Johnny Utterback photo
There are your garden-variety street musicians, and then there is Gull, the skull-masked one-man band who can be seen and heard around town. (We caught him on a Sunday afternoon in front of Carytown's Plan 9 Music.) Gull is the creative project of Nathaniel Rappole, a 28-year-old Jackson Ward resident who also plays in the bands Snack Truck and the Ultra Dolphins. By sound only, one might mistake Gull for a three-piece group — his left hand hammers out a frenetic melody on the guitar frets, while his right hand and foot go full-time on a stripped-down drum set. As for the face gear, it's both performance and purpose. In the mouthpiece is a microphone to catch Gull's vocals. The skull mask, meanwhile, is Rappole's juxtaposed experiment of presenting a public art form from behind a veil of anonymity.
