The Slambovian Circus of Dreams have been around for over 25 years and have built a loyal community of fans. The band is about to hit the road throughout the Northeast celebrating A Very Slambovian Christmas that promises to be unlike any other holiday show this season. On the eve of the tour, founding members Tink Lloyd and Joziah Longo sat with me to talk about the history of the band and what fans can expect from these special holiday shows.
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On who joins them and a brief history of The Circus – Joziah: Our main cohort who’s been with us over the years is Sharkie McKewan. We’ve played, we’ve been in two different bands with him, the Ancestors and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams. The Magic of the other guys in the band, which are Bob Torsello on bass, Matthew Abourezk on drums and RJ McCarty on keyboards is, they were fans of the band for many years. Then we did a UK tour, and I needed a band, and we asked them to come and they all pulled together and did it. So, there’s this extra magic and reverence towards the concept of the Circus in these guys that really makes us feel it again. So, the band’s like brand new from these guys being on board with us.
Tink: They’ve been working with us since 2019, but the band started right at the turn of the last century. It was like we were just hiding out in the woods, and we just uprooted ourselves from New York City and just retooled ourselves and said, “Hey, we’re going to do it ultimate DIY, everything”. We were known as the kind of the pioneers of DIY. When Ani DeFranco was doing her thing, we were just getting out of the New York bar scene, whatever, and we just we just thought, “Hey, let’s just do it all ourselves”. We just did everything ourselves and that’s why we’re still really under the radar.
Joziah: We had just ditched a lot of major offers after doing an album with Eddie Kramer. So, all the majors were after us at that time, and we were very paranoid about that notion, so we just hightailed it outta town and hid in the woods for a year or so. We used to be a band called The Ancestors, which was a little bit more proggy. We still are, and we’re very experimental now but back in those days we had just been the first American band into China. Somebody who was conducting a symphony orchestra in New York asked us to play Carnegie Hall with a 72-piece orchestra. So, we did all these crazy things without any backing or a label. It was just friends who were fans of the band. All the majors came and we just hightailed it out of town, left a lot of people mad at us, and then we just did this thing by ourselves,
Tink: We felt like the surf was changing. If you’re a surfer, you feel the waves and you feel like pulling back, waiting for the big wave. We felt there’s a big wave coming and if we stay here, we’re gonna get crushed in it. So, we just disappeared and reinvented ourselves and we went to school to do all the digital, like digital recording, graphics, everything we just did ourselves. We still are really, it’s just the two of us doing most everything. With Sharky as our engineer, he does a lot of the engineering.
On if there is one release that defines their sound – Joziah – That’s a hard one. There are people who think that the second album, which is called Flapjacks from the Sky, is like our Quadrophenia, but even the new album to me, as we understand more what it is that you just said you know about it. We’re fans. Just like everybody else who doesn’t even play is a fan. It’s the same thing. We have such a love for a huge variety of music and my grandfather played, so I get everything from the turn of the century, of the last century my dad played. So, I get all the stuff that he did through the fifties into the early sixties, and then the whole British Invasion thing came in, and we were at the time before the British invasion. I was doing Hank Williams with my father, in South Philadelphia.
Tink: He was the ultimate apprentice to 20th century music. I call him the human jukebox. He grew up on all the classics of I’ll say that. Josiah, he’s really, he’s the ultimate songwriter to me. But he just draws from all these influences. It’s really in his DNA because he grew up in South Philly playing with his dad in the middle of the sixties and seventies as this young guy.
Joziah: I can’t read music or anything, I don’t even know the names of most of the chords I play, so I’m really taking snippets of everything that has a certain feeling and posture to them and incorporating them in. So, a lot of it’s got the DNA of places we’ve been or things that we felt together during a certain period of time, sixties, seventies, whatever, eighties. Somehow is in there. It’s funny for me too, because I have a certain kind of Forrest Gump fortune. It’s like I’ve met all my heroes. I’ve met John Lennon a number of times before he passed. I met, hung out with Lou Reed in the Village, like a lot of crazy things. In some crazy way, I was never after anything. I don’t have the capacity to strategize to make things happen, but I was always just (there). You’ve mentioned the Temptations. I met the Temptations in amusement park in Steel Pier, New Jersey. Paul (Williams) from the Temps saw this little white kid, and grabbed him and took me on all the rides with the Temptations. David (Ruffin) was going, “What are you doing with that little white kid?” He was actually saying that. Paul was like, “He’s like my nephew”, and we went on. It just increased the love that we feel for those people by those little incidental experiences. So there’s, the flavor of that comes in too, so I grew up I also grew up right across the street, or at 16, I was living in Center City, Philadelphia, right across the alleyway from Daryl Hall while he was still waiting for John (Oates) to come back from a tour of Germany so they could start the band. I’m saying that with gratitude, it’s like there’s little snippets and magic. Then when we ditch the labels and we formed the Circus, we were free to just let everything be.
The Beatles did a lot of different styles. All of a sudden, they’re “Rocky Raccoon”, they could do things that were not on style. So, we have a tendency to be that kind of jukebox thing like Tink was saying. We are an extension of the Sergeant Pepper aesthetic, like that’s why it’s like Gandalf Murphy, because there’s a part of all of us that loves that aesthetic. So, we tried to create that by saying the Slambovian Circus of Dreams and make it a big tent, we could all be inside. That’s the gist of the sketch of it, right?
