My Big, Gigantic Drum Kit

“California Tuffy” - Geraldine Fibbers (Butch)

Writing a review on one of Nels Cline’s newer collaborations (with superb jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman) got me thinking about how fantastic he sounded backing Carla Bozulich on Butch.

On a very superficial level, some of the same tendencies are at play in Butch-era Geraldine Fibbers and in some incarnations of Wilco, like a slight affinity for tweaked Americana, nods to punk (remember when they used to do stuff like this?), and a restless tendency to play with form. But the end result of Cline’s work with the respective bands isn’t even in the same universe.