Headless Household. At Center Stage Theater, Monday, December
4.
Reviewed by Charles Donelan
advertising and no discernible media hype, Joe Woodard’s Headless
Household consistently fills Center Stage Theater for an annual
Christmas concert that doesn’t include any Christmas music. This
seeming paradox makes perfect sense when one sees the crowd that
turns out — they have almost all known each other for the 20 or so
years this venerable Santa Barbara tradition has been in existence.
It is a tribute not only to the extended family of musicians
involved, but also to the audience, proving the siren call of the
Household’s wild amalgam of free jazz, honky-tonk, polka, waltz,
and Americana retains its grip. The core members of Headless
Household are Dick Dunlap, Tom Lackner, Chris Symer, and Joe
Woodard, who writes most of the fascinating and eccentric charts,
many of which fell to the floor promptly upon the musicians’
arrival onstage.
The first thing to understand about the Household’s music is
that when they announce a genre — say, polka for example — that
hardly means they will stick to anything much resembling a
traditional polka, or even that one of their polkas will sound much
like another. For example, the opener, “Pig in a Polka,” was very
different in mood and tone than “Splinkety Polka” from later in the
first set; “Bolka,” from the second set, was different again.