Baby Flamehead

Philly's acoustic pioneer babies reignite as wise old-heads.

by M.J. Fine

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Published: Sep 21, 2010

Mark Stehle NEW FLAMES: The reunited Baby Flamehead (L-R: Chris Unrath, Eden Daniels, Dean Sabatino and Andy Bresnan) perform at Liberty Lands earlier this month.

If, as they say, youth is wasted on the young, nowhere is it more true than when it comes to music. When you're in your early 20s, you start a band because you're bored, because you want to entertain yourself, because your roommate came home with some weird stringed thing and you want to use it to make noise that no one's ever made before.

That's how it was for Baby Flamehead.

"Three of us were living in a shanty-apartment on 18th Street," recalls guitarist Chris Unrath. "Andy brought home a crazy-looking instrument."

It turned out to be a burda, a three-stringed monster bass, and Andy Bresnan played the hell out of it. In 1987, no other Philly band had a burda; few bands outside Ukraine did. And while the cool kids were devouring hardcore and grunge, Baby Flamehead was going acoustic.

"I've always thought we were one of the very early 'unplugged'-style bands," says drummer Dean Sabatino. "We had all come from various 'rock' combos and we switched it up using the acoustic stuff."

They released just one album: 1990's Life Sandwich, on the then-hip, now-defunct indie label Texas Hotel. It was filed under folk-rock at the time, but that's just because no other term really encompassed the saucy, shuffling, sensual, syncopated, surfy and sprawling sounds the quartet made.

"We got compared to 10,000 Maniacs on occasion because they also had a female singer," says frontwoman Eden Daniels. "But — seriously, folks — we sounded nothing like them."

"Thimble Full o' Nothin'" goes back and forth between spirited '50s tent revival and lonesome a cappella dirge; "Amy" is a jangly, sing-along swipe at a know-it-all loser. Twenty years later, Life Sandwich is long out of print and still sounds like nothing else.

Bresnan agrees. "Sometimes I think, 'Those young people are pretty clever!' I am kind of a fan of them now, separate from having made them back then."

Baby Flamehead garnered a loyal hometown following, but after four years and several lineup changes, they flamed out. When you live in bars and your van breaks down and your merch gets stolen, you think the universe is telling you something. That the universe is telling every other band the same thing doesn't minimize your misery one iota. When you're young, you think your next gig will be just as special.

And who's to say it won't be? Bresnan, who split first, quickly got a good thing going with Big Mess Orchestra, while Sabatino stuck with the Dead Milkmen and Daniels did time in The Shimmers. Unrath played with everybody. Baby Flamehead's legacy remained untarnished — but, apparently, incomplete.

Because when you're in your 40s, you're ready to re-create the chemistry and drop the drama. So what's different this time? "No smoking, not a whole lot of drinking," Unrath says. "We're the grown-ups now. We are the people warning you not to be like the people we were then. We sound fabulous."

Just don't hold your breath waiting for a reissue of Life Sandwich. "We probably have an album's worth of 'new' material right now, so that's more exciting to us than trying to get the old stuff out again," Daniels says.

For now, that means polishing off songs that never got recorded the first time around, but she's excited by the prospect of introducing things she wrote in the interim.

Saturday marks Baby Flamehead's fourth show since reuniting earlier this year, and time has given them the perspective they need to hold on tight this time.

"I would love to play in this band forever," says Unrath. "I really would."

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

Sat., Sept. 25, 9 p.m., $10, with Party Photographers and Anita Maj, Tritone, 1508 South St., 215-545-0475, tritonebar.com.

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