Bass Guitar Member Since: 2009
Little Jack Melody started out life in a spectral suburb of Houston, utilizing the name Steve Carter. "It was a wonderbread gray-green surreality, like a 'Leave It To Beaver' episode that rolled over day after year,” he laments. In the third grade, his Pollyanna existence was shattered with the arrival of a crystal radio. "The first things I heard were 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' and 'Washington Square'—man o man!” he enthuses. The British Invasion was next, followed by heaviness, prog rock, and later, Tom Waits and Frank Sinatra.
Melody moved to Denton to attend UNT when he was 20, and he’s lived there ever since. He has a Bachelor of Music in Composition, completed after writing "…the requisite amount of atonal chamber music, most of it serial in nature, almost none of it listenable." He first met Carl Finch in the early days of Combo, when Melody was bassist in a band called Schwantz Lefantz and the two groups were crossing paths regularly in the clubs.
For the last many years, his primary focus has been alt-cabaret band Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks, a Luddite response to technology and Twinkie-pop. Comprised of harmonium, tuba, tenor banjo, sax/clarinet, and trap kit, the project’s been the vehicle for Melody’s songs and passions, and the group’s four CDs have garnered considerable critical acclaim. The band continues, but performs less frequently since LJM joined Combo in May, 2009.
Melody’s written extensively for musical theater, having composed for productions in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Fort Worth, and Dallas. His muses include Hubert Selby, Jr., Nino Rota, Brecht/Weill, Carla Bley, Randy Newman, Henry Miller, Raymond Carver, Beat literature, European cabaret, circus music, and Salvation Army-esque plaintive best-musical-intentions.
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