Author: Michael Witthaus

Comic Cory Gee debuts at Headliners

When Cory Gee bounds onstage, he’s almost immediately mixing with the crowd. Learning who’s married, dating for the first time, celebrating a birthday. The rapid-fire back and forth helps the veteran comic size up the audience, but it’s not a call for conversation.

He’s setting up jokes, polished over time. Like the one about why asking a baby-faced cop how he caught him while riding a Big Wheel isn’t a good way to get out of a speeding ticket, or how single men shouldn’t plan bachelor parties, and the reason a VFW hall is a better venue for such gatherings than a strip bar.

Cory Gee really doesn’t want to hear about your day, but thanks anyway.

“In today’s TikTok era, crowd work is a necessary evil,” Gee said in a recent phone interview, noting that shutting down hecklers is a reliable way to get clicks. “I love to engage with the crowd, but what is frustrating for me as a comedian is when the crowd talks to me. Does that make sense?”

Sometimes, though, Gee’s high-wire act leads to comedy gold. “A perfect joke for me is the joke I never intended to do,” he said. Like when a random crowd remark sparks the memory of a long-unfinished bit. “You just start to work it, then it all starts to fall into place … and it’s like this moment. I was not meant to figure out that joke until just now.”

Gee will appear for the first time at Headliners in Manchester on Feb. 4. He’s talked for a while with promoter Rob Steen about playing there. “I pretty much know every headliner he uses on a regular basis, and they were all saying the same thing … ‘You’d do so well in New Hampshire, those crowds would really enjoy you.’ I’m really looking forward to it.”

He began doing comedy in 2002 at Comedy Connection in Providence, Rhode Island. The decision to become a standup was an evolution. He majored in theater in college, left early to find fame in Hollywood, but only got as far as his dad’s home in Georgia, where he got work in a professional theater company.

It didn’t last past a series of grueling rehearsals for Lips Together, Teeth Apart.

“I was just tired of saying other people’s words,” Gee explained. “In comedy, everything sits on you, all of the writing is you, all of the performing is you, every movement you make on stage is solely you, [and] knowing I was in complete control was probably the moment that I realized … this is what I want to be doing.”

It ended in 2013. His employer, a well-known nonprofit, gave him an ultimatum: jokes or a job. With two sons, Gee had little choice, so he quit, cold turkey. He didn’t write a bit, go to a show, or even think about comedy for five years. Then he got an offer at a new company. It was a lateral move; commuting costs actually reduced his take-home.

His wife had only one question. “She said, ‘Can you do comedy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, they told me they don’t care what I do.’ She was like, ‘We will figure out whatever financial impact this will have; you have to get back to comedy,’” he recalled.

He’s ever grateful for the boost. After shows, she helps him deconstruct and decompress. “I took it for granted the first time,” he said. “It has definitely added a wrinkle to our relationship from a support standpoint. Not that it wasn’t there before; I just I didn’t realize how important it was.”

Gee returns the favor by co-hosting a podcast with her. Ready, Set, Disney offers tips for visiting the theme parks. It helps that the manic stage prowler is already a big fan of Disney World. “If you’ve seen my act, you know I can’t stand still,” he said. “So the idea of a vacation in which I sit on a beach and just kinda throw my feet up would not work for me. When we go to Disney, I’m constantly moving.”

Cory Gee
When: Saturday, Feb. 4, 8:30 p.m.
Where: Headliners Comedy Club, 700 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $20 at headlinersnh.com

Featured photo: Cory Gee. Courtesy photo.

Blues Fest debuts at Rex

The first New England Blues Festival was a modest one-off featuring regional bands, including Mr. Nick & the Dirty Tricks, led by organizer Nick David. Buoyed by its success, David brought it back the following year and soon was attracting national talent like Chicago heavy-hitter Nick Moss, and the event scaled to multiple venues.

The annual show has attracted a bevy of talent over the years, including Muddy Waters’ son Big Bill Morganfield. David’s former group Mr. Nick & the Dirty Tricks backed him up in 2018. “I get goosebumps talking about it,” David recalled in 2019, “because that’s as close as I’ll ever get to playing with Muddy.”

David always hoped the show would stop in his hometown of Manchester; that will finally happen on Sunday, Jan. 29, on the stage of the Rex Theatre. “I’ve been talking to the Rex off and on for the last few years,” David said by phone recently. “I really like the venue a lot.”

The 13th festival features four guitar heroes. There’s headliner Mike Zito, Moss, playing for his fourth time, Roberto Morbioli, and Paul Size, the latter a member of David’s latest group, and concert house band, The Wicked Lo-Down.

