Author: Michael Witthaus

Eclectic band Annie In The Water hits Manchester

The music of Annie In The Water is a contagious hybrid of rock, funk and rhythm infused with a feel-good reggae groove. It’s the kind of sound that’s kept Michael Franti bouncing around the globe for decades, done with capability and verve.

For many years the band was a duo; singer-guitarists Michael Lashomb and Bradley Hester met while attending college in upstate New York in 2006. When a female friend fell into a lake trying to tie up her boat, they found a name, and gigged steadily in the region.

Ten years later, Lashomb and Hester began assembling what would grow into a six-piece band. One of their recruits was drummer Josh West, then at a crossroads when his longtime band decided to forego touring for local shows. West stuck around for a couple of years, departing to work on his own record; the collection of songs, completed during the pandemic, will drop next spring.

West returned to the group last summer. In an interesting twist, he replaced the original drummer of Lucid, the band he’d been in before joining the first time. Along with Hester, Lashomb and West, members now include bassist Chris Meier, Matt Richards on keyboards, and percussionist Brock Kuca.

It’s a big sound, West agreed in a recent phone interview.

“We’re really taking the time to explore what it means to play in a band with that many people and all these layers, and make sure that we’re not overplaying,” he said. He’s known Richards since his days in Formula Five and Meier from his earlier band Space Carnival. “We hadn’t really done much playing together; but we’re friends… we’ve respected each other’s musical abilities.”

Influences for the group come from a myriad of sources. West is a big fan of drummer Bernard Purdy, who played with Steely Dan and others, along with Carlton Barrett of the Wailers. He also names Snarky Puppy and Ghost Notes as favorite bands. Others in the group cite festival mainstays like Grateful Dead and Phish, along with ’90s alt rock.

A recent Halloween show was indicative of the group’s wide-ranging oeuvre. “We’re playing everything from Prince to Blink-182 to Red Hot Chili Peppers to Radiohead, to Daft Punk,” West said. “A big eclectic kind of influence there, but I think all these songs really speak lyrically and are kind of timeless pieces.”

When it first came together, the band was mainly a vehicle for the original duo’s material. A debut album, Time To Play, “was pretty much all songs that Brad and Mike had written 10 years ago,” West said. The second studio effort was more collaborative; though he wasn’t on the sessions for this year’s The Sun At Dawn, West called it evolutionary. “Since I’ve been back, that kind of energy has carried over.”

West recalled a recent songwriting session at a hunting camp in northern Vermont, where the band is now based. “We each brought a song to the table, and on top of that, we all have little parts,” he said. “It’s really a very democratic process, [with] open and equal energy… which is very inspiring.”

The newest lineup is already poised to follow up Sun At Dawn.

“We’ve got pretty much a new record of songs that we’ve written in the last three months,” West said. “We’re getting ready to hit the studio for this winter.”

That energy has translated to the stage. “The camaraderie in the band between members is at an all-time high; we’re firing on all cylinders right now,” West continued. “Pretty much every show we’ve been playing lately, the energy is tangible in the room; it’s just something you gotta come check out.”

Jordan Paul’s JigsMusic agency booked the band’s Veterans Day show at Shaskeen Pub in Manchester.

“I’m so excited to bring Annie in the Water back to the Granite State,” Paul said in a recent text message. “We haven’t seen them since before the pandemic. I know they’ve been picking up a lot of steam with their new lineup and I’m very excited to see this new chemistry everyone’s been talking about.”

Annie In The Water w/ DJ SP1
When: Friday, Nov. 1, 9 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door
More: See facebook.com/annieinthewater

Featured photo: Annie In The Water. Courtesy photo.

Zero hits New Hampshire with new (old) album

The hallmark of a good jam band is how well it plays with others, and Zero is a standout example. In fact, it may hold the record in the number of guests brought to the stage over many years and over 1,300 shows. A friend of the band once did a family tree that included hundreds of musicians who’d joined them at one time or another.

Zero was formed in the early 1980s by guitarist Steve Kimock and drummer Greg Anton, after the two played in Keith and Donna Godchaux’s Heart of Gold Band; guitarist John Cipollina was a member until his death in 1989. In a recent phone interview, Anton described the band’s music as created with collaboration in mind.

“We have a lot of dynamics and wide-open space when we play,” he said. “What happens often is … somebody will come and sit in, and they’ll go, ‘Wow, it’s a good thing I showed up tonight or these guys would have big holes in their music — it’s a good thing I showed up to fill them in.’ It’s actually intentional, but some guys just figure it out and just fit right in.”

Zero just released a double album, Naught Again, that was recorded in 1992 during a three-night run at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. It features many great guests, including late piano legend Nicky Hopkins, Vince Welnick from the Tubes and Grateful Dead, and longtime Jerry Garcia mate John Kahn.

