The ROGUES -- Glad to be Plaid
Dirty Linen Magazine
February - March 2003 (#104)
The Rogues, one of the biggest names on the Renaissance Festival circuit, want you to know that it's not all about cantilevered bosoms and steak-on-sticks. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
Houston, Texas self-proclaimed "bad boys of Celtic music" are best known for the powerful live sets that showcase their bagpipe-based Celtic/world-beat sound, performances which have made them the best-loved RenFaire act that doesn't involve sharp objects or fractured Elizabethan pentameter. At such venues as the Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville, their shows pack the small taverns and stages to overflowing. They always seem to gather longtime fans, including beautiful, lively women known as "Roguettes," who move to the sinuous percussive beats of Randy Wothke and Nelson Stewart.
But the Rogues can also rock out or go transcendentally mellow. During their Crownsville residency in the fall of 2002, they headlined a benefit concert that raised over $6,000 for a widowed friend. Their set featured newest member Stewart, whose band mates jokingly call him "Nelvis," wailing away on electric guitar and bass. In contrast, the highlight of their fifth CD, appropriately titled Rogues V.0, is Wothke's tribute to his wife, "The Rose of Sharon," featuring Brian Thomas of the Houston Symphony playing a haunting melody on French horn. When Thomas guested at the Crownsville festival, with Wothke on keyboards, Stewart on bodhran, and Lars Sloan and Jimmy Mitchell on pipes, "Sharon" 's blend of traditional Celtic and modern electric sounds stopped festival-goers' mead cups halfway to their lips.
Wothke and Sloan are two of the band's founding members. When asked "How long have you been a Rogue?" Wothke replied, "You'd have to ask my wife." A sly joke? No. Sharon Wothke is the group's institutional memory. "If you want facts, come tell me, because they don't even know this stuff," she laughed.
The Rogues have had more names than Spinal Tap. (Also, possibly, more drummers, though the departures of Rogues drummers don't generally involve spontaneous combustion.) In 1987, Sloan, Randy Wothke, E.J. Jones, and J.W. McCormick founded a band called Clandestine. Then career and educational changes drew Jones, Sloan, and McCormick out of the band. Sloan, who left to work in the film industry, took the Clandestine name with him. Sharon Wothke christened the 1994 incarnation--Wothke, Jones (who left and then came back), Thomas Campbell, and Paul Rendon--the Scottish Rogues. A year later, when Jones and Rendon left to form a new Clandestine with Sloan, the Scottish Rogues picked up Bryan Blaylock and Jimmy Mitchell and recorded their first album to sell at the Texas Renaissance Festival. Its overwhelming sales led the group to record more albums and tour more extensively, even as the personnel shifted yet again with the departure of Mitchell in 1996. Sloan came back, and the group recorded Hollerin' for Haggis that fall. In 1997, Campbell left, Mitchell rejoined, and the band shortened its name to The Rogues. A show in Ontario was released as Live in Canada, eh?
Off Kilter, released in 1999, and and V.0 picked up six preliminary Grammy nominations in new-artist and folk categories. "We made it to the second level," said Randy Wothke. Thrust into a pool of diverse musicians, many with more national exposure, the Rogues material failed to make the final batch of nominees in its categories. "Until we get a [Celtic] category, it's going to be next to impossible" to reach the final five, Wothke said.
While still undeniably Celtic, V.0 gains strength from its eclecticism. Besides the usual dyed-in-the-wool instrumental compositions by Mitchell, Sloan, and Wothke, it contains a Gypsy dance based on "John MacKenzie's Fancy" (featuring the flamenco tapping of dancer Leandra La Greca), as well as Sloan's song "Cullen Anderson," with lyrics by his father and guest turns from vocalist Emily Vacek and electric-bouzouki player Wolf Loescher. Marc Gunn at CelticMP3s.com called V.0 "not just another bagpipe album. . . the crossover album that will make fans of those who never before liked the bagpipes." Well, that might be a bit of a stretch--there's no escaping the bold, often rousing, often mournful sound of the pipes at a Rogues show. Jimmy Mitchell plays shuttle pipes and Highland pipes, and Lars Sloan plays, he said, "the great Highland war pipe -- the loud obnoxious one."
When asked what Texas and Scotland had in common, Randy Wothke quickly answered, "Bagpipes. There's a school down in our home town--" St. Thomas Episcopal School in Houston--"where they teach bagpiping instead of wind band."
"There's a strong Celtic community in Texas," added wife Sharon. "People don't realize. There's a lot of people who immigrated from Scotland and then just went down to the South. There's a lot of people who ended up in Texas with Scottish or Irish links. And when you go to Houston, you think it's all cows and oil wells, but it's actually a very strong Celtic community there." Sloan, in fact, founded the Hamilton School of Piping in Houston nearly 20 years ago, and Mitchell attended St. Thomas Episcopal School.
Besides percussion and pipes, there's another element to the Rogues' success. Call it charisma. Or maybe call it sex appeal. The boyish Stewart, who shamelessly mugs for the crowd, seems to be especially well loved by the ladies. He's been enjoying his Roguish experience since joining in January 2002, after the departure of Blaylock and just in time for V.0. "I love it. It's awesome."
At some point, the Rogues began to notice a group of dancers who showed up at Texas shows. The phenomenon has spread, and the guys--and Sharon Wothke, who's sometimes called "the fifth Rogue" and who can be spotted in the audience, undulating in bare-midriffed peasant wear and flogging Rogues swag, when weather permits--have encouraged it. "Sharon came up with the idea of having Roguette shirts," Randy Wothke explained. "We just started selling those last year."
It's all in good fun. "We've got family all over the place," said Sharon Wothke, and she wasn't speaking of relatives. "That's the neat thing about the Rogues--wherever we go, we're more than just a group that entertains. People really take us into their hearts and homes. People give us food and presents. I think the music really opens people's hearts up. They don't think of us as stars. They think of us as family."
They hope that the family will grow with the release of their next album, planned for later this year. "We're doing a live album, Nov. 23, at the Mucky Duck, a club down in Houston," Mitchell informed.
"We're gonna have a little driving sound," added Sloan, "with the keyboards, some bass guitar. We're gonna have a lot of guest musicians from local bands, friends of ours down in the Houston area." Those friends will include Clandestine's E.J. Jones--you can't keep an old Rogue down.
But they aren't giving up the sound of the old country. When asked whether the Rogues were going to change too much, Sloan patted his bag: "With the bagpipes in it, you're always gonna have that little bit of Scottish."
by Pamela Murray Winters
