Sawtelles Keep CT Weird

“When I grew up there … the river was completely polluted,” Peter said on a recent interview for WNHH’s ​“Northern Remedy.” ​“It was gelatinous with different colors, and bubbling. If you drove up Route 8 toward Torrington, you’d pass the oil plant and the dye plants, and your throat would burn from chemicals. It’s completely come back from that now…. What was there when I was a kid is pretty much gone.”

“But it’s also about finding out your relationship’s ending through radio,” he added. ​“Almost like getting a secret message over the radio.”

Though the Sawtelles are a fixture on the New Haven music scene, in a sense you could say they’re defining the sound of the Naugatuck Valley. But in their studiously self-taught ways, their affinity for open strings and dense chords, they’re also tapping into the same Old Weird America that nourished Bob Dylan and Neil Young, connecting Connecticut to mountains and rivers, and the ruins of industry, farther south. And they’re still moving.

Married couple Peter and Julie Riccio have been playing together for the entire 17 years of their marriage. Earlier in their history, musician Pete Brunelli played bass, ​“and then,” as Julie said, ​“we were playing parking lots in Torrington and Brunelli went off to Germany with Doctor Dark and was playing Zappanale.” Musician Richard Brown has joined them for the past three or four years on guitar and saxophone. But for the most part, it has just been the Riccios, playing gigs all over the state — and frequently in New Haven — and writing, practicing, and recording in their house.

“Making records is integrated totally into our daily living,” Peter said. ​“We do not have a spare bedroom,” Julie said. ​“The spare bedroom is the studio. Sorry you can’t stay over. We don’t have any room.”

They met in the summer of 1997, thanks to the English rock band Psychedelic Furs — or, more specifically, Love Spit Love, the project Furs lead singer Richard Butler started while the Furs were on hiatus. Julie was married and living in Massachusetts, but her marriage was ending. She was going to see Love Spit Love, and was interested in meeting up with people who were also going to see them.

Peter was living in Connecticut. His marriage also happened to be breaking up, and he was playing drums in a Boston-based band called Pyewacket. He was looking to start socializing again, and he had heard that Love Spit Love was playing in Danbury. He scored a ticket, but couldn’t find a guest. He brought his daughter, who was 10 years old. The next day, Peter posted a review of the show on an online forum for Furs fans. Julie wrote and asked if he was going to the Boston show also. Peter said no, but he was going to be playing in Boston in the next couple weeks. He suggested Julie and her husband come see Pyewacket; if they did, he would get them on the guest list. Julie and her husband attended. Peter and Julie met and shook hands at the end of his band’s set.

They started writing each other. Peter invited Julie to dinner. She agreed. She didn’t realize how long the drive would be. ​“I was living in Shrewsbury, which is up near Wooster,” Julie said. ​“He says, ​‘it’s Exit 32 off of 84.’ And I’m thinking, ​‘I can just get on the Mass Pike, go a couple exits, and I hit 84.’ So I get on 84, Exit 1, Exit 2, Exit 3, Exit 4, and then I’m at Exit 74, and I realize, ​‘oh my God … I am going to be almost in New York State by the time I get done driving. I am never coming down here again.’”

But their relationship flourished. Julie moved to Connecticut in the summer of 1998 and she and Peter were married in 2000.

Peter had been playing music his entire life. His dad played in ​“lounge bands in the heyday of lounge bands, and we always had people rehearsing at our house.” He played drums in school jazz bands, and toured with the Hartford Youth Orchestra, playing Lincoln Center, Nashville, Knoxville, and other points south. He went to Berklee College of Music for jazz drums and he met a lot of ​“disgruntled classical musicians” and decided it wasn’t for him; ​“it was just a bad vibe,” he said.

He started playing drums in punk bands and wrote songs for them, first from behind the drums. But ​“I finally just got bugged with playing drums and having to show guitar players my weird guitar parts, which invariably they never wanted to play,” Peter said. ​“I’d be like, ​‘it’s in this tuning, and it does this and this,’ and then I’d get, ​‘well, I’m just going to play an open D chord.”

So Peter switched to guitar, learned to play and sing at the same time. He developed his affinity for open and alternate tunings. He played a couple of shows with Pete Brunelli, playing as a duo. Julie had moved down by then, and all the gear they needed was in the house ​“So I said, ​‘you have a dance background, I know you can move and count. You’re always banging something out on the steering wheel anyway. Why don’t you just try to play drums?’”

Julie started with just a snare and a tom that she stood behind. She added a cymbal as she got more comfortable. ​“Now I need another sound,” Julie said. ​“How about a closed hi-hat?” She added the kick drum last, and was seated behind a more standard drum kit, but still plays the stand-up kit for quieter gigs.

So Julie invented her own way of playing drums, just as Peter invented his own way of playing guitar. ​“Sometimes if you just walk up to an instrument, without any kind of formal training other than ​‘desire plus instinct equals how you’re going to play,’ then you can develop things that … most people would think are weird, but are natural to you,” Peter said.

The Sawtelles’ style of playing has been generating material for 17 years, across 13 albums (which you can hear and buy here) and countless shows. They’ve become fixtures on the New Haven and state scene, not only as the Sawtelles, but as musicians in other people’s groups; Peter plays drums with Lys Guillorn and Her Band and Julie has played with Zoo Front. Music right now is the balance to their day jobs, the thing they do when they’re not working. With retirement on the horizon, it’s possible that the Sawtelles will tour. Or maybe they’ll stay in the state and keep doing what they’re doing. Whatever the case, they’ll be doing it the way they want to.

“I don’t know if I want music to be a job,” Peter said. ​“No, I want it to be fun,” Julie said. ​“I don’t want to rely on it for my livelihood.”

“We can do whatever we want now, however we want to do it. We don’t have answer to anybody because it’s not a job.” Peter said. ​“We play whatever we want to play, whenever we want to play it.”

To hear the full interview with the Sawtelles, click on the file below.