Songs from the shows were on 1994’s Chance In A Million. A few months before the pandemic, recording engineer Brian Reasoner suggested to Anton that they remaster that disc using newer technology. He also asked him to find a bonus track or two for the project.

“I went back and listened to the outtakes, and Naught Again is a whole other record; none of that stuff has been previously released,” Anton said. “I was pleasantly surprised that I went back to look for one song and found a double record of songs that I thought were really up to snuff to put out.”

The group was all instrumental until Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter chatted up Anton at a Bay Area party. “He said, ‘You know, that band Zero is really good, but most of your audience is made up of other musicians — if you want to spread out a little bit, you might want to think about getting some songs,’” Anton recalled him saying. “I said, ‘You got any?’ and he said, ‘Yeah. You got any?’ So, I gave him some of our instrumental stuff, and he put words to it.”

Ultimately, the two wrote 25 songs together. Hunter, who died in 2019, introduces the band on Naught Again with a trippy spoken-word bit and closes out the set with another space age rap. The music is sublime, as is the newfound clarity of the show, recorded by Grateful Dead sound man Dan Healy.

It also includes some of Hopkins’ best piano work.

“I’ve never heard him stretch out like that. His playing is just kind of superhuman,” Anton said of Hopkins, who recorded and toured with the Rolling Stones and Jefferson Airplane and was a member of Quicksilver Messenger Service. “He invented that style of rock ’n’ roll piano-playing; I mean, there was a lot of history before him, but he took it to another level.”

To celebrate the new collection, Zero is out on a short jaunt stopping at Plymouth’s Flying Monkey on Nov. 5. Along with two founders, it now includes Pete Sears on bass, trumpet player Haidi Al-Saadoon and Spencer Burrows on keyboards.

They kicked off the current tour with a vinyl release show for Naught Again at the Fillmore in San Francisco. “We had a great time; it’s special music, I think,” Anton said. Their upcoming Granite State show will feature covers included on the new record, done with a unique twist, such as The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” without Moog synthesizer, and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a song suggested by Welnick.

As always, an improvisational mood will prevail for a band that plays when time and mood allow.

“Every Zero show is different, I don’t think anybody’s going to say, ‘Oh, that band’s just like Zero,’” he said. “It’s rock and jazz, we have horns, keyboards, and the world’s greatest guitar player. We have a lot of stuff going for us, and we’re looking forward to being able to do it.”

Zero
When: Saturday, Nov. 5, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Flying Monkey, 39 S. Main St., Plymouth
More: $39 and up at flyingmonkeynh.com

Featured photo: Zero. Courtesy photo.

Robert Dubac tries to make sense in Book of Moron

The idea of aliens landing and attempting to understand human nature has been around a while. In his one-man show The Book of Moron, Robert Dubac gets more down to earth, playing an amnesiac desperately in need of people to explain the current state of a world where the loudest voices are frequently the dumbest.

Dubac begins by being bewildered at what makes some people angry. “Isn’t same-sex marriage all marriages? You marry one person and have the same sex forever,” he says at one point.

All the other characters in Book of Moron are voices in Dubac’s head trying to fill his brain’s blank slate with their version of the truth.

“It expounds on Freud’s id, ego and superego,” he said by phone recently. “You’ve got the inner child, inner moron, the voice of reason, common sense and your inner a-hole, who obviously is the one who says things that you don’t want to say out loud, but they’re swirling around in the back of your head.”

The premise for the show came to Dubac as he was doing his previous one-man show, The Male Intellect – An Oxymoron? for a crowd in Amish country. “Even though this group of people have chosen not to interact, they still have kind of a higher moral standard,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if you woke up like that and you had no idea?’ There’s a good and bad side — you could be in the Amish community, or you could wake up in a camp run by Taliban.”

Though its “Idiocracy is a documentary” subject matter is up to the minute in a culture peppered with alternative facts and ignorant bluster, Dubac began developing the show over a decade ago. He had the help of his good friend, the late comic and television star Garry Shandling. Experience taught them both to spot the writing on the wall.

“If you’re really pushing comedy, you’re doing it before the rest of the world piles on if you’re doing it right,” Dubac said. “We could see the insanity starting to foment… everybody lives in their own little bubbles, and the public doesn’t really realize what’s going on outside as much as a traveling artist.”

Dubac began doing comedy in the late 1970s, first as a magician opening rock concerts, followed by standup in a West Coast scene that included pioneers like Dana Carvey, Bob Saget and Robin Williams. During that time, he came up with the idea of a stupidity tax — five bucks assessed for transgressions like pushing an already-lit elevator button.

Now, the bit is back.

