Twenty years ago, one could hardly have blamed Chan Poling if he’d walked away from a music career altogether. His band, pioneering Minneapolis punk-poppers The Suburbs, was in its second abortive go-round with a major record label—this time, A&M. The ’Burbs’ primary ally at the label had left the company, often the kiss of death for an act not well established at a label of A&M’s size, and the band’s phone messages were going unreturned.
“We were right at the height of our frustration then,” Poling recalled last month, during a phone conversation. “It got to be a strain, trying to figure out what the label wanted and what radio wanted.”
The Suburbs were dropped from A&M a short time later, after which the band dissolved. It occurred to Poling at the time that the only way for him to stay happily (and gainfully) employed in the music biz was to concentrate on what he wanted to do.
It’s a strategy that’s paid off with an eclectic string of projects: Poling has scored productions for Theatre de la Jeune Lune; co-composed a musical (Heaven) for Rent producer and former Ordway Center for the Performing Arts president Kevin McCollum; taught music at Moorhead State University, the University of Minnesota, and MacPhail Center for the Arts; written scores and incidental music for movies and TV shows ranging from indie documentaries to Melrose Place; released a solo CD (Calling All Stars); participated in sporadic reunions of the still-beloved Suburbs; and founded a successful downtown studio/jingle house, Pixel Farm Music.
The dexterity needed to cover so much ground is born of more than the musician’s ever-present need to hustle up work; in Poling’s case, it’s a matter of genetic imperative. “Music is in my blood, my biological makeup,” he said. “I wake up thinking about music. I have no choice in the matter; this is what I have to do.”
It’s the rare musician who remains vital even while sustaining a comfortable income from music well past his fortieth birthday. (Poling turns fifty next year.) He has, at the same time, avoided the grinds of touring and running a gauntlet of underpaying saloon gigs.
Poling’s newest passion, at first glance, looks like the hoariest refuge of all for a working musician: a cover band. The New Standards, however, is an entirely different animal from the goodtime combos littering the suburban-bar circuit. Along with Semisonic bassist John Munson and vibraphonist Steve Roehm, Poling is using the band to unearth pop and rock gems from the past few decades that can hang with the evergreen tunes of our grandparents’ generation—in other words, new standards. That might mean anything from playing up the timeless descending chord sequence of Mott the Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes” to tweezing the melody from the roar of Blur’s “Song 2.”
The project started a few years ago during some routine riffing between old friends and music chums. At one point, Poling and Munson found themselves marveling at the structure and nuances of the great (if little-remembered) 1972 Dan Hicks track, “I Scare Myself.”
“I was thrilled that John knew something that obscure and that our common musical songbook was that wide,” Poling recalled. “The next time he came over, he brought his stand-up bass, and we sat around all day going, ‘What about this Kurt Weill song? Do you know this one by Lou Reed?’ We just started playing them in this raw, simple style. And we started realizing that a number of songs, like [the Replacements’] ‘I Will Dare,’ have a real swingy, jazzy feel to them, even if they weren’t written in that style.”
The two agreed that Roehm made for the trio’s obvious third leg, his vibraphone being a natural fit with the piano and bass, and at the urging of Poling’s wife, Eleanor Mondale, the group started gigging and recording. In 2005, a self-titled CD was released, and The New Standards started making waves in unexpected places. A residency at Joe’s Pub in New York resulted in a prominent profile of the band in the “Night Out With” column in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times.
The band has a new album in the preproduction stages, and it just finished another series of New York shows. Having recently hired Wilco’s booking agency, and in the process of fielding label overtures, The New Standards has quickly become more than a side project.
Nevertheless, said Poling, “It’s still all about fun, because we’re all pretty easygoing, and we share a similar vibe and similar tastes. We have no qualms about taking a song we love and improving it. Or wrecking it.”
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