Allen Clapp

Allen Gordon Clapp (born August 5, 1967) is the singer, guitarist and principal songwriter for the California rock band The Orange Peels. Since 1990, he has also periodically released material under his own name and under the moniker "Allen Clapp and his Orchestra."

Though Clapp's music is largely considered part of the Indie-pop genre, his music production techniques and lyrical content reflect a distinct sense of place—an attribute more common to indigenous folk music.

Clapp was raised two blocks from the San Francisco bay in a Joseph Eichler-built home in Foster City, CA, where his mother and big sister taught him piano as a young child. He also studied the violin until his teen years, when he hooked up with likeminded musicians Dan Jewett, Larry Winther, Chris Boyke and Maz Kattuah, and formed a garage band alternately known as The Batmen and The Morsels.

The band disintegrated at the end of the 1980s, with Winther and Kattuah going on to form garage-rock band The Mummies, and Jewett leaving to form The Himalayans, a band which included a pre-Counting Crows Adam Duritz.

Clapp and Boyke split off to explore more esoteric, folky material in the duo The Goodfellows, who performed regularly around Berkeley (where Clapp had graduated in 1989 with a major in English Literature), and San Francisco. The two later added a bass player, Neal Trembath (Pullman), a drummer, Tom Freeman (The Muskrats), a harmonica player, Juliet Pries, and a manager, Alison Hefner (Dirty Deeds). They gigged around the Bay Area as, variously, "Huck," "Hunk," and "Hulk" (cf. Spinal Tap). Clapp released one flexi as Huck on Winter's Mist records out of San Jose.

In the midst of playing in those bands, Clapp had begun recording pop songs under his own name using a Radio Shack tie-clip microphone, a Roland RE-201 Space Echo and his Tascam Porta One four-track cassette recorder. The Roland Space Echo would become an important part of Clapp's production of musical soundscapes, helping him achieve a cool, coastal sound.

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