Author: Michael Witthaus

The Music Roundup 26/03/05

• Roots player: Paul Driscoll, an alt folk and country singer/guitarist who’s played out in the region for more than a decade. He mixes originals with covers from artists like Tom Waits, the Steeldrivers and Colter Wall. Check out his spare cover of John Hartford’s “Gentle On My Mind,” a late ’60s hit for Glen Campbell — it’s a gem, and it’s up on his YouTube page. Thursday, March 5, at 5 p.m., The Local, 15 E. Main St., Warner, nhmusiccollective.com.

• Irish import: Mark the arrival St. Patrick’s Day season with music from Téada, a traditional band from Sligo, Ireland, celebrating 25 years together in 2026. The six-person group has toured the world, performing treasures like “Ríl Liadroma / The Green Cockade / The Mourne Mountains” and “March at Kilmore.” Their take on the timeless “Patriot Game” is a standout. Friday, March 6, at 7:30 p.m., Dana Center, 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester, $29.50 and up, anselm.edu.

• Local lights: A four-band show leans into punk, garage rock and power pop with Fun City Fan Club atop the bill. The raucous quartet released a delightful debut LP last year, Yuck, recorded at Rocking Horse Studio with Josh Kimball, who’s also their drummer. They’re joined by Cozy Throne, a Patti Smith-channeling band that would have fit in at CBGB in the mid-’70s, Cape Crush and Donaher. Saturday, March 7, at 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $15 at the door, 21+.

• Bach rock: With her pioneering trio Take3, violinist Lindsay Deutsch was way ahead of Bridgerton turning pop hits like Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” into string quartet renditions. Deutsch is joined by former Take3 piano player Jason Stoll for a show that takes works from “rock stars of yesteryear” like Bach and Beethoven and lines them up with music by modern performers. Saturday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m., Concord City Auditorium, 2 Prince St., Concord, $24, eventbrite.com.

• Piano man: At an intimate afternoon show in BNH Stage’s upstairs lounge, Andrew North will perform selections from Strider, a piano-forward “headphone album.” The lively calypso-flavored opener “Build a Fort” sets a mood removed from North’s jammy band The Rangers. The album, he writes, “occupies a quieter space, closer to a desk lamp than a spotlight,” that’s ideal for focused listening. Sunday, March 8, 4 p.m., The Cantin Room, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $20, ccanh.com.

Flower power

‘Bloom’ pairs art and floral arrangements

A four-day event at Manchester’s Currier Museum of Art pairs paintings and sculptures with floral arrangements done by members of the New Hampshire Federation of Garden Clubs. “Bloom – A Floral Palette” also offers hands-on artmaking and tours led by floral designers. It culminates with a catered party and awards ceremony.

“Bloom” is something that NHFGC has long wanted to do, Winnie Schmidt, the organization’s President, noted recently.

“Many of us have attended this type of an event in places like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and right now there’s one going on in Worcester, Mass., at their art gallery,” she said in a phone interview. “We’ve seen them all over, and for years we’ve wanted to bring it here.”

Arrangers include winners of past events like the Philadelphia Art Show and the Rhode Island Flower Show, along with some who are in the milieu for the first time but just as passionate. “These are ladies who absolutely love to do floral design,” Schmidt said. “From Salem up to Littleton and Ashland.”

Floral designers are tasked with addressing the question of how art and arrangements work together, Schmidt continued. They should, she said, “complement, harmonize, showcase or unite with a piece of art or in the theme [and] demonstrate creativity, originality, use of bold color choices, textures and unexpected materials.”

Museums are a brave new world for NHFGC, which is part of a national group of garden clubs. “Most of us are digging-in-the-dirt garden clubs, but a good number of us are also interested in floral design,” she said. “It’s a mixture of both outdoor gardeners and floral designers, so it’s a very eclectic group.”

Floral designers picked works from the Currier collection on a first-come basis, a process that worked well, Schmidt said. “You have to remember this, we’re inventing this as it goes — none of us have done this before. So our mantra is, ‘We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re having a good time doing it.’”

Attendees at the Bloom Bash on the evening of Saturday, March 14, are encouraged to dress in their favorite floral fashions in an early celebration of spring. The event will offer light hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar, capped by an awards ceremony in the Currier’s Winter Garden to celebrate the designers.

Currier Director and CEO Jordana Pomeroy will choose the arrangement that she feels best represents the intersection of design and art. A Committee Award will be chosen by Currier Board of Trustees member Bill Stelling; Sally Shea, who organized a similar effort called “Petals to Paint” for many years, and a dozen NHFGC presidents, including Schmidt.

Finally, there’s a People’s Choice Award.

“Everyone who attends will be able to vote for the arrangement that they feel best exemplifies the show,” Schmidt said. “All those things will be given out at the Bloom Bash on Saturday night, so it’ll be like a culmination — ‘We did it, let’s celebrate and party and have a good time.’”

