Ruckus at the Vail House

House shows are nothing new for Vail cooperative house in Kerrytown. Vail house has an ideal setup for loud shows and parties, existing dingily in its own cottage-like universe, chronically unnoticed by police or neighbors. Though the coop sits in the middle of a student-housing neighborhood close to the city center and campus, an unkempt wilderness surrounds it on all sides, allowing it to stretch peacefully almost across the city block – breaking the neat rows of gravel and garages unnoticed. An enormous, solid old oak tree sits between the house and the sidewalk, dwarfing the house with warped perspective. When I lived there for a year, I learned to love the wood paneled, windowed living room and the washed out glory of the faded, split and mended 30-year-old furniture and carpeting, the shelves filled with forgotten knick-knacks and musty books, objects that hadn’t touched hands in decades.

After a month, I had learned to navigate the dark hallways without pause – I could fly from my room to the basement to the kitchen in near complete darkness while my friends felt along the walls, lost within the horizontal labyrinth. The vanguard of trees, shrubs and grasses dimmed the sunlight during the day and, and at night on the second-floor porch the smoke from a half dozen spliffs floated upwards in one ghostly mass while the riffs from a mandolin, a banjo, a guitar rippled around us. Trash and recycling spilled out of their containers, the floors could turn a bare foot black in minutes, and nobody cared enough to not sit on the large tubs of flour and sugar in the kitchen while they drank whiskey and ate garlic toast on stale pretzel rolls.

My memories of Vail – both frustrated and fond – came rushing back to me when I returned to the house for the Frontier Ruckus living room show tour this past Friday. Frontier Ruckus, the verbose Ann Arbor based folk band, has been touring the country doing a series of intimate living room shows. After fans purchased tickets on line, the venue was revealed to them (though Vail House residents and ‘friends and family,’ myself included, were admitted for free). Openers Fred Thomas, a solo Michigan acoustic musician, and Wych Elm, Vail’s folk-band-in residence turned actual folk band, played on a ‘stage’ consisting of a carpet against the wall, with an audience of 75-100 strangers and friends sitting on chairs and couches or standing against the wall.

Then Frontier Ruckus took the stage, feeding off the already warm and intimate energy established in the audience. As the band played songs from their three albums, front man Matt Milia offering vignettes and stories to accompany his lyrically dense anthems of Midwestern angst, while David Winston Jones provided an energetic banjo and Zach Nichols rotating between trumpet, musical saw, and the Vail basement’s defiantly un-tunable grand piano. Former member Anna Burch joined with the band to provide the harmonies, a key addition to the band’s sound. I had seen Frontier Ruckus before without Anna’s accompaniment, and I noticed how much her voice added – both amplifying the acoustic sound and complicating the melodies. I found myself paying more attention to the singer throughout the show, as she performed unprotected by a musical instrument, hands occasionally clasped behind her back, completely comfortable in the space she occupied.

Though Vail often has live music performances, usually they take place during a party or in a party-like atmosphere – people thrash and dance, holding red cups, while the amplified musicians sweat, either hollering through or grooving to the chaos. I once spent most of the Vail House Band’s fourth of July porch show anxiously, drunkenly protecting a cello player who had set up her expensive instrument too close to the keg. This show was different, intimate, respectful. People hadn’t come to drink and party, accompanied by music, they had actually come to see music that they were interested in. I was oddly touched, realizing that of all the house shows I’ve attended at Vail – including shows that I had fun at, shows that took place when I lived at the house, shows of bands I’m more dedicated to than Frontier Ruckus–  this may have been the one that I was the most present for.