Jason and Alison are back together, although they haven’t really been apart as long as it seems. The pair met while working at a local coffee house and discovered they had similar tastes in music. While washing dishes, Jason would tune the radio station to WCBR 92.7 (“The Bear”), a suburban alternative station of the time. “We started talking about music,” Alison says, and “we were both into The Who, we were both into Bob Mould, and we were sort of coming from the same place.” They started playing together as Jason and Alison.
Evanston native Jason Narducy got his first guitar at age nine and formed the punk band Verboten with some of his friends when he was ten. Alison Chesley was born and raised in Los Angeles, but moved to the Chicago area to attend Northwestern, where she received a masters in cello in 1994.
Under the name Jason and Alison, the duo released their debut album, “Woodshed,” also in 1994. They gigged relentlessly, with just guitar, cello, pedals and amps. Showing up with an acoustic guitar and cello, they tell me on a recent Saturday afternoon that they relished combating the perception that a folk duo would be playing that night, proving themselves onstage as a rock band. Touring on their way to play South By Southwest in Austin in 1994, they were sound-checking at The Bottleneck in Lawrence, Kansas, Narducy relates, when the sound guy told them that their sound was louder than Helmet, who had played there the week before. They were pleased with themselves (given that Helmet played loud guitar rock, bordering on metal), but later discovered that the headliner that night, Jonathan Richman, was not as pleased. On the next night of the tour opening for Richman, the sound levels were more “in tune.”
Jason and Alison gained notoriety, opening for Live and Bob Mould, and got profiled in Billboard. (“The only thing I want people to know is we play loud,” Chesley told writer Moira McCormick.)
The duo expanded into a quartet with the addition of bass and drums, and released two albums on 550 Music (part of major label Epic) as Verbow. Verbow, I now realize, is a pun on his earlier punk band’s name, adding Chesley’s cello bow into the mix (fitting, given the cello’s integral part of the band’s sound). “Chronicles,” recorded and mixed by Bob Mould, was released in 1997, followed by “White Out” in 2000, nine songs of which were produced by Brad Wood (best known for his work with Liz Phair, but who has produced many Chicago and national artists). Narducy himself produced the other three songs on the album.
Despite critical accolades, buzz in college radio circles, and tours opening for Mould, Frank Black, Morrissey, Liz Phair and Counting Crows, when “White Out” failed to move sufficient units for Epic, the label dropped them. Chesley departed on good terms in 2001, and Verbow officially called it quits in 2003.
Given all that, it’s pretty clear why the end came, but I ask Narducy and Chesley for their thoughts about why Verbow ended. “So many things,” Narducy says now, with a laugh. “When you write, record and tour for three records, there’s just an exhaustion that certainly set in for me. And I think even a little bit of depression, because as many victories, as we had… I used to have this analogy, that if you’re gonna be a musician, be prepared to have 800 ‘nos’ to every ‘yes,’ and I personally was not prepared for that at all. It was very difficult, and I think that was evident.
“I basically stepped away from music after that because I was so damaged by not reaching the goals that I hoped we could achieve. Even just [to get to] levels of recognition, not even money, that kind of success.” Narducy says that he played in a cover band and briefly put together the trio Rockets Over Sweden, who put out an EP and performed maybe ten shows. “So I kind of think that I was done, I was just exhausted. The core of it was Alison and I, but we had other bassists and drummers that played with us, and there were a lot of them. And that was exhausting, too, to constantly be teaching people the music. I think we just kind of ran our course. But fortunately, we stayed friends and stayed in touch through the years.”
Chesley agrees that “it was really hard, and I feel like I didn’t handle it well. And I think also we were looking for a little more support from the record company than we got.”
“It was a really weird time, too, that was right around when the whole Napster thing happened,” she says, alluding to the advent of the music-file-sharing platform in 1999, that by 2001 had as many as 1.5 million people sharing “free” music with each other. Narducy tells the story of just he and Chesley playing a show in Carrboro, North Carolina (“Not a big crowd, but a really good crowd, they knew our stuff and they were requesting songs”) and meeting a couple of Duke students afterwards who offered them a place to crash. “They had a big house near campus, and we were having a beer after the show, and talking, and we started to talk about Napster. That was the first time I saw it, where they had it on their computer, and they were like, ‘Oh, look, we can just get any music for free. Check this out.’ And I remember that these guys were much younger than me, and I didn’t want to get all doom and gloom, but I was thinking, ‘Oh, this feels like the end.’ Like this is not what a musician wants to see happening at all.”
