[ Music ] Coming up next on State of the Arts, we take a look at rock music, its ability to bring people together and challenge our perceptions of art.

This week on State of the Arts.

[ Music ] I'm Mary Paul and welcome to another episode of State of the Arts.

This week we're exploring popular forms of music.

We begin by meeting a singer-songwriter who was born into music and it's been a steady and meaningful influence in every aspect of her life.

With her upbeat, story-driven pop rock, Allegra DuChaine invites fans to join her in her harmonious journey of growth, resilience, and finding your voice through music.

My name is Allegra DuChaine and I'm going to play some music for you.

[ Music ] The beginning of Allegra as a musician was probably when I was little with my two older sisters.

[ Music ] Singing with the family, like the Partridge Family.

[ Music ] My parents were musicians.

My parents loved to sing.

[ Music ] My dad would come into our rooms in the morning to wake us up for school with his guitar.

[ Music ] Music was always a part of my life.

[ Music ] Harmony has always been this kind of just intrinsic thing for me, especially singing with my sisters.

Our voices do blend really, really familially together, you know?

[ Music ] I always liked songs that started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, and it took you on a journey.

[ Music ] So I'm a Garfunkel, Ella Fitzgerald, John Denver, James Taylor.

I like storytelling, and that's definitely how I write, and that's how I love to write.

I had just moved to Norfolk.

We were in the military.

My husband was in the military for 20 years, and life was changing and uncertain.

That was kind of my transition into creating this new existence, this new way of living and loving and, you know, learning about what I need and what I want and how to live in a way that is not just what we've been told is the right way.

[ Music ] Me time is finding my new normal, finding the new me, figure out how to love myself and how to take care of me and not put that on anybody else.

[ Music ] [ Music ] Being a musician and being a female, a lot of men use the terminology "baby."

[ Music ] Go ahead, and you don't need to put me in a box.

I'm good.

When I wrote it, I wanted it to be kind of upbeat and fun.

[ Music ] I'm a little bit funny.

I'm a little bit kind, and I'm unpredictable, and, you know, you don't have to call me 'baby' to make yourself feel bigger.

I don't need you to name me or label me.

[ Music ] I'm too big in my own skin to be called 'baby' from a person that I don't even know, so you can keep it.

[ Music ] Also, you guys, one more thing.

We do have our little libation table over here.

Please do help yourselves.

We got wine and beer, champagne.

Yeah, please.

It's our gift to you for coming out.

We got a little chocolate there.

Don't be shy.

Of course, you know, if you're of age, don't be a 16-year-old trying to come up here and score some booze, all right?

You don't need that.

All right.

[ Music ] I really do love it here.

I love the diversity of Norfolk.

I love my friend group.

Having my friends there to support, you know, any time I play anywhere around here, it's great to get them out.

[ Music ] To get up on stage with people who you can communicate with and listen to, that is just, that's it.

That is it.

Any musician you ever talk to will say the same thing, is being on stage with people that are listening.

They're listening and communicating.

It's just, it makes it a dream.

[ Music ] Paige Miller, she is a phenomenal drummer and percussionist.

She and I lived in San Diego at the same time and found each other within the music community and started playing gigs together.

Then she moved back to her hometown, Ashland.

And when I moved to Virginia, she immediately got in touch with me and said, "Hey, girl, you know, we're like an hour and a half from each other.

It's been years, but let's make music."

We met up, had some wine in Williamsburg, and the rest is history, so.

Paige is just spectacular.

She listens and communicates, and it makes playing with her a dream.

[ Music ] I want so badly right now I want to write about things that are important.

I want to write about people using their minds and using their humanity and banding together as compassionate, intelligent, creative beings.

We have to do that.

We have to.

It's essential.

[ Music ] [ Music ] From a singer-songwriter to a modern retro quartet with a rockabilly spirit, next we meet the Lucky 757 band, whose sound follows the musical spirit of Sun Records in the 1950s pulling from influences in early rock, honky-tonk, and the blues.

We see them in this next story as they record a live album.

[ Music ] At 13, I got on stage for the first time.

Me and Dad played at a truck stop.

I'm his eyeball, I guess, in a way.

He has to get to where he goes, and I take him to where he goes.

