Author: Michael Witthaus

Off With Their Heads unplugged, and comedy

Music and standup comedy have intersected since Midge Maisel opened for Shy Baldwin — OK, that’s fiction, but Steve Martin was the lead-in for Toto back in the ’70s, and Richard Belzer once did the same for Warren Zevon. Ben Roy uniquely embodies this junction; he’s a comic, who co-wrote and starred in TruTV’s Those Who Can’t, and a singer in a band. He’s also a veteran of J.T. Habersaat’s annual punk-spirited Altercation Comedy Festival in Austin, Texas.

Roy has opened for Minnesota punk rockers Off With Their Heads both as a comic and as a musician. For a show that’s part of a stripped down OWTH tour Friday, Aug. 12, at Manchester’s Shaskeen Pub, he’ll only be telling jokes. He’s joined by local favorite Jay Chanoine and host Eric Hurst for the laughter portion of the evening. That’s followed by music from Nick Ferrero of the Graniteers and Seth Anderson.

Two-thirds of Off With Their Heads, singer-guitarist Ryan Young and drummer Kyle Manning, will close things out.

The duo tour was inspired by Character, an album released mid-lockdown containing reworked versions of favorite songs from the band’s catalog. Adding comedy to the Shaskeen show was Roy’s idea. A native New Englander who relocated to Denver in 1999, he saw an opportunity for a family visit, and a chance to again work with one of his favorite acts.

Both Roy and Chanoine are keen on the idea of blending unplugged punk rock with comedy.

“It actually lends itself super well to stand-up, just because of that more stripped-down vibe,” Roy said in a recent phone interview. “Ryan is a really good songwriter and people love to sing along…. There’s a lot of catharsis to their special brand of misery.”

Starting with jokes and closing with bands makes sense. “It’s harder to go back once you’re in music mode. It’s a different energy,” Roy said. Also, Young and Manning are happy with the arrangement. “They’re all big comedy nerds [and] I know they like that they get to sit and listen and watch.”

Roy recorded his third album of comedy, Take The Sandwich, at the end of 2020, releasing it early last year. It has some great bits about Covid-19, like how the best intentions to eat healthy in lockdown were derailed when his grocery store ran out of quinoa, replaced by mac & cheese and “those shiny Hawaiian buns that are sweet and buttery all at the same time.”

However, his Shaskeen set will draw from non-pandemic material Roy plans to use in an upcoming one-hour special.

“What really frustrates me is this plunge into anti-intellectualism, our continued backslide as a culture into being proud of being inconsiderate or ignorant,” he said, teasing one of the subjects he’ll cover. “It’s super f-in’ annoying [and] it’s created a division in music, especially in punk rock. This feeling you shouldn’t do things to protect other people simply because you’re told to [since] we’re anti-establishment.”

He holds special ire for bad television, particularly the show Is It Cake? “One of the dumbest ideas … of all time,” he said. “Most of the world is struggling to put food in their mouths and we’re using that food to build objects and decide whether they’re food or not. It’s just it’s a slap in the face to the rest of the planet as we careen into an environmental catastrophe.”

The set will be Roy’s second at the Shaskeen; he headlined the regular midweek comedy night in 2021.

“That was my first time and I loved it,” he said. “Everybody was super rad; the comics were all really funny. Growing up, we used to come down to Manchester if there was a show there. I lived in New Hampshire for half the time I was in New England, so it was a little bit of a homecoming to come back as well.”

During the three years that Those Who Can’t ran, Roy lived and worked in Los Angeles. He left with mostly positive feelings about the city.

“It’s a strange place that has the rare distinction of not being nearly as good or as bad as everybody describes it,” he said. “It’s like demonized by so many people as being terrible and it’s not; it’s filled with really awesome people and amazing food and culture. But then there are people who make it out to be ‘Cali! It’s amazing!’ It’s also not that … but I actually liked Los Angeles. It’s alive, and in a weird way that a lot of other places aren’t. I miss a lot of the diversity.”

Off With Their Heads feat. Seth Anderson w/ Ben Roy, Jay Chanoine
When: Friday, Aug. 12, 8 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Ben Roy. Courtesy photo.

On his latest, Albert Cummings shifts gears

Though firmly rooted in New England, Albert Cummings has an affinity for the South. He made his 2003 breakthrough album, From the Heart, in Austin, Texas, backed by Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. His longtime producer Jim Gaines is a Memphis native, and with him, 2019’s Believe was recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Cummings’ latest, Ten, was done in Nashville, a city he admits is probably the only one that might pry him from his home in Williamstown, Mass. “I don’t have any plans on leaving,” he said on his way to a tour stop in Reading, Pennsylvania. “But if I do, I’d go there. I love the whole area. You’re in the music world, that’s a pretty good place to go and hang out.”

