Author: Michael Witthaus

Dan Crohn’s comedy craft

On his 1977 live album Let’s Get Small, Steve Martin riffs about the wonders of the world, and ends by quipping, “the most amazing thing to me is I get paid for doing this.” It’s a thought that echoes during a conversation with Dan Crohn. One reason is he credits Martin for inspiring him to become a comic, but the other is that to Crohn standup isn’t just a job. It’s a way to hang out with like-minded friends and do what he loves.

That said, Crohn is a workaholic. If he’s not on stage, he’s home in Somerville writing jokes. During a recent phone interview, it’s Tuesday night and he’s booked to do 10 minutes at Boston’s Bell in Hand. Lately he’s spent a lot of time testing material at Modern Pastry, an 80-year-old North End Italian bakery. “I always feel like if I’m not doing new stuff, what’s the point?” he said. “My jokes get old, and I get tired of them.”

Crohn did his first set in 2004 — he still has the tape. Ten years later he quit a job teaching fourth-graders to go full-time. Now he regularly headlines throughout New England and often beyond, at places like Gotham Comedy Club in New York City. In August he’ll do two nights at Helium in St. Louis, and he’s performing on a Caribbean cruise ship in late December.

As a child Crohn was a comedy nerd, encouraged by his parents. Shows like In Living Color and SNL were appointment television. His father owned a record store that provided albums and VHS tapes; he remembers hearing Henny Youngman on the family turntable at a tender age.

“My parents would go in their room and listen to Redd Foxx with the door closed.” Crohn recalled. Though less adult, his own comedy fare was captivating in its own way. “I was listening to standup very early, and got obsessed with it almost immediately.”

A year or two after turning pro, he made his own album, It’s Enough Already. In May he recorded a second, to be released later this year on Virtual Comedy Network, a label that in 2019 included him on Best of Boston Standup, Vol. 1. His clip, “I Think About Death a Lot,” discussed true crime shows that keep him paranoid and always noting the time, lest he get called as a witness. My whole life “is preparing for police questioning that’s never gonna happen,” Crohn said.

He’s had the opportunity to work with many great comics and compare notes with them, like his favorite comic, Dave Attel, who he shared the stage with at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre. “The highlight of my career,” he said. “We talked forever about it, which was really nice.”

Crohn spent a couple of years supporting Sebastian Maniscalco, and he has also opened for Nikki Glaser, John Oliver, and Jon Lovitz. In 2013 he was a panel guest on a Boston-centric episode of Marc Maron’s WTF Podcast. Another great memory is a long conversation with Steven Wright at the prestigious Nantucket Comedy Festival.

“Writing is my favorite part of this,” he said. “My second is getting to work with incredible acts.”

For Crohn, the discipline of standup is part of its appeal. “A great comic, Nick Di Paolo, once said, ‘Oh, you’re funny off the cuff, well, that’s why you become a comedian — now go write some jokes.’ I believe that it’s a lot harder to write jokes and entertain people. When you’re just making stuff up, that’s improv. If you wanna do improv, go for it.”

To that end, he didn’t share the antipathy many comics had toward online shows during the pandemic. “I love Zoom,” he said. “I approached it as a way to workshop jokes, with cards and my notes out. I refused to let that muscle atrophy.”

On the other hand, crowd work — the comic’s euphemism for bantering with an audience — holds little appeal for Crohn.

“I hate it! I like writing,” he said. “The craft of standup, the editing and the refinement of material, is what I’m addicted to the most. I love how jokes work, and I love how my jokes work specifically. I love the creative process. It’s what drew me to it originally, and it’s what continues to sustain me in a business that shouldn’t be called a business.”

All the while, the words of his wild and crazy comedy idol ring in his ears. “I continue to be enamored about it to this day,” Crohn said. “I still can’t believe that people give me money.”

Dan Crohn
When: Saturday, June 10, 8 p.m.
Where: Headliners Comedy Club, 700 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at headlinersnh.com
Also supporting Mike Koutrobis on Friday, June 9, 8 p.m. at Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry ($22 at tupelohall.com)

Featured photo: Dan Crohn. Courtesy photo.

A multi-band, mid-week show

Helping to shake the walls at an upcoming weeknight show from Georgia metal stalwarts Dead Reckoning will be a sizable contingent of Granite State acts. Female-fronted metal band Sepsiss, raw power trio Abel Blood and hard rockers Edgewize all hail from New Hampshire. Deathcore quartet Mark of Wrath comes from close by; they’re based in Rhode Island.

Finally, there’s Dust Prophet, a Manchester four-piece that formed in the months before the pandemic and polished its sound through lockdown. In January they released a debut album, One Last Look Upon the Sky, that’s a master class in stoner rock, the gloomy metal-limned sound forged by Black Sabbath and later refined by bands like Kyuss and Electric Wizard.

Guitarist Otto Kinzel and Sarah Wappler, who plays bass and keys, came together around a love of heavy riffs. The two were previously in an industrial-rock band called Fiends of a New Republic; they wanted to try something different.

“I didn’t have a passion to get back into using a lot of electronics,” Kinzel explained in a recent phone interview. “I just wanted it to be guitar-bass-drums, more stripped down and straightforward … just focusing on being heavy.”

In bringing their shared influences together, “It was Sarah who heavily drove that train,” Kinzel said. “She wrote a huge amount of the riffs that are on the album. She really deserves to be credited. We’re all listed as songwriters because we collaborated on the songs and melded them all together, but she was nine times out of ten the one bringing the riffs to the table.”

With Wappler churning out one heavy chord after another, and Kinzel penning lyrics worthy of slasher films, finding a drummer turned out to be their biggest challenge.

