Robert Wagner has been holding out on us.
For almost 20 years, the singer-songwriter-guitarist has been sitting on a long-stashed studio album from The Little Wretches, which he recently released with two companion projects.
“Undesirables & Anarchists” was recorded in 2001 with producer Dave Granati (of The Granati Brothers) with a lineup that featured Wagner’s now ex-wife Rosa Colucci on vocals. If released, it would have come out two decades into the run of The Little Wretches, which evolved out of No Shelter, the band with which Wagner first hit the Pittsburgh punk/indie scene in the late ’70s.
The timely named album has held up well in that the poetic frontman never gave into trends, choosing to hold the line with a driving guitar sound influenced by The Velvet Underground and such disciples as The Dream Syndicate. As Wagner explains, the impassioned album went unreleased because the Wretches were in no position to promote it.
Wagner, now based outside of Philadelphia, has released it along with “When It Snows,” an intimate indie-folk acoustic record he recorded around 1996 with Colucci (who works part-time at the Post-Gazette) that shows off their lovely harmonies.
The third project is “Burning Lantern Dropped in Straw,” an album that found the Wretches in 1994 rerecording some of its staples and a few new songs for a possible deal with an Atlanta management company. That fell through when Dave Losi left the band to start a family.
All three records are available on streaming sites. Here’s what Wagner had to say about them in a phone interview this week.
Let’s start with “Undesirables and Anarchists,” which has a very timely name. This album was just sitting there all this time?
Yeah. Well, you know, we have a lot of stuff that was just sitting there. There was a time, you know, when you had to make a decision: Are we gonna put this out on vinyl? We gonna put this out on cassette? Then, later, you had to make the decision: Are we gonna put this out on CD? When I started, the dream was not to be an indie band, the dream was to be signed by a label that would do all that promotion and distribution for you and all you would have to worry about it was the creative side. But when we recorded “Undesirables and Anarchists,” the question was, if we manufacture a CD, how in the world are we gonna promote it? Whatever following we might have managed to attract, most of them have moved on to the next phase of their lives, where they’re more focused on raising families and stuff, so they’re not really coming out much. Older people are not going to attract younger audiences, and the stations that in Western Pennsylvania that we might have hoped would support us never really did, so we have this great recording, and we’re gonna make some CDs that are basically gonna sit in boxes. What’s the point of that? You’re not going to be able to tour or promote it. That’s how bands do it. You make money off the ticket sales and merchandise sales, and, you know, then you go back home and live in your grandmother’s basement. That’s not where we were in our lives. People had families and houses and mortgages and stuff like that.
How did you come to work with Dave Granati, who was in a different scene than you?
We used to play a lot of gigs with The Cynics, when they were more of a psych band, and their bass player [knew] Dave Granati. We had won some studio time, and I’d gone around to the different studios, and his approach to recording was my approach to recording: It doesn’t have to take, uh, 30 takes, isolating every single instrument. You know, work fast. His thing for us was if you could record without headphones, if you knew the material well enough to record without headphones, just set up in the studio like you’re setting up for a live show, except we’ll move the drums, position the drums a little differently than they would be in a live show. He said, by the time you’re done setting up, I’ll be ready to track. So, basically, he worked fast and just intuitively knew what we were going for. And Rosa and Dave had that Italian thing. So, you know, they could trade tomatoes and talk. It was a very, very cool thing.
And now here it is, and it doesn’t sound dated because your influences don’t sound dated.
It sounds pretty contemporary. It sounds great. And it’s like, the line from the song, “all of my friends are undesirables and anarchists,” little did we know that would be the two camps in American society in 2020. And “Who is America?” a lot of the songs on there, I think, thematically fit the zeitgeist of the times. Yeah, we made it and never did anything with it, except for wishing we had a way of putting it out and promoting it.
So this was fully finished, you didn’t have to do a single thing to this when you loaded it up on Spotify?
I had several albums that had been unreleased, and I had them remastered because even if you go through your CD collection and you take, say, “Blonde on Blonde” from 1990, then “Blonde on Blonde” remastered in 2016, or whenever they would have done it, the one thing that really changes is the newer stuff is louder and has more presence. So I didn’t want our stuff to come on and then you have to reach for the volume.
So were these “Undesirables” songs ones that you’d been playing in your live set?
Yeah, some of them go back all the way to, like, 1979 or 1980, some of the first ones I wrote. Some of those songs have their origins in No Shelter. And then in the original version of The Little Wretches, we were playing “Don’t You Ever Mention My Name” and “I Rather Would Go.” Some of the lyrics were updated, but some of the songs went way back. And from my point of view, they’re new songs because the world hasn’t heard them yet.