“I resurrected that, and it’s in The Book of Moron, because it’s just timeless,” he said. “When I came up with it, it was just a surface joke, but now, coupled with this whole meaning of the change of culture and the dumbing down of America, it resonates more graphically.”

He’s quick to point out that the show isn’t about left versus right, but smart and stupid, noting, “the thing about stupidity … is stupid people won’t admit they’re stupid because it was intelligently designed that way, so all they do is double down.” Even if one side is more guilty, the comedy needs to stay balanced. “It can’t just be full tilt against stupidity and right-wing idiots, because then you’re going to lose the crowd. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve put aside, because it’s just too much.”

Instead, he keeps things level, though it can be difficult. “It’s done from a point of view of let’s start from scratch; let’s take some points from the left and the right, and solve some problems,” he said. “It’s also a way to get some great one-liners.”

In mid-2000s, the Mensa organization challenged its members to take a word from the dictionary and add or subtract one letter to give it a new meaning. One wag came up with “bozone,” defined as “the substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.” 

Reminded of that, Dubac observed, “We’re living in a time where irony doesn’t mean anything anymore; people can’t even grasp the concept.” Asked if there’s something that gives him hope in spite of this, he answered quickly.

“Humor! I mean, funny is the only emotion that brings everybody together, in truth.”

Robert Dubac’s The Book of Moron
When: Friday, Oct. 28, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
More: $39 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Robert Dubac. Courtesy photo.

Chris Trapper has his own show to do

From late spring to summer’s end, Chris Trapper was on the road, supporting headliners. He opened for a tour starring Sammy Hagar and George Thorogood, did a run with Pat Benatar and her husband guitarist, Neil Giraldo, and played some dates with John Hiatt. Each night was an introduction of sorts, though Trapper has been making music going back to his days with Boston buzz band The Push Stars in the 1990s.
“I just described myself as the appetizer for a very rocking main meal,” Trapper said in a recent phone interview, noting he did but four songs to precede Hagar and Thorogood. He’ll have more room to stretch out when he does an evening solo at the Music Hall Lounge in Portsmouth, on Oct. 22. “It’s going to feel great to play a full set again.”
Not that Trapper minds his role as a palate cleanser. Delivered in a husky sweet voice, his songs have an easy familiarity. He’s wry with the raucous “Keg on My Coffin,” and emotive on “Under Blue Stars,” which leads off Cold Water Waltz, his most recent album. Perhaps his best-known song, the soaring “This Time” was sung by Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the 2007 film August Rush.
He spent much of 2019 opening for Rob Thomas, who co-wrote a song on the new album. “The one thing Rob said about me repeatedly was ‘You’re a very good master of ceremonies’ … I have some ability to get the crowd’s attention; even if they don’t know me, I can always try a few things.”
A mid-summer house concert in upstate New York, during a break in shed touring, put it in perspective for Trapper.
“Songwriting at its core has always been about finding commonality among us,” he said. Playing on a backyard stage, he watched an approaching storm. “There was lightning in the distance, kind of coming closer, but it wasn’t raining yet. I had a literal lightning bolt moment — that it was my job to make people feel less alone.”
Trapper is aware of the thin line between art and selling. “You can start to feel a little bit stuck in the vanity of it all,” he said. “But I started to feel like there is a sense of purpose to this [and] that process makes me feel less alone also. When you’re writing or singing a song, you’re trying to find those things that connect us. It doesn’t have to be too complicated. I think I’ve become a decent support act because even people who don’t know me will walk away feeling that they do.”
For the past few years, Trapper has booked space on a cruise ship, “trying to build a little culture around my music and community…. I do a few concerts, a Q&A session, a meet-and-greet, we have dinner every night, and also there’s a lot of after-hours disco dancing — my dance moves definitely look problematic,” he said. “A lot of people on the cruise were the base of my favorite people who I see on tour, so it ended up being a total lovefest.”
Though he wouldn’t mind a big hit or two, Trapper is content.
“I have always wanted to have kind of a John Prine career, where you have to play a couple of songs that people need to hear, then basically play whatever you felt like playing,” he said. “People would love it because the quality of material was always good. That’s been my goal. … I always have a few things that I definitely have to play, and the rest of the stuff is pretty variable.”
For his upcoming show, “I basically do everything, early Push Stars, some of my solo stuff and some off the new album,” he continued. Last year saw a Push Stars holiday record with all but two originals, When Christmas Comes Home. Trapper enjoyed the effort. “I stretched my songwriting muscles for that. Writing original Christmas songs is not the easiest thing to do … there’s only about five or six themes you can latch onto, and they’ve all been done a billion times.”
On Cold Water Waltz’s tongue-in-cheek “Out of the Limelight,” he hints at the promise of his early Push Stars days as he sings about an Austin band on their comeback tour.
“With my band it was funny, because we had some of the struggles that I joke about in that song, like the lead singer being a mess,” he said. “I of course I was in certain ways, but I stayed stable enough to stay in the business.”
Next February Trapper will be back in the area, opening for ex-Great Big Sea singer Allen Doyle in Concord. “I actually wrote about seven Great Big Sea songs, so Alan sings some of my stuff on his tour, and we always get up and collaborate for a couple of songs,” he said. “We’re old friends at this point.”

