Silvertide 'Show & Tell' album

“When I was 16, I was writing songs with this guy,” remembers Silvertide frontman Walt Lafty.

“We were in the basement of his house jamming, and this kid walks in right after we finished a song. He looks at me and says, ‘I’m gonna be in a band with you someday.’ It was weird.”

The kid was Nick Perri, Silvertide’s lead guitarist. This initial encounter was pretty well buried in their respective subconsciouses by the time Walt and Nick met for real. But for Walt, there was nonetheless something elementary about the moment Silvertide’s two halves came together: “Mark and I – a rhythm guitar player and a singer – were doing this open-mic night. Nick and Kevin were there, too – a lead guitar player and a drummer. We saw them and they saw us, and it was just putting two and two together.”

What joined these musical factions was an unspoken reverence for rock and roll. “Walt and Mark were into exactly what Kevin and I thought was cool musically,” Nick confirms. Says Walt, still a bit incredulous, “Those guys were into Jeff Beck. Jeff Beck. Most of the kids in Northeast Philly have never even heard of Jeff Beck.”

In fact, the band’s obvious admiration for Jeff Beck – not to mention The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Aerosmith and Jimi Hendrix, among other titans of rock – made them odd men out in the heavily Catholic, working-class section of Philadelphia they call home. “Whatever was popular never seemed to be my thing,” Kevin points out.

Echoes Nick: “I respect whatever anyone else wants to listen to, but I grew up on something different; I’ve always just been into rock and roll and the blues. I looked completely different from everyone else. I was made fun of and I felt like an outcast and I didn’t care. It just fueled my desire to play rock music. It was the same with Walt and Mark and Kevin [bassist Brian Weaver was called in a bit later]. We opened for Aerosmith six months after we got together because, I swear, we were one of the only bands playing that kind of original rock and roll in Philadelphia. We were the only band testifying.”

Testifying. Rock is indeed a religion with Silvertide, whose debut album, Show and Tell (J Records), releases September 28, 2004. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Walt found his true calling in a church basement.

“I was at this CYO [Catholic Youth Organization] meeting, “he explains. “I was 13 and just hanging out. I’d been playing drums for a couple of years and a lot of the kids there were in bands. This one guy was playing a Zeppelin riff, and I just started singing. I hit every note, so this other guy said, “Screw covers – we should write some originals.” So he and I started writing songs. That’s when I went downhill in school. All I wanted to do was work on songs, and school seemed like the perfect free time to do that. Then I stopped going altogether. I only wanted to practice.”

And even though Walt’s father played music and his mom was a Stones fanatic, the senior Laftys were not happy with their boy’s truancy. “I got kicked out of school. My parents threw me out of the house … multiple times,” says the singer, 23. “A couple times I lived at my grandma’s, but then my best friend had a house and I rented a room off him. When I finally moved back home, I said, ‘I started up a band and I think we’re gonna do pretty good. I need to quit my job as a janitor and do this full time.’”

Another pivotal juncture came when Walt met Mark Melchiorre, Jr. “He had a Volkswagen hippy bus, like an ‘81 Westphalia camper,” Walt notes. “That was really different.”

“I’d noticed Walt at school,” informs Mark, 22. “I knew he was into music because I’d seen him singing. We met junior year. I’d been playing guitar since I was eight or nine, and we started playing and writing together pretty quick.”

“My dad plays bass,” Mark continues. “He was in a band when he was younger with my uncle and a friend. They worked at a garage together and on weekends they’d bring all their gear over there and just play. My dad loved The Beatles, and my uncle was totally into Aerosmith.

Nick Perri and Kevin Frank, both 20, were likewise developing their chops. The former began playing guitar when he was 12, having been converted to rock by his aunt at the age of 10. “My mom would listen to Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, the more singer-songwriter stuff,” Nick notes. “My dad is right off the boat from Italy. He listens to Luciano Pavarotti. They were pretty conservative. My aunt would come over, and when my mom wasn’t looking, she’d slip me these records – AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, old blues stuff like Albert King, Elmore James, T-Bone Walker. They changed my life.”

“Nick and I have been playing together since the first day we met, in freshman year,” adds Kevin. “He really stood out in a high school band situation. No one played as well as he did; there was just more sophistication in what he was doing, even when he was 13. He had a natural passion, and I could really relate to that.”

Kevin’s percussive passion was born early on. “I just banged on the pots and pans, everything, all the time, until I completely annoyed everyone in the family,” he says. “I finally said to my mom, ‘Please get me a drum set.’ I got this awesome, old ‘70s Rogers kit free from my sister’s friend. I had no clue how to play. I never took lessons; I just taught myself. I play differently from most drummers – I’m left-handed but right-footed. I didn’t know it was wrong. That’s just how I started playing. It was noise and nonsense for about a year, and then things started to sound like beats. I just listened to whatever was on the radio, but my favorite stuff is from the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

“Walt has undeniable charisma,” Nick confides. “I look back at that open mic night as being an intensely exciting experience because I felt like I was meeting the Bon Scott of Philadelphia. He has this volatile, loose-cannon thing – you
never know what he’s gonna do next. No matter how close you get, there’s just this mystery. When I met him, he’d already broken out of his conformist home life. I saw this free spirit and it got me thinking. I quit DJ’ing parties [though it had become a lucrative sideline] and everything else I was doing and devoted myself completely to playing guitar.”

