Cultivating creativity

Most people know Carole Griffin as the artisan baker who created English Village’s beloved, three-decade-old Continental Bakery and later Chez Lulu. She’s also known for the one-of-a-kind seasonal celebrations she hosts at the two restaurants, like Springalingadingdong and the Fall Oohlala! festival. 

Although Griffin has a long-time love for baking from-scratch artisan breads, she has also spent most of her life capturing the hearts of locals with yet another one of her creative sides: her singing voice.

“Carole happens to be one of these people born with the ability to captivate people. I guess you can call it charisma,” longtime musician and friend Leif Bondarenko said.

Griffin and her musical endeavors have been in Birmingham for the majority of her life, where she was one of the first female students to attend Indian Springs School. She said her large Czech family has always been prone to the artistic way of life, as well as being loud and expressive, which she quickly picked up. 

They sang together constantly and ate together weekly for big family meals, which she realized has influenced what matters to her most in life: gathering around fresh food with family and friends and sharing music.

Bondarenko, who has performed with Griffin over the years, said her energy, driven personality and sense of humor has allowed her the ability to not take herself too seriously, while still having success.

“Some people know me from both worlds; there’s always been a lot of cross-pollination,” Griffin said.

Before traveling and performing with bands, Griffin attended Rice University. She first thought she was going to become a lawyer and then later a midwife, until she started working the night shift at a bakery. She said she loved the hands-on focus of making artisan bread.

“It sort of changed everything. That’s what I keep telling my son, you just do what you love, and you have no idea where you’re going to end up,” she said. “In fact, doing what you love seems to put you more in a place to find what you should be doing. The thing is, you’re probably going to end up where you put your energy — it just happens that way, it just happened to me.”

After she first moved to Birmingham and opened the Continental Bakery with her brother and best friend, she always felt like she would wind up leaving eventually, but the city grew on her. After her co-owners left, she took over complete ownership of the bakery. She loved what they had built and how the city responded.

“I really feel supported by my customers,” Griffin said. “… [My] businesses seem to be very reflective of my personality, and I feel really embraced by Mountain Brook and really celebrated for just kind of dancing to a different beat.”

Ultimately, she decided she wanted to stay in Mountain Brook.

At the same time that she was opening the bakery, she was also playing music with a band called the Janes. Her musical beginning actually started in high school, where she used to sing in the choir and play guitar solo as part of happy hour and daytime entertainment, especially at places along Morris Avenue. 

She first played with some friends and a boyfriend at the time in a band first called the Lucky Bucks, later changed to the Ticks. They would play Birmingham-based stages and later all over the Southeast in underground venues. She sang and played guitar for the alt-country band, which became fairly popular. 

Singing, she said, “is something that springs naturally from the human spirit.” 

Her interests have rarely been about money and success, but rather her ability to focus on her enthusiasms and create a community with people who also love creativity and expression. When she started playing music, she said she didn’t expect it to go anywhere.

Then came the rise of the Sugar Lalas.

After her time with the Ticks, some old friends from a different band approached her asking if she would join as a backup singer. The band, which they would soon re-name as the Sugar Lalas, consisted of six people including Griffin, Bondarenko, Mats Roden, David Kilmer, Ed Glaze, Eric Onimus and Matt Kimbrell.

“They were kind of ‘darlings’ of Birmingham and had gotten some national recognition, but [Roden] said he was kind of in a place where they were flailing, so he was looking for something to spice it up,” she said. 

Within a month, Griffin said, she and the other lead singer and songwriter Roden, now deceased, connected on a strong level musically, which changed the band’s dynamic. Griffin said her style was to be “super open and kind of iconoclastic,” and Roden believed freedom bred freedom. They began to merge styles and developed the band into free-spirited art that combined elements of theatrical performance, alternative rock-and-roll and disco dance.

