By Anika Imajo
Chris Bopst gets RVA. He always has.
“You have to make your entertainment in this city,” advises the musician/writer/booking agent, whose hard-nosed attitude toward music has served him – and his community – well over the years.
As the driving force behind the eclectic live performances at Balliceaux and as a member of the programming committee for the Richmond Folk Festival, he never fails to bring new sounds to Richmond audiences. As a widely published music writer, he promotes upcoming local shows while offering his reliably frank opinions about both music and the region.
“I always write about Richmond somehow, through the prism of music,” he remarks.
The Fairfax native, who has been bringing shows to town since he first arrived in 1984, says he started importing performers simply because he wanted to see them.
And his purity of purpose has remained evident over the years, reflected in the musical lineup at Balliceaux, in the playlists from his five-year tenure as an AM radio show host, in his current podcast, and in his prolific reviews of local artists.
Pointing out that he wouldn’t book a band – or broadcast music – he couldn’t stomach himself, he explains, “Life is compromise and I’m fine with that, but the one thing I’m not going to compromise on is music. It means too much to me.”
But don’t mistake Bopst’s unwavering loyalty to his personal preferences for a limited view of what constitutes good music. To our benefit, the man who helps expand Greater Richmond’s musical horizons has a palate that knows no stylistic bounds. Consider the continuous rotation of shows at Balliceaux – where the sounds of gamelan (traditional Indonesian musical ensemble), thrive in cozy proximity to the rhythms of big band, soul and classical on any given week.
“I book music like I eat food,” he explains. “I’ll try anything.”
An accomplished musician with widespread name recognition, Bopst has the influence and experience to both attract notable musicians and show them proper love. Treating the bands well, he says, is part of the formula that makes Balliceaux a successful venue.
Bopst’s career as a performer was rooted in the salad days of Richmond’s 1980s punk scene. When he arrived “fresh from the suburbs” to study sculpture at VCU, the downtown that greeted him was an open field for creative ebullience where a knack for do-it-yourself amusement could find particularly fertile soil. Richmond, he recalls, provided the ideal landscape for the birth of several bands that tapped into the city’s resources to enhance a vibrant countercultural underground. Cheap rehearsal space, geographic immediacy, and relative freedom from meddling authorities helped spawn several of the hardcore projects in which Bopst played.
His early musical resume reads like a Black Label-soaked flyer from a bygone Richmond bar, boasting tenures with such bands as Absence of Malice, the Alter Natives, and Death Piggy. The latter “morphed into Gwar” – a whimsical little project mocking the reviled hair metal of the time – of which Bopst was a founding member and the original bass player.
“We were basically Northern Virginia refugees, almost everybody in Gwar … and we loved the city. Nothing was downtown. It was like our own little playground.”
In early 1987, Bopst hung up his spiky helmet, shook off the fake blood, and devoted his talent to the Alter Natives. The instrumental band signed with SST Records in California and toured extensively throughout the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Europe. He then joined the D.C.-based Holy Rollers, with whom Richmond drummer/artist Ed Trask played, and whose Dischord Records label was founded by one of Bopst’s personal idols Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat, Teen Idles, and Fugazi fame). From the Holy Rollers, he moved onto the progressive Mao Tse Helen, continuing to record and tour extensively.
But throughout the 15 or so years that he spent on the road, Bopst always kept his home base in RVA and kept abreast of its evolution.
“The rise of VCU has changed everything,” he remarks.
With its burgeoning arts community, Richmond, he says, “is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century…the 20th century.”
While the success of the Richmond Folk Festival has made it the largest in the country, Bopst argues that the town’s relative obscurity continues to nurture the robust underground that has inhabited the River City’s streets for decades. This environment has spawned a healthy harvest of world-renowned musicians. GWAR, Lamb of God, No BS Brass Band, Municipal Waste, Matthew White, Avail, and Tim Berry are among the examples Bopst offers of Richmond’s musical exports.
“They all pack shows all across the country and in Europe. So we are an international city musically.”
Richmond’s uncommon musical yield is attributable in part, he says, to its openness to diverse genres. Since the days when he could hear the Good Guys’ ska in the same lineup as the Orthotonics’ experimental rock, Bopst has admired this town’s intermingling of varied styles.
“Richmond still doesn’t have a discernable sound, a certain sound that we’re known for…we can’t be pigeonholed, which I’ve always loved.”
And this custom endures, as does Bopst’s eternal quest for unfamiliar manifestations of quality music.
He likes the old stuff. His six-year old daughter is named after Nina Simone. And his wife, painter Jennifer Holloway Bopst, was screened for musical compatibility on their first date. Had she not appreciated Gil Scott-Heron’s performance that night, he insists they would have parted ways. The couple celebrates their 17th anniversary this month.
But the new stuff is what really captivates him.
Partial to local up-and-comers Black Girls and Mutwawa, he also searches nationally and internationally for new sounds. He’s currently enjoying bands such as Konono N01, Lake Street Dive, and Ethiopian funk ensemble Debo Band.
“I’m just looking,” he explains. “I live under the theory that I haven’t heard my favorite band. I want to hear it all.”
To follow some of Bopst’s latest fascinations, catch his podcast on Mondays or in one of its twice-weekly rebroadcasts on Internet station Kaos Radio Austin.