That was before they drafted Brian Weaver, 23 (another bassist had actually played with Nick and Kevin at the open mic). Brian was studying bass at Philadelphia’s University Of The Arts. “I grew up three houses down from Mark – we’ve known each other since we were three,” he says. “One day he called me up and said, ‘I’m doing this band with Walt. I don’t know if the bass player is gonna work out; would you be able to play some gigs?’

“I’d met Walt at a party where this cover band I was in was playing. I went outside to smoke and Walt was out there singing ‘Jesus Christ Superstar,’ just having a good time. We were laughing and saying, ‘We should start a band.’ It never happened, but a couple of years later, I get this call from Mark.”

That call was less about neighborliness and more about Brian’s reputation as an accomplished instrumentalist. He started playing guitar when he was eight, then switched to drums, then picked up the bass. When Mark asked Brian to check out Silvertide, he didn’t know what to expect. “But I was impressed,” he maintains. “I thought the songs, especially, were really good. And I felt definite chemistry.” So Brian left school and joined the band. “And,” Walt deadpans, “we’ve been a disgruntled happy family ever since.”

It wasn’t long before Silvertide landed a weekly gig at Philly’s Abilene Blues Bar. Nick speculates as to why the club would grant a residency to a virtually untested act: “The promoter, like any promoter, wanted to make money, and I think he saw there was something different about us, so he took a chance. At first there were two people at the bar, but the next week there were, like, 10 and the week after that 20. Eventually, the club was so fuckin’ packed they had to turn people away.”

Walt thinks he knows why: “The trick is to give people something to see. You can be five virtuosos up there, but if you don’t put on a show, you aren’t gonna create the kind of fans that come back week after week and know every word to every song even though you don’t have a record out. You climb into the crowd, you light yourself on fire, you hang from the ceiling, you smash stuff, you dance on the bar, you get the whole crowd onstage – whatever you want to do. It becomes a party, a bunch of completely unruly people. That’s what we were looking for; that’s what every single one of us wanted.”

Once Silvertide was recruited to support Aerosmith at the last minute when the original opener was forced to cancel, all hell broke loose. And where all hell goes, A&R guys follow. James Diener at J Records eventually shut down the bidding and sent the band out on the road. They’ve now played or toured with Velvet Revolver, Van Halen, Kid Rock, Godsmack, Alice Cooper, Tantric, Shinedown and The Darkness and mounted headlining shows all over the U.S. and in London.

The label released a Silvertide EP, American Excess, in 2002, then put the band up in a house so they could nurture their creativity in peace and quiet. Of course, they spent most of that time partying. Still, they did manage to hone their songwriting method.

Though Walt is Silvertide’s lyricist, every member of the band writes with every other member. The making of “Mary Jane” is revelatory. “With that song, Kevin had a lick and Mark had a chorus section and Nick had a bridge and Brian had this cool little run going on,” Walt elaborates. “After we were done hammering on it, it was this great, uplifting, totally rocking song. At first it was just about pot, smoking a joint and having a good time. But I went back to it later and realized it could also be about a relationship, and I kind of reinforced that meaning. I’ve always been a big fan of those kinds of lyrics, where something can be taken a couple of different ways. It makes the experience of listening to the song much more universal; you can see your own situation.”

When it came time to make Show and Tell, Silvertide headed out to Los Angeles to work at Ocean Studios with Oliver Leiber, who’s collaborated with a panoply of pop and rock artists, from Aretha Franklin to Antigone Rising.

Show and Tell is loud, proud, rough and ready. The sound is outsized but organic. “We didn’t want it to be overproduced,” says Kevin. We did a couple of takes here and there, but we tried to keep it as simple and live as possible.”

Perhaps hometown music scribe Tom Moon said it best when he wrote of Silvertide: “They’re disciples of the Church Of The Power Chord in whose songs shopworn classic-rock elements are reborn as signifiers of a wild, feral, renegade life” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

And though Show and Tell does boast its fair share of sex, drugs and rock and roll, it also charges into complicated, emotionally fraught territory. “Nothing Stays,” for one, bears a resigned, elegiac sentiment: “When everything seems to go away/ I can hear the silver call my name/ Nothing happens when I pray, no/ Nothing happens when I pray/ No nothing gold ever stays.” And “Foxhole J.C.” is an anguished cry of caution: “Brothers, sisters, the war is coming so you better stand strong/ Brothers, sisters, if peace was in this war it would have already gunned you down/ I said get down, I said down/ We got one unit lost and the others too proud/ Down, get down, down, I said down.”

In the end, though, the essence of Silvertide is more in the blood, sweat and tears of its members and fans than in even the most evocative words printed on a page. When asked to distill that elusive spirit, Walt says matter-of-factly, “We’re a great live act.” Then he poses the challenge: “If you don’t believe me, spend the 15 bucks on a ticket and come to one of our shows. I could tell you it’s the greatest drug in the world, but you wouldn’t believe it unless you experienced it yourself.”

For Nick, Walt’s challenge is an invitation to the curious to immerse themselves completely in what he considers the most sacred of rock and roll sacraments: listening. “I’m still blown away by music,” he marvels. “The more I listen, the more there is to listen to. I get inspired by it every day, and that’s how I want other people to feel.”

The Band

Walt Lafty, vocals
Nick Perri, lead guitar
Mark Melchiorre, Jr., rhythm guitar
Brian Weaver, bass
Kevin Frank, drums

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Silvertide - Show & Tell