Poi Dog Pondering back in isles for concert

Poi Dog Pondering, the band that wandered from Hawaii across the nation, returns to the islands this weekend for a show at Next Door.

Band founder Frank Orrall is pleased to be back.

“We’ve really only played here a few times,” he noted.

Though Orrall proudly claims his local roots, his band has played here in a concert setting just a handful of times. Those include a gig at The Wave in 1988 and another in 1999. But it was Poi Dog Pondering’s opening show at the Honolulu Museum of Art, then known as the Honolulu Academy of Arts, in 1986 that Orrall remembers as “foundational.”

“It sort of set the tone for everything we did after that,” he said.

The 1986 concert was partly inspired by the 1983 film “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film that revolutionized the notion of what a rock concert is and how rock music could be presented. Rather than simply showing the band performing, the Jonathan Demme-directed film was a montage of band members, dancers, backup singers — even the road crew — showing the concert coming together, not just performer by performer, but also stage prop by stage prop.

“It really blew the doors wide open as far as ‘Wow, you can do that in a performance?’” Orrall said. “So our first show had video projections of lava. … We had tap dancers, and we had bagpipe musicians sitting with us, kind of like Velvet Underground. It was all over the map. …

“Basically, the whole thing of doing more of a conceptual show, that seed was planted there.”

It would take a while before that seed truly germinated, with many of Poi Dog Pondering’s most successful years spent outside of Hawaii.

The band started out playing on the streets of Waikiki, trying out its own sound while band members held down day jobs playing conventional club music.

“The truth is, we were all in other bands,” Orrall said. “Everybody was in post-punk bands, and we kind of had the feeling that we were beating our heads against the wall playing in the clubs. The scene was pretty small, and we couldn’t do as (much) weird stuff as we wanted to. They would say to you, ‘We need you to play 60 percent covers,’ so we just started playing on the street in Waikiki for fun.”

Shortly after the concert at the museum, the band decided to pack up and head off on a tour of the mainland. The members were just a bunch of friends who decided to go on an adventure together, busking on street corners for spare change as they had in Waikiki.

The tour took the band up and down the West Coast and out to Austin, Texas, which was then beginning to come into its own as a center for indie rock.

Poi Dog Pondering fit right in with Austin’s adventurous music scene, and the band drew increasing public attention. That earned the band a contract with Columbia-Sony. However, Orrall said, the arrangement was a struggle from the start. The five-year contract was not renewed, by mutual consent.

“We were a very young band, really sort of green, when we signed with Columbia,” Orrall said. “It was a high-pressure situation, and we were glad to get out of it. When they dropped us we were relieved, and we just went directly into starting our own label (Platetectonic Music). We’ve been doing that ever since, which we really love.

“To me the real gravity started after that, in ’94 or ’95. That’s when the band really came into its own, and it’s still just as strong as it ever was. It kind of does its own thing in its own way. We’re kind of stubborn like that, but it keeps the fire in the belly.”

The band relocated to Chicago in the mid-’90s. “We were interested in a big-city experience,” Orrall said. It’s been based there since. Poi Dog Pondering performs in Chicago two or three times a year; other periods are spent touring or recording.

“I played for a lot of bands in Honolulu, five-night-a-week things,” Orrall said, “When I started Poi Dog, I just really decided not to do that. It was like, ‘In your hometown, only play three or four times a year but really make those shows count.’ That’s been our motto ever since.

“If you play all the time, it’s kind of like, ‘Maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t.’ But if you don’t and you save it up and you think about the show and you bring something special, then there’s anticipation.

“People get excited, and the band feels that same thing — and you have to deliver.”

For the performance here, Orrall will be bringing a small band, stripped down from the 15-piece dance band he normally performs with. The band’s eclectic mixture of sounds from violinist Susan Voelz, mandolin player Ted Cho and Dave Max Crawford, who plays brass and keyboards, will be featured. Orrall expects some friends to join in as well.

They’ll be playing tunes from their 2015 recording, “Everybody’s Got a Star,” which the band describes as “an unapologetic off-road venture, a joy ride recalling the vibe of ’80s/’90s nightclub DJs,” as well as material from throughout the band’s 32-year history.

“Before we even made our first record, we were putting out stuff on cassette albums, and that was here in Honolulu,” Orrall said. “We sold like three, so there are three copies of them out there in the world.”

Now 55, Orrall grew up in a family with eclectic musical interests. His mother was a self-taught guitarist and had an extensive folk-music record collection; his brother played slack-key guitar. “My sister’s degree in school was sea chanteys,” he said with a laugh.

The islands remain close to his heart. Orrall comes out to Hawaii most years to enjoy the sun and surf, and his girlfriend is from the islands as well. “We kind of have one foot on the boat, one foot on the pier,” he said.