The Bee Team

Dirty folk for the whole family [Listen on the CP Playa]


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Published: Oct 17, 2007

Michael T. Regan

Folk music's supposed to be a link from one generation to the next. The Bee Team sees that tradition reflected in the people who watch their rehearsals in the park.

"Kids and moms really like our music," says Chrissy Tashjian, who sings and plays bass. "'Cause it sounds totally cute." But while the babes are bouncing around to the sprightly bluegrass, the hip mamas are enjoying the words.

"Some of our lyrics are really dirty," singer-guitarist Josh Craft laughs. "They're like dirty kids' songs."

Well, who goes for cute and dirty more than kids and moms? And who better to expose kids to the facts of life than a bunch of impish twentysomethings?

"We're sort of both big little boys," Tashjian says of herself and her songwriting partner. "We like adventures." She does most of the talking, over cigarettes and cider outside Govinda's Gourmet to Go, with Craft frequently interrupting to confirm, contradict or make light of what she just said. Sean Cox, who plays banjo and mandolin, is soft-spoken but shares a few twisted thoughts of his own.

The Bee Team's first album, Hot Times USA (Our Neighborhood), is fun even if you don't pay close attention to the words. "Paul McCartney's Wallet Song" is a hummer; "Boots" is another upbeat country song about cheatin'. Then there's their signature tune, "Birds and Da Bees," in which Tashjian and Craft sing joyously and slightly out of sync about cunnilingus.

The two have been playing together for a couple of years, first as Birds and the Bees and then as Bees and the Birds. (They settled on their current moniker after being threatened with legal action by similarly named bands.) At first, the collaboration was an outlet for them to escape the weight of their previous groups.

"It's funny," Tashjian says, "because my band was like heavy prog-rock, like Blood Brothers-y, and his band was like heavy Q and Not U sort of stuff, and we were like, 'Let's play folk music. We don't want anything electric for a while.'"

The band's going through a transition period, with producer Joe Reinhart replacing Chrissy's brother Mike on drums and Cox starting to add electric guitar to the band's mostly acoustic palette. They're all looking forward to filling a second album with newer, rockier material, but for now they've got to sell some copies of the first one. Right before its scheduled June release, the group had what Cox calls "a shortage of resources in a very broad sense." Everything hit at once: lineup changes, family issues, money problems. Then their van broke, scuttling a promotional tour. But not completely.

"I was like, 'You know what? I've been planning this for, like, so long, I'm really just gonna do this,'" Craft says. "So I went out to Chicago and back."

He had to play some solo songs instead of the band's sweet 'n' raunchy duets, but he made some friends and gave out free copies of the CD. Hey, whatever works to get the music out there — all three learned that from their parents. Cox remembers his father working in a factory all day and playing in a Southern rock band at night. Craft's mom had a country-rock band, and he got his first taste of the stage before he was 10, singing comic backup on a song about single motherhood.

Tashjian says that after she quit violin in elementary school, her dad — who still plays in a Delaware County cover band — made her learn every Beatles song on a beat-up guitar before buying her a good one. She had to prove herself on the drums, too. "My dad didn't have a lot of money," she says. "He wanted to make sure I really wanted it." She still sits in on drums sometimes when visiting bands play house shows at the Palindrome, her South Philly pad, but she's happier playing bass in the Bee Team. "With this sort of stuff, I really like to be, like, dancing," she says.

Lyrically, though, Tashjian's trying to branch out. "A lot of my songs are about girls, but then a lot of them really aren't," she says. "And so I'm trying to push more in that direction. Not because I don't love girls, but the newer songs are just songs about a lot of different things."

Such as? "Like sharing," she says. "Sharing's a great concept. Don't you think?"

(m_fine@citypaper.net)