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Arts & Entertainment

For Dutch Pink, Ballad-y Piano Songs Transition into Rock 'n' Roll

Meet some of Ferndale's finest and see them live at the Pig & Whiskey event Saturday evening.

The Ferndale quartet Dutch Pink never takes the easy route.

This is a band that makes sure every show is a happening, having hosted multiple mobile performances via busloads of gear and audience members to handfuls of venues.

This band spent months of long nights rehearsing to learn two dozen new songs, purposely kept hidden from any of its booked live performances in 2010, so it could record these songs, unheard by any ear, onto a live double album recorded at Cliff Bell's on a snow-smothered pair of bitterly cold Monday evenings in downtown Detroit.

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"Getting ready for that was like boot camp," said singer/pianist/guitarist Dustin Leslie.

Drummer Scottie Stone considers his first live show to have been "trial by fire," having to gird himself after a night of no sleep for the band's six-hour, dawn-to-noon performances upon the steps of Cobo Hall for the Detroit Marathon, out in the blustery chilled October air.

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The band, formed by Leslie and bassist Clyde Mashinter in 2004 with their lifelong friend and co-founder drummer Dave Iannuzzi, added Stone and guitarist Joel McCune, who, between the two of them combined, perform in six other bands between them.

"Everything is bigger, better and," Leslie nods with raised eyebrows, "surprisingly easier. The songs are stronger because there's a new kind of depth to them. They're more of a tapestry or have more layers."

At an initiating rehearsal for Stone, Mashinter recalled whispering into his ear, "This is what I'm feeling about where we could go, but don't let anybody know when we go through it."

Midway through, Mashinter said, Leslie turned and looked, widened eyes, at the two. "I knew it then, yep, this is the band!" said Mashinter, who works at the the Emory.

"The goal is to retool songs in such a way that you can retool them every time you play it and still maintain the structure," McCune said.

McCune, a secret-weapon six stringer who characteristically finger-picks his signature blend of psychedelic noodling and raucous bluesy shreds, said he enjoys playing in multiple bands (his current other half is Ferndale's Duende). Vintage shoppers might spot him at Regeneration on the border of Pleasant Ridge.

"I get noisy or gentle or melodic in both bands, but maybe in Dutch Pink, I play slide or fake a pedal steel and get more airy, while I get more raucous or psychedelic in Duende," he said.

"Each band makes the other band stronger," he said.

"If I wasn't in so many bands," said Stone, who also plays in Ferndale's Pupils and Eleanora, "I'd drive the one band I was in completely insane. I just have so many things and styles that I love and like to employ musically. It fits me."

Leslie, who neighbors can find tending the bar at Sakana, said this band wouldn't work without these four distinct personalities, talents and energies.

He credits McCune for partly motivating him to move back to Detroit to start this band. Leslie had moved to Phoenix in 2001 and took Iannuzzi's advice to see the touring band The Hypno-Twists because he thought they would appeal to Leslie's homesick reverence for inimitable Detroit rock 'n' roll. The Hypno-Twists' lead guitarist was McCune, and, it so happened, the Hypno-Twists' biggest fan was — another momentary Phoenix settler, who would later form Duende and finally introduce Leslie and McCune in '07.

Leslie said he is able to experiment with the expression this "four-piece" provides, which he said is a blessing for him since his talents are rooted in the written word. (Dutch Pink once translated Shakespeare's sonnets, word for word, into their own realms of gritty blues-rock).

"The songs felt brand-new; I relearned my parts, having not to play as much. So I didn't rush lyrics, I could rethink my vocal delivery. Ballad-y, singer-songwriter-y piano song transitions into a rock 'n' roll song."

Performing (and recording) live at Cliff Bell's, a jazz bar in Detroit's Fox Town area, was a formative moment for the band. All the members felt electrified by the night, not only seeing their friends (a "jeans and a T-shirt" crowd) come out, dedicatedly, dressed to the nines in suits and gowns, but also experiencing the emotion of charging through these songs they'd formed.

The performers said they felt they were on the verge of tears. Mashinter said audience members came up to him — "and these were dudes you'd think wouldn't even cry at their mom's funerals" — to say a certain song brought on tears.

"That validated all of our hard work," Mashinter said.

The band has enough material to record what would be its fourth LP. Dutch Pink released its second LP, Times New Roman, in the spring of 2010, while the Cliff Bell's concert album, currently being mixed and mastered, will be its third proper album. The goal is to enter the studio in late autumn and release its Cliff Bell's songs on double vinyl around New Year 2012.

Dutch Pink performs with The Detroit Cobras, FAWN and Big Mess as part of Saturday evening's entertainment at the Pig & Whiskey event. Entertainment for the Pig & Whiskey begins at 5 p.m.

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