Pendergast - KCStar07162004

Pendergast and Tony Ladesich sing stories about flawed folks on 'Saturday Night'
By TIMOTHY FINN
The Kansas City Star
July 16, 2004

Most teenage boys learn to play a guitar so they can join a band and meet girls. Tony Ladesich learned to play so he could get right with God.

“At the end of junior high I started playing bass and then guitar because at the time I was a pretty hard-core, fundamentalist Christian,” he said Monday afternoon. “I wanted to play in church. That's how it started.”

But that's not how it ended, unless what he's doing now qualifies as preaching.

Saturday night Ladesich's band Pendergast will officially release its first full-length CD, “The Truth About Saturday Night.” It's a collection of songs about people stuck in ruts and bad habits and mired in boredom and hopelessness.

“The people on this record are not great people,” Ladesich said. “They are people who hurt other people and who get hurt. The record is inhabited by characters who have given up on everything: religion, love, themselves — everything but alcohol.”

“Saturday Night” represents where Ladesich ended up at the end of a tumultuous year: He'd split with a long-time girlfriend, his mother died and he lost a vital member of the band he figured was his last-ditch chance to get his songs off his porch, onto a record and out into public.

Unlike the characters in his songs, however, Ladesich used his trouble and pain as motivation to write songs, record them and keep the band going. That's where the preacher in him began to emerge.

“We recorded this album with Lou Whitney, but Lou was much more than a producer,” Ladesich said. “He was a confidante about everything, life, politics, whatever. Lou contends that there are only two kinds of songs: boy/girl songs and train songs. A train song is about something, an issue. It goes places. On this latest cycle of songs, I'm not completely out of the boy/girl thing. I'm still writing about people who need to fall in love or hurt each other.

“But I have written songs that take more of a working-man's stance. I really think rock 'n' roll is working-class music. Those are the people it connects with. We've got the haves, the have-nots and the have-mores. I might someday work hard enough to save some money and approach becoming a have, but I'm never going to be rich; I'm never going to not lament the loss of a dollar. Those are the people I connect with: someone who has been laid off because they closed the refinery and it smells like they did it to keep the price of oil up. I have no patience for that, for people who value profits over other people.”

The characters in “Saturday Night” aren't necessarily jobless or on the verge of homelessness, but they tend to come off as the punch-the-clock, shot-and-a-beer types who realize that they'll never be rich and that they'll probably have to work past retirement age just to keep stretching ends that never quite meet. That sense of resignation and dead-end despair spills over into their personal lives, which is why their love lives are so cold and dissatisfying.

Ladesich, who is a documentary filmmaker on the side, said his many projects and jobs are what eventually led to the end of his five-year relationship.

“I was trying to direct two movies, work a full-time job and be in a band,” he said, “which made it hard to be there for someone. I just imploded emotionally. My breakup was the most painful thing that ever happened to me. Am I in a better place now? Yes. But what haunts me is the pain I caused others.”

That wasn't the only breakup he and his band had to weather as it made “Saturday Night.” Chris Meck, the band's original guitar player, left the band.

“Chris is one of the best musicians I've ever played with,” Ladesich said, “but he really needed to be in a situation where he has more control over things, more than he did in Pendergast anyway.”

In Meck's place Ladesich brought in Mike Rooney, who had all the country chops Ladesich wanted on the record. The music on “Saturday Night” is beefy and melodic roots-rock with some country-rock accents. At times it vaguely recalls bands like Whiskeytown, the Bottle Rockets and Wilco in its infancy, but mostly it sounds like a Heartland version of Ladesich's favorite songwriter, Bruce Springsteen.

“He tells stories,” he said. “He paints pictures of people and where they live. And he writes about big things by telling small stories.”

The last song on “Saturday Night” continues a story Ladesich began with his old band, Sandoval. “Union Man” is the sequal to Sandoval's “Last Prayer of a Coal Miner.”

“It's about the Molly McGuires and the coal miners and the uprising back in the 1800s,” he said. “I'm not a big fan of sequel songs, but that one was always a fan favorite. So I wrote ‘Union Man' to say something bigger with it.”

The recorded version features every member of the band and anyone else who was in the studio that day — Whitney dubbed them all the “AFL-CIO Choir.” The song is a call-to-arms, a tale of murderous revenge by a group of Irish Catholic workers fed up with miserable working conditions and low pay.

The story is nearly 150 years old, but Ladesich figured it might resonate in a time when unions are under attack and people in general feel they have no control in the workplace. Mission accomplished. At a recent show in Memphis, a fan showed his appreciation.

“I could tell he was a working-class guy,” Ladesich said. “His hands were calloused and blistered. He comes up and says, ‘Thanks for that song. You and I are going to do a shot together.'

“So, yeah, maybe it is like preaching — the revival of rock and roll and what it is really about. Amen to that. We need it, especially now.”