That said, it will be a party that’s more about marking an achievement for everyone involved, rather than to pick winners.

“It’s not a floral design contest,” Schmidt said. “The National Garden Club has a handbook on floral design arrangement that is probably 1,000 pages thick. This is not what this is.”

More than anything, the hope is that the long weekend of commingling flowers and arts inspires another one, and another after that, she stressed.

“It’s our inaugural one, but the one that we were at in Connecticut last weekend was celebrating their 44th, and I hope someday we will be celebrating our 44th annual here in Manchester.”

Bloom – A Floral Palette
When: Thursday, March 12, through Sunday, March 15
Where: Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester
Tickets: Weekend pass $50 adults, $20 members (does not include Bloom Bash on Saturday, March 14, 6 p.m., $50)

Daily admission $30 adults, $15 members, includes museum access, arrangement viewing, artmaking and tours.

Featured photo: “Cross By the Sea, Canada” by Georgia O’Keeffe one of the pieces floral designers will take inspiration from for “Bloom.” Images courtesy the Currier.

Big stage night

Pointless Culture performs local showcase

The upcoming “Locally Sourced” show at Concord’s BNH Stage is a two-band affair. Granite Staters Pointless Culture draw from a range of influences for a sound that’s equally raucous, angsty and melodic. From Billerica, Cosmic Triumph brings full-throttled abandon to their energetic original songs.

The two groups have a history of helping each other out, Pointless Culture band members said in a recent Zoom interview. “Anytime they have a big show going on down there, they always call us,” guitarist Harrison Fantasia said. “So we make sure to call them. They go good with us, like cheese and wine.”

“We’ve played with them quite a bit,” drummer Harrison Hinman agreed. “So it was kind of a no-brainer to ask them.”

Yes, the two share a first name.

It’s something they bonded over the day Hinman walked into an Upper Valley guitar shop to buy drumsticks a few years back. Fantasia, who worked there, was strumming a tune he wrote and asked Hinman to check it out.

“You didn’t even introduce yourself, right?” Hinman said to Fantasia in the interview, who nodded in assent. “Eventually, we did. He said, ‘My name’s Harrison,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, my name’s Harrison. How can I help you?’ We didn’t know what to say. We’re like, ‘Wow, two Harrisons.’ That took us as a surprise. He played the song, and I loved it.”

The two ended up practicing together after hours in the shop — until Fantasia quit. “I’m a carpenter,” he said. “I tried working at a guitar shop and I didn’t like it, but I met this guy through it.” Sadly, they wouldn’t connect again for another two years, when he asked Hinman to support him at a festival in Acworth.

The gig went very well, as did a few jams after. In 2022 the two decided to get serious.

“We’re like, ‘We gotta make a band; I can’t believe we let that slip for two years,’” Hinman recalled. “I’d thought he didn’t like me anymore, but it’s funny — we just realized that we’re both really bad at texting people back.”

Fantasia “begged” childhood friend Ben Schultz to be lead guitarist, but it took some time for their schedules to line up.

“I couldn’t practice because I was always working at like seven o’clock at night,” Schultz said. Eventually he got a first-shift job and was able to join the band.

Guitarist Nolan Cota had played with Hinman in a “couple of failed metal bands” and really wanted to join his new one.

“I could tell he was jealous of what I was doing, and I felt bad,” Hinman said, but the multi-instrumentalist was undeterred. “Nolan was like, ‘You guys need a bass player?’”

Their first single, “Severed Ties,” came at the end of 2022, followed by “Breakfast Song,” a quirky ode to morning meal proclivities that helped raise their profile. Both were on Can’t Stand the Rain, an EP released in December 2023. Preceded by a few singles, the debut LP Better Off Dead came last summer, including the song Fantasia played in the store that day.

It’s hard to pin down Pointless Culture’s music. The playful “Little House,” from the new album, is sweet and brims with innocence, while “Warning Signs” rocks harder and comes off a bit darker, with a grungy angst, and the new “Squirrel Food” is, Fantasia said, “written from the point of view of an acorn.” Yes, the band delights in being a moving target.

“One of the biggest compliments I get at the end of the shows is people can’t compare us to anybody, and they really like what we’re doing,” Fantasia said. “It’s like classic punk and rock, but then we play a little bit of bluegrass. We play a little bit of everything. We just want to see people out having fun … come have fun with us.”

Pointless Culture w/ Cosmic Triumph
When: Friday, Feb. 27, 8 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Pointless Culture. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/02/26

• Blues power: Though Willie J. Laws will be there, the 16th Annual New England Winter Blues Festival favors singers over guitar slingers. John Németh tops the bill, joined by singing harmonica players Kevin Burt, Darrell Nulisch and Nick David, who created the event. Németh, wrote No Depression in 2022, “is one of the best soul singers in the business, with a floor-to-ceiling range.” Thursday, Feb. 26, 7 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $40, palacetheatre.org.

