Author: Michael Witthaus

Bluegrass with Bella White in Portsmouth

It’s understandable to mistake Bella White’s debut album, Just Like Leaving, for a mid-20th-century episode of Louisiana Hayride. With its layers of honey, hardscrabble and harmony, it’s a throwback that’s only missing the crackle and hiss of a big table radio.

The bigger surprise is it’s coming from a Canadian urbanite who was barely 20 years old when she recorded it at a rustic studio in the Green Mountains. Exposed to bluegrass at an early age by a touring musician father, Bella White became a natural at the genre, and her talent continues to grow.

She deftly draws from the hill country music that captivated her as a youngster, while staying aware of the dichotomy of it and her Calgary, Alberta, upbringing. “I was growing up going to public school in the city, taking the C train … this very urban kind of lifestyle,” White said by phone recently. “Then singing all of these really troublesome, ‘woe is me’ songs; I always found it really interesting.”

That said, she can evoke the pain of her own lived experience. “Broke (When I Realized)” recalls the dissolution of her parents’ marriage when she was a child. It’s devastating, as she recounts overhearing her father deliver the news and thinking it’s a bad dream, only to have a dawning awareness: “I’d yet to fall asleep.”

White can also express romantic longing with startling maturity. “Now I’ve chased your love ’cause I thought it might feel woolen/like a dram on a damn cold winter’s night,” she sings on Just Like Leaving’s title track. The line, oft-quoted by admiring writers and critics, would be at home on an early Joni Mitchell album.

The likening delights White. “That means a lot, she’s my favorite,” she said, adding, “we’re both from the Prairies.”

The characters in many of White’s songs are on the move, a state that often mirrors her life. At 19, she came to Boston after hearing about the city’s roots scene. “I kind of just took a leap of faith,” she said. Settling into a dorm-like, musician-filled dwelling called Brighton House, she gained a Berklee education by osmosis, auditing the music college’s American Roots class and jamming whenever she could.

Better still was hanging out with many others who were close to her in age. “I wasn’t really exposed to that growing up; I felt like I was always the youngest person at the jam,” White said. “I started to meet people through going to bluegrass festivals who went to Berklee…. I thought, how funny that there’s this mecca for old-time bluegrass and country music in Boston, of all places.”

She hung around New England long enough to make her first serious record — a studio recording done in her teens remains unreleased — at the urging of old home country friend Patrick M’Gonigle. The multi-instrumentalist, known for his time in the Lonely Heartstring Band, produced, and led her to Guilford Sound, a facility built into a southern Vermont hill.

Fortune smiled when they entered the studio just as lockdown began in mid-March 2020. “We were in this little box in the woods, kind of oblivious to what’s going on,” she said. “It created this really interesting dynamic … the best quarantine I could have ever asked for. Definitely some divine intervention or something.”

White then decamped to Nashville, keeping a home base there while touring a lot. She’s opened for Sierra Ferrell, Molly Tuttle and others, while becoming a steady presence on the festival scene. One day after her show at Portsmouth’s newly renovated Music Hall Lounge, she’ll be at the Green Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Manchester, Vermont.

Lately she’s been “kind of just quietly” staying in Victoria, British Columbia. “I’ve lived in Nashville kind of on and off for the past three years or so, but have been mostly in Victoria these days,” she said.

Ahead of a run that continues through mid-September, White released a new single. “The Way I Oughta Go” finds her voice with a Lydia Loveless edge as she rambles from city to city. It’s part of an upcoming album done with Jonathan Wilson, a producer who’s worked with Father John Misty, Billy Strings and White’s friend Erin Rae, among others.

A big fan of the country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, White sees herself evolving beyond her bluegrass roots into something a bit more raucous.

“In the fall, I plan on having some electric guitar and maybe some pedal steel coming into the mix,” she said. “There are so many other elements of country music that are not acoustic, that are electric … that’s a huge part of the history as well. It’s really fun to broaden your horizon and play with it all, you know?”

