Author: Michael Witthaus

Indie comedy grows in Manchester

When he last was in Manchester, Shane Torres appeared at Shaskeen Pub. In 2021, it was one of the few places in the city for his brand of comedy. Since then, though, the scene has grown. Comedy at Queen City Center began in April, Strange Brew Tavern’s Laugh Attic has a good groove going, and now a theater district coffee bar is in the game.

Early returns are more than encouraging. The Moka Pot, near the corner of Elm and Hanover, has two shows with Seattle comic Bo Johnson on April 12. The early set sold out weeks ago, with only a few tickets remaining for the late one. Coming up are Aaron Berg (July 31 and Aug. 1), Brendan Sagalow (Aug. 8) and Robby Slowik (Aug. 21).

The Moka Pot is ready, with a recently issued liquor license and new LED lighting array. Alex LaChance is the venue’s comedy booker. With fellow comic Nick Sands, LaChance also runs the game show parody Wrong Hill to Die On at the Shaskeen, which returns for a third time on July 14. The first Wrong Hill event sold out, and the second came close.

The day after Johnson’s show, Torres will appear at Queen City Center. The laconic Texas native has had a lot of success since his last visit. His first special, The Blue Eyed Mexican, came out at the end of 2023. Vulture praised its “beautiful directness and keen sense of good storytelling,” calling it “a refreshing combination of delicate and obscene.”

Torres’s other recent credits include The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, though he didn’t get the McCartney treatment when he appeared, as Colbert was out of town that night. The host pretaped introductions for him and a few other comics. “Sadly, it was not the version I’d dreamed of,” Torres said by phone recently. “No couch, no Stephen.”

Another late-night talk show helped elevate Torres in 2017. He appeared on Conan O’Brien and went viral for defending shock-haired Food Network host Guy Fieri. It was 10 years ago, but the bit still follows him around, and he professes to be at peace with his “Free Bird” moment.

“I don’t do that bit anymore, but sometimes people will call for it,” he said. “Like, I was in Seattle doing Fremont Abbey, a really cool room, and somebody yelled something about Guy Fieri. This other guy shouted, ‘That’s how I heard about you,’ and another one said, ‘Me too!’ So I have that to be grateful for.”

He and fellow comedian Katherine Blanford’s Coastal Idiots podcast stands out in a crowded field. The two “frenemies” have a delightful Odd Couple banter well-suited to Torres’s laid back demeanor. Recurring bits include a contest to guess the sale price of various works of art, some museum worthy, others county fair castoffs.

Torres balances all this with incessant touring.

“Last year I did something like 250,000 miles, and that was just on Delta,” he said. “Not even including riding on a tour bus for a few weeks, or driving from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison to Minneapolis. The only mileage accounted for is just through the Delta app.”

He’s looking forward to coming back to Manchester, recalling doing many shows at the Shaskeen when it was booked by Nick Lavallee, who’s now in charge of Queen City Center’s comedy events, and will also be opening up his Wicked Joyful retail store in the Canal Street facility on June 20.

Torres enjoyed hanging out with Lavallee in the Shaskeen days.

“I always had fun there,” he said. “Nick is a friend; he’s an old indie rock kind of punk rock guy like me. That’s the kind of culture and stuff he came up in as a kid. So we had a little bit of that in common.”

Along with the success Torres has experienced since his last visit is a newfound desire to savor it more, including when he’s back in New Hampshire.

“I will appreciate being in this place more presently,” he said, adding, “There’s a difference between logically knowing you’ve moved forward … and feeling it, recognizing it and appreciating it.”

Torres’s next big career milestone happens after his Manchester show. In August he’ll head to the legendary Edinburgh Fringe Festival, where he’ll perform his one-man show, tentatively titled Skinned Knees. The show is about his mother’s coma and his father’s homelessness, framed as comedy about what home means and what masculinity looks like.

“It’s going to be terrifying,” he said, adding that he hopes people will find laughs among the show’s poignancy. “I’m afraid people are going to be like, ‘You’re brave!’ And I’ll be like, ‘and funny?” That’s a real fear, but also a self-deflating (and funny) joke in his statement, a combination that is the Shane Torres essence.

