Old roles, new rock in Pa. Dutch country
Frog Holler gives voice to a generation's conflict.

By Geoffrey Himes
FOR THE INQUIRER

STOUCHSBURG, Pa. - A new sound is stirring in Berks County, a sound the locals call "Pennsylvania Dutch rock." Stouchsburg, a tiny hamlet 18 miles west of Reading, is one of many battlefields in the region's struggle between agriculture and suburban sprawl. The town's old Black Dog Cafe represents one of the area's few compromises, seeing duty as a gentrified restaurant during the dinner hour before reverting to its former life as a neighborhood tavern after 9. On the Thursday before Christmas, Berks County's best-known rock band, Frog Holler, is squeezed into a corner of the Black Dog to play an unplugged set for the late crowd.

The six-member outfit - which comes to the Tin Angel on Friday - also blends the old and new, for it is an Americana combo that began life as a bluegrass group. The band's origins are especially obvious in the Black Dog's acoustic setting. With a left-handed strum, Darren Schlappich kicks off a song from the band's latest CD, Idiots (Record Cellar). "Pennsylvania is my home," bellows Schlappich, a burly man with a dark, bushy beard, dressed in a rumpled plaid shirt and faded jeans. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder the length of the narrow bar, the audience takes its cue and joins in: "Pennsylvania's where I was born. I'm PA Dutch, and I ain't learned much, but I'm willing to try." As the chorus shifts into John Kilgore's guitar riff, the crowd whoops and hollers as if it's just finished "The Star-Spangled Banner" before a Phillies game.

With its "ain't learned much" tagline, "Pennsylvania" is an odd choice as the unofficial anthem for the young adults of Berks, Lebanon and Lancaster Counties. The song's tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation reflects the area's mixed feelings about its heritage. Still smarting over wisecracks such as "dumb as a Dutchman" and struggling with their parents' and grandparents' traditional ways, Frog Holler's following of 22- to 34-year-olds (the same age range as the band's members) has discovered there might be some value in the old way of life after all.

"I call our music 'Pennsylvania Dutch rock,' " Schlappich explains, "because nothing else seemed to fit. We're not a real bluegrass band because we have amps and drums, and we're not your usual rock band because we have mandolin and banjo. But most of my songs are about where I live and the people that I know, so the Pennsylvania Dutch label seemed the best description."
Though Pennsylvania Dutch technically refers to the Amish and Mennonites, locals use the term in a broader sense to refer to any of the area's conservative working-class German Americans who remain stubbornly loyal to the old foods (scrapple, shoo-fly pie), the old idioms ("Redd up your room!" "Do you want to go with?"), and the old values (including a respect for hard work and a suspicion of outsiders).

"When I started playing music," Schlappich, 34, recalls. "I met all these creative people eating different kinds of food and living without TVs. They said, 'Try this, try that,' and I said, 'I don't want to try that; I know what I like.' That's when I realized I had a lot of PA Dutch inside me. "My music is about those two sides of myself - the creative side and the Dutch side. I don't want to be one of those old farmers who make remarks about the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Reading. But I also don't want to be one of those suburbanites who are glad to see the old farms replaced by another mall."

Those mixed feelings make Idiots, Frog Holler's third release, one of last year's most original roots albums. Posing a series of questions - Should we sell the farm or keep it? Should we stay put or move to California? Should we go to church or to the barroom? Should we embrace the local traditions or rebel? - Schlappich's conversational baritone promises no easy answers. Unlike so many modern-rock albums that could be from anywhere, Idiots could only have come from Berks County.

Growing up in West Wyomissing, outside Reading, "I wanted out of here so bad," Schlappich admits. "You couldn't see live music except for hair-metal bands. Woody Allen's movies never came here. But I never left, because I never had anywhere to go."
Eventually, the Shippensburg State grad says, "I realized I'm a Dutchman at heart; I belong here. And if I'm going to write songs that are true, I'm going to write about the people and places here." Idiots begins with "Adams Hotel Road," about the rural road in Shoemakersville where Frog Holler used to rehearse in Schlappich's rented farmhouse. It describes how many of the nearby farms and taverns have been torn down by Berks County developers. Over Mike Lavdanski's elegiac banjo, Schlappich sings wistfully, "There at the mouth of the Hotel Road, the Adamses lived and the Adamses sold, out to a deal, left out in the cold, the ghosts of the bar and the stories it told."

Frog Holler now rehearses in Breinigsville, Upper Macungie - just over the Lehigh side of the county line - in a 19th-century farmhouse rented by bassist Josh Sceurman. From a kitchen decorated with hex signs and a Jimi Hendrix poster, you can look over the porch and across a field to a massive sheet-metal warehouse. "This farmhouse will be gone in a year," predicts Sceurman, 28, who grew up in Whitehall, near Allentown. "Those warehouses have been creeping closer and closer each year, and the old widow who owns this house has already told me that she's going to sell." Sceurman plans to stay in the Berks County area. "My philosophy is that if everybody like us leaves, there will be no interesting people left. There will be no sense of community left. Sometimes it feels like all the old ways are dying out. My great-grandparents were the last ones in my family to speak the Pennsylvania Dutch language. But I've always been proud of where I'm from, and I want to help preserve that in my music. One of the things I like about Darren's songwriting is its sense of place."