Alison Chesley and Jason Narducy, 2017/courtesy of the artists
Those were dark days for musicians trying to make a living, especially given the sudden ubiquity of file sharing, but now, more than twenty years later, both Narducy and Chesley are busier than ever.
In contrast to the short-lived Rockets Over Sweden, Narducy’s solo project Split Single has released three full-length albums since 2014 (featuring Spoon’s Britt Daniel, Wilco’s John Stirrat and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills on bass). He has played with and recorded with a grocery list of cool acts like actor Michael Shannon (with whom he toured and played R.E.M.’s “Murmur” album), Sunny Day Real Estate, Patricia Barber, The Pretenders, Liz Phair, Eddie Vedder and Robert Pollard. When we speak, he’s still recovering from jet lag after a Japanese tour with Superchunk. He’s also come full circle from sitting on stage at DC’s 9:30 Club for Bob Mould’s show promoting “Black Sheets of Rain” in 1990, to touring with him as bassist and backing vocalist since 2005. (Mould’s drummer Jon Wurster has played drums on all three Split Single albums.) Narducy has also recorded with Mould on his last five albums. Narducy’s sense of humor (and talent) is abundantly on display in “The Sexiest Elbows In Rock Music” and on his “Home Show” series, recorded with guest appearances from his kids, during the pandemic.
Narducy’s preteen punk band got an odd boost from Dave Grohl because Grohl had visited Chicago and seen Naked Raygun at Cubby Bear (his first-ever concert) with his cousin Tracy Bradford, who also happened to be the lead singer in Verboten. The story and the band were featured in the Chicago episode of Grohl’s “Sonic Highways” documentary series, a story that Grohl retold with greater brevity at Wrigley Field on one of the nights Naked Raygun opened for Foo Fighters.
Playwright and television writer Brett Neveu saw that episode of “Sonic Highways” and realized that Grohl was talking about his neighbor, Jason Narducy—their daughters attended the same school. Neveu told the Tribune that he had been in bands for twenty years, “had wanted to do a rock musical for a while,” and “loved Jason’s music, the pop quality of it, and felt it would translate well to the stage.” It took Narducy and Neveu five years, but they eventually brought “Verboten,” the musical, to stage at the Chopin Theater in early 2020. The show was so well-received that it was extended past its original closing date, but was short-circuited by the pandemic. Narducy is collaborating with Neveu again on their next musical, but it’s so early in the process, he’s mum about the subject. Narducy says he’s written two songs so far, and has sessions booked in June to record four more, but given that the first musical took five years, he’s guessing this one will take just as long.
Since leaving Verbow, Chesley has worked with artists including Mono, Anthrax, Broken Social Scene, Russian Circles, Chris Connelly, Poi Dog Pondering and Disturbed, and appears on albums by Thalia Zedek Band, Grimes and naturally, Split Single (in 2021) and Bob Mould (with whom she toured on his “Workbook 25” tour in 2015). Altogether, her cello playing can be heard on over 150 albums. She began releasing solo albums under the name Helen Money in 2007. Her fifth and most recent full-length, “Atomic,” was released in 2020.
Chesley says she’s just begun the writing process for her next Helen Money record, hoping for a 2025 release. As Helen Money, she has opened and toured with Sleep, Neurosis, Mono, Russian Circles and Shellac, who chose her to be on the bill for the All Tomorrow’s Parties “Nightmare Before Christmas” in December 2012. Portishead also chose her to perform at the ATP “I’ll Be Your Mirror” festival they curated in July 2011 in London. Locally, and most recently, I saw her perform live (I think for the third time), opening for Codeine at The Empty Bottle in March.
She doesn’t see a big distinction between her “abstract” Helen Money work and playing cello with Narducy, playing more conventional rock songs. “The way I play now is informed by what I was doing with Jason. When I started to play solo stuff, I still wanted to play that really intense, powerful music, so I feel like that’s still where I’m coming from…it feels very similar to me—it doesn’t feel like I’m doing something completely different.”
Chesley says what she most looks forward to about this show at Space and the tour that will follow is the chance to play with Narducy again. The feeling is mutual for Narducy, although he admits he is having to relearn some of those thirty-year old lyrics.
Their show and tour to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of “Woodshed,” their one and only album as Jason and Alison, begins with a sold-out gig at Space in Evanston on May 25. That performance will be followed by tour dates in Detroit on June 3; Toronto on June 4; Albany, New York on June 5; Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 6; Haddon Township, New Jersey (close to Philly) on June 7; Baltimore on June 8; and Richmond, Virginia on June 9.
