Photo courtesy Charles Ries
Charles Ries
Charles Ries
Words that began as poetry was transformed into songs that have found their way into a potential series for streaming. Charles P. Ries was a published poet and storywriter before hooking up with musicians in the final years of the last decade before Covid. He began recording with them as the MinkTronics, the name a reference to Ries’ childhood on a mink farm near Sheboygan.
The lineup has morphed but his words and recitations/vocals remain at the project’s heart. The new release by Charles P. Ries and the MinkTronics is a three-song EP called Amphitrite. Ron Baake continues in his role as producer-drummer, helping endow each of the tracks with a unique sonic ambiance.
Ries credits the late Milwaukee guitarist Michael DeBoer with changing his direction as a writer. “I didn’t know how to write lyrics,” he admits, alluding to his modernist penchant for free verse. “Michael convinced me to rhyme. ‘Nothing wrong with rhyming’ he told me.” “Ice Water” from Amphitrite began with DeBoer’s smoky slow melody, a hint of Brazil or the Caribbean in the undertow. “When Michael gave me the music, I began to recite and edit to the music,” Ries says.
Many MinkTronics’ song lyrics began as poems that Ries edited and spliced to better fit the cadences of contemporary music. The harder-edged rock of “Oh LaLa” features Jesse Tapola on lead guitar with DeBoer coming in underneath on slide. The country-bluesy “Jolly Buddha” takes the EP in an entirely different direction.
After experiencing the bountiful results of his collaboration with various lineups of the MinkTronics, Ries was ready for something bigger. He met Michael Angeli, whose credits include “Monk” and “Battlestar Galactica,” after the screenwriter-producer returned to Milwaukee after 35 years in Los Angeles. Ries is working alongside Angeli to advise him on how go about securing investors for a feature film Angeli wants to make in Milwaukee.
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Discussions between them led to their collaboration on a series they plan to pitch to Amazon, Netflix and company, “Can Boys Fly,” based on his fictionalized memoir, The Fathers We Find. The coming-of-age story is set in 1965 in Sheboygan, “The Mink Capital of the U.S.” Ries and Angeli worked together on the screenplay, another lesson for the already accomplished Ries in how to make words work differently.
“Screenwriting is a more complicated form of writing—it’s language accompanying a visual cue,” he explains. Ries learned from Angeli that a good screenplay requires “conflict and tension—action is the character.”
The MinkTronics’ music is integral to “Can Boys Fly,” already built into the screenplay’s website through the digital wonders of sound drops and serving, Ries says, as “the Greek chorus” of the story. Two pilot episodes have been completed. Angeli will begin pitching the idea this year, armed with screenplays online and a beautiful storyboard booklet produced by Green Bay’s Elevate 97.
“Michael told me ‘There are no new stories—just the same stories told in different times and cultures. And there’s never been a story like this told on top of the fur industry.”
Stay tuned for updates.
