After the painful breakup of his first serious band in the fall of 1997, Adam Busch was sure about one thing: he didn’t want to start another one. His new project, Manishevitz, would be a name for him to perform and record under, backed by whatever other players he could get to help him out. But despite his best efforts, the group that will join Busch onstage at the Hideout Saturday to celebrate the release of the third Manishevitz record has evolved into something more than a collection of old friends and hired hands.
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Busch had formed the Curious Digit, an avant-pop combo, with some roommates in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1995. They put out two records but fell apart just after the release of the second. “The band dynamic was weird,” he says. “We were all superclose friends, but we weren’t very good at making decisions together, and it was really hard for us to move ahead. Everyone had a different conception of how much money to spend on the band and how much we should tour.” A particularly nasty falling-out with one member of the group led Busch to finally pull the plug. “After having such a bad experience it was really tempting to do a singer-songwriter project and not have a band. I wanted it to be just my thing.”
He was, however, looking to get out of Charlottesville, and that October he and Nuon moved to Chicago. Busch figured they’d return to Virginia to make the next record, but then Chris Swanson from Secretly Canadian introduced him to Michael Krassner, house producer and guitarist at Truckstop–the recording studio that was the nexus for a crowd of versatile musicians playing in groups like Boxhead Ensemble, Lofty Pillars, and Pinetop Seven. “I had seen Boxhead once,” Busch says, “and after I met [Krassner] he gave me some CDs he’d done, but I think I was mostly excited about working with a guy who was well respected and knew lots of great musicians.”
Shortly after making the EP Adasiewicz moved to Madison; Joe Adamik, percussionist with Califone and another figure in the Truckstop circle, stepped in, and his playing on City Life pushes the sound still further in a rock direction. Nuon’s crystalline guitar and Lepine’s reeds crisscross elegantly over the tight rhythms, while Busch does an endearingly deficient Bryan Ferry impression, replacing Ferry’s outsize vibrato with eccentric upward swoops into an unsteady falsetto. It may irritate as many listeners as it charms, but he’s come a long way from the uncommitted murmur of a few years ago.
