Alexinder Gunn: Press/Reviews

The Phenomenal Conundrum play Trout Lily Cafe at noon on June 5, 6 and 7. -

In these days of well-planned careers featuring well-manicured appearances and well-kept personalities, designed by well-managed curators of societal conveniences meant to make all things acceptable, palatable and negotiable, finding a creative space to do what one will becomes a daunting challenge. For a couple of musicians traveling on the road, the challenge melted with a choice to not go with the flow of average American lifestyles, but to follow the natural course of inner conscience and choose a path against the obvious grain, one leading toward a heartfelt and sincere relationship to the surrounding world.

The twosome of Raymond and Alexinder work under the moniker of the Phenomenal Conundrum as a rare breed of entertainer, one not attached to monetary gains but to fulfilling an artistic reach. Living in the Washington, D.C., area for the last decade, the guys recently decided to “travel the country playing music.” In playing original music self-described as “folk/soul grunge/death pop” while being managed by “God,” what may appear flippant underlies a conviction to act according to personal beliefs rather than standard cultural policy.

In a 1995 Ford Ranger loaded with an assortment of instruments including, but not limited to, “an acoustic 6-string, an acoustic 12-string, a very good electric guitar, a djembe, a set of congas, (2) violins, a banjo, and a tambourine,” the fellows make the bold claim of, “we are ready to play right now,” and I can tell they mean it. But playing music is not all they do. Within the spirit of traveling to experience, they stay in an area for weeks, helping out in the community, jamming on music and touching lives.

“We’ve been in the Midwest lately and working our way to Texas,” says Raymond. “We heard Springfield was a cool place to hang out and made some calls to get started.”

One of the calls went to Kate Hawkes at the Trout Lily Café, a longtime supporter of local acoustic original music and always a friend of the creative arts.

“They called me after Googling coffee shops and Trout Lily came up,” says Hawkes. “They sounded interesting, like some gypsy hippies, so I worked them in at our noontime Original Acoustic Lunch next week on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday” (June 5, 6 and 9).

The Phenomenal Conundrum is also booked Thursday, June 9, at the Keg (11th and Ash). Expect them to pop up at a few more places around town, plus be interviewed on WQNA’s Fly-over Zone some Saturday morning soon. Check the Trout Lily Café Facebook page for details. According to Raymond, the guys will hit all the open mics in town, make acquaintances and start finding jobs, musically related and otherwise. For accommodations, they find a quiet spot to park, then sleep in the Ranger.

“We do roofing, build decks and help out tons during the day, then play music at night,” says Raymond. “We get to do a lot and play with the best musicians in the world no one’s ever heard of everywhere we go.”

Armed with a small digital recorder and permission of the players, the diatonic duo records performances then posts them at their Reverbnation website. As they continue to attract more listeners, those musicians “no one’s ever heard of” receive exposure through sharing by the PC’s ever-expanding network of friends and the extensive reach of the Internet.

“I’m 35 and he’s 24 and we both agreed this is what we want to do with our lives,” says Raymond, explaining they were and are influenced greatly by the writings and lifestyle of folksinger and activist Woody Guthrie. “We’re reaching lots of people, crossing paths and connecting while doing what we think is a good way to live.”

Contact Tom Irwin at tirwin@illinoistimes.com.

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The truck belongs to Alexinder Gunn, and that makes the driver’s seat his.

“That’s my room, right over there,” says his partner, Raymond Husmann, nodding to the passenger seat. It’s not much bigger.

Squished paperbacks and heavy metal CDs are stacked and wedged in every crevice of the cab. Toothbrushes sprout from the side storage pockets. Jutting from an A/C duct is a smoking stick of incense, which keeps the place from smelling like an ashtray. The back bed is stuffed with guitars, djembes, a banjo, a violin, and the rest of Gunn and Husmann’s worldly possessions.

Husmann and Gunn are a two-man acoustic folk band from Fredericksburg, Va., called The Phenomenal Conundrum. They are not well known there, or here, or anywhere, for that matter.

