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NEW YORK – Rock-band theme songs went out with the Monkees, but you wouldn’t know that when Susan Cowsill of the Continental Drifters steps to the microphone for “Someday.” It sounds like she’s singing about the very reasons for her band and its work.
“I’m gonna pay my bills and stand where I stand,” she sings, “and maybe even start a little rock ‘n’ roll band. And maybe my friends will give me a hand. And if that doesn’t take away my sorrow, I’m gonna get up again and do it tomorrow.”
Eyes closed, she holds the last note – bathed in the supportive harmonies of Peter Holsapple and Vicki Peterson.
The New Orleans-based Drifters are a hidden treasure, a rock band for adults, with three gifted singers and songwriters who have persevered despite music business indifference and personal trauma.
The group pushes on, it seems, because it’s six members need music more than music needs them.
“You often call this band your reward,” Holsapple said during a recent visit to New York, looking over at colleague Mark Walton, “and I see it in the same way. We’ve got nothing to retire to, frankly, and this is the kind of job you do until you die, because it does all the right things for your internal organs.”
“The downside,” drawled guitarist Robert Mache, “is we’re not going to draw Social Security from this.”
Holsapple played with the dB’s, a critical favorite in the 1980s, and toured as a side player for R.E.M. Peterson was – and is – a Bangle. Cowsill grew up in an eponymous family act (remember “The Rain, the Park and Other Things”?) Walton was in the Dream Syndicate and Mache played in the Steve Wynn Band. Drummer Russ Broussard completes the lineup.
Because of that past (and future Peterson is recording a new album with the Bangles) the Continental Drifters are still nagged by the perception that the band is a place to bide time while waiting for something else.
“We do other things and that somehow is used to imply that we’re not serious about this,” Cowsill said, “and it’s ridiculous.”
Their music fits into the loosely defined Americana genre but they’re essentially the sort of main stream rock band that was commonplace a couple of decades ago but rarer today.
Having three distinct voices and viewpoints set them apart. So does the sound when those voices blend.
“You would think that any fund mentally tasteful person would understand the concept of the Continental Drifters,” Holsapple said. “We see this as an embarrassment of riches in a lot of different ways.”
Then his cynicism about the music business seeps in.
“Were we playing the game, the marketers and tastemakers would say, ‘It’s too confused, there’s too much going on. You people have no focus. You’re fat, you’re balding, you take too much time between songs. You play too long.’ We fly in the face of tradition with whatever the star making machinery would have us do to be big stars, and we are just fine with that.”
They all had those dreams of stardom, and lived them to some extent. The band drifted together a decade ago in Los Angeles informally, as a group of friends who gathered once a week to play each other’s songs.
Walton was the band’s heart in those early days, the one constant in several different lineups. He believed it could be more than a friendly sidelight.
“It’s the best band I’ve ever played with,” he said, “and I don’t want to give that up.”
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