, a must-see—of the downtown arts scene, with long-running and celebrated residencies at Lower East Side venues like Rockwood Music Hall and the now-defunct Living Room.
Campilongo left the East Coast to return West roughly two years ago. But his newest record, She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show, is very much a New York album—maybe his most New York one of all. It is also very much a rock album—maybe his most rock one of all. There are reasons for this. The roots of the record stretch back to the dark days of Covid, when words like “quarantine” and “distancing” were too much a part of the common vernacular. Life was weirder, quieter and, truth be told, often drearier. Campilongo found escape where he could, which manifested in daily 5 a.m. walks around his Brooklyn neighborhood. His companion was an old iPod playlist of classic-rock songs. “I’d go out, it’d be pitch black, there’d be no one around—it was like a science-fiction movie,” he recalls. “I had these old-school Vic Firth headphones, and an iPod that had a playlist of maybe 300 classic-rock tunes that I made back when iPods were the latest thing. And I would walk the streets listening to it over and over.”
The 4TET, from left to right: drummer Dan Rieser, Campilongo, bassist Andy Hess, and guitarist Luca Benedetti.
Some of the songs that, quite literally, got into Campilongo’s head? “It was ‘Mississippi Queen’ kind of stuff,” he says. “‘Hush’ by Deep Purple. Elvin Bishop’s ‘Travelin’ Shoes,’ which is an amazingly eventful track. There’s background vocals, there’s a little breakdown, there’s a melodic solo. There’s harmonies, a great rhythm.... I became obsessed with it.”
These songs, and the 297 or so others on Campilongo’s playlist, informed several of the tracks on She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. One, a greasy, growly workout titled “This Is a Quiet Street,” was influenced by Grand Funk Railroad’s live version of the Animals’ 1966 single, “Inside Looking Out”—“a song I’ve been listening to since high school, and that I’ve been trying to write for 20 years,” Campilongo says. “This is about the closest I’ve gotten.” Another track, “Do Not Disturb,” he continues, “is like my interpretation of a ZZ Top tune.”
“I’d go out, it’d be pitch black, there’d be no one around—it was like a science-fiction movie.... And I would walk the streets listening to it over and over.”
But She Loves the Coney Island Freak Show is not all rock-influenced. Leadoff track “Dragon Stamp,” a dark, deep-in-the-pocket jam that Campilongo introduces by sounding a detuned open low string, and then hitting a harmonic and raising the pitch by bending the string behind the nut (something of a JC trademark move), came to Campilongo after repeated playings of “Step to Me,” a 1991 song from deceased New York hardcore rapper Tim Dog, on his early morning walks. “I think I listened to that 50 times in a row, numerous times,” Campilongo says. “I couldn’t get enough of it.” The emotive “Sunset Park,” meanwhile, in which Campilongo unspools languid, vocal guitar lines in a manner that is nothing short of a master class in the subtle art of touch, tone and phrasing, was influenced by a Maria Callas aria. Another track, “Sal’s Waltz,” by Frédéric Chopin. “Whether it’s successful or not, who knows?” Campilongo says self-effacingly.
Sunset Park
While many of the She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show songs have their origins in Campilongo’s early-morning walks and his iPod-provided soundtrack, bringing them into existence was in some ways a more immediate affair. To record the album, Campilongo got together with guitarist and longtime collaborator Luca Benedetti, bassist Andy Hess, and drummer Dan Rieser in a combo they dubbed the 4TET, and laid down the tracks live in the studio—two studios, to be exact. “We did two days recording at Bunker [in Williamsburg, Brooklyn], and then another two days at a different studio [Atomic Sound, in Red Hook, Brooklyn],” he says. “It was pure joy to play with those guys.”
“I always figured I could get all the sounds I want from the volume and tone knobs on the guitar, or from where I pick, and how hard; all those little variations.”
Campilongo, as is his way, kept his gear setup minimal: his trusty 1959 Fender Telecaster with a top-loader bridge, plugged straight into a 1970 silver-panel Fender Princeton Reverb fitted with a Celestion G10 speaker—no pedals required. “It’s so uninteresting for me to talk about gear, because it’s basically the same answer every time,” he says with a laugh. As for why he mostly eschews effects? “I always figured I could get all the sounds I want from the volume and tone knobs on the guitar—and on a Tele, those knobs are really dramatic—or from where I pick, and how hard; all those little variations,” he reasons. Another benefit of going sans pedals? “You kind of just accept the hand you’re dealt, and you can get down to playing music quicker.”
When it came to the playing, Campilongo stuck to another tried-and-true aspect of his guitar style—improvisation. “None of what I’m doing on the album was worked out beforehand,” he says of his solos on She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. In his opinion, this makes for not only a better playing experience, but a better listening one, too. “If I play a perfect solo and it’s worked out, I generally don’t like listening to it, because it’s not a time capsule of that moment,” he says. “It’s like going out on a first date and having a script of what to talk about, instead of it just being a natural conversation. I want to hear the real talk, warts and all.”
