Ex-punk rocker, theater director form momandpop show

Take one former Little Rock punk rocker, add his theater director wife and what do you get? "Kindie" duo momandpop, who will celebrate the release of their self-titled debut album of wildly catchy, creative children's music with a party Saturday at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children's Library & Learning Center in Little Rock.

"I've been in bands since I was a teenager," says Bobby Matthews -- the pop of momandpop -- who, in 1989, founded Trusty, one of Little Rock's best-known underground bands. The group was signed to venerated Washington indie label Dischord in 1994.

And now, at 49, bubbling with the energy and enthusiasm of a kid with a new toy, he has joined forces with wife, Virginia Ralph, and is performing for children in a show that combines the couple's love for theater, variety shows and classic '60s pop.

In the momandpop universe, mom and pop are longtime entertainers convinced they are still big stars, but are actually unknowns.

"We come out to fanfare, like we're huge," Matthews says of the show from Eureka Springs, where the couple lives with their daughters, 11-year-old Rosie and 15-year-old Janie, who also appear on the album. "No one really knows who we are, but we still carry ourselves like we're the highest-caliber stars, almost like Sonny and Cher. The show is like a musical-comedy-variety show. We have guests, and the joke is, of course, [the guests are] us. It's wonderful when the kids see it."

Matthews and Ralph met as high school juniors at Arkansas Governor's School -- he was the only person there with a Mohawk -- and married in 1991.

Trusty folded in 1998, and Matthews went on to teach elementary school visual arts in Memphis for 15 years, while Ralph worked with the Memphis theater company Voices of the South, scoring plays and also visiting classrooms throughout the region teaching art. A comedy bit during a Trusty reunion show went so well that Matthews signed up for improv classes and, by early 2015, momandpop became a thing.

Inspired by the music they were creating -- which reflects Matthews' love for '60s pop like The Dave Clark 5, The Beatles, The Hollies and The Monkees -- the couple agreed that they wanted to explore a different approach to children's entertainment, and not just be two grown-ups acting and dressing as children.

"We thought, 'how can we embrace the fact that we're not kids, that we're older,'" Ralph, 48, says. "We're parents, so we're coming at a lot of this from having children ourselves and what our children experienced. That's how we started to think about who these characters could be."

And the name has a bit of a double meaning. "We're a mom and a dad and we love that a mom and pop business is a family business, so we love the play on words there," Ralph says.

The show has been performed in Memphis and also with the Upright Citizens Brigade in Brooklyn (with fellow Arkansan Colin Brooks on drums). There have also been several performances in Eureka Springs.

They both sing and interact with children in the audience, while Matthews plays guitar and Ralph strums a ukulele. There's also a pair of British puppets named mumandson.

And while audience interaction is a big part of the show, Matthews says it can sometimes remind him of the stage-diving crowds from his punk rock days.

"We don't mind the kids talking to us. We do mind when they get up onstage, which they have done," he says, laughing. "We've had kids at a Eureka Springs show bum rush the show. They had their hands in the puppets' mouths. It was insane."

The music on momandpop is like the Partridge Family hanging out on Sesame Street, and it's easy to see why kids (and maybe the occasional adult) could get carried away. Colors, stinky feet, pizza parties (no mushrooms on that pizza, though), days of the week, a whale who learns to believe in herself -- they're all covered on momandpop. Recorded with Jason Weinheimer at Fellowship Hall in Little Rock, the album is being released by local label Max Recordings (which also released Sugar Smack, a collection of Trusty outtakes).

"I'm excited," Matthews says of Saturday's show, in what may be the biggest understatement of an hour long phone conversation. "It would make me choke up to see parents who were at Trusty shows there with their kids. That would be an amazing, full-circle kind of thing."

Weekend on 10/13/2016