But they have an optimistic plan to change that. Instead of performing around their hometown, or embarking on a one-time tour, Husmann and Gunn have decided to live on the road, encamping like gypsies in cities around the southeast. They spend a few weeks here, a fortnight there, sleeping in their truck and booking shows as they go. They arrived in Tampa in January; it’s their fifth stop in six months, following stays in Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale and two stints in Orlando.

They are homeless, but they don’t panhandle. They work the angles, but they refuse to be pushy. They make fast friends, crash on couches, work odd jobs for food and sell CDs wrapped in brown paper bags. They wash in public bathrooms, brush in public parking lots, smoke hand-rolled cigarettes packed with cheap tobacco and sleep side-by-side in Gunn’s Ranger.

“We’re looked at as bums, as hobos, in the eyes of a lot of people,” says Husmann, 35. “But it’s a wonderful existence if your mind can gear itself that way.”

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Gunn, 23, was born in Aberdeen, Wash., where Kurt Cobain lived beneath a bridge as a teenager. He started a metal band at age 16, but was kicked out, he says, “because I wasn’t very good at it.” He found his calling in the folk music of Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie, and made pilgrimages to folk festivals around the country.

When Gunn met Husmann, he was already a character of some repute in Fredericksburg. Born on a farm in Iowa, Husmann moved around the country in adulthood, working a series of odd jobs — cello making, metal building construction, a stint in Blockbuster’s corporate headquarters. In Virginia, he played in an “improv metal band,” booked concerts at bars and lived in his car, a ’93 Buick Regal, which he kept parked behind a used bookstore.

Gunn and Husmann had been playing together only a month when they agreed to hit the road.

“Once I decided I wanted to do music, that’s all I put my focus on,” Gunn says. “The only way to do it in this day and age, and make money, is to go out on the road.”

“If it ends up failing miserably,” Husmann says, “you’re living in your car, so ... how do you fail?”

Living without a schedule has its privileges. Wherever each day takes them, they can afford to take the scenic route, stopping to chat with artists, the homeless and other interesting characters along the way. They park their truck in Walmart parking lots and other public sites, but some nights, they get lucky. They’ve slept at the beach in Daytona, a nightclub in Sanford and a frat house in Orlando.

To make ends meet, they pick up work when it comes. The owner of a sub shop in Ybor City gave them food in exchange for cleaning his restaurant. A man in West Tampa let them crash at his home recording studio; in return, they’re spreading the word about his fledgling music business.

And at night, they’re doing what they set out to do: Play music.

Gunn has a folksy warble that’s soulful beyond his years, in the vein of Ray LaMontagne. Husmann sings and plays guitar, too, calling his sound “soul grunge.” When one plays, the other taps his fingers on the djembe, or rattles a tambourine, or steps outside for a smoke break. Between them, they have more than six hours of original music in their repertoire, enough to perform until closing time at many bars.

In each city, they research bars with friendly open-mic nights, such as Sacred Grounds Coffee House or The Pegasus Lounge in Tampa. They cold-call bars, asking for stage time on their slowest night — that led to a weekly spot on Thursdays at Gaspar’s Grotto in Ybor City. At every stop, local musicians offer suggestions for where to go next.

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Why do people take a chance on them?

It doesn’t hurt that, in spite of their scruffy appearances, Gunn and Husmann act nothing like prima donna musicians. They say they rarely drink and don’t do drugs. Husmann reads the Bible almost every day, and says he’s been celibate for eight years. For fun, they listen to a shortwave radio in Gunn’s pickup.

“We’re articulate,” Husmann says. “We’re kind. We’re not swearing and spitting, and we try to look somewhat presentable. People are pretty quickly willing to take a chance on that.”

Sacred Grounds owner Karen Lowman said her shop exists to host artists like The Phenomenal Conundrum, who are happy to tour with no money, as long as they can do what they love. “They want to make music, and they have faith that whatever they need is going to come their way.”