What were the circumstances of working on “When It Snows” with Rosa, which is very intimate?
At that point, I was going to just personally travel as a solo artist to every musical mecca in the United States, like maybe spend a year in Kansas City, spend a year in Memphis, spend a year in Nashville and move from place to place, and be a solo artist. And as it happens, I was visiting a friend in San Francisco, and it looked like, OK, it’s gonna be three or four months before I move. So I put an ad in In Pittsburgh for a singer, because, like, what am I going to do for three or four months? And Rosa responded to the ad, and then all of a sudden, things got good again, so what’s the point of moving? So, the songs on “When It Snows” started off as just me, and then when Rosa became available, then it was me and her, and some of the songs on there Bob Banerjee plays a little bit of violin and mandolin. But, basically, it was just me and Rosa singing. And the model at that point was Simon and Garfunkel’s “Wednesday Morning, Three AM” album — that was in my head, what we were trying to accomplish.
How was your duo stuff with her received?
I was always surprised why there’d be people who loved it and then the people who liked The Little Wretches, they were very lukewarm towards it. It wasn’t what they wanted from me, anyhow. I burned 20 copies at [producer] Michael Ketter’s studio, and we had a little private party down at an art gallery in the Strip District. That was as far as we went with it.
But, by ’96, a lot of the people that were part of the Electric Banana scene were moving on to more acoustic, folkier kind of stuff.
For me, Angelo George, the bass player for The Little Wretches, was playing in New Jersey with Norman Nardini, and when he came back from the trip, he wanted me to listen to this duet of Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris, which then led me to discover the duet on “Love Hurts” of Emmylou Harris and Graham Parsons, and that’s where the idea came for me and Rosa singing together — that male and female voice together with kind of simple country-ish songs underneath them. That’s how I got into it. I didn’t really have any relationship with the Electric Banana people, except Steve Sciulli, whose music cuts across everything.
Rosa is very versatile. She does “When It Snows” in the more Emmylou way, and then she brings an almost B-52s style to the rock stuff.
Yeah, and I don’t know where her connection to any of this stuff comes from. When we met, she had sung karaoke, and she sang in the gospel choir. Her taste in music leaned very much towards pop. The things that are my biggest influences, she doesn’t like them at all or has no affinity for.
So you had these great records sitting there? Why do you think you couldn’t get label interest?
Well, we didn’t even shop it. Anyway, at that point, there was nothing even to shop. If you’re not gonna be able to tour or promote it, at that point in our lives there was nothing to sell. Rosa wanted me to sell songs to Nashville or maybe try to get the songs licensed to movies or something, but the traditional indie thing of making a record and supporting it, that wasn’t it. And from shopping the band, shopping the tape, who’s going to invest in a bunch of 40-year-old guys that have day jobs? The last Little Wretches CD where we tried to get people interested was “Beyond the Stormy Blast” or the third Little Wretches CD. We were trying to get people in the music industry interested. We would get feedback. We’d make changes based on the feedback we got, and we were hopeful of getting signed. But from ’94 on, I was done.
You had a day job at that point?
I’ve had a teaching certificate since 1988, and I never worked a full-time job until I met Rosa. My understanding when we married was that we’re going to do music full time, she was gonna follow my lead, because the only way you even have a sliver of a chance is if you go for it 100%. You might have to supplement your income working here, working there, but if you insist on having a full-time job with benefits, who’s going to invest in you, you know? Really? So, for me, I worked a bunch of part-time jobs, sometimes had no job at all. I look back on people who basically let me live like a parasite, people who gave me cars, people who gave me enough food to last me for the summer. It’s ridiculous the generosity that was poured out on me when I was younger.
People saw that talent in you. It was undeniable.
Well, if only I could find a way to pay them back. For me, when we started making the first Little Wretches CDs that I made with Dave Losi and Ellen Hildebrand, it was with an understanding that it’s gonna take about a three-year process. First, we’re gonna introduce ourselves to people, and then we’re gonna build off of that. And probably after three years, we will improve in ourselves to be a worthwhile commodity. And so that’s my attitude towards this stuff now is, uh, you know, we’re gonna promote “Undesirables and Anarchists.” When it runs its course, we’ll probably do “Burning Lantern Dropped in Straw,” unless I record something completely new. But follow this one up, and who knows where it leads? I just want to be in the game. When someone mentions Steve Wynn of The Dream Syndicate or Steve Earle, I’d like for some people who know about them to know about Robert Wagner and The Little Wretches.
First Published August 18, 2020, 10:49am