For Ten, Cummings immersed himself in the spirit of Music City. He worked with producer Chuck Ainlay, whose credits include a who’s who of country royalty, from Conway Twitty and George Strait to Dolly Parton and Miranda Lambert. For a guitarist who once had plans to play bluegrass before shifting to blues, it was a dream come true.

“Oh man, it was such a great experience,” Cummings said. “Chuck is just an amazing guy. He jokes around and says, ‘Well, I’m pretty good at turning knobs,’ but he’s a master of orchestrating everything … to work with him was an honor, and to watch him was just amazing.”

For the project, Ainlay recruited “all the first-call players down there, just the best musicians I’ve ever seen,” Cummings said. If that weren’t enough, Vince Gill was enticed to sing harmony on “Last Call,” a country rocker about a long night of drinking that’s one of the disc’s highlights.

“It’s a pinch-me moment, you know what I mean? Vince Gill, talk about an idol,” Cummings said. “It’s just lightning; how does that happen? I really don’t have any words to describe it … an amazing experience, a beautiful human being.”

Cummings says he dug deep for the songs on his most country-flavored record ever. “What I wanted to do was be honest with what was in my head,” he said.

Not every tune was new. “Beautiful Bride” was the first song Cummings ever sang in front of an audience, in 1989. He’d done a spare version for From the Heart, but “I always wanted to have kind of a little bit bigger sound, a different flavor,” he said. “Give it a little boost … I knew once I was in Nashville I had to put that on the record.”

“Sounds Like the Road” is a solid blues rocker inspired by a hotel lobby encounter with fellow guitarist Robben Ford — “I was checking in, he was checking out,” Cummings explained. It was during a period when he split time between working construction and performing, a late-blooming musician who hadn’t begun to play in public until age 27.

When Ford asked Cummings what he was up to, “I told him, ‘I’m just trying to get things squared away, go out and play.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah? Where are you playing?’ I said, ‘We’re going here, we’re going there, and then we’re flying here.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Sounds like the road to me.’ I was like, ‘Bam, that’s a song.’ I knew it right then.”

Many years and tours later, “it just feels so good to be back playing,” Cummings said, particularly after Covid cut a swath through his livelihood; he released Believe just as the world shut down. “It never had a life; it died before it ever got the chance to even get out.”

He’s buoyed by a new release that’s exciting fans, even drawing new ones.

“I think this record has really brought me a lot of attention, because crowds are way bigger than they used to be,” he said. “I have a feeling that people are just loving to get back out; couple of years away from music made them realize how much they miss it … I really do love it, no matter how hard the road is.”

Finally, though much of the buzz around Ten is it’s “Cummings Goes Country,” the fiery-fingered guitarist who’s shared stages with B.B. King and Johnny Winter and worked with Nashville’s A-Team isn’t tucking himself into any genre. He has opined that the difference between blues and country is beverages — one’s whiskey, the other’s beer. He still feels that way.

“I told that to Vince Gill,” he recalled. “He said, ‘That’s a great analogy — the same three chords, just a different cocktail.’”

Albert Cummings
When: Thursday, July 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $30 at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Albert Cummings. Courtesy photo.

Celtic crushers Rebel Collective hit Bank of NH Stage

Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts continues its happy trend of bringing homegrown acts to the smaller Bank of NH Stage when Rebel Collective appears there on July 23. The raucous, Celtic-infused sextet started out at True Brew Barista, a nearby Bicentennial Square hub for local bands before the owners retired and closed it in July 2020.

At that time, 2015, the group consisted of three cousins on main instruments and a rhythm section, and was a casual affair. “We’d always joked about doing a pub band,” guitarist and singer Michael Green said by phone recently. “One year, we decided to throw something together and have a show, and we had a lot of fun.”

After True Brew, they went on to play St. Patrick’s Day events, at Manchester’s Shaskeen and Salt hill Pub in the Upper Valley. Their sound was informed by Green’s roots. “I am about half Irish, with my grandmother being straight off the boat. That said, it wasn’t part of my upbringing really, and it was through the music of the Pogues and Dropkick Murphys that I started getting into the history of Ireland and my own ancestry.”

When the band got booked to play the New Hampshire Highland Games, Scottish songs were added to their set, creating a boozy hybrid that sets them apart. They’ve opened shows for the Dropkicks, Flogging Molly and Derek Warfield, all the while writing original songs, a few of which appear on 2018’s Old Sad State.

The title cut of that EP is a true, if half remembered, story of a wild night “with a bottle of Pogues whiskey, singing for the fair maidens and hoping they’ll feel frisky” that ends “out in the street, singing for salvation in the moonlight.” Though the hooch is named after Green’s “favorite band forever,” he’s no fan, not by a long shot.

“It’s god-awful and I don’t recommend it,” he said, but he is thankful that, as Shawn Colvin once noted, he got a tune out of it. “We weren’t feeling too good the next morning, but I’m lucky in the fact that I might make bad decisions, but at least they usually make good songs.”

