A Weekly Magazine

REVIEW

SMOKED CHEESE
Posted On: 3/10/2009
A celebrated Austin lounge group re-creates itself in Richmond.
by Brent Baldwin

The Recliners retrofit Cream, Billy Idol and Beastie Boys into lounge versions at Café Diem every Friday.
They are: bandleader and founder Russell Young on keyboards and trumpet, drummer CJ Wolfe, bassist Justin Poroszok, guitarist Ray Dilello and cocktail-shaking, bubble-making singer Joseph Weindl.

The Richmond music scene could always use a little more good humor. All that math rock, jazz and metal is so damn serious.
Enter The Recliners, your new lounge band, playing cheesy (but technically adept), oddly soothing versions of popular modern songs — be they rock, rap or disco — in a swinging Vegas style full of bossa nova and cha-cha rhythms. Maybe you’ve heard L.A. comedy act Richard Cheese performing Nirvana with boozy, Dean Martin-like authority?
These guys were onto the shtick even earlier, in the mid-’90s, when they filled weekly gigs at clubs like Ego’s and the Ritz in Austin, Texas as well as multiple West Coast tours from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Phoenix and Vegas.
The original Recliners won numerous awards from the Austin Chronicle and the South by Southwest Music Awards, including being voted "Best Lounge/Swing Band", “Best Cover Act” and “Best Wedding Band.”
Actress Sandra Bullock, who has a house in Austin, hired them for her 2000 movie, “Miss Congeniality.”

Founder and principal arranger Russell Young, who plays keyboards and trumpet for the group, grew up in Richmond, where he once played in the Monarchs, a rock quartet that relocated to Austin and wound up backing Ronnie Lane of Small Faces fame and Bobby Keys, sax-man for The Rolling Stones---touring nationally as "Ronnie Lane and The Tremors with Bobby Keys". (You can find more info in "The History of Rock-n-Roll; Vol 12)
With his tinted shades and lounge jacket, Young looks the part of a late-show musical director. Sitting at a booth in the smoky confines of the Devil’s Triangle bar Café Diem, where his locally constituted version of the Recliners plays every Friday night, Young gives the lowdown on why he left one of the best music scenes in the country to return to his hometown a year and a half ago.
“I fell in love years and years ago and came back to be with her and now she hates my guts,” Young says, displaying the cheerful optimism of someone who has weathered these storms before.
“But I love it here. … one of the biggest differences performing is more people go out and support local music in Austin.”

Raoul Hernandez, music editor at the Austin Chronicle, that city’s alternative weekly, remembers the Recliners as spearheading the swing and lounge scene of the late ’90s in Austin. He recalls writing a feature about Thin Lizzy bassist Phil Lynott in which he recommended the Recliners’ cover of “The Boys Are Back in Town.”“A very well-done lounge version — almost like Hoagy Carmichael,” Hernandez says. “It really brought out what a great song that was, how it could’ve been a ’40s tune.”

The Recliners’ irreverent live show is all about hearing your favorite pop songs in a new light.
Since the beginning, Young has been writing down audience requests on bar napkins, which he keeps filed at home.“Not every song lends itself to this,” he says. “We take a three-chord song and arrange it with 12 chords. … when we first started, sometimes I had to record it and track every part myself, like on Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry,’ to prove to the band we could do it.”

Having formed the Recliners as a joke while working as a studio engineer and producer in Austin (“I always wanted to play on ‘The Love Boat,’” Young says), he now treats the group as a mobile project, with versions in both Austin and Richmond. When he resettled here, he found several talented musicians via Craigslist.

The Richmond version of the Recliners has a new album coming out titled “White Room” (yes, after the Cream song). The group’s other records have received commercial radio airplay throughout the country, Young says, with three songs currently in heavy rotation on Sirius Radio and Dish Network.

Tonight the band sounds like it’s played together for years, its first set featuring snazzy, cocktail versions of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper” and Billy Idol’s “White Wedding,” before a heartwarming version of Nirvana’s “Come as You Are” featuring sultry crooning from debonair lead singer, Joseph Weindl.
My eyes burn from the smoky haze, but the last thing I see appears to be a trio of Octomoms shimmying beneath a sputtering bubble machine while the band plays a nearly unrecognizable version of the Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!).

”Not your usual Friday night bar tunes in Richmond. The Recliners play Café Diem, 600 N. Sheppard St., Friday night April 3rd, 2009 at 9:30. Free. 353-2500.