• Eighties glow: Hearken back to the days of MTV with Neon Wave totally covering The Cure, Duran Duran, The Fixx, and others. Their letter-perfect redo of Corey Hart’s “Sunglasses at Night” is a set highlight, and they also do a banging version of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” The band recently added singer Natalie Turgeon to the fold, but it’s not clear she’ll be at this show. Friday, Feb. 27, 8 p.m., Stumble Inn, 20 Rockingham Road, Londonderry, neonwaveband.com.

• Glimmer twins: With Keith Call as Mick Jagger, and Bernie Bollendorf doing Keith Richards, Classic Stones Live™ are, writes Dan Geringer of the Philadelphia Daily News, “the spitting image Rolling Stones tribute band.” Their secret weapon, he continued, is their ability to “demonstrate the dramatic difference between a cover band that plays the tunes and a tribute band that lives them.” Saturday, Feb. 28, 8 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $44, tupelohall.com.

• Sunday grass: Brunch and bluegrass combine with The Bottom Dollars, a harmony-rich trio that includes ubiquitous fiddler Betsy Green (Hazel Project, The Green Sisters), Dave Shaw (Bear Bridge Band, Newfound Grass) on mandolin and banjo, and guitarist Tim FitzGerald. The group performs originals and revives many neglected but quite worthy songs from the bluegrass canon. Sunday, March 1, noon, Chapel + Main Brewing, 83 Main St., Dover, chapelandmain.com.

• Roots master: In the course of a nearly 50-year career, Keb’ Mo’ has won multiple Grammys, performed at the White House and Carnegie Hall, and collaborated with a who’s who of the music world, including Jackson Browne, The Chicks, Bonnie Raitt and Willie Nelson. The singer, guitarist and arranger even has acting skills, appearing on The West Wing and Sesame Street. Tuesday, March 3, 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $68 and up, etix.com.

Millyard movies

Two films chronicle ’60s-’70s urban renewal

To bookend an exhibit that’s run for the past several months, the Manchester Historical Association will screen two films that together offer a view into a city in transition. One is a 1978 PBS documentary, The Amoskeag Transcripts, the other a collection of footage from an MHA project that never came to fruition.

“The Lost Films of Amoskeag” will be shown on Saturday, Feb. 28, at the Millyard Museum. This follows “Amoskeag Revisited: A Fifty-Year Retrospective,” which opened in September. That exhibit looked back at a Manchester urban renewal project that saw demolition of mill buildings and the filling in of canals in a once-thriving but by then largely abandoned area.

Both of the 30-minute films are illuminating. Particularly moving is the work of Tobe and Alan Carey, two brothers who in 1968 walked around the Millyard with movie cameras capturing the area before it was leveled. It’s a nice counterpart to The Amoskeag Transcripts, which aired on WGBH a few years after the renewal work ended.

“It’s almost like looking at old home movies,” MHA Executive Director Jeff Barraclough said recently. “Now, really for the first time, they’re available to be shown … I mean, we’ve seen some photographs, but to see it on film and see people walking through, it’s very exciting.”

Stored in MHA’s archives, the footage was rediscovered in July, just in time for the current exhibit, which recalls a similar one 50 years ago at the Currier Gallery of Art. “Amoskeag, A Sense of Place, A Way of Life” was designed by architectural historian Randolph Langenbach, and opened after the renewal project was completed.

That exhibition used historic images, Langenbach’s before and after photos, and millworker recollections along with salvaged machinery and equipment. At the time, it helped raise awareness of the area’s historical importance, while the Millyard Museum’s current exhibit is examining its lasting impact on Manchester.

Langenbach’s Currier exhibit “began to change people’s perceptions [and] created a newfound respect for the Millyard; it was something that began to be recognized as important and almost celebrated,” Barraclough said. “Eventually, [people] came to respect that this was the lifeblood of the city of Manchester for over a century.”

The WGBH documentary was adapted from Dr. Tamara Hareven’s book, Amoskeag: The Oral History of a Factory City, as well as drawing from Langenbach’s Currier exhibit. The two were married at the time, and later divorced. Hareven passed away in 2003.

A memorial tribute from a colleague at University of Delaware offered clues to Hareven’s interest in the Millyard. “She reached into the 19th century and then traced its modern impact through her in-depth interviews and her analysis of the historic patterns of women’s work to support their families in industrial New England,” Professor Barbara Settles recalled.

Langenbach now lives in California. He attended the Millyard Museum opening in September.