Bella White
When: Saturday, Aug. 20, 8 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $15 advance, $17 day of show, $25 premium seating at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Bella White. Photo Credit Morgan-Mason

Greg Fitzsimmons brings his comedy to Manchester

It was inevitable that Greg Fitzsimmons would find his way into comedy. His father was a revered New York City radio host who knew guys like Henny Youngman and emceed Friars Club roasts. “It was sort of the family business…. It’s like when your father’s a doctor, you think, ‘OK, Dad did that, I could do it,’” Fitzsimmons said by phone recently.

That prediction has been borne out by a career lasting over 30 years. He’s won accolades for his writing skills, including four daytime Emmys working on the Ellen DeGeneres show, and his standup, which comes to Manchester for two shows on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13. However, Fitzsimmons’s first foray into comedy happened in Boston, not the Big Apple.

In the late ’80s, while attending BU, he tested the waters at places like Nick’s Comedy Stop, one among a rich crop of new comics.

“Joe Rogan and I started at the exact same time,” he said. “We spent a lot of time in cars together, going to gigs all over New England. Dane Cook, David Cross, Marc Maron, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Patrice O’Neal…. Those were all the guys that were around when I was coming up. It was just crazy that there was this much talent.”

One luxury they shared during that time was access, even if there were plenty of what Fitzsimmons termed “hell gigs … true saloon comedy where it was never assumed that the comedian was the funniest one in the room” — a hard but valuable proving ground. Today’s young comics are encountering a different terrain.

“It’s so competitive at the entry level, trying to get seen and get stage time,” Fitzsimmons said. “I was fortunate enough to make a living when I wasn’t even very funny just because there was a ton of rooms and they needed warm bodies. Because of that, I was able to log my 10,000 hours and get to a more proficient place.”

Fitzsimmons was one of the first comics to launch a podcast, in the mid-2000s. It grew out of a radio show Howard Stern gave him for his Howard 101 channel. “I would get these really great guests, like Bill Burr, Adam Carolla, Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, and then it would be over so fast,” he said. “So we’d continue with the same guest for another hour.”

The Fitzdog Radio podcast marks its 1,000th episode in a few weeks. Along with Ellen, he’s also written for HBO’s slice-of-standup-life series Crashing, The Man Show, Politically Incorrect and Lucky Louie. The latter was his favorite. “I just had so much respect for Louis [C.K.],” he said. “We started in Boston together, we’ve always lived in the same city, and we have kids that are the same age. We’d drive to work together and just talk about ideas … very organic, I didn’t have to imagine anything. We just had to tell stories from our life.”

An unconventional show with a dour disposition, Lucky Louie only lasted one season, though HBO ordered a second one that wasn’t made. “I think the show was aesthetically unappealing … done to look like The Honeymooners,” Fitzsimmons said. “With the drabness of the characters, it became something people [who] watch sitcoms weren’t used to. They wanted a bunch of people in a bright coffee shop.”

The comic’s onstage act doesn’t suffer similarly. Fitzsimmons is quick and instinctive, adept at crowd work and able to mine his own life for comedy gold. Lately, as he noted in a recent Fitzdog Radio episode, he’s hitting on all cylinders.

“I’m very funny right now; it goes in waves,” he said. As to why, “it’s all about being in the moment. … There are times where you’re caught up in your thoughts and second-guessing, trying too hard, worrying about whatever you’re doing wrong. Then there are times you just get in the pocket … it’s money. Even the same jokes you’ve been doing for a long time have new life in them for some reason.”

If it sounds easy, it’s not, he continued, offering advice to aspirants: “Comedy is a game of inches; each joke lives and dies on a turn of a phrase, losing a word or adding a little tag line,” he said. It starts with finding a voice. “Some people are storytellers and it doesn’t hinge on the words as much. But life for most comics really is about rolling up your sleeves, really honing the material. Because people are seeing a lot of comedy; they know the difference. They can feel it when somebody has put in the work.”

Greg Fitzsimmons
When: Friday, Aug. 12, 8:30 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 13, 9 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 707 Huse Road, Manchester
Tickets: $30 at chunkys.com

Featured photo: Greg Fitzsimmons. Courtesy photo.

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.