Lowman sees a lot of artists who live this way. One singer-songwriter she’s booked sleeps in a trailer she hauls from town to town. Someday, Lowman said she’d like to get a building where traveling musicians can stay when they’re in Tampa.

"This is how people used to go from town to town,” she said. “This is what happened before there were hotels. This is what happened before there were paid venues to go to. This is where we all came from. The practice of their existence reminds us of where we all came from.”

It is a valuable skill, Husmann says, knowing how to live on the road — befriending strangers, hustling for jobs, learning to survive without a permanent home. And it is a skill that he says could matter more in years to come.

“The more we travel, we’re meeting people who are either being forced into this type of lifestyle, or who are being more open to bartering or working for food,” he says. “ We’re learning how to do it in each town.”

Tampa has been fair to the Phenomenal Conundrum, they say. Not as productive as Orlando, but fair. They’ve met friends, made contacts, even laid down some studio tracks. But money is tight. The most frustrating thing is not being able to afford a $6 cover to see another local band.

They’ll stick around through February, and after that, it’s off to Nashville. But first, they’ll swing through Chapel Hill, where a college student they met in Orlando has promised to help them record their first studio album at the University of North Carolina. It’s an exciting opportunity — one they wouldn’t have found if not for this road experiment — and who knows where it might lead?

Exactly.

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You can catch The Phenomenal Conundrum at one of these Tampa venues:

Friday: Pegasus Lounge

Tuesday: Sacred Grounds Coffee House, 8 p.m. to midnight.

Feb. 24: Gaspar’s Grotto, 8 p.m. to close

Feb. 25: Sacred Grounds

-- Jay Cridlin, tbt*. Photos: Luis Santana, tbt*

Rough translation, i will have a better one up soon.



Alexinder Gunn may have been singing that folk music is dead, but as long as there are talented Alexinder's walking, richly from exhaustive own emotional life, runs this genre provisionally no risks. Alexinder loves Jack Kerouac and westerns, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, Damien Rice and Eva Cassidy. In his first solo album would be sporadic echoes to capture, among other influences. Melancholy and desire are inherent to his songs, all of which he wrote himself. He also producing this album, which he tackles two jobs simultaneously and Live occurred where he could. He comes from Fredericksburg, Virginia, and after wanderings in the club of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey followed with performances at festivals as crowning the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival this year. In his songs, it processes liefdesthema's, hartzeer, bitterness and desire, the whole gamut of gemoedsschakeringen. He waadt if it were in troubled waters, reaching down to vertroosting or salvation. In 'Cold Water Comin' he screams with a passionate singing style, strange for a young singer-songwriter, barely twenty passed. That intensity declares himself "as being caught by the music ', a disease that affects him from a young age digested. His decision to be a musician was already down when he saw six-year age Garth Brooks singing and Bob Dylan's "Hurricane" meant absolutely a revelation. First he made a detour through 16 years at a rockbandje to be closed. And with a local band from Stafford he made the CD "Mercy" when he was 19. But the direction he is taking, stands for him as the right, is aversion to loud music, metal and hardcore. For the guidance of his songs makes himself tortured with electric or acoustic guitar, harmonica, keyboard and drums, sometimes orchestral through. The reverberation of his voice often stresses the desolate, as in 'The Streets Of This Town' with a nostalgic appeal. Also 'Leavin' Home 'goes to the throat because of the defenceless incorporated doorschemert. In that sense, he leans more to the bluesbeleving, than in the folkballades example of Woody Guthrie. Al brings Alexinder in "I Know Your Here 'a eigensoortig eretribuut with this folktroubadour. Alexinder you can see as the young version of Martyn Joseph of Peter Case, though his lyrics betray a maturity, unusual for a eenentwintigjarige. 'Folk Music', it's in the Voice and the Mind Of Alexinder Gunn. Bijlange not yet dead.
Marcie