Author: Michael Witthaus

Guy Davis returns to Flying Goose

By Michael Witthaus

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History through song and storytelling imbues the performance of Guy Davis. His 2024 album, The Legend of Sugarbelly, was inspired by a woman murdered in Georgia during the early 20th century, a tale Davis’s uncle would share every time he visited. Though the victim’s name was a mystery, everyone was aware of her killer’s identity.

“I knew the story by heart, it was like a ceremony between my uncle and I,” Davis said by phone recently. “Not only did my whole family know this man, that same man at one point was assigned by the Ku Klux Klan to kill my grandfather, because he was a Black man. I’ll just say that my grandfather’s death at his hands never did take place; a lot of mitigating circumstances that had to do with family looking out for each other, that kind of thing.”

The Legend of Sugarbelly began as a song and later became a play that debuted at Crossroads Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J., in 2022. Davis will draw from the work at an upcoming New London show, and do a monologue from the theatrical version.

“That uncle who used to tell me the story, he died the day I finished writing the play,” Davis noted poignantly.

The son of actors and civil rights leaders Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, Davis grew up with people like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Pointier stopping by his home.

“I remember my dad introducing me to Malcolm X and having to reach way up and him having to reach way down to shake my hand,” he said. Meeting boxer Joe Louis at a Harlem fair housing protest was another favorite memory.

Davis found music at a Vermont summer camp run by John Seeger, Pete’s brother, where he learned banjo, later adding six- and 12-string guitar to his repertoire. He grew so dedicated to banjo that one day on a hike that stopped at an estate auction, he bid all his money on an armless rocking chair. “I was 25 cents short, but then the guy running the auction looked at me and said, ‘Here, I’ll give you the quarter.’”

It was perfect for practicing, which the camp counselors let him do during rest time.

“They allowed me to take my rocking chair, sit it outside the cabin with my banjo, and just sit, rock and play,” he said. “I wasn’t any good … but I was trying to learn that basic baton stroke that Pete does.”

He’d meet the legendary folksinger a few years later, after seeing him in concert on a camp day trip. “I came home and I found Pete Seeger standing in my living room,” Davis recalled. “I didn’t know he knew my folks. He asked me a couple of questions, and then over the years, I got to go up to his cabin and meet his daughters…. His door always seemed to be open for the rest of his life to me. I was very grateful.”

In his 20s, Davis began playing with Seeger. “Pete made the mistake of never chasing anyone off the stage who came up to sing with him,” he said. “A bunch of us would just follow him around, and when he went on stage, we’d … back him up. If his guitar or banjo was on the floor of the stage while we sang, he seemed to not mind if I picked one of them up.”

Seeger figured prominently in the recent Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, and Davis was asked to comment on Edward Norton’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the man he’d grown to call “Uncle Pete” — along with his wife, “Aunt Toshi” — as the interview wound down.

He enjoyed it, Davis began. “He captured something of Pete, and I can’t quite explain what it was, but there’s a sense of humility, a sense of decency, a sense of being a helping hand,” he said, then added his take on the film’s subject. “As far as Timothee Chalamet is concerned; after seeing the movie, I think I knew less about Bob Dylan after than I did before.”

Guy Davis

When: Thursday, Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Flying Goose Pub, 40 Andover Road, New London
Tickets: $30, call 526-6899 to reserve

Featured Photo: Guy Davis. Courtesy photo.

Lotus Land plays twice at Tupelo

By Michael Witthaus

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A good tribute act walks a tightrope, capturing a sound without trying to fully reproduce it. It’s something that bassist Chris Nelson thinks about frequently. His band Lotus Land plays the challenging catalog of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame trio Rush, and Nelson knows that convincing proximity, not perfection, is a sane performer’s best target.

“It’s not like we’re trying to repaint the Mona Lisa, that’s almost a thankless task,” he said by phone recently. “We’ve gelled into performing this stuff with a certain degree of our personalities. Tone comes from the hands of the musician; you can’t help but sound a bit like yourself … you’re not trying to just be a robot.”

Fortunately, Nelson’s voice has a natural pitch that’s similar to that of Rush’s lead singer. Comments about the vocal resemblance have followed him for years. “I’d sing a Zeppelin tune and without fail people would say, ‘You sound so much like Geddy Lee,’” he said. “Here I thought I was doing a pretty good Robert Plant! But anyway, I’m a crazy Rush fan.”

His bandmates, guitarist Bob Chartrand and drummer Mark Dalton, started Lotus Land as a four-piece, parting ways with the original bass and keyboard players when they met Nelson and became a trio. Before playing out, they watched videos and practiced hard, aware that Rush’s fans would “be as understandably critical of us as they are loyal to the real thing.”

They approached their first gig fretting about the formula, prepared to bail if it failed. “I’m not going to put myself and my bandmates through the embarrassment — if it doesn’t work, that’s going to be it, because I know it’s a tall order,” Nelson recalled thinking at the time. “But it was well-received … and it kept snowballing.”

The band took its name from a line in “Freewill,” a song from Rush’s breakthrough 1980 album Permanent Waves. The late Neal Peart was inspired by Homer’s The Odyssey when he wrote it, according to interpretations. In the book Merely Players, Peart said the “Lotus-land” was “a metaphor for an idealized background, a land of milk and honey.”

Their website describes “an obsessive approach … that inevitably compels us to incorporate every authentic Rush nuance into whatever amazing tune of theirs we may be playing,” and on songs like “Spirit of the Radio” and “Tom Sawyer” they deliver on the promise with masterful musicianship that honors the original songs.

Nelson’s bonafides as a fan are undeniable — he’s seen them live almost 20 times, and Lotus Land performed at the 2012 RushCon in Toronto. The latter was a life-changing event for him — he met his future wife there. She was there from L.A., along with thousands of others who’d traveled there.

The meeting only sparked a friendship; both were with other partners at the time. “Two years later, our situations changed, and here we are married; so I can credit the band for that,” he said. “What’s cool is I got to tell Geddy Lee that, very briefly at a book signing, I had my 60 seconds like everybody else, and I got to tell him that.”

Asked to name his most enjoyable moments during Lotus Land’s set, Nelson responded, “I love that question. People have their favorite areas of the band and mine happens to be from Permanent Waves through Grace Under Pressure, so that’s also Moving Pictures and Signals. For my natural register as a vocalist, that feels right in my pocket, so that’s the kind of stuff I love to do.”

That said, there’s another song he loves not on any of those albums.

“I love playing ‘The Path,’” he said, adding a side note. “I never try to change my voice to sound like him at all. I hear some other tribute acts do, but I’ve got a higher, and similar register as Geddy, so I’m just going to sing in my natural voice. If it sounds like him at the end of the day, great. If not, it shouldn’t be too painful on people’s ears because I’m going for the right pitch … it should be close.”

Lotus Land

When: Friday, Feb. 7, and Saturday, Feb. 8, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $42 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured Photo: Courtesy Photo.