Edwardsville Scene » Kentucky Knife Fight

Knife Fight at The Stagger!

Leesa — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:00:00 +0000

Kentucky Knife Fight, Edwardsville’s very own alt. country band and 2009 River Front Times winner of the Best Album (self-released) plays The Stagger Thursday, August 26 around 9 pm. The band will be joined on the night by The Blind Eyes Micah Schnabel of Two Cow Garage. Read Kentucky Knife Fight. You can also check out a story about their guitarist here.

The Good Fight: Kentucky Knife Fight Keeps Bringing It

Paul Peters — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:58:02 +0000

story by Paul Peters, cover photo by Peter Wochniak

I first heard about Kentucky Knife Fight a few years ago when my brother told me a story about a great band he saw at The Stagger Inn, a crazy combo of 1970s punk and George Thorogood.

At a point during the show where the music had reached a frenzy, he told me, the raucous crowd lifted lead singer Jason Holler into the air, while he continued singing. They lifted him so high that they almost stuck his head into a ceiling fan. He managed to somehow avoid it, and get back onto the stage, without ever missing a beat. (Click for info on Kentucky Knife Fight’s next show).

Holler says this wasn’t exactly the band he and bass player Jason Koenig set out to create in 2005 after seeing a Woodbox Gang show at The Stagger.

“They’re like a dark, dark blue grass band,” he says, describing Woodbox. “We decided we wanted to do something in the same vein, but at the same time we were listening to a lot of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, early punk rock music, and 90s stuff like the Murder City Devils. We kind of wanted to do something like dark blue grass with an early punk lean, and before we knew it, things kind of changed and we became nowhere near the realm of bluegrass music.”

Explaining how the band came across its unusual name, Holler says, “Somebody was giving me grief during a practice and I said ‘You don’t want to invite me to a Kentucky Knife Fight boy ‘cause you’ll lose.’” “That was around the time we were trying to figure out what our name was going to be. And I think it was Jason [Koenig] that said, ‘you know, we should just call ourselves Kentucky Knife Fight.’”

Since then, Holler says, the band has gotten grief from a few Georgians, “Who couldn’t understand why we didn’t call ourselves Georgia Knife Fight.”

Video of Kentucky Knife Fight, Woodbox Gang, Johnny Thunders and Murder City Devils (story continues below)

The band started off playing short sets at the Duck Tape Duo open mic night at The Stagger, and were soon offered to play a full show at The Stagger, which has been the start of many a local band.

In the last couple years, all but one of the band members have moved to St. Louis, where they have had a measure of success, playing bars in the city, and getting their 2008 album Wolf Crept the Children Slept named best self-released album in June of 2009 by readers of St. Louis alt-weekly The River Front Times.

The band currently has an album’s worth of unrecorded songs that it is playing live. Holler says these songs have now almost completely taken over the band’s live set.

He feels like there has been a progression since the last album.

“The older material we’re doing, we had songs where the lyrics were more catering to aggressive rock and roll. On the slower tempo songs I spent more time on the writing,” he says. “Now I’m trying to make it so that even our adrenline pumping rock-and-roll numbers have more well-written, or well-organized lyrics.”

In January, he says the band will tour, and after that, they plan to record a live EP with Firebrand Recording in St. Louis.

“After that our intentions are to record a full-length album,” he says, but they have no date set for recording the songs yet.

“It’s all monetary,” Holler says of their reason for sitting on 13 new songs. “We had been saving up for a new van, and kind of putting our ducks in a row.”

He says the band has been approached by some small labels, “but it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t exactly what we wanted, and so we held off. We’re not waiting for some major label to sign some unknown band from St. Louis, but the labels we’ve been approached by, it just wasn’t the right marriage.”

It seems the band has it’s feet firmly planted on the ground, when it’s audience isn’t snatching them up into the air. With music like this, we hope they keep ascending, and keep avoiding those wily ceiling fans.

Edwardsville’s Jazz Man

Editor — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:43:15 +0000

David Wiatrolik (center with guitar) at a jazz rehearsal.

by Jesse Gernigin

This isn’t my first time meeting guitarist David Wiatrolik.
We have seen each other in passing, either at gigs with his jazz band, The David Wiatrolik Trio, playing guitar for Kentucky Knife Fight, or just sippin’ coffee at Sacred Grounds. Although it is early on a Monday we have been talking for a while now. David stops suddenly, goes quiet, and looks off into the distance. I wonder what he is thinking, because up until now he has been talking at full tilt, smiling, and keeping an iron grip on our eye contact. But now he is alone for a second, suspended between two thoughts, one he was sharing and one he considers. Then he’s talking again, continuing on from where he stopped and saying nothing to acknowledge what it was that froze him mid-story.
Maybe David’s a robot. It sounds crazy, but consider the schedule he keeps. If he isn’t giving lessons or spending time with his girlfriend, he is either practicing or playing gigs with one of his bands, both of which have seen some measure of success.
Kentucky Knife Fight, an alt-country band with a healthy dose of punk, has received wide acclaim, and was awarded best self released album this year by the River Front Times.
David started his jazz trio as an undergraduate at SIUE, where he culled his friends and classmates to play in his band. The trio has played a lot of different venues from art shows at SIUE to Mangia in St. Louis, or Erato in downtown Edwardsville. The jazz trio produces a smooth sound with sultry bass lines and witty guitar riffs while avoiding the expected slowness made popular by Louis Armstong. The music is wonderful and adaptable; you can let it completely absorb you, eyes closed as you tap your foot to the rhythm, or subconsciously inspire you as the theme music to a great bar conversation.
“I just want to play,” he replies when I ask him about why he doesn’t focus on just one band. “Although jazz is what I go to school for, Kentucky Knife Fight is a lot of fun.”
David’s own sound is conscious of his technical talent but also moves comfortably with a secret inner rhythm, pulling together heady bass lines with the velvet smooth crooning of his guitar. David’s talent decries the histrionics of lesser talented technicians, choosing instead to allocate sound precisely when and where it is needed. I imagine that this is a large part of what originally attracted him to jazz is his natural storytelling ability. I say this because to me jazz and storytelling share a common trait. They both have a definite beginning and end and what happens in the middle depends on the audience’s perception, the artist’s technical talent, and the artist’s interpretation of it.
When asked about the future of what he hopes to do with jazz, he talks in terms of size.
“There just isn’t the money for big bands right now, so I’m playing shows with two guys instead of five,” he says.
Regardless of the current economy David has a positive out-look.
“I am lucky to play weddings and cover the local venues pretty regularly.”
David’s comments really opened my eyes to the constraints a bad economy can put on musicians.
When I pressed David on solutions he explained, “It would help if local musician’s banded together. I’m not saying we need picketing and to form Unions, but we must show a little tact and self control because it hurts all of us. We all play music cause we love it. For some it might be more of a hobby. But those of us who want to make a living out of it, we got to eat! It’s the same as any other profession that requires a skill. Lawyers, plumber’s, mechanics are all well organized professions and have set a ball park rate for performing their services in order to make a decent living, so should musicians.”
David’s myspace has further detail on his performance dates along with some mp3’s of his work. You can check out his next gig here.