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One last hoorah for local band Baby Toro

After six years, a handful of singles, a full-length record and countless shows at regional venues, art galleries and nontraditional performance spaces, the Montezuma County duo known as Baby Toro is calling it quits.

Guitarist and vocalist Lindsay Isbell and guitarist and vocalist Hardison Collins created a unique and original sound well outside of your typical male-female duo singing folk songs. Baby Toro favored simple guitars, some reverb and vocal harmony reminiscent of the Everly Brothers but more in tune with John Doe and Exene Cervenka from X. Pair their Cramps-like “folkabilly” sound with the punk rock do-it-yourself ethics of record making, from their recording methods to creating limited number, hand-pressed CDs complete with cut-out collage artwork, and you’ve got a contribution to original, independent music. They were one-of-a-kind in the Southwest, playing music right up the alley of fans of American punk and country-goth.

Baby Toro’s last show is Saturday at the Sideshow Emporium in Dolores. The reason behind the finale is lack of time: Life responsibilities make it difficult to write, practice and perform.

“It’s hard as parents and adults to get together,” Collins said last week from the KSJD studios in Cortez. “This seemed like a good time to stop with this and focus on some other stuff.”

Baby Toro was founded in 2008. Collins has always been fond of having a female in his bands, favoring the harmonizing sounds of the male and female voice.

“I had been playing, and I had songs, and I was doing stuff by myself, and frankly, I wasn’t that confident,” Collins said. “So, I decided I wanted to get somebody else to play with me, and specifically a woman, just because my last couple bands had been with women involved. Having a girl in your band is idiot repellent. It’s always cooler with the ladies.

“In my head when I was thinking about what Baby Toro was going to be, it was going to be Jesus and Mary Chain without a drummer and maybe a little Everly brothers with a boy and a girl,” he said.

The mark they’ve left is one left by many DIY bands: a document of one time in one community of one band, resulting in show memories and collectable, few of a kind CDs, singles and show-posters. There’s no nostalgia factor; it happened, it was enjoyable and it’s over.

“A lot of the stuff I like is really disposable. It’s short, and it doesn’t have to mean anything at all, but sometimes, it does,” Collins said. “There are some things that are throwaway that have hung around. I shouldn’t be referring to our music as throwaway and disposable. Hank Williams, he cranked them out, song after song. Some were bad copies of other songs, but they just sort of came out. I tried to do it like that.”

Liggett_b@fortlewis.edu. Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager.

Bryant’s best

saturday: Codestar and Wake Up Laughing, 8 p.m., no cover, Moe’s, 937 Main Ave., 259-9018.

Saturday: Folkabilly duo Baby Toro’s final show, 8 p.m., no cover, Sideshow Emporium, 411 Central in Dolores, 739-8646.



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