The Rich Fabec Band:
Name Your Poison

by Chris Wissmann

The Rich Fabec Band, still aglow from a recent second-place finish at a Blues Royale battle of the blues bands in Saint Louis, will celebrate the release of their new CD, Name Your Poison, with a show Thursday, August 31 at Tres Hombres.

Fabec overdubbed pretty much all the instruments on his last disc, Talking to Shadows. With only a few exceptions, however, Name Your Poison features drummer John Shadowens and bassist Danny Vinson, and was recorded live in Fabec's home studio with only the vocals overdubbed. "The full band makes a huge world of a difference," Fabec tells Nightlife. Blues, he adds, is supposed to be about communication between people, and programming spontaneity into a drum machine presents a difficult challenge.

Indeed, Name Your Poison is far less polished than Talking to Shadows, and far more authentic as a result. Fabec's singing in particular is dramatically improved, and he delivers the songs with grit and fervor.

Overall, the band interaction made the recording process a great deal of fun, Fabec says, and doing it in the relaxing atmosphere of a home studio added to the group's enjoyment-- there were times when they kept playing after the tape ran out, simply to keep the vibe going. The pleasant surprises and happy accidents that arose during the sessions abound on Name Your Poison.

Name Your Poison consists of eleven songs, only one of which, "Midnight Train," features Fabec solo. It's a song he cut with a steel-body tricone-resonator guitar just to hear how the instrument sounded. The band, Fabec says, insisted that he put it on the CD.

"It's more bluesy, but not traditional blues," Fabec says in comparing Name Your Poison to Talking to Shadows.

What the two discs share, adds Fabec, is that "It's blues, but it's blues in 2006." In other words, musically Fabec is not afraid to incorporate recent influences like Gov't Mule and Derek Trucks. Lyrically Fabec feels compelled to address social issues, though this does not necessarily make the songs political so much as it makes them human-- conscious of and empathetic toward the human condition and some its causes.

"I don't think you can be a songwriter and not be influenced by recent events, especially Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the way it was handled and that it was handled so badly," he says. "The way that people treat people and the way that government treats people. I'm trying to think about how to put this diplomatically.

"It seems like the government forgets that the beauty of America is in the people, the details, not big business and oil," he adds after a pause. "It seems like more and more people have fallen through the cracks and that the cracks are getting bigger. It seems like our technology has outstripped our humanity. And there's the war. Those are the kinds of things that inspire me. I still write about love and relationships, but I try to look beyond that. I need to get that out of me, too."

In a subsequent email, Fabec adds, "I guess the major thing these days is the little people. We live in a world with big business, big oil, big SUVs, big churches, supersized meals, superstores, and as all of this gets bigger, people get smaller. I said yesterday that people fall through the cracks because the cracks get bigger. But in thinking about it, maybe it's the people who are getting smaller. The people in New Orleans were ignored by FEMA, the President, and the government in general because they were small. Hurricanes aren't like earthquakes-- they knew it was coming."