Friday night, they're playing the ODU Goode Theater.

They're going to be making a live album while you're there, right?

That's right.

I think we all feed off a live audience.

You get a little bit of energy from people that you don't get when you're just in the studio by yourself.

That's what makes this band work, is everybody knows each other's thoughts almost.

It's what you do.

Everybody got to give.

You just got to bring it on out.

[ Music ] [ Music ] The Lucky 757 band, we started five years ago doing some cover songs.

Then we said, "Well, we can write our own songs."

We started doing that, and that's how we started the whole deal.

It's based on rockabilly, early 50s rockabilly, Sun Records sound.

But it has other influences, too.

It's got honky tonk country, western swing, surf rock, blues.

I write most of the lyrics and come up with some of the melody of the song to get it started.

Then it kind of goes, you know, just give it to them, and they just take it, play their part, whatever they want.

[ Music ] I've been playing since 1978, and I just like to play anything I get my hands on.

I just like making noise.

I met these guys.

I was working at a music store, actually, and they used to come in and get strings and stuff like that.

They used to jam outside late after work and all that kind of stuff.

So when I first started hanging out with them, I was just going over playing guitar, trying to pick up a lick or two, you know.

Yeah, it just kept coming back, and they kept letting me come back, you know.

[ Music ] To my left here is my son, Cory, and in the music since he was a child, I bought a mandolin, and I gave it to him, and on the way home from the music store, he was playing Rod Stewart's song, "Maggie Mac."

He was playing it, and I'm like, he's eight years old, and I'm like, "What am I going to do now?"

So that's when I knew we were destined to have me out in the parking lot and just getting sick, from stage fright.

But anyway, we got through, and that's been going on ever since.

[ Music ] [ Singing ] It ain't just part of the look, you know.

It's because I was born blind with a rare condition.

After a bunch of surgeries, I was able to get a very teeny tiny partial bit of sight into my right eye, and my left eye was removed.

But you don't need to see to play good music.

[ Music ] He's been singing since he was a little kid.

He just has that, he didn't get it from me.

I sing, but we have similar tone.

But he can just belt it out there.

He has been since a little boy.

He started singing, and after a while, I decided, well, I had to break out the guitar.

So I started playing the songs for him so he could sing, but then he started learning all the words, and I didn't know all the songs.

And so he would get upset with me, even as a little child.

He would point his finger in my face and tell me, I'm going to keep doing it until I got straight.

I do pay a lot of attention to detail.

I'm a bit nitpicky.

Like when I was eight years old, after I had this eye removed, we went to see Herman's Hermits.

Peter Noone was the lead singer, and he was up there singing the song Just a Little Bit Better.

The second verse says, "He'll take you to nightclubs in a shiny limousine."

But he got the words on it, and he said, "fancy limousine."

I told Dad, I said, "He's got it wrong.

That ain't right."

And he noticed that there's this kid out there causing some commotion, and I was talking to his dad, and he stopped the show, and he was like, "Did I do something wrong, mate?"

And he'd got the words wrong.

I told him what the words were, and so the next song, he had me sing it with him so he could get the words right.

For the last 20 years, ever since that concert, I've kept up with him, seen him on Facebook and online, and he's got the words right every time Since then.

So, he remembered.

[music] At 13, I got on stage for the first time with Dad.

Me and him played at a truck stop.

He played a couple songs.

Dad was nervous as he could be.

I wasn't, and I've never had stage fright.

Just always felt comfortable performing.

After that, we had the bug, and it's been what we've been doing ever since.

Since I was 13, that's all we've ever done.

He came by the way of a dream He said the way I was living was right No matter how wrong it seemed Him and I did acoustic things called "Radio 60s," and we would do music, songs from the 60s, Everly Brothers and all that.

And then it went from there to, "Let's do pure 50s rockabilly and see where it started."

[music] [music] One, two, three, four.

[music] It's kind of fun doing this part once it starts getting closer, because as you add the water, you can start to see what it's really going to look like once it's polished.

I needed something that would be lighter for me, because I had both of my wrists operated on.

So I wanted a guitar built for me with a neck and everything that would fit just like me.

And Sam's a luthier.

A luthier is someone who works and builds stringed instruments, mostly guitars these days.

