Dance with Danger

Dangerous Ponies know what they like and make it look easy.

by John Vettese

Sarah Green PONY SHOW: Clockwise from top left: Brooks A. Breakdancer, Crackle (aka Chrissy Tashjian), Chris Baga Ponytails, Mikey Blunt, Elastic One-sey and Bernerd.

"You realize what you like through process of elimination," says Chrissy Tashjian.

After playing with several bands, the South Philly singer-guitarist has found she likes tambourine and gang vocals, colorful outfits and confetti, and songs that don't just invite you to sing along, they demand it.

We're sitting out front of Mix on Chestnut Street, sipping $2 lagers down the street from the First Unitarian Church, where Kimya Dawson is playing. Tashjian's occasional band, The Bee Team, has stylistic parallels to Dawson's sprightly, irreverent folk. Her first band, The March Hare, is über-technical punk, all screamy and sadistic.

She still loves both (and felt particularly proud of The March Hare when she heard their new Mister Nimbus, a full-length they finished after her departure), but her current squeeze is the carnivalesque pop-rock troupe Dangerous Ponies.

So how does one go from maniacal punk to jaunty pop?

"In The March Hare, I'd play these crazy technical bass parts, and it was like, 'This is cool, this is so hard to play,'" Tashjian says. "But at home I was writing pop music. It was actually harder."

Pop songs are not praised for their technique in the same way that spasmodic riffs are, but it's there. She points for example to "Friends of Mine," a song by The Zombies that the Ponies are fond of covering in concert.

"There are like 802 chords you play in that song," she says. "And they are not easy to play in succession. But you wouldn't know it when you hear it, since it sounds like just a pop song."

Tashjian first began tinkering with this in the cutely subdued Bee Team; in the Ponies, she adds color, spectacle and feisty rhythm. Her brother, who plays under the stage name Mikey Blunt, pounds his drums all hellacious. The band is decked out in a bright wardrobe that synth player Brooks Banker — aka Brooks A. Breakdancer — picked out during volunteer shifts at Philly AIDS Thrift. Guitarist Evan Bernard adds some counterpoint licks and hollered interjections, bassist Chris Baglivo holds down the low end, hype girls Gretchen Simms and Sarah Green prance and shout and shake a tambourine, and away we go. A-wah-oh-whoa.

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Some of the band's newer songs, the bandmates don't even know by their proper titles. They refer to them by their hooky, wordless refrains. "When You're In Town" becomes "the 'la la la' song." Tashjian's idea was to take that sing-along quality of the funny folk she played in The Bee Team, and put it in a rock song. Let the energy force you to sing along and get swept away with the nutty kids onstage.

"Part of the performance for us is bringing that fun to the crowd," says Banker, who makes a thing of leaping into the front row with Sims, shaking tambourines and dancing in the faces of the audience, getting them to dance along.

"It's always fun for them," Banker laughs. "I mean, I'm forcing that experience on them. But it goes well."

While the Dangerous Ponies are readying their full-length debut, Dr. Ponie, Medicine Ponie, for a May release, this week they're out on their first tour, playing a string of dates on a diagonal path to Texas for Gay by Gay Gay, a queer spinoff of the much-ballyhooed South by Southwest music conference.

Their sexual identity plays a role in the Ponies, but it also doesn't. In the bio blurb on their MySpace page, they put "queer and allied band" higher up than the description of their sound. Half the members are gay, half are straight. But the songs aren't "issues" songs, per se. They're just about love and life; the closest they come to providing "a queer perspective," or whatever, is the occasional silly double entendre. Which leads me to the question — what's the difference between "a queer band" and "a band, which happens to have queer members"?

"Nothing," says Tashjian pointedly. "We are just a band, which happens to have queer members. We only identify as that so it's clear that it is a safe space for kids who are queer, or who are trans, but who also like going to rock shows."

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Wed., March 25, 8 p.m., free (donations accepted), with The Armchairs, Zinc Ponie, A Yoshi Story and The Wild, The Wail, 529 Mifflin St., myspace.com/enterthewail.