Chris Meck is looking for bigger truths [The Kansas City Star]

Oct. 30--He has been performing in rock bands for more than 20 years, but Chris Meck admits he's nervous about playing Friday night with his new band, the Guilty Birds. It will be an evening of firsts, including the band's first show.

"I've never been the primary singer in a band before," he said. "I've never been the primary songwriter, and I've never been in a trio. So this is all very new and kind of terrifying."

In addition to all that, Friday's show at the Midwestern Musical Co., 1830 Locust St., is also the first evening of the two-night, sixth annual Apocalypse Meow benefit. Proceeds from the event will go to the Midwest Music Foundation and its Abby Fund, named in memory of Abigail Henderson, Meck's wife and longtime bandmate, who died in August after a five-year battle with cancer.

She and Meck co-founded the foundation in 2008 to help local musicians without health insurance survive economic hardships caused by health issues. They also performed at each of the previous Apocalypse Meow benefits, which is what prompted Meck to start a new band.

"As Abby was passing, I was looking ahead to the next couple of months, and I started thinking about Apocalypse Meow," he said. "We always performed on Friday night because when Abby was feeling good, we'd help run the Saturday night event. So I decided to keep that Friday slot, even though I had no idea what I was going to do."

What he ended up doing was mentioning his notion to Matt Richey, the drummer in Tiny Horse, one of three bands Meck was in with Henderson. Richey immediately volunteered to enlist in the band. A few days later, so did Zach Phillips, bassist in Tiny Horse. At that point, Meck decided that three was plenty.

"I have lots of other really talented friends I could have brought in," he said. "But I figured if I did, the band would be influenced by the direction they'd take it. I wanted to wait and see what happened and figure out later what might need to be added, if anything."

Meck had no songs in the bank, so he started writing from scratch, focusing solely on lyrics at first.

"I'm such a guitar geek that I found out that if I sit down with a guitar to write I just ended up noodling," he said. "So, I put the guitar away for a few weeks and got up every morning and filled pages of notebooks with stream-of-conscience blather. After awhile, I got less self-conscious about it, and I'd end up with three or four lines of lyrics."

He now has four songs completed. One of them he started as an instrumental about a year ago.

"Abby always said that it should have words," he said. "I didn't think it needed them, but a few weeks ago I decided she was right. So I wrote some verses and moved some things around and now it's one of our songs."

That one is called "Last Reprise." Meck said his lyrical themes are general and universal and not necessarily related to Henderson or the past three or four months.

"Obviously, I've been going through some heavy stuff," he said. "But I didn't want to write a bunch of sad-bastard songs. Instead, I looked for bigger truths. Everybody has had somebody leave or has lost someone in other ways. As you go through those situations, you start to understand things and learn some life lessons, like: 'You don't know how long you're going to be here, so don't waste time.' Things like that."

Musically, he said, the band is in a place that's new to him. Some of that is a consequence of being in a trio and having to fill in more space.

"It's a lot more rock and much less country," he said. "I have a lot of country influences in me, but they don't come out in these first songs. It's kind of like classic soul and rock and fuzzed-out (Jimi) Hendrix stuff.

"Right now, there's a lot of guitar, probably too much guitar. I may need to hire a keyboard player."

"The music rocks," said Phillips, who also plays bass in the hard-rock band the Architects. "It's a lot more soul and a lot less country. I feel like I joined a Hi Records band or even Rare Earth."

That sound is still evolving and changing, Meck said, sometimes from one rehearsal to another. It's part of the process of learning to write a song from scratch and figure out when one is finished.

"The guys will show up for practice thinking they've got a song down, but over the week I've rearranged it so they have to learn it again," he said. "But they've been good sports about it.

"I've worked with some really prolific songwriters: Abby, Kristie Stremel, Tony Ladesich. I learned a lot from them. But I've always been the guitarist and band leader, kind of the arranger.

"I'd say my piece in an eight-bar solo or help with the bridge. It had been more than 10 years since I wrote a song start to finish. So it takes me a while. I have to hear the song played through before I know whether it's what I want or don't want."

To fill out the set, he and the band have worked out some covers of songs by Tom Petty, Richard Thompson, the Beatles and others. No covers of Tiny Horse or any of the other bands he and Henderson shared (the Gaslights and Atlantic Fadeout) will be played.

"I can't imagine singing any of her songs," he said. "But she was working on a song over the last couple days before she passed. I may go back and revisit that."

Henderson's presence will be felt on Friday: She gave the band its name.

"I'd be tending bar and Abby would come by and sit with me and hang out until we closed," Meck said. "A lot of times, we wouldn't get out of there until 4 or 4:30 in the morning. That's what she called the birds that were out at that time: the guilty birds."

To reach Timothy Finn, call 816-234-4781 or send email to tfinn@kcstar.com.

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