(This cover story originally appeared in the February, 2006 issue of the San Diego Troubadour–www.sandiegotroubadour.com)

The Grams Weigh In
The Anatomy Of A Modern Working Band

by Simeon Flick

It is still many hours before his band’s gig later that night as Chuck Schiele saunters somnolently down the stairs in search of a cup of joe. His wife Joanna had just let me in moments before, greeting me with a warm hug and a smile, and trailing the scent of many enticing culinary delights in from the kitchen behind her. I have entered nothing if not the cozy HQ of Charles Schiele Creative, Ocean Beach Music Mafia, and a number of other joint and singular ventures on which the still somewhat recently married Mr. and Mrs. Schiele collaborate.

It is also ground zero for The Grams, Schiele’s latest musical project. Everything about The Grams (as in the movie 21 Grams, which is the supposed weight of the soul that leaves the body upon death) begins and ends here in this halcyon two-story house and accompanying backyard garage. These edifices both literally and figuratively bespeak the anatomy of a modern working band.

(Now, by “working” I mean to imply two things: one; The Grams “work” in that there is a symbiotic synergy between them, that each band member has his or her own complementary function, ergo it works in a way that won’t find them disintegrating anytime soon, and two; they seem to be working like mad these days, gigging frequently, taking advantage of every available opportunity that comes their way, and building a successful career in music outside the confluence of the flagging major label system.)

Chuck picks up a snack-laden tray that Joanna prepared and leads me out through the small backyard, past a congenial sea of deck chairs and barbeque grilles (where much colloquial revelry has obviously transpired) and into the converted garage. Here is where his growing collection of instruments, eclectic trinkets, eccentric furnishings, band posters, memorabilia and recording equipment is housed. This is the creative womb where Schiele conducts rehearsals for The Grams and other local bands as an ancillary service provided by his Ocean Beach Music Mafia, or simply the “Mob.”

This tapestry and rug-laden room is the principal–if not always literal–birthplace of Schiele’s music, and the locus where it usually passes through sundry bits of recording equipment to find quasi-physical form. He is the chief songwriter and lead vocalist for The Grams, and a veteran of the San Diego music scene.

Schiele’s formative years transpired in upstate New York, but you would hardly know it from the laid-back bohemian air he now emanates. It’s necessary to wait for the brusque New York frankness to spill out of his Sagittarian mouth to confirm his East cost origins. When he was four or five he matter-of-factly informed his parents he would be heading out West when he came of age. Perhaps the shock of him leaving was more due to the realization that the time had finally arrived than to any disbelief of the child he had been when he’d made the promise. Even at such an early age, Chuck Schiele already had a supple grip on his destiny…like Babe Ruth’s hands on a baseball bat.

While the time-biding child languished in Syracuse, he vainly set about trying to get his elementary school music teacher to learn him the drums. Chuck was diverted to at least three other less enchanting instruments before quitting music altogether. It wasn’t until college that he picked up the trail again, inspired by The Beatles, Queen, Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion,” and his dad, who was a professional jazz bass player in San Diego at the height of the 70’s club scene.

“There was a guitar in the corner so I asked him to show me how to play it,” Chuck reminisces. “He explained music theory to me and I was off and running. I never really had any formal music training, but I took a lot of classes in college, went to recording school, and then learned mostly by jumping in. I could write songs before I could play guitar and have written them all through my life. Early on I often wrote stuff I couldn't play, so my lesson became the act of learning how to play the music I heard in my head.”
“Before I knew it I was in a band,” Schiele continues, “and have been in a band ever since. My favorites include The And (rock and groove band), Modern Peasants (Rock/Groove/World), Mysterious Ways (rock/acoustic), The Gandhi Method (folk rock/acoustic) and now The Grams.”

Along the way he also made a point to play solo, fleshing out the musical concepts that stemmed from what Jim Earp had taught him regarding alternate guitar tunings during their time together in the Modern Peasants. In a live performance scenario with The Grams, Schiele draws on this erudition by providing the perfect foundation for his bandmates; a bass-heavy sound with solid, driving rhythms. He is, in effect, a self-contained rhythm section.

