Chad Lore: Press

Weekly Web show with musician Chad Lore and band Free Bier debuts Sunday

'MONTY PYTHON' MEETS 'HEE HAW'

At the house where the filming takes place, you find yourself asking questions you never considered you'd ask.

Like: Is that a witch on your car? (Nope. Merlin doll.)

Why is the newscaster sitting in a bathtub filled with circus peanuts? (Peanuts are the free giveaway.)

Why is that guitar wrapped in tinfoil? (Punch line coming later.)

The basement smells faintly of ketchup. Streaks of yellow and red paint stain the floor. A shelving unit and clothing rack hold the props and costumes: clocks, a telephone, wigs, cardboard bricks, lederhosen.

It's possible Casper musician Chad Lore spends more time cleaning than filming. He's in $4,000, including the cost of a camera, costumes and at least 10 pounds of bubble wrap.

Why?

Well, Lore said, why not?

Lore, his friends and band, Free Bier, have been filming for two months. The product: "Free Beer & the Door," six 15-minute Web shows scheduled to run Sunday nights on Lore's website, beginning this week.

There is no cost to watch. Lore is simply providing a Sunday pick-me-up before the work week begins, something along the lines of "‘Monty Python' meets ‘Hee Haw,' in a trailer park," he said.

Each show includes music, comedy, local entertainment, beer tasting, faux local news with "Action News KWY Channel 20" and a drum solo, every week in a different place: Casper Mountain in the snow, kitchens, elevators, parking garages.

Ideas for what would become Web show skits popped up over the years. Lore and musician Tom Price have played together for 20 years, forming Free Bier three or four years ago with bassist Bob Sellers. Lore, known for his one-man-band performances at venues throughout Casper, said he wrote the first six Web shows in one day. Filming takes place on the weekends, often in Lore's basement. His wife films and edits.

After the first six episodes air, Lore hopes for more.

"We keep getting more ideas. I want to keep doing it," he said.

Audiences watching online from home can expect to see the band performing dressed as a hot dog and condiments, spraying paint, mustard and ketchup on bed sheets tacked to the wall. One skit begins with Lore's daughter placing a tinfoil-wrapped potato into the oven. Lore then jams out on his guitar as a baked potato - the basement walls, guitar and Lore himself all wrapped in tinfoil.

There is Bubble Wrap Boy, a Mediterranean man named Gunther who speaks in a German accent, and newscasters Woody Johnson and Chuck Buck, who present a "digital word of the day," by turning digital clocks upside down and reading the numbers as letters. They give away free prizes, like a box of Hot Tamales, used gas cards and, in one episode, a lifetime supply of air.

Price said it doesn't matter if people find it absurd, ridiculous, hilarious or stupid. In a way, it's all those things.

Opinions have already appeared on Facebook, where Lore posted some photographs of the filming:

dude do you ever sleep?

How many episodes have you guys made and WHEN do we get to see them?!

Are you guys trippin??

You guys have a lot of free time, don't you?

As long as people aren't apathetic, Price said he'll be happy.

"We've already lost more money doing the Web show, but it's all about having fun," Lore said.

Going for broke and throwing circus peanuts is OK with them.

The peanuts made their debut for Price and Lore in the late ‘80s. Price remembers playing a concert while at Casper College, dressed as the Blues Brothers, carrying a briefcase filled with the peanuts. He opened the briefcase and started throwing the candy at the audience.

"That was the beginning of our love affair with circus peanuts," Price said.

Lore hopes for something else, too. Maybe if people watch the show, they'll want to donate to the band's biggest idea, he said. The musicians want to hit the road in September, making an improbable tour of ten states in 24 hours. Lore's got it planned out. They'll start in Texas and end up in Montana, playing briefly where they can, in gas stations and coffee shops. They'll ride in his rusty blue Oldsmobile, harmonicas glued to its front, whistling as they drive. The Harmonicar, they already call it.

In the meantime, they've got more filming and script writing to do. Beyond the props in the basement, Lore's got a trove of gear in the backyard, basketball hoops to tap shoes, juggling equipment to propane tanks, bikes, banjos, Koosh balls, snowshoes, a globe, a toilet seat, Jack-in-the-Box, lava lamp and a stuffed Merlin doll, resting on the hood of the car.

An open bottle of Miller Lite wobbles in his shirt pocket. He takes a few swigs between songs and pockets the bottle again. Two more rattle in water bottle holders secured to his microphone stand with duct tape. They go down slow, sipped only during millisecond breaks.

"Ghost Riders in the Sky" barely finishes vibrating on his guitar strings before he pulls his red bandana over his mouth like a bandit and thumps out a hyperactive beat, like a rock band does to introduce its members.

But the man doesn't stop. He thumps and slaps and taps, contorting his face all the while, until the howling laughter from the crowd in the Poor Boy's Steakhouse Pump Room is louder than his beat.

It's introduction enough. Chad Lore is the only man in his band, anyway.

Armed with harmonica, guitar, tap shoes, accordion, duct tape, a massive repertoire of songs and some fierce wit, Lore has become a regular in Casper's music scene. He plays the Wonder Bar Wednesdays, Poor Boy's Thursdays, All That Jazz monthly, Elixirs randomly and dozens of other venues as requested.

