Photograph by Mike DeFilippo
“I think it was an inborn thing,” says Mike Newman, in consideration of how he became a musician. “I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and I was hooked.”
“Very similar for me,” chimes in Dan Randant. “I didn’t really have a family that was musical, but I saw that Beatles thing and I was right at the age where it hit me. I picked it up, and for whatever reason, it just seemed to come to me.”
Of course, tens of thousands of teenagers picked up guitars in 1964 and formed garage bands; only a tiny percentage of them are still performing regularly, but Lucky Dan and Naked Mike managed to play 157 different gigs as a duo last year. Enough that both Randant, who also does freelance video work for Anheuser-Busch, and Newman, who spends his days repairing guitars at J. Gravity Strings, consider their income to be divided 50-50 between performing and their other jobs.
Chances are, if you’ve been to a brew house, a winery, an outdoor performance festival or a bar in Soulard or Kirkwood or Webster Groves or any of a dozen other locations, you’ve found yourself tapping your feet or nodding your head in appreciation of the music of these two veteran guitar players, as they dip into their repertoire of more than 200 songs.
“Our song list is diverse enough that you’ll see somebody looking up wondering who did that song,” says Randant. “We do an old Peter and Gordon song that stumps the audience. They’ll think it’s the Beatles, but it’s Peter and Gordon. That helps get the crowd into it. There’s enough people out there who know music that they’ll come up and ask you about it.”
Playing mostly covers, whether of obscure artists like Darden Smith or Marshall Crenshaw, or surefire crowd pleasers like the Beatles or Van Morrison, doesn’t have to require as much care and attention to arrangement as Newman and Randant offer. They take the music seriously, though, and stamp each song with their own personalities, creating intricate interlocking guitar parts and tight harmonies, which can be as inventive and surprising as the original full-band version.
“Like we do ‘Up From the Skies’ by Hendrix. I used to love that song, and Mike just took it and nailed it, did a Hendrix thing without the wah-wah pedal,” says Randant.
The pair teamed up six or seven years ago, after their long-term band projects—Randant was a key player in the Lucky Dog Band, and Newman was (and still is, on occasion) the lead guitarist in Fairchild—stopped being full-time commitments. “I was playing out, I think it was at the Majestic Café in the Central West End,” says Newman. “Dan popped in one night. We had been together at parties and stuff, social occasions before, done some jamming. He asked, ‘Do you mind if I bring my guitar?’ I said, ‘Come on in.’ He played along with me, and it sounded cool. He came back another date, same thing happened. We really enjoyed it and got together, had a rehearsal and figured out about 50 songs in one night, and there it is.” (Though Randant’s moniker is obvious, Newman’s isn’t; he says it’s because he feels naked playing onstage without a full band.)
Earlier this year, Lucky Dan and Naked Mike released their first CD. This Time contains 14 songs recorded with only slight augmentation from instruments and overdubs they can’t perform live. In addition to seven cover songs from their enormous catalog, the CD includes seven brand-new, original cuts (four by Newman, three by Randant).
“It started as a demo tape,” says Randant. “‘Let’s go in and record some covers to get some gigs.’ And it seemed to take longer than we anticipated, for a lot of reasons. As we were going through the motions, and more gigs were coming in anyway, we said, ‘Why don’t we throw in this original song?’ or Mike would write a new song, ‘Let’s try that.’”
“And now the original bug bites, and you want to do more,” says Newman.
“The way I write, anyway, it just sort of comes out, and I know Mike will do something sympathetic to it and embellish it,” adds Randant. “Otherwise, if it was just me doing it, it would be straightforward and simplistic. That’s just kind of the way I write. But he embellishes it and makes it greater than what it could be.”
Chances are good that Lucky Dan and Naked Mike are playing somewhere in the St. Louis area tonight; if not tonight, certainly within the next few days. Check luckyandnaked.com for their complete schedule, as well as information on picking up your very own copy of This Time.