The music that flows out of Schiele now is at once Southern sass (think New Awlins, Cajun, Zydeco), classic rock, and implicitly evocative of old world locales where ancient religions have roosted for eons. “I write mostly from spiritual motivations, often associated with travels,” Chuck relates. “I also write from explorations in my personal music learning. I learn something new to do everyday...something to pick on my own skills about...and I'll always be in that school.”

We’re conversing over the hors d’oeuvres in the darkened garage studio when the husband and wife team of Craig Yerkes and Elise Ohki finally arrive. They’ve left their gig clothes and instruments up front in the living room and have joined us in the studio. “Craigness” and “Sweet Elise,” as they are familiarly known, are usually late for Grams-related events because they have to commute all the way from North County. The married musicians also have full-time careers; Yerkes commutes to Orange County five days a week for his job, and Ohki works in the biotech field.

Because their music making doesn’t have to pay bills, and due to erstwhile life decisions made in their younger years (including having children, on Craig’s part), there is no pressure to “succeed” put on their collaboration with Chuck, who is the only full-time musician among them (although he also does graphic design, among a plethora of other things). The trio harbors no old-fashioned dreams of–and have no time or patience for–the idiosyncrasies of rock stardom, but they may still be able to enjoy some kind of success and notoriety due to the growing number of resources and marketing avenues now available to independent artists. Their recent inclusion on a Japanese radio playlist, Chuck’s visit to the legendary Sun studios in Memphis, his solo appearance at New York’s renowned CBGBs, and The Grams’ San Diego Music Award nomination this past September are all evidence of such emerging possibilities.

Elise Ohki grew up in the greater Buffalo area of upstate New York and discovered the piano and the violin while still in single digits. She played the latter in school and county orchestras, including the Buffalo Suzuki Strings group, and found her way to Oberlin College, where she would arrive at the crucial musical crossroad of her life. Ohki felt too much pressure to be perfect on the path to becoming a professional classical violinist, so she made the decision to pursue a career in science and keep her musical activity free on the side. She was determined to obtain a degree in a field that would enable her to provide for herself financially, and the classical music profession seemed to be a glorified crapshoot for even the most proficient of players. Nevertheless, she continued to play violin through graduate school at SUNY Buffalo as well as with the Amherst Community Orchestra, and finally moved to San Diego to pursue employment opportunities in 2002. Elise now works in the gene regulation division at the Invitrogen Corporation.

By the time she met and befriended Chuck Schiele through a mutual acquaintance at an Ocean Beach bar, Elise had all but abandoned the violin. The plot gradually thickened, however, as Chuck discovered and slowly drew out Elise’s musicality. They began their collaboration in 2003, and the result was a creative detour for Ohki’s classically trained hands, which, although still well regimented, were liberated by their first foray into contemporary music.

The two outspoken yet also somehow reserved upstate New Yorkers fell into (and still enjoy) an older-brother/younger-sister kind of rapport, full of acerbic yet lighthearted jabs, quips and jovial razzing. The male Grams will be the first to tell you that Elise is the band’s barometer of relative goodness, as she is blunt in her views and deft with the power of veto when it comes to things like new song choices, stage volume, and the length of Craig’s solos. The sardonic twist to the “Sweet Elise” nickname is that she is decidedly curt and brusque with her opinions and judgments, though not maliciously so. The fact that she is more often astute in these observations and conclusions than not lends a paradoxically endearing puerility to her general countenance.

Elise and her violin provide the group with a connection to both old and new musical idioms. The lyricism of her neoclassical violin melodies provide a traditionally fresh counterpoint to Chuck’s lead vocals, and the modern “fiddle” context of the instrument itself connects The Grams with a more contemporary folk and bluegrass tradition. When she’s not recapitulating vocal melodies or introducing new motifs, she’s adding staccato and sustained pedal tone textures underneath Chuck’s vocal expositions. The occasional addition of her own mezzo-soprano voice at the top of three-part group harmonies rounds out her contributions to The Grams’ sound.