Jim Campilongo's Gear
Campilongo performing at Rockwood Music Hall Stage 3, the same Lower East Side venue where he previously held a long-running residency.
Photo by Manish Gosalia
Guitars
- 1959 Fender Telecaster
- Lumiere Jim Campilongo Signature T- Model
- Fender Custom Shop Jim Campilongo Signature Telecaster
Amps
Effects
- Crazy Tube Circuits Splash Reverb
- Crazy Tube Circuits Stardust Overdrive
- JAM Pedals Wahcko
- Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box
- Boomerang Phrase Sampler
Strings, Picks, & Accessories
- D’Addario EXL120 Nickel Wound Super Light (.009–.042)
- V-Picks Fusion
- Klotz Titanium guitar cable
- Souldier guitar straps
Campilongo’s commitment to balancing on that creative knife edge informs every aspect of the album, and also his music in general. “I don’t want to ever put out the same record twice in a row,” he says. To that end, he is already plotting future challenges, including a “pseudo-jazz record where I’m playing standards in the way I would present them, which would be a little scary.”
For all his musical adventurism, one aspect of Campilongo’s artistic makeup that remains steadfast is his connection to the city that helped birth She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show. “Even though I’m back in California, in many ways I feel like a transplanted New Yorker,” Campilongo says. “It’s in my DNA,” he laughs. “It’s not like I’m returning home to the West Coast and, you know, I can’t wait to go surfing.”
YouTube It
For years, Jim Campilongo held court at New York City’s Rockwood Music Hall. Here, Jim and the 4TET tear through a She Loved the Coney Island Freak Show highlight: the Southern-rock-inflected, ZZ Top-inspired “Do Not Disturb.”
Black Duck are drummer Charles Rumback and guitarists Douglas McCombs and Bill MacKay.
Lemon Treasure
McCombs is known as a founding member of post-rock pioneers Tortoise, as well as the leader of instrumental Americana group Brokeback. He’s also the longtime bassist for influential alt-rock outfit Eleventh Dream Day. MacKay’s ventures, meanwhile, include guest stints with McCombs’ Eleventh Dream Day and duo collaborations with the likes of banjoist Nathan Bowles, alongside a sequence of solo albums, plus two intricate instrumental LPs made with songwriter-guitarist Ryley Walker. Rumback, who met MacKay in college, also recorded two excellent instrumental discs with Walker, and has released several albums as a leader, too. Perhaps the most compelling is 2020’s standout, June Holiday (featuring extraordinary Windy City pianist Jim Baker). Improvisation has been Black Duck’s initial focus onstage, and studio improv yielded most of the tracks on the new album. But three hook-laced compositions—one brought to the session by each member of the band—serve as sonic tent poles for Black Duck. Inviting opener “Of Lit Backyards,” written by McCombs, is a loping, lyrical number that McCombs describes as “sort of Roy Orbison meets Tom Verlaine.” “Delivery,” MacKay’s growling contribution, builds to something much darker and more volatile, as if Link Wray scored a spaghetti Western shootout. Rumback’s pensive “The Trees Are Dancing” could be the most compelling of the three, with beautiful guitar melodies unspooling over a stalking bassline and clapping drums. Even though each began as a solo composition, McCombs points out that these tracks all ended up as group arrangements when realized for Black Duck.
Bill MacKay's Gear
Black Duck improvises a lot of their music, but guitarist Bill MacKay says there’s usually a theme that their songs center on.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Guitars
- 1975 Fender Thinline Telecaster with Fender humbuckers
- 1976 Gibson Les Paul Custom
Amps
- 1970 Fender Princeton Reverb
Pedals
- • Wampler cata
- Pulp ThroBak Overdrive Boost
- Boss RV-3
- Death By Audio Reverberation Machine
Strings, Picks, & Slides
- Ernie Ball, mixed set of Power Slinky and Regular Slinky (.011-.046)
- Ernie Ball Power Slinky (.011-.048)
- Gibson XH Extra Heavy Standard Pick (1.17 mm)
- Dunlop Gator Grip (1.14 mm)
- Dunlop Gator Grip (1.50 mm)
- Diamond Bottlenecks Pill Bottle glass slides
McCombs, who moved to Chicago in 1980 from small-town Illinois, describes the music community of his adopted city as “having a real openness to adventure.” Black Duck, he says, is a product of its environment. “The various creative music scenes in Chicago, whether jazz and improvisation or electronic music or rock or whatever, sort of intersect in a general swirl of creativity,” he says. “When we first started performing out as a band, we played the Constellation, a progressive, European-style venue here that has a genre-less aesthetic that we all identify with. Eventually, we played the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, where I think we fit in well as an improvising group.”