Rebel Collective changed significantly when accordion player and high harmony singer Brian Waldron moved to Florida in 2021. Brought on board were fiddler Esther Bostick and guitarist Jordan, whom Green calls Granddaddy SG for his 1960s vintage Gibson. With Green, Ross Ketchum on mandolin, guitar and vocals, and Pete Provencher and Connor Veazey on drums and bass, the new direction is “really similar in a lot of ways” to what they were doing before, Green said, but with an edge that comes from swapping a squeeze box for a rocking ax.

“It’s not heavy, but it’s not clean, and it really fills up the sound … we’ve committed to making a bigger, cohesive sound,” he said. “It’s led to having more fun [and] while we miss having Brian’s beautiful voice we gain by having other singers. Our gang vocals are a little bit thicker. We’re the same, just different.”

After releasing one studio effort, they’re not in a hurry to make another record. They have plenty of other novel pursuits to fill the time, including a Flag Hill Whiskey release party in the fall, along with another Highland Games. Besides, given their Celtic Crush repertoire, audiences often can’t tell the band’s own material from cover songs, which pleases Green.

“I’ve had people come up and thank me for playing this old traditional song, and they’re talking about one of my originals; I don’t correct them,” he said. “It’s a kind of a barometer; if you’ve written a song and it immediately resonates like they’ve heard it before, you know you really wrote a good one. I let them say their piece and take it as a compliment.”

The Concord show will benefit Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of New Hampshire, a nonprofit the band has been helping out for years, including playing their annual fundraiser and tasking one of their dancers to high step crowds into filling a tip jar at shows. “We were able to raise a couple thousand for CASA last year,” Green said. “So we’re really excited to take this great opportunity at this great event and use it as a way to continue doing our work for them.”

Rebel Collective
When: Saturday, July 23, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Rebel Collective. Courtesy photo.

Rock legend talks music, photography and politics

Though he’s happy a live re-recording of his first two solo albums is doing well, Graham Nash often wishes that the music on 1971’s Songs For Beginners and 1974’s Wild Tales didn’t still resonate the way it did in the Watergate era. A vocal opponent of the previous administration — he has an upcoming record with a track called “Golden Idol” aimed at proponents of the “Big Lie” — Nash isn’t optimistic about the country he became a citizen of in 1979.

“I’m pleased that my music seems to have lasted a couple of decades, but at the same time it’s a pain in the ass that we have not learned from our history,” he said by phone recently. “I think what I’m seeing now, unfortunately, is the fall of the American Empire. I think that we are completely divided as a people, and a divided nation can’t last very long.”

Nash is a two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, with his first band The Hollies, and with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Despite their acrimonious 2016 breakup, the supergroup reunited earlier this year to demand that Spotify remove their music in protest of Joe Rogan, who frequently hosts vaccine deniers and Covid-19 skeptics on his podcast.

In early July, CSNY was back on Spotify. The interview with Nash happened earlier, on June 24. At that time, he spoke of steps taken by the streaming service that hint at reasons for the group’s eventual reversal. “They have put genuine Covid-19 information on a million podcasts and that is a great step forward,” he said. “They’re now recognizing that people like Rogan and his guests were spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Last November, Nash published a book of photographs called A Life In Focus. His passion for pictures dates back to the first one he took, of his mother, in 1953, and learning darkroom technique as a child from his father. The shot of his mom, in repose and unaware of her son’s camera, is among the collection’s best.

Pictures of icons like Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, even ’60s supermodel Twiggy, are equally candid. It’s the only way, asserts Nash. “Having had probably hundreds of thousands of photographs taken of me, I know … the face that you put on because you want to look cool,” he said. “I give that face sometimes when people are taking pictures of me [and] I don’t like that face. So my best portraits of people are taken when they have no idea that I’m there.”

Nash also has a skillful eye for street scenes, like a shot of a well-dressed woman staring into the window of an expensive jewelry store as a homeless man sleeps mere inches from her. “I use a camera to capture surreal moments that happen in front of me,” he said. “Which they seem to do a lot.”

That said, he believes social media trivializes the art. “There are [millions of] smartphones in this world and maybe only a hundred photographers,” he said, adding, “I don’t use my camera as my memory. I don’t want a picture of me in Mickey Mouse ears at Disneyland, I don’t take pictures that match my couch, or kittens with balls of wool. I don’t take landscapes — I’d rather remember the landscape.”

He loves gear — an IRIS 3047 printer he bought in 1989 for his company Nash Images is now in the Smithsonian — and he also enjoys playing with the process of photography. There’s a distinctive shot of fellow musician Dave Mason in the book that’s basically a smudged Polaroid, taken in his suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel in the mid-1970s. “In those days, if you had a ballpoint pen, a sharp instrument or something, you could move the emulsion around,” he explained. “As a matter of fact, Elton John just bought that picture.”