Elise was eventually drawn into the overlapping spheres of Chuck’s myriad musical connections, and it didn’t take long for her own circle to expand and create the perfect conditions for a fateful meeting with Craig Yerkes. Brother to fellow San Diego musician Marcia Claire of the Citizen Band and the Cathryn Beeks Ordeal, Craig had known Chuck for some time and traveled in the same circles. The pieces slowly fell into place and by the end of 2003 The Grams had become a band. Craig and Elise would eventually marry in July of 2004, and it is a point of pride for Chuck that he not only got them together but also brought them both out of semi-retirement.

Yerkes is the only California native of the three, having spent most of his life in San Diego County. He got an early start and was playing guitar in a touring teenybopper group with Marcia Claire by age 12. He also played in his high school and college jazz bands until he realized he was “a rock guitarist doing a bad imitation of a jazz guitarist,” as he self-deprecatingly put it. “I was really into the chops thing to a fault when I was younger,” Craig continues. “I just wanted to keep getting faster due to influences like Al DiMeola and Steve Morse. Now it’s all about the solo singing its own song, whether I’m playing 1 note or 100.”

After a brief, failed stint as a guitarist with two Grammy-winning gospel artists, Craig decided to downgrade his musical pursuits to hobby status. He had only occasionally picked up the guitar during the previous twelve years when Schiele came calling.

Yerkes is a lead guitarist in the old tradition of axe men who don’t always double the rhythm part under the vocals but add another complimentary texture or melody to the underlying work. Craig’s leads are concise, rich in tone and wildly entertaining. When the gig is long and space needs filling, Craig is the Gram who is most ready, willing and able to step in and fill it. He has the chops and exploratory mindset to improvise lengthy, interesting solos in the live milieu, and the restraint to compose ingenious countermelodies and instrumental harmonies for him and Elise live and in the studio. His curtailed jazz aspirations led him to an ideal grotto where the wild, histrionic waterfall of technique met the pool of mature melodic restraint.

Craig adds his clear, crisp tenor to The Grams’ vocal palette, performing close harmonies with Chuck and even singing lead on “Poor Little Rich Girl” from the recently completed, eponymous debut album. The general gist is that Yerkes may be singing some more songs in the future. For now, though, he is content with his predominantly supportive role in the band.

While we’ve been talking in the studio, Joanna has been occasionally popping in and out with updates on the sumptuous meal she is preparing. A few minutes pass after one such visit when we collectively realize that Joanna is as much a part of what goes on behind the scenes at Grams Central as her husband. Craig and Elise are as anxious to hear our new pertinent subject’s story as I am, for they are equally as uneducated as to exactly what it is she does on behalf of The Grams.

Joanna also grew up in New York and cut her music, marketing and networking teeth at the Manhattan Design firm, the same company responsible for the MTV logo among many other pertinent icons of pop culture and music. She brings these years of big-city marketing experience (not to mention her own history of singing in bands–she lent background vocals to some of the songs on the record) to what she does administratively for The Grams. Her understanding of both sides of the commercialization of art sums up her contribution to the trio’s behind-the-scenes machine.

Chuck had already become quite proficient at executing the administrative functions that most musicians bemoan and are poorly suited for when Joanna came into his life. Now they are virtually as unstoppable as they are thorough in their combination of complementary attributes. They work together in the conjoined pair of bedrooms on the house’s second floor, unearthing predominantly internet-based marketing opportunities for The Grams, and shouting updates back and forth to streamline their efforts.

“With Joanna coming into my life, things have only gotten better and healthier for music matters,” Chuck says. “We work together very closely, and I am astonished by what happens when we combine our strengths to fix on and obtain our goal. We are furthering our involvements to include the movie industry as well as alternative markets and distribution. We're also big on serving our community and go so far as to get them involved. We've grown so fast that we're in the process of reorganizing and building our team.”

We wrap up the interview and head inside, where Joanna’s delectable dinner awaits us. We watch something about the end of days on the History channel while we eat and drink wine and revel in the sense of unity and nourishment we’ve established throughout the day. Then the time comes for them to do the fun part of their work, and after changing into their performance attire The Grams disappear into the inviting night to show a new audience the weight of the soul.