Bo Johnson
When: Friday, June 12, 9:30 p.m. (7 p.m. show sold out)
Where: Moka Pot, 8 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $25, eventbrite.com

Shane Torres
When: Saturday, June 13, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Queen City Center, Canal Street, Manchester
Tickets: $25, eventbrite.com ($30 day of show)

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Jon Pousette-Dart plays intimate Rex show

As he walked into Quadrafonic Sound Studio to begin his band’s first album in 1972, Jon Pousette-Dart heard the strains of another session. Curious, he looked in to find Dobie Gray finishing up his classic single “Drift Away,” with a stunning group of players behind him.

Awestruck, Pousette-Dart made a mental promise in that moment to someday record with them himself.

Four decades and change later, it happened. His solo album Talk gathered together guitarist Reggie Young, who plucked the delicate chords on Gray’s song, Kenny Malone on percussion, bass player Glen Worf, and Clayton Ivey on keyboards. “All these original Muscle Shoals guys,” Pousette-Dart recalled by phone recently. “It’s got a really nice feel.”

With a roots-fueled remake of his band’s late-’70s radio hit “Amnesia” and “Invisible,” a lively rocker co-written with John Oates, Talk is also his best solo album. “The Story of My Life,” a Nathan Meckel/Blue Miller ballad that deserves to be a wedding dance standard, is another of the disc’s gems.

Alas, it’s the 21st century, where great records are born and disappear on the regular. As much as he enjoyed making Talk, Pousette-Dart wishes more people had heard the album when it came out 11 years ago. But industry economics got in the way, along with a streaming algorithm that punishes long players.

“I put a lot of work into it, and it was just typical with the way things are … it just sailed by,” he lamented. “Because the whole delivery system of records has really changed, you know?” He’s not surprised; after all, he named his 2002 album Sample This as a dare to the music business when it began to implode.

“There was an awful lot of stuff going on [at the time] that was kind of turning my stomach, so I made light of it,” he said.

So he’s adapted, releasing new music song by song. His most recent single is 2024’s “Cry No More,” with its virtual flip side, the NRBQ nugget “Only You.” His next one, “Gone,” is due soon. “It’s about the universal loss that so many people are going through right now in the world,” Pousette-Dart said.

“Gone” will have a music video, something he’s done since a film made with “Who I Am” went viral. That song, written with Dawn Young (Pousette-Dart’s wife) and singer/songwriter Jaime Kyle, addressed Young’s mother’s journey through Alzheimer’s. “That’s been in film festivals all over the world,” he said. “Because it just hits home to so many people.”

One thing he hasn’t grown weary of or cynical about is performing live. In its heyday, his eponymous band was a touring force, and since its dissolution in the 1980s Pousette-Dart has continued to play the songs that inhabited Boston radio and points beyond, like “Harder,” “What Can I Say” and “There’s Been a Mistake.”

At an upcoming show in Manchester he’ll be joined by longtime accompanist Jim Chapdelaine, who has an interesting backstory of his own. A true multi-hyphenate, Chapdelaine is an Emmy-winning composer and a producer. He’s worked with Paula Cole and Delbert McClinton, and mastered projects for Clarence Clemons with Bruce Springsteen.

They met at the Harvard Coop record store in Cambridge when both were starting out; Chapdelaine worked there, and Pousette-Dart had a deal with the store’s record buyer to trade in his used albums for new ones (side note: absolutely no one called them “vinyls” back then).

“He started a band called Mr. Right and got signed to Epic, so we were bouncing around at the same time,” Pousette-Dart recalled. “We reconnected many years later when he was playing with a friend of mine at a function. I really liked him, so I asked if he wanted to come out with the band … that’s how it started.”

Twenty-five years on, they have an easy rapport as they glide through Pousette-Dart’s catalog in a format that delights them both.

“You’re taking the songs back to where they begin … it always starts with an intimate, voice guitar setting, and that’s when you really know you have a song or you don’t,” Pousette-Dart said. “You can’t produce something into being a good song … it’s got to have it from the heart and soul.”

Jon Pousette-Dart Duo
When: Friday, June 5, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40, palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.