“It was like a Saturday Night Live skit in some parts, I mean, it was just unbelievable,” Kinzel recalled. “Some of the people that answered the ad that would come to audition and have zero preparation.”

Finally a fellow guitarist pointed them to drummer Tyler MacPherson, and the group was complete, mostly. Jason Doyle, a longtime friend of Kinzel’s, had mixed and mastered Dust Prophet in the studio. When the group finally began playing out, Kinzel decided he wanted to concentrate on singing, so he recruited Doyle to play guitar at their early shows.

“I was singing and playing at the same time, and I was at 50 percent … not great at either one,” Kinzel said. “Jason already knew all the songs because he did all the postproduction on them, and he’s also a great guitar player. He played a couple of dates with us and immediately went from being a live guitar player to a full-fledged member of the band.”

Adding Doyle shifted their sound. “We’re still very much a doom metal band, but there’s a bit more of a progressive element,” Kinzel observed. “I’m working in more live audio samples for interludes, more synth. In the studio, we overdubbed tons of secondary drums … congas and other hand percussion instruments are layered in and out. With me not playing guitar live, it frees me up to do that, to incorporate some of that live.”

Beyond that, the plan is to go back in the studio and document their new musical direction. “Artistically, we want to keep moving forward, and we’ve already started recording material for the next album,” Kinzel said. “We’re going to do an EP with a couple of cuts from the first album reimagined, and then maybe one or two brand new songs…. Our goal is to level up with each release.”

Kinzel is keen to do a hometown show.

“This is the first time we’ve played Manchester in 2023,” he said. “We’re always jumping at the opportunity because we get a pretty good turnout. It’s one of the few times our friends and family can come to shows because it’s a relatively local event. We know several of the other bands. We’ve played with Abel Blood before, we’ve played with Sepsiss before. We’ll see some friends and just go hang out.”

Dead Army Takeover Tour
When: Tuesday, June 6, 7 p.m.
Where: Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester
Tickets: $15 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Dust Prophet. Courtesy photo.

Mother Iguana plans release show

Restlessness animates many artists; insomnia can cripple more than a few. For a Concord guitarist and singer-songwriter it does both. On the new album Eyeball Planet, Mac Holmes, performing as Mother Iguana, has created a song cycle about sleeplessness. The music isn’t comforting, but it brilliantly conveys the experience of the struggle to finally rest, both sonically and lyrically.

Though well-ensconced in the local music scene, Holmes recruited 22 musicians from around the world for the project. Each was given a loose outline to work with. Their tracks were emailed and assembled, collage-like, for each song. Frank Zappa and Charlie Mingus are named as influences, and the complex, textured results evoke both. Holmes explained his approach in a recent phone interview.

“My process was to write detailed prompts and briefs … including a number of reference tracks,” he said. “I encouraged people to bring their own ideas to the table and if something contradicted my idea, I’d love to hear that as well. My thinking was, they know what they do best, better than I do.”

International collaboration wasn’t the plan when Holmes began writing a few years ago.

“My initial vision for it was to do fairly dense, psychedelic arrangements with a lot of moving parts. And I can’t play most of those instruments,” he said. “Once I started along that path, I figured I should push that as far as I could go with it and just layer those things up … that’s the aesthetic I was trying to work with.”

Brazilian percussionist Tom Andrade appears on every cut, playing an exotic list of instruments too lengthy to catalog, including guizo, udu, agogô, seeds and, more prosaically, bongos. “I just love what he did so much,” Holmes said. “I wanted him on the whole thing.”

Carina Bruwer, a flute player from South Africa, offered a standout performance on “It Must Always Be Night,” which leads off the album. “She sent four or five takes of her just shredding the flute, and I felt compelled to use as much of it as I could,” Holmes said. He set them into multiple places in the mix, “kind of weaving in and out in different parts. Midway through the song, they’re kind of all going at once.”

Another Holmes influence is songwriter Van Dyke Parks, best known for his collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “Lights Out” is reminiscent of Parks’ work. The touchstone song hints at the ambivalence of being on the line between waking and dreaming. “I watch the crack beneath the door, and every breath I take reminds me I’m awake, reminds me I’m alive,” Holmes sings over bouncy chords, and a swampy swell of horns, cello and vibraphone.

A release show for Eyeball Planet will happen Saturday, May 27, at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord. Singer Kelsie Collins, who contributed to the album (and is Holmes’ girlfriend), will be in a band that includes Zane McDaniel on bass, fiddlers JD Nadeau and Audrey Budington, along with multi-instrumentalist Brian Burnout.

Collins, who plays jazz standards and vintage country songs with Holmes in the duo Mac & Kelsie, will do a few of her own songs.

Missing from the group will be drummer/percussionist Killian Venman, who died suddenly on May 12. At the time of his death Venman was working with Holmes on a project at Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield, where Eyeball Planet was mixed. Holmes considered postponing the show, but encouragement from others who knew Venman compelled him to carry on with the date.

“I’ve repeatedly heard from friends that he would have wanted me to do that,” he said, “because he was very supportive. He was also a very ambitious, creative guy, who always had crazy art projects going on. That resonates with me as being the truth.”

Losing his close friend and collaborator does, however, cast a pall over what was supposed to be a celebration. That said, he’s glad to put the finishing touches on a project that’s consumed years of his life.

“It was already having a weird impact on my mental health, just in terms of orienting so much of my mental real estate,” Holmes said. “I indulged my mania working on this thing way past the point where anyone would even notice little things I was changing. I’m definitely proud of it, and the response to it so far has been good. A number of people whose opinions I really respect have said nice things about it.”

Mother Iguana
When: Saturday, May 27, 9 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: motheriguana.bandcamp.com

Featured photo: Mac Holmes. Courtesy photo.