Starting out in the ’80s, McCombs was inspired by punk rock, and his band Tortoise earned its renown for studio experimentation. “Bill and Charles have more experience as live improvisers than I do,” he explains. “But the main idea behind Black Duck, for me, was to further develop my guitar playing through improvisation in a group setting, to expand myself as a musician. The three of us don’t rehearse that much or even have a whole lot of discussion, having cultivated our musical rapport on stage. We try to keep things instinctual, intuitive, open. From the first, the trio felt like it had the potential to get really expansive or be more intimate—the music seems to have a lot of pliability.” McCombs says there’s room for Black Duck to “get more ‘out,’” but the more “‘inside’” sound of Black Duck is just what happened when they went into the studio.
McCombs plays a Fender Jazzmaster on the record, as well as an Allparts Baritone Telecaster to fill out the bottom end on various tracks, such as “Delivery.” He also overdubbed bass on a few songs with his Guild B-30 acoustic bass guitar. “I’ve never been one of those players in search of the perfect guitar,” McCombs says. “I’ve always been someone who tended to adapt to my instruments. My gateway to the guitar from bass was a Fender Bass VI in the ’90s, which I played a lot in Tortoise and Brokeback. I then went to my Jazzmaster out of my love for Verlaine and his sound. The scale of it felt comfortable coming from bass, and I also love the versatility of the Jazzmaster’s pickup sounds. As for my baritone Tele, it adds more low-end to a two-guitar band. I also love the Duane Eddy twang you can get from it.”
“The various creative music scenes in Chicago, whether jazz and improvisation or electronic music or rock or whatever, sort of intersect in a general swirl of creativity.”—Douglas McCombs
MacKay, a Pittsburgh native who settled in Chicago in 1998, can play with what McCombs calls “a real rock guitar feel, that Stones-y, chooglin’ thing you can hear in ‘Delivery,’ a method that tends to be more chordal than my note-y approach. Our styles are complementary, I think.”
MacKay agrees that he and McCombs occupy different territory. “Douglas is a very different guitarist than, say, Ryley Walker,” says MacKay. “I tend to bob and weave a lot with Ryley, whereas Doug and I will play in more delineated rhythm and lead roles. Or if I’m doing a slide thing, he’ll be pulsing, as happens in ‘Lemon Treasure’ on the album. You can also get an idea of our guitar weave really well on the improv ‘Second Guess.’ We’re both fans of full-frequency guitar playing. As a bassist, too, Doug is keenly aware of the bottom even when he’s playing guitar. His baritone instrument helps with that, of course. Having some low-end emphasis in there means that the music can resonate with a listener’s body as well as their minds.”
Douglas McCombs' Gear
The three members of Black Duck say they’re experiencing an uptick in performing opportunities for improvised music recently, including Big Ears and other notable festivals.
Photo by Evan Jenkins
Guitars/Bass
- 1964 Fender Jazzmaster with Mastery bridge
- Allparts Baritone Telecaster with Fralin pickups and Bigsby tremolo
- 1970s Guild B-30 acoustic bass guitar
Pedals
- Alan Yee Last Temptation of Boost
- Fulltone Full-Drive2
- ZVEX Woolly Mammoth
- Lehle Mono Volume
- Moog Moogerfooger MF-104Z
- EarthQuaker Disaster Transport
- TC Electronic Ditto Looper
- Electro-Harmonix Freeze Sound Retainer
- Moog Moogerfooger MF-102 Ring Modulator
Amps
- 1960s Ampeg B-18N Portaflex
- Victoria Victorilux 3x10 Combo
Strings, Picks, Cables
- D'Addario EJ21 XL Jazz Light (.012-.052), with wound G string for JazzMaster
- D’Addario baritone sets
- Dunlop Orange Tortex picks
- Divine Noise guitar cables
MacKay says Black Duck sounds different than anything the three musicians might do on their own. Having three distinct perspectives bouncing around creates more possibility. “Charles and I know the mutual directions we can go down and follow each other,” says MacKay. “With Doug in the mix, it makes things more combustible.”
Black Duck’s music is spontaneous, but there’s some semblance of order to the spontaneity. “Improvisations seem most successful to me when they have something of a compositional quality,” says MacKay. “With this band, we’re not starting from complete abstraction like more jazz-oriented improv groups. One of us will have a theme or a motif we can center on. For the improvised piece ‘Thunder Fade That Earth Smells,’ I brought out a bit of a riff that I had played before, something heavy and fuzzy that could play off the more ethereal sections. I like having an unheard riff in my back pocket like that, and seeing how the other guys react to it.”