Chris Trapper
When: Saturday, Oct. 22, 8 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
More: $22 and $32 at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Chris Trapper. Courtesy photo.

Currier hosts Doctor Gasp & the Eeks

In October 2001, inspired by being a moaning cowboy ghost in a haunted house, Dan Blakeslee wrote his own Halloween song and performed it a few nights later at the Press Room in Portsmouth. The moment he finished, Blakeslee apologized and promised the crowd he’d never attempt anything like it again.

The audience, however, had other ideas.

“I wrote one song, and I didn’t like it, but everyone there said, ‘man, you gotta do more of this stuff,’” Blakeslee recalled in a recent phone interview. The next year, he began a tradition that’s lasted for two decades, appearing as his spooky alter ego Doctor Gasp, with his band The Eeks — Mike Effenberger on keys, bassist Nick Phaneuf and drummer Jim Rudolf.

Blakeslee even managed to perform 10 frosty shows outdoors during the pandemic year.

“I love doing this stuff so much, it really feeds my soul,” he said. “It’s my favorite holiday, since I was a kid.”

Eighteen dates are booked for the 20th anniversary, including the first in Manchester since an early 2010s appearance at Jewell & the Beanstalk, a now-shuttered restaurant. The free show on Oct. 13 at the Currier Museum is part of the weekly Art After Work series. It will feature selections from the two Doctor Gasp & The Eeks albums, 2003’s Vampire Fish and 2013’s Vampire Fish For Two.

Setlists always include Blakeslee’s bang-up version of Bobby Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” and “Witchtrot Road,” the song that started it all in 2001. Always a highlight, “Teeth of Candycorn” should be a seasonal standard. It’s a hurdy gurdy howler with a haunting and addictive chorus, based on a real person.

“I wrote that about a friend of mine who I call the King of Halloween,” Blakeslee said. “Go into his place, and it’s literally Halloween year-round in there. It’s crazy, it’s awesome. Early on, when we were first starting to get to know each other, he told me he was born with teeth of candy corn. I’m like, ‘OK, I have got to write a song about this.’”

In 2012 the band mapped out a tour itinerary in the shape of a pumpkin, an effort that found him playing in a few strange places simply to connect the dots. This time around, “it looks more like a scribble” according to Blakeslee. But he did do something special for the two-decade landmark, illustrating a novella written by friend and fellow musician Brian Serven called Lore of the Jack-O’-Lantern.

Blakeslee’s reputation as an artist almost overshadows his music. He’s drawn posters for Newport Folk Festival, the iconic Hearts For Boston riff on Zakim Bridge, created in response to the Marathon Bombing in 2013, and Alchemist Brewing’s Heady Topper label, voted the industry’s best in a craft beer poll.

His pen and ink talents were a natural for the task, but it took a while to happen.

“Brian asked me if I would illustrate the book, and at the time things were just too hectic,” he recalled. “I was going on my first cross-country tour and there was a lot of activity that year, so he kind of put the book on the back burner. In 2021, he asked again if I could do it, so I carved out a good chunk of this year to make it happen, and I’m so glad I did. The book is so beautifully written, it’s super intriguing and it’s a great read for all ages.”

A first printing sold out at a Sept. 30 book release show, but Blakeslee held out hope that there may be a few copies at his Currier appearance. Barring that, the singer always has plenty of his own works of art on the merch table — lithographs, posters and other collectibles.

The tour will again end on Halloween night at the Press Room, where Blakeslee will share the stage with Soggy Po’ Boys front man Stu Dias’s band Cirque Desolate. As winter approaches, the Doctor Gasp persona will give way to Christmas — Blakeslee released an album in 2020 to honor his second-favorite holiday.

He’d like to blend both into a single show one day, sometime during the sweet spot between pumpkin spice latte and mistletoe seasons. “I did that during the pandemic, set up my kitchen with Halloween décor and then turned the camera to my living room, which is decorated completely for Christmas. We changed costumes and everything; it was pretty wild.”

Doctor Gasp’s 20th Annual Halloween Special
When: Thursday, Oct. 13, 5:30 p.m.
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
Tickets: doctorgasp.com and currier.org

Featured photo: Doctor Gasp. Courtesy photo.