[music] [music] Cory's sound definitely comes from all vintage gear.

He doesn't use any of the modern effects pedals or anything like that.

And Cor y's is going to get some actual 60s fender pickups.

So if he wanted the vintage sound, he'll get it.

[music] Lucky 757 live on Out of the Box.

Going to be playing on Friday night.

They're going to be recording a live album at the Goode Theater starting at 7 o'clock.

This is being recorded.

This is a live video and audio.

So get up and dance and make noise.

Let's do it.

Y'all ready?

[cheers] Okay, then.

[music] Hey little baby, won't you run with me I say hey little baby, won't you run with me We wanted to capture what Lucky does live, you know, what we look like, what we're doing.

I'm definitely a live player and they are too.

And that's where we feel most at home, in front of an audience.

And I think doing this is going to show some people what we're really about.

Hey little baby, don't you run with me First of all, the guitar felt like I had owned it for 100 years.

It felt like a part of me.

And the sound was what I'd been chasing.

And this is it.

I finally got it.

Kind of knew it was going to look cool.

I knew that.

It was going to look cool.

The shape alone was going to look good.

But you wouldn't know until you actually, you see it live.

And it was like, wow.

Yeah, I'm thrilled with it.

They turned out great.

And I got them done with a couple weeks of spare so they could play them and check them out.

[music] Me and Dad, we're extremely close.

We're best friends.

We can finish each other's sentences.

I guess that's why we play so good together.

You've heard of family harmony and it's that way with the vocals and it's that way with the guitar playing.

And we try to complement each other.

He knows how to enhance what I'm doing and accent it and do the same thing.

It's always been that way.

And we try to find players that are the same way.

And Angel and Sam happen to do that.

[music] He's the reason that keeps me driving.

That's the reason, you know.

I love music, but anything I can do to keep him playing music rest of his life is what we're set out to do.

That's what this whole, it's always been about.

[music] Next we meet a woman who's sharing the power of music through her work as director of a nonprofit girls rock and roll camp.

Through education, performance, and the power of rock music, participants gain knowledge, self-assurance, and leadership skills.

[music] Alright.

Just starting with the tuning process.

What being in a band did for me was it gave me a sense of belonging and it gave me a sense of confidence, of being celebrated.

[music] It gave me a path in life of leadership.

[music] I lead music education and performance nonprofits for youth as well as adults.

We are like rock and roll Girl Scouts.

[music] Our program instills values of confidence.

There's just a lot of opportunity for planting seeds of realizing that your voice matters.

[bell rings] That you can take risks and succeed.

[music] It is all collaborative and supportive.

[music] [music] So this is the first bass that I ever bought when I was 25.

I did not learn how to play bass until I was 25 years old.

It's never too late to learn.

This is a Schecter Damien 4 and it has bat inlays on the fretboard.

But yeah, very special bass to me.

I would say, you know, they ask you that question of like, what things would you grab if your house was on fire?

Like, I would grab this bass.

That would be like one of the three things.

I grew up on the end of a road out in the country just outside of Rosholt, Wisconsin.

And one of my first memories is just dancing to the Beach Boys.

And I just loved music so much.

[music] It just was liberating and it just became a very important part of my identity.

This guitar really shepherded me into my stringed instrument era.

I had a project called Chi Chi's Restaurant where I was able to play a couple different instruments within the band.

I played drums for most of the songs, but I also wrote some songs for it.

The song that I've been playing is called "It Hurts" and it's about kind of defeating the worst parts of yourself so that you can prevail for the greater good.

[music] I remember when I first got into music, you know, all of my idols were men.

I think what we're doing with Girls Rock is really about expanding the amount of role models that we can put out there that can show what you can do.

That speaks to what keeps me going is that on several different levels in society that that is granted equitably.

Girls Rock Camp is a crazy wild week.

There's a lot going on.

We have our instrument instruction, which is our technical instruction on an instrument.

So when campers apply for a camp, they get to list their first choice and second choice instrument.

And then I get to do like the grandest logic puzzle of all time and put them all into band groupings and assign them to their band.

And they will have an assigned lead band coach, sometimes an ambassador or an assistant band coach in the room.

And that band coach works with the campers towards writing an original song.

Hey!

