To take a risk, you’ve gotta really believe in something. For Paul Basile, when he was 26 and living in Bethel, that something was his music.
“I spent so much time in those years thinking about trying to identify the thing that I was most passionate about,” Basile explained. “And just kind of threw caution to the wind, I guess. And was like, ‘Well, this is it, and this is the thing.'”
That "thing" grew into the rock band Great Elk, which will be reuniting for an Alaska tour this month.
On Tuesday, May 20, Great Elk’s tour will kick off in Bethel at the Yupiit Piciryarait Cultural Center. Sponsored by the Southwest Alaska Arts Group (SWAAG) and Uncommon Pizza, who will be serving up slices, Great Elk will also be accompanied by local band Velma Lyle. The show starts at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25 and $40 for family entry.
Building his passion for music and playing shows with friends in a boom of Bethel’s music scene, Basile said that community support helped him gain the confidence to try something big.
“Enough people were like, ‘Hey, that song's pretty good. That sounds pretty good. You should do something with that song,'” Basile remembered. “And so I started believing. So, yeah, took a great leap. And you know, my life would be really much, much different if I hadn't done that.”
Basile said that the Bethel community helped give him the confidence to do what any young person who wants to make it big inevitably tries: move to New York City and give the music thing a shot.
Basile said that his first attempts to break into the New York music scene included a lot of playing at open mics. Then one day after a performance, he got a break.
“This woman that I was friendly with introduced me to her old classmate. And we're on the sidewalk outside of this club, and she said, ‘Paul, Patrick, you guys both wear plaid. You both like the band Wilco; you should make music together,'” Basile remembered. “And we're like, ‘Oh, all right, hey, nice to meet you.'”
Within the week, Basile said, he and the woman's old classmate, Patrick Hay, got to playing together and discovered that they had a musical chemistry — the creative jackpot.
In Brooklyn, Great Elk began to grow into itself. The duo expanded into a five-piece folky rock band that would go on to record two professional albums and tour the United States and Europe. In chasing the dream of making it big, they were starting to become a legit rock band.
In the years since that exciting time, Basile has become well-rooted in Bethel. Now songwriting takes a different pace. He’s got two kiddos in the mix and a full-time job as the Kuskokwim 300 Sled Dog Race manager.
But Great Elk has persisted across thousands of miles and the new speeds of life. Basile has managed to collaborate with bandmate Hay over the distance and years since their first meeting 15 years ago. The duo have continued to create under Great Elk, preparing to embark on their upcoming Alaska tour, albeit with a different kind of fervor than 20-somethings trying to make it big.
“Fifteen years ago, when I was writing songs and recording them, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and on the band, and had great expectations for what was going to happen with them, and now I'm just doing it because I love it and because it's fun,” Basile explained. “And so sometimes that means that they come much more easily.”
In the band’s modern era, Basile has also collaborated locally to produce the new songs Great Elk will feature on its Alaska tour.
“I reached out to my friend, Don Rearden, who's from Bethel and an author, and I said, ‘hey, what if I sent you some phone recordings of me humming a melody while I play the guitar and you write some lyrics,'” Basile said. “And so that was kind of the thing that jump-started me being able to write songs again.”
Basile and Hay will perform as a pared down version of Great Elk on a tour of eight shows across Alaska with stops in Bethel, Anchorage, Wasilla, Talkeetna, and Hatcher Pass.
With years of perspective and moves from Bethel to New York City and back, Basile said that he’s glad he took that initial risk to dive head-first into music.
Basile said that the journey has come with lots of fond memories in all kinds of venues. Great Elk has taken them all over the world and into professional recording studios. This time, on the band’s upcoming Alaska tour, he said that part of the gratitude is in knowing they’ll add more of those memories to Great Elk’s catalog.