MacKay plays a “pretty stock” 1975 Fender Thinline Telecaster on Black Duck, “except that it has Fender humbuckers, which are powerful,” he explains. “It’s a dream guitar to play, with a lot of great tones beyond the usual Telecaster twang. You can get clear, clean tones, but the pickups are hot, so the Tele can be pushed into some dirty sounds. It’s a partial hollowbody, so it has some real resonance, too. It has been my main performing guitar for a long while.” MacKay also plays a ’76 Les Paul Custom that he’s had for decades. “It’s all stock, except for a new wall cord,” he says. “The Gibson is an excellent all-around instrument, as it has both warmth and bite, with so much color.”
“I’ll see an instrumentalist perform and it sparks something in me. That experience can sort of clear the connections and allow new energy to come through. To me, that’s a kind of transcendence.”—Bill MacKay
MacKay’s key effects pedals for Black Duck included a ThroBak booster (which “is based on the Colorsound Overdriver, for that vintage Jeff Beck/David Gilmour sound”), a Wampler cataPulp (“for nice distortion tones, based on the Orange Rockerverb amp”), and a Boss RV-3 reverb/delay (“which I’ve used for every show and album for more than 20 years”). As for McCombs, he summons an array of atmospheres via his board of delay, fuzz, overdrive, and looper effects, which include Alan Yee’s Last Temptation of Boost pedal (with more details in the gear list below).
The simplicity of the album cover belies the depth of creativity and improvisational transcendence in Black Duck’s recorded debut.
At 43, Rumback is the youngest of the trio, having moved from his native Kansas to Chicago in 2001. McCombs credits the drummer’s “intense knowledge of rhythm and the way his playing balances solidity with a sense of restraint” with building out Black Duck’s sound, and MacKay adds that Rumback “has his own voice on the drums.” “He totally is himself on his instrument, which is easier said than accomplished,” says MacKay. “He places beats with his phrasing in such an individual, personal way. With drums as much as guitar, phrasing is like breathing. It’s a subtle but potent aspect of music.”
Instrumental acts may never be on Top of the Pops, but MacKay takes heart in “how much instrumental music there seems to be, quiet or loud, on festival bills.
“There seems to be an openness to abstraction in music these days,” he says. “Words and the human voice have their own special expressive power, of course, but I think there’s a space in instrumental music where listeners can find themselves. I know that I’ve been in a rut sometimes, but I’ll see an instrumentalist perform and it sparks something in me. That experience can sort of clear the connections and allow new energy to come through. To me, that’s a kind of transcendence.”
YouTube It
Here, a recording of a live set at a record store in Milwaukee captures Black Duck at their most raw and powerful.
Theo Katzman plays with a fluency and fire that makes this guitarist, producer, singer, and songwriter an MVP of modern, funk-fueled rock and pop. At a recent gig at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl outpost, Katzman—who’s also a member of the formidable Vulfpeck collective—invited PG’s Rig Rundown team to soundcheck, to see the gear that makes his tone sing. And Katzman’s tech, Nick “Turk” Nagurka, provided assistance.
Brought to you by D’Addario XS Strings.
Stripped Strat
Theo Katzman’s No. 1 is a Fender 1962 reissue that he’s had since he was 16. He stripped the Strat’s finish down to the bare wood, and then added an Ilitch Back Plate Hum Canceling system, which takes the noise out of the stock single-coil pickups. The Strat stays strung with D’Addario NYXL .010 sets. When Katzman plays with a pick, he uses Strum-N-Comfort SNC-ST/EXH/6 Sharktooth 1.5 mm Heavy Pearl Celluloids.
Hole-y Moley!
Katzman’s Tele is an $800 parts guitar with TV Jones pickups that he purchased on Reverb. It lives in open Eb and also has D’Addario NYXL .010s.
Black Hat Strat
This Japan-built ’62 reissue Strat has an oddball headstock, with what looks like black epoxy or resin covering most of what’s at the top of its Mike Cornwall neck. It’s tuned in open D and is used primarily for slide. The stings? Yep, D’Addario NYXL .010s.
Princeton Grad
Katzman uses two amps, sending a dry signal to his Benson Nathan Junior and a wet signal to his 1968 Fender Princeton Reverb loaded with a Celestion Greenback 12. Both amps face 90 degrees offstage, to prevent hitting the front row with a laser beam of awesome. The Princeton gets a Beyerdynamic M88, which complements the punchy midrange of the amp with a healthy proximity effect and rounds the top end out a bit.
Benson, Benson, Benson
The Benson has a bit more grind and a more controlled tone. He uses a Sennheiser 906 for a dry, clear sound with minimal proximity effect. Both amps feed into the in-ear-monitor mix, hard panned left and right. Since there’s some degree of modulation from the pedalboard, that helps Katzman enjoy a sense of space in his sound. The front-of-house mix typically uses the Benson, too, since it has a more refined sound.
Theo Katzman's Pedalboard