If it seems like he's everywhere in town, he is.

If it seems like he plays everything, he pretty much does. A ukulele while riding a unicycle? Yep. An accordion and a harmonica at the same time? Only if he feels the crowd can handle it. Slide guitar with a beer bottle, a tap dance accompaniment and a few jokes? It's an almost nightly ritual.

"The playing's the easy part," he says. But it's not the only part. Lore is one of those rare musicians who does music full-time, 50, 60 hours a week. Before he hits any of his several stages in town, he networks, markets and books himself and side bands, learns new songs, strings guitars and ukes, records in his studio and sets up amps, microphones and accessories for his show. Then he entertains for three or four hours and heads home in the early morning hours to fill his number one role: husband and father of three.

"Is it glamorous? No. Fun? Yes. The second you get people dancing and having fun, that's when it's worth it," he says.

"You get addicted to having people smile."

Back at Poor Boy's, he blows a few notes from his harmonica and hoists an accordion onto his shoulder.

"There's a few dirty words in this German beer song, so if anyone here speaks German and I offend them, I'm sorry," he says. "Of course, just playing the accordion is kind of offensive anyway."

Lore got the accordion as a Christmas gift shortly after marrying his wife, Guadalupe, in her native Spain 11 years ago. They met when he was home from Europe for a summer and she was in Casper on a foreign exchange. Their children are 6, 2 1/2 and 4-months, the youngest being born on the Fourth of July. When Lore "jokes" about speaking only Spanish at home and having, like, 400 Spanish relatives, he is only slightly stretching the truth. (He doesn't have 400 Spanish kin.)

Lore isn't quite sure where he got the humor that entertains people as much as his music.

"I don't tell jokes. I just tell the truth and people can't believe it," he says.

He really was a street musician in Europe for a decade. He worked at a worm farm when he was 16 to save money for the trip and landed in Germany when he was 17. He traveled Holland, France, England, Sweden and Germany on a mountain bike, carrying only a guitar and a blue tarp for sleeping in the forests that surrounded each town.

At first, he just played guitar on the street corners. Actually, he just played "Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones over and over. But other street bums taught him more songs, and he eventually saved enough money to buy a harmonica. Problem was, every other street musician played harmonica and guitar too. So, in a desperate attempt to set himself apart, he taped a couple European coins to the bottom of his shoes and started tapping. He threw in some wit in the people's tongue, and Chad Lore, the one man band, was born.

"He's an entertainer," says Jason Beck, friend and co-owner of Poor Boy's, the Wonder Bar and All That Jazz. "He's got a list of songs in his head that will blow you away. I don't even know where they're coming from. I never see a show turn out the same as any before. He just goes with the crowd."

Poor Boy's is mellow. The Wonder Bar gets wild. His band, Free Bier, is like Lore triplets. And the singing telegrams with fellow musician Tom Price as part of The Valentiners are just silly.

"It was one of those crazy ideas, but people love it," he says. "We sat around wondering what does Casper not have and thought, 'Well, they don't have singing telegrams.'"

And that's pretty much how Lore works. He sees a need for things to be better and fixes them however he can, be it with duct tape, singing telegrams or love.

In Europe he would take his coins and exchange them for bills and store them in his shoes.

"By the end of the summer I was walking on like $500," he says.

Here in Casper, which, he says, is the best place on earth, he walks through a life that is beyond his expectations.

"I wake up in the morn and it's like a dream. I have a beautiful wife, three kids and I play music full time," he says.

"I'll be rich in the next life. I just want to have fun in this one."

One-man show

During my whirlwind visit to Wyoming, I stopped at a bar called Karen & Jim's to see one of my favorite performers. Chad Lore puts on the best one-man show I've seen in any town, anywhere.

Lore usually stands on a slab of wood and tap dances a rhythm as he plays his guitar and sings whatever request is yelled from the crowd.

Within the time it took me to drink one 12 oz. Fat Tire, Lore sang a song by The Cars, sang in Greek for the Greek bar owner's wedding anniversary and strapped a bicycle helmet to his head with duct tape before riding a unicycle around the room while playing a ukulele and singing "Cotton-Eyed Joe."

Harmonicas played by the freeway     PROP
Chad Lore, a Casper musician, compares his car to the sound of a swarm of bees or the tuning of an orchestra. His car’s belly isn’t scraping across the asphalt or rolling on four flat tires. Lore has attached 200 harmonicas to his blue spray-painted, four door generating an ominous noise unheard of before his invention.

When assembling the rig, Lore spent no more than $10 dollars on a bottle of blue spray paint and all of the harmonicas were his own discarded instruments he kept after they broke.

Lore intends on taking a road trip through 10 different states to go on a 24-hour musical tour. It will be a sight to see Lore on the road, but the sound may be a cause for passersby to glance over at his spectacle of a car, and then keep driving. Though his idea is inventive and keeps an old beater of a car out of the dump, along with 200 harmonicas, but I don’t believe Lore will have too many groupies on his musical tour. In fact, I question how long he’s going to last listening to a broken record of 200 harmonicas screaming along at 60 miles per hour. Nonetheless, props to Lore, whether drivers dig it or not, for taking his musical creativity to a whole new level.