Mr. Airplane Man

You've got to hand it to Jeffrey Evans. Aside from all the music he's made over the years, he's credited with introducing the White Stripes to Sympathy for the Record Industry (and, hence, to the world). Then he did the same for Mr. Airplane Man. Although the Boston duo's first effort was self-released, Sympathy would handle their subsequent recordings. Granted, MAM would stand out in any crowd, even without the assistance of an Evans, a Long Gone John, or the late Mark Sandman (Morphine), who became a fan after hearing them on the streets in 1998. And, to be sure, there are other duos who've been around as long, like the Stripes, but MAM features two women: Margaret Garrett (guitar, vocals) and Tara McManus (drums), and yet they sound nothing like such female duos as the Softies. Their punk-blues hybrid has more in common with the garagey sounds Detroit trio the Gories were laying down in the 1990s. Then there's their name, which confuses the issue altogether, but it's really just a tribute to Howlin' Wolf, who once drafted a ditty called…"Mr. Airplane Man." It was, in fact, a shared obsession with Wolf (aka Chester Burnett) that inspired the band's formation. After living on opposite coasts for some time, the friends reunited in Boston in 1995, where they locked themselves up in a basement for a year and absorbed the sounds of the Delta blues as well as any two people can. With that, they hit the streets, honing their chops by playing for rent on the sidewalks of Cambridge -- Garrett with an electric guitar and battery-powered amp and McManus with her trusty five-gallon drum. Sandman wasn't the only Bostonian to take notice. In 1999, they were voted Best New Local Act by readers of the Boston Phoenix. Then they went on tour with Sandman, who helped record their...