Politics are intertwined with both his music and photography. In the Wild Tales track “Prison Song,” Nash alludes to his father spending a year in high-security lockup for unknowingly buying a stolen camera from a co-worker to give him as a gift. It made Nash a lifetime foe of unjust authority, along with his ire at being spanked by his school principal for ditching class to buy Bill Haley concert tickets in 1958.

With him at the Haley performance was best mate Allan Clarke; the two would later start The Hollies. Years later, they’re working together again, on Clarke’s solo record. “I’m very pleased to be able to sing with Allan after all this time,” Nash said. “He had to leave the Hollies because he had throat trouble, but it may have been psychosomatic … his excuse to be able to leave. Because right now, he’s singing very well.”

Nash has no regrets about skipping school that day. The experience both confirmed, to quote his 2013 autobiography, that “justice was malleable and subjective … too much politics involved,” and launched him on a lifetime of music. “The truth is … I’ve lost houses, and I’ve lost relationships; I have not lost my ticket to that show. I have it in my wallet as we speak.”

An Evening with Graham Nash
When: Wednesday, July 20, 8 p.m.
Where: Colonial Theatre, 609 Main St., Laconia
Tickets: $50 to $100 at coloniallaconia.com

Featured photo: Graham Nash. Photo by Amy Grantham.

Jimmy Tingle’s Humor for Humanity

Though he’s a political comedian, and maybe the only standup who attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Jimmy Tingle doesn’t lean left or right in his joke-telling. Yes, he ran for Lieutenant Governor in Massachusetts’s 2018 Democratic primary, but on stage, he’s there for everyone.

Tingle believes, to paraphrase the old Burt Bacharach/Hal David song, that’s what the world needs now.

“People don’t need to be beat up rhetorically; people want to laugh,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t shy away from what’s going on, but I don’t want to be finger-pointing at people and turning on them, making people feel like there’s no hope, that we’re not making progress. Because we are.”

Tingle calls his new campaign Humor For Humanity, and aims to draw laughs and do good. “It’s basically using humor to illuminate the human condition and where we are in the country right now,” he said, “but it’s also a social enterprise that raises spirits, funds and awareness for nonprofits, charities and social causes. Our mission is your mission … humor in helping, humor in healing, humor in hope — ha, ha, ha!”

Proceeds from a pair of upcoming shows at The Music Hall in Portsmouth will benefit the Friends of Moldova Refugee Relief charity. Tingle’s Harvard classmate Maia Sandu is president of Moldova, which borders Ukraine and has been severely impacted by the Russian invasion of that country. “I’ve done some low-level fundraising for [the cause] in the past couple of months,” Tingle said, “but this will be a more direct deposit to the organization.”

Tingle was inspired to become a comic by Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Lenny Bruce in the 1974 Bob Fosse-directed biopic. “That just illustrated what comedy could be besides what I grew up on — The Three Stooges, Honeymooners, Jackie Gleason,” he said. “When I watched that movie back in college, while we were discussing … all the challenges that were front and center in the country at that time, coming out of the Vietnam War, I saw what comedy could be as well. It just resonated with me.”

His show is autobiographical, beginning with Tingle’s days as a street performer in Cambridge, doing standup in the city’s burgeoning ’80s comedy scene. He’ll talk about working at the Ding Ho club, where he was a fixture, then moving to one-man shows, running through a ‘greatest hits’ of some of those, then touch on his time as a 60 Minutes correspondent.

The evening concludes in the present, where Tingle remains an optimist. “Things that were revealed during the pandemic, like racial equity [and] treating these subjects with humor, but also, I would like to think, insight and, again, progressive commentary.” That last word reflects a continuum rather than an ideology, Tingle stressed. “I like to think we’re making progress; we gotta keep making progress.”

Along with live work, Tingle has a podcast that’s hosted comics like Colin Quinn, Marc Maron and Paula Poundstone, as well as activists like John Rosenthal, the founder of Stop Handgun Violence.

“It’s not just about entertainment, but that’s … first and foremost on my agenda,” he continued. “I want to be funny as well as as positive and uplifting as I can be, and also hopeful regarding the situation that’s going on. The doom and gloom is overwhelming, and the division in the country is overwhelming. I want to be less partisan and more unifying about the human condition, and what we all have in common.”

After two years of uncertainty, Tingle feels it’s the least he can do.

“I just want people to come out and have a good time and leave the theater hopefully feeling uplifted and more positive,” he said. “More hopeful than they were when they went in. I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Thank you so much for doing this show. It’s exactly what I needed, because I haven’t been out of the house in two years. It was so good to be back out and laughing with people.’”

Jimmy Tingle
When: Saturday, July 16, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $30 at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Jimmy Tingle. Courtesy photo.