One thing that defines that place is the Appalachian Trail, which runs through Berks County. With its forests and farms, the area is a sort of northern extension of Appalachia. Perhaps that's why bluegrass struck such an emotional chord with Schlappich.
He was 29 when he first saw the bluegrass duo Norman and Nancy Blake at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem in 1996. He was so bowled over by the intensity and rootedness of their music that he was an instant convert. Schlappich pulled out an acoustic guitar that he had never learned to play and was soon picking out bluegrass tunes and writing new words to old melodies. Before long he was attending open-mike nights in Kutztown, home to the county's liberal arts college.

The influential pop artist Keith Haring was from Kutztown, Schlappich points out, "and the town has this whole artistic underground that I had never known about, even though I only lived a few miles away. That's part of being Pennsylvania Dutch; you get stuck in your ways and ignore the world around you. "But once I discovered this whole scene, I couldn't get enough of it. And bluegrass was part of it, because it was creative and yet it was rural, like the small towns around Kutztown."

Schlappich was so eager to play his favorite bluegrass songs and his own tunes that he formed Chigliac Feedhorn with Van Wagner. Before 1996 was over, the duo had released the 15-song Dunawetter, which included seven Schlappich originals. When Wagner went off to Penn State in the fall, the duo became a trio with the addition of banjoist Lavdanski and acoustic bassist Will Dennis.
The trio went through several names before settling on Frog Holler. Lavdanski brought along guitarist Kilgore, a former bandmate from the Saucony Creek Ramblers, a legendary Kutztown bluegrass jam band. Frog Holler was an acoustic quartet for three months before Schlappich decided he needed a drummer, who turned out to be Toby Martin. Before long, Dennis was replaced by Sceurman on electric bass.

"I started out as a bluegrass traditionalist," Schlappich confesses, but "my old tastes began to reassert themselves. Before I started playing music, I had been a serious record collector, and my collection was rock records, from the Beatles and Stones to the Replacements and the Clash. Most of the guys in the band had a similar background, so it was an easy transition to make."
Before Sceurman came on board, Frog Holler released its debut album, the 19-cut Couldn't Get Along, in 1998. Fiddler Ted Fenstermacher - who has since left - was on hand for the 1999 album, Adams Hotel Road (Record Cellar). And mandolinist/steel-guitarist Todd Bartolo was a band member when Idiots was recorded. Daniel Bower has replaced Martin on drums.

Frog Holler isn't the only Pennsylvania Dutch rock act. Several band members have side projects, and Schlappich wrote a song, "Spiders & Planes," about James Jewell, a Berks County songwriter who addresses similar concerns. On "Reading," from his latest album, Instruments and Controls (Antenna), Jewell describes the last passenger train from the city and the last whistle of the stocking factory as invitations to leave. But on "Realfriend," he sings, "One of these days we're gonna wake up and this will all be gone into thin air. Wouldn't it be funny if we were still livin' here?"

Renewed interest in the area's traditions even extends to the lively visual arts community that has sprung up around Kutztown State University. One of the leading figures in that scene is Dave "Big Dutch" Nally, whose colored-pencil drawing can be found in the Idiots CD booklet. With its bright, cartoonish renditions of Reading steel mills, Kutztown brick houses, a Shoemakersville tavern, a Virginville barn, chickens, cats and ghosts, it's a perfect counterpart to the songs.

"When I first heard Frog Holler, I knew Darren's songs were hitting on themes I was dealing with in my artwork," Nally says at his Reading home. "My paintings aren't full of hex signs but of my grandmother fussing around the kitchen, unconcerned with how fatty the food is." Like Schlappich, "I wanted out, too," Nally admits, "but I never had the ways or means. I knew I was going to work in a factory, and now I work at a steel mill full of Dutchmen. But I've always had my artwork, so I've always had to deal with those two cultures colliding, the Pennsylvania Dutch and the hippie-bohemian thing."

"Frog Holler could only have happened here," Schlappich insists. "Only the musicians around here could have connected with playing these songs, and only the audiences around here could have connected with hearing these songs." "In Philadelphia," Nally agrees, "Darren would have been bombarded with so many influences that it would have been hard to hang on to his own thing. But here in Berks County, you're in such a cultural vacuum that you have the room to develop your own ideas. If he had been in a big city, he might be Ryan Adams by now, but you would never have had Frog Holler."

Many of the patrons in the Black Dog Cafe struggle with the same questions as Schlappich and Nally: Should they settle down and conform to the conservative way of life in Pennsylvania Dutch country, or should they move where there's more tolerance for their brand of rowdy bohemia? Or is it possible to stay put in a rural area and still pursue an unconventional life?
Those questions are posed comically on the boisterous bluegrass number "Choose a Path," in which Schlappich asks his churchgoing neighbors Elly May and Cindy Lou if they will "take the straight and narrow or join us down below . . . where there's cheatin', fightin', smokin', and drinking beer."

The question is taken more seriously on the album's most powerful number, "Stray." Over a gorgeous, slow-moving melody, the singer addresses his girlfriend, a local who can't wait to get out of her small town and hit the road. Schlappich hopes that she'll realize what rural Pennsylvania has to offer, but she breaks his heart with her reply: "I'm not a housecat; I'm a stray."
The front and back covers of Idiots reinforce that metaphor with black-and-white photos of stray cats from around Schlappich's house in New Jerusalem, Berks County. The music inside is so smart, so catchy, so rooted in its home turf that it's clear that the members of Frog Holler are no idiots. They are not strays. They're housecats.