Follow the beat drop!

Oh, one, two, three, four.

[singing] We also have a holistic workshop curriculum that gets at some of the mindsets behind what our campers are working towards rather than those skillsets, giving them that leadership development in their mindset so that when they do get up on stage and perform, that that's something that they're ready to do.

(music) In that space, you have to come to some decisions about what something's going to be.

How many times are you going to do the chorus or the verse or are you going to have a bridge?

How are you going to start the song?

How are you going to stop the song?

All of those decisions are open, ambiguous.

There's no right answer.

As our world changes faster and faster and faster, there's a lot more ambiguity.

There's a lot less certainty.

I think creativity gives you the tools that you can navigate ambiguity and know that even if you don't know what the next right step is, that maybe in collaboration with others, you can ask for help or you can have a better idea of what questions to ask to get to that next right step.

And as you layer on these complexities in your life, it can be so easy to give up that creative part of yourself.

You know, we all grow up getting very specific messaging, kind of put on very specific paths, and it takes exposure to different perspectives, to different possibilities, to fully embrace all of the possibilities for your life, to make the fullest choice for you, the most authentic choice for you.

And finally today, we take you inside a Milwaukee gallery for the exhibition "Gigs Up!

50 Years of Punk Posters."

The show isn't your normal art exhibit.

It's gritty, brazenly authentic, and a little bit weird, challenging how we think about art and about what art can be.

What people see when they see art is that when they see something that's made by hand, they see that potential for something not being perfect, for it to be clumsy, fluid, broken, accidental, going directions it's not supposed to.

So people like things to be a little bit skewed, and that's what they're always trying to get, and that's why this random note looks so awesome.

[music] The show, it's a history of punk, post-punk, and just kind of alternative music in Milwaukee, vis-a-vis the playbills that were used to advertise those shows, but it's become honestly more than that.

[music] It's become like a community center and like a reunion of that culture.

The vast majority is like deep into the roots of our local punk and alternative scene.

It's raw, it's real, it's working class, it's not lip service.

You know, and Milwaukee has that in spades, it's like one of the most beautiful things about this city.

And the punk scene, there's not a million producers and trillions of dollars like hanging right out of reach for them.

Milwaukee has this kind of like really pure, isolated, almost like Galapagos culture, where it's allowed to do crazy things.

Most of it is like Oil Tasters, Haskels, like kind of old, like early 80s, late 70s punk.

And then it moves into some of the newer stuff because like Eric Von Munz has the Cramps and Jack White.

In the very beginning they were collected as just an ongoing way to preserve a culture that was very organic.

A lot of them they were collected for the bands but didn't know the artist.

In some cases, like the artists are really, really important because they were designed as pieces of art.

Eric Von Munz is like an amazing, emotionally honest, connected guy.

And as an art store, like that's what makes people good artists because they're not outside of themselves.

They're pretty, they're like a full point of view that's growing and changing and trying to get to something.

And those people always make great art because they're growing and learning and developing and you see it in his work.

[music] The plan for this was to kind of keep it in situ as if it would be like on, you know, a construction site, like as people really did poster, which was irregular and all over.

And then in some cases we curated a little bit more like a gallery.

We curated this through kind of like organically through how it felt.

We were just pulling them out of like an archive and we started generally older to newer.

So you're seeing that.

And so this is going to be like, you know, seventies to newer things.

So you tend to see more production as we get into computers.

What makes a good poster?

I mean, I think some like big, bold, straightforward.

But sometimes if the image is so weird and so cool, the art gets you in, the band gets you out.

You know, I think sometimes you could say going really simple and say band venue date.

But sometimes it is just such a rad image.

Like people go, God, let's grab that poster.

And then the music sinks in eventually for real.

The people that come in here, they're true, weirdo, wonderful, awesome unicorns.

I want them to look at this and go, this is what we should be striving for.

This is the kind of thing we should want in the world.

I think we should be striving to find real, authentic culture that forces us to think about how we live better.

Of course, I want them to love Milwaukee punk and music and whatever.

But even deeper than that, I want them to engage with things that are strange and different, that keep their mind crackling and keep their feet moving in weird directions.

Now it's the final curtain for this week's show.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Mary Paul.

We'll see you next time.