Tink: Yeah, that’s a lot of it. Again, with that definite, the literary aspect of Dylan is in there. But then also the fantastic visual thing. He’s really a visual artist and I am too, but not like him. He’s like more of an actor and he really gets the character in. That’s why the songs are all different. But he really tries to tap the character of the song. For me, I’m like the set designer.
Joziah: She plays 30 different instruments.
Tink: That’s why I play a bunch of punk fashion. I play a bunch of different things because I feel like I’m really like the designer. He has this house, he has this blueprint. He starts to build it and I go, “Oh, I know what that room needs”. My side of the stage looks like a music store a bit. The whole stage does
Joziah: As does our house.
Tink: But I just love the songs, and I feel like each one needs to be treated dressed appropriately.
On what fans can expect from A Very Slambovian Christmas Tour – Joziah: The way I think of these shows, because we’re doing one tomorrow, it starts tomorrow, early in December. I always tell the audience, this is like an opportunity for us all to warm up our muscles and get ready to love all the people that we’re supposed to love over the holidays and that we have to take care of. We’ll start the show with songs that they know that the classics like “Silver Bells” or something like that where we can all sing together and get into that vibration together. Then we’ll take them off on some of the trippy, Slambovian original Christmas things, which also incorporate characters like the Coca-Cola Santa Claus that we all grew up with. It’s all in there. These shows really are like come and participate. Pete Seeger, who let us pose as a folk band for many years, we really appreciate. That he gave us his imprimatur and let us do all the folk festivals because we’re certainly a classic rock band more than a folk band. But Pete always said, “Just make sure you do sing-alongs. Don’t just be posers.” So, there’s something magical when everybody’s singing their hearts out together, there’s a vibrational thing happens. So that happens at these Christmas shows. Then, like I said, we’ll take them on some trips to some places they’ve never been with Slambovian twists on things, but it’s a very deep and comfortable thing where we can get our muscles warmed up to love people over the holidays, which everybody needs right now.
Tink: We know every family has challenges of people that are maybe hard to love. We’re just trying to, I say to people, “Bring your most unruly relatives and we’ll try and tenderize them”.
On creating a family community amongst their fans – Joziah: Yeah, we’re really grateful for that. They keep us afloat. When you don’t sign with the majors back in the day, it’s a different animal now, but that’s a pretty dumb, a dumb thing to do, and so they really, they keep us afloat when we hit hard times. The money came our way from the fans, and we just keep going and we keep trying to build it into something that’s more magical. Try to give it a little more height and depth all the time, while you stay true to the simplest thing. We really love our fan base, and we always try to slow down enough to just really tune in and make sure we’re all flying together, so that’s a big part of the Circus,
Tink: At the Christmas shows, we also, when we can, which is almost every show this season, is in a theater with some kind of projection ability. So, we actually have been amping up the immersive projections and the immersive end. You don’t have to just look at us, you can look at, look around and it’s like we don’t try to be the center of everything.
On if there will be new music soon – Joziah: Yeah. Our, the thing which we’ve been trying to focus on this year is the means of production because, I write a lot more than we get out. I always have a few albums on the docket that are actually finished because I never stop writing. I write. It’s insane how much I write, and I’ve got a few musicals I’m working on. I had the opportunity in the past to do a couple children’s musicals with Ted Mann at the Circle in the Square Theater. So got me into that whole tip. So, there’s a few musicals on the way right now and we wanna work with some of the, I’m hoping to work with the local Shakespeare company right around here that did, that, had been doing shows in a Circus tent. Will Shakespeare appeared to me in a dream, however nutty that sounds and said to me, look, “I sent you a theater troop wrapped in a circus tent. I thought you would get it.” And I was like, “Oh”. So, we started going to all their shows, to see if there’s something going on there. It’s like there’s a lot of new music coming and we’re nailing the means of production again. We kinda lost it for a little while to get stuff done, but we’re doing it and we got a fantastic videographer in our drummer, Matthew, who used to play in Thin White Rope, he’s from that band and he’s really just a brilliant guy. We’ll get a lot more done this year. A lot more stuff will come out. We’re really happy about that. Also people that we love, you were talking Jeff, about the opportunity you get to interview people that you really loved and looked up to. People like Ian Anderson are jumping across and saying stuff about us, which is really nice. Ian also said to people, “And they got hats and moustaches.” It’s an interesting time.
Tink: Oh, and also, we were just included last week in a brand-new book that this guy wrote called “Rock and Roll Underdogs”. It just came out the guy, what’s his name? (Karl Sharicz)
Joziah: Yeah, with a lot of people in it, like Syd Barrett and stuff like that, who I particularly love, Sandy Denny. So, we’re really honored to be in that book,
Tink: Yeah, he picked 70 of his favorite bands that never quite did the major breakthrough. He had Josiah write the Forward and put his name on the cover, and we are one of the featured. I guess we’re rock and roll underdogs. So now we have the Good Housekeeping rock and roll seal of approval or something. I don’t know.
Joziah: So that’s really coo, and we’re thinking, “oh, maybe the money’s gonna start rolling and really soon”.