Bondarenko, the drummer for the band, said the Sugar Lalas were groundbreaking and “one of a handful of original bands in Birmingham at the time.” They played a wide variety of musical styles, he said, from AC/DC covers to folk songs in several languages that Griffin could sing, including Czech, Arabic and French.

“[Griffin] was just a really a powerful force and a big inspiration for that whole project because she’s so creative. She has a wonderful singing voice for one thing, but even more so we all got along really well. Our chemistry and personalities just all fit together,” Bondarenko said. 

Roden, he said, was the other front to the band besides Griffin who brought his talent as a great songwriter and singer to captivate the audience. At the time, Griffin said he was coming to terms with his sexuality, which resulted in talented, heartfelt music.

“I don’t think there were any other bands where the lead singer was as big as the football player, but he liked to wear dresses and things like that on stage with motorcycle boots,” Bondarenko said. 

He added that as soon as Griffin came on board, costumes became a big part of the performance, and the Sugar Lalas “dressed to stand out.”

They would wear theater clothes and cover themselves with glitter and body art, he said, when everyone is Birmingham was just performing in street clothes. All kinds of people came to their shows, Bondarenko said, which struck him as unusual but wonderful.

“We’d have just everybody, from like bankers and lawyers to the alternative kids that were going out to hear what was the new rock band at the time,” he said. “We’d have young people. We’d have old people. We’d have dance people show up that loved disco. … It touched something in a lot of different people, and that was unique about the band.”

Griffin and Roden wrote all the songs together and soon the band developed a cult-like following of people who attended shows wherever they would go.

“Our popularity started exploding. We got attention from publishers and record companies. People would pay our way to New York and other showcases all over the world. We drew huge crowds, we packed stages and I couldn’t see the back of the crowd,” Griffin said. “It sort of had a life of its own.”

The Sugar Lalas went on to make grand performances at every show, carrying Griffin in on a door once like Cleopatra, riding motorcycles into the Nick and even reenacting the movie based on the prom scene in Stephen King’s book “Carrie,” by dressing up and dumping an entire bucket of Kool-Aid on stage. 

“But it was so fun, and people really responded to the wildness and livelihood of my music,” Griffin said. “… My excitement and joy tended to incite those feelings in others.”

The Sugar Lalas played together for about three and half years before they split up, when they were right on the verge of signing a major label.

Playing music, while opening and running a bakery, she said, sometimes required her to work 19 hours a day. Looking back, she said she isn’t even sure how she managed it all, she just knew she loved them both.

“I would leave the club, load up the equipment, take it back to the practice space. Then I would look in the mirror. I had an uneven haircut, and it was dyed red and [each night] I would scrub the top of my head so it would stand up high,” she recalled. “Then I would get into the bakery, unpack the croissants and set up the case and customers came in. They accepted me for who I was, seemed entertained by it even.”

Griffin said she’s always been an “Energizer bunny,” able to find that extra reserve of energy, especially in those early days when she needed it. She has also been able to rely on her employees and turn it over to them when she needed nights to focus on performing or writing songs. 

In more recent years, after she opened the popular French cafe Chez Lulu, she also performed in the band Orange Bunny, which primarily played at random pop-ups and the event space she bought in downtown Birmingham.

“I think music is so much deeper and wider than any way you can think of it, music and life in general — I think it’s like a human. It’s natural for humans to sing, to be creative, to be part of all those things,” Griffin said. 

In September, Bondarenko approached her about performing as June Carter on occasion in his Johnny Cash cover band, Cash Back. Griffin grew up listening to Johnny Cash, and said she always “absolutely adored” his music. Plus, she said she planned to always be a part of music, in whatever form that may take.

“I’m overjoyed that I get to work with Carole again and sing with her and everything. She’s just a natural,” Bondarenko said.

After Griffin created a reunion for the surviving members of the Sugar Lalas to gather and catch up, they decided it was time they create an album to commemorate the time they spent together.

Bondarenko said to stay tuned in 2019 for Sugar Lalas to release the album. For more about Continental Bakery and Chez Lulu, go to chezlulu.us.