“He’s sadly not in good health, but was able to come back out,” Barraclough said, noting that Langenbach was a Harvard architectural student when demolition began. “He took it upon himself to go in, and not only photographed the Millyard both before and during some of the demolition, but he was able to save certain pieces of architectural fragments.” Those included windows, doors and cornice pieces. “He was able to store them away so that they were salvaged. Some of those items have been given to the MHA, and we use them in our permanent display at the Millyard Museum that talks about the history of the Millyard.”

Barraclough looks forward to opening up a time capsule for museum patrons, who can watch the movies with admission.

“I think it’s just going to be a fun program,” he said. “We hope we’ll have a good turnout and people will come and get to watch these films, one of which has never been seen, one that hasn’t been seen in almost 50 years; it’s a great way to spend the morning.”

The Lost Films of Amoskeag
When: Saturday, Feb. 28, at 11 a.m.
Where: Millyard Museum, 200 Bedford St., Manchester
Tickets: Free with admission ($12 adults, $10 seniors & students, $6 ages 12-18, no charge under 12). RSVP at 622-7531 or history@manchseterhistoric.org
More: manchesterhistoric.org

Featured photo: The Amokseag Transcripts

Whole Lotta Zep

Get the Led Out comes to Concord

Paul Hammond has an extra ticket for Led Zeppelin’s reunion show. The caveat is that anyone looking to claim it will have to time travel. Hammond plays lead guitar in Get the Led Out, a band that outflanks other tribute acts via exacting attention to detail. One of his more memorable Zep moments, however, was as a spectator. It was a rock ’n’ roll fantasy come true.

It’s no stretch to say Zep’s one-off 2007 concert was the hardest ticket ever; 20 million fans entered a worldwide lottery to purchase a mere 18,000 seats. Hammond, however, knew someone connected to a charity run by Jimmy Page’s wife at the time, who got him in, and then some.

Prior to the show, he watched soundcheck with Queen guitarist Brian May for company, and the two enjoyed the concert from the VIP section. Also, and what explains the wayback machine requirement, Hammond had access to six additional tickets. Sadly, he couldn’t find anyone able to quickly jet to London and use them.

“I was with the top of the top rock stars, the inner circle of rock royalty,” Hammond said in a recent phone interview. He may perform the music of the gods, and convincingly, but he enjoyed the perks of one that night. “In the A100 section, with Brian May, and then three rows down in front of me was Ronnie Wood and Jeff Beck.”

Hammond also met Page backstage that night. He had another Zep-adjacent moment, courtesy of the band he co-formed in 2003 with singer Paul Sinclair, with a mission to perform note for note songs from the iconic band’s studio recordings. It came as GTLO was preparing to go on stage at Portsmouth’s Music Hall a few years back.

After a phone call, the show’s promoter informed him she’d been speaking to Robert Plant. “He asked her, ‘What band is playing tonight?’ and she said, ‘It’s Get the Led Out,’ and he says, ‘Oh, Get the Led Out, that’s a great band,’” he recalled. “He knows us! Our sound man told us he’d come to our show in Nashville.”

GTLO delivers a concert experience that’s currently rivaled only by Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening. The son of the late Zep drummer was also behind the kit in 2007 at O2 Arena. They play the iconic band’s entire catalog, almost. A few songs just don’t translate well to their arena rock show.

“Like, ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’ from Led Zeppelin III is a bizarre song with the effects, and doesn’t have a lot of crowd appeal,” Hammond said. “‘Carouselambra’ from In Through the Out Door is essentially a John Paul Jones experimental record. I don’t know what Jimmy Page was up to then, maybe hanging out in the pub … but it’s a long and a weary song.”

The good news is GTLO plays everything else in their two-and-a-half-hour show, even Zeppelin’s lone B-side, “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do.” To call the band’s approach exacting is an understatement. Songs are not only transcribed precisely, but they are also true to both key and pitch, which provides a big dopamine hit for true fans.

“It brings back that memory, that sound, because intrinsically people know,” Hammond said. “Some Led Zeppelin bands, if the singer can’t hit the notes, they’ll tune a half-step down, and it just doesn’t sound the same, and the audience knows it, whether they know it or not. Because it’s just been ingrained for so many years, hearing it the way you want to hear it.”

The band grew out of a residency at Bridgeport Rib House in Pennsylvania. Zeppelin was one band they covered in a set that included Aerosmith songs, but patrons there kept asking for a Zep-centric show.

It works because Hammond and his mates revere Zeppelin as much as their audience, and deliver accordingly.

“Basically, we want to give people all the stuff that they know and love,” Hammond said. “When we go into deep cuts, they’re deep cuts that people also would know, that true die-hard Zeppelin fans would be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe they did ‘In The Light’ or we’ve delved as deep as ‘Sick Again.’”

Get the Led Out
When: Saturday, Feb. 21, at 8 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $45 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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