Size is a legend in the blues rock world dating back to his stint in L.A.-by-way-of-Texas band The Red Devils, whose early ’90s residency at the gritty King King club attracted movie stars and music legends. They made an album with Mick Jagger that was never released (one cut was on Jagger’s Very Best compilation), and backed Bruce Willis on his Return of Bruno LP. Rick Rubin produced their lone live album, in 1995.

The Wicked Lo-Down grew out of a fruitful collaboration in late 2019 between David, Size and another guitarist, later replaced by Jeff Berg and augmented by a rhythm section of Nick Toscano and Mike Law. Hobbled by lockdown, they made an album, We Hot, in mid-2020 that stayed shelved for almost two years before its release last November. It’s a barn-burner, with a churning title cut and the Blasters-adjacent “Lena” among the standouts.

They’re now gigging and shopping the record to labels, including Zito’s moniker Gulf Coast. David met the guitarist in 2021 at the White Mountain Boogie & Blues Festival. Zito passed on releasing it, even though he reportedly “loved” the album, according to David. “Nobody was willing to sign us because we weren’t out there gigging … how are they going to make money off us if we’re not playing? Who knows who we are?”

Zito has had a string of blues chart-topping albums in the recent past, beginning with 2018’s First Class Life and a Chuck Berry tribute collection that had assistance from Joe Bonamassa, Walter Trout, Robben Ford, Luther Dickinson and Sonny Landreth. Zito’s most recent disc, Resurrection, received a Blue Music Award last year for Best Blues Rock Album.

The chat with Zito did get David a headliner for his festival, which has two Massachusetts dates, Salisbury and Norwood, along with Hartford, Connecticut, before its New Hampshire finale. “Mike and I have some stuff in common,” David said. “He was into doing it, so we were able to get it together this year.”

Morbioli is an Italian guitarist who comes Stateside once a year. David met him over a decade ago when he appeared on John Guregian’s Blues Deluxe radio show. “It was on the UMass Lowell radio station,” David explained. “I was living there with my wife at the time, and she spoke fluent Italian. We went down there, hung out and played a few songs. We’ve been friends ever since.”

Finally, along with his status as a fest perennial, Moss created an interesting conundrum for David from the time they met.

“I got confused for him often; we’re both similar-looking,” he reported of the guitarist, who rose to fame with Nick Moss & the Pop Tops. “We both had big greasy pompadours, and we’re big guys named Nick. I saw a picture of him once and thought he was me. I was like, why do I have a guitar in my hand? Oh, it’s because that’s not me.”

13th Annual New England Winter Blues Festival
When: Sunday, Jan. 29, 8 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $23 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Mike Zito. Photo by Scott Lukes.

Wyn Doran readies next project

Watching a private screening of Beautiful Was The Fight provided a full-circle moment for Wyn Doran. The Nashua based singer-songwriter appears early in David Habeeb’s documentary film about the challenges faced by New England’s female and non-binary musicians. A nervous Doran is seen in 2017 auditioning for an eventual role in Liz Bills’ band. Years later she’s fronting her own all-female combo.

“We were babies,” Doran said by phone recently about the clip of her and Bills. “The first day we met was basically captured in that film, and now she is one of my absolute best friends.”

The journey from jittery aspirant to confident artist wasn’t easy, but watching Wyn Doran these days, it feels complete.

While singing backup for Bills, Doran made her stirring 2019 EP Thick of It, an effort marked by medical emergencies, bouts of stage fright, even a house fire. During the pandemic she released a few singles, including a reverent cover of Amy Winehouse’s “Back To Black.” In February she’ll enter the studio to record her first full-length album.

Fans can get an early preview of the as-yet-unnamed project, to be produced by Colin Lester Fleming at Great North Sound Society in Maine, when Doran appears at Stone Church Music Club on Jan. 25, backed by upright bassist and multi-instrumentalist Lucia Jean.

Catalyzed by Covid-19, playing live has become much easier for Doran.

“After not being able to get in front of people for such a long time, the second I could, the stage fright was gone,” she said. “It was this huge shift in mindset … this is something that I really enjoy and feel like I’m born to do; why am I sabotaging it with myself?”

With only the livestreams to do, Doran spent the pandemic creating, continuing after the world began to open up. When she wrapped up last fall, she had a unified set of songs worthy of her first long-player. “It was this big piece of work,” she said. “I really do see the album as a journey. I got the band, a producer, and we started workshopping things in December; it’s the real thing in February.”

Lyrically, the new record “is a mix of both my personal anguish and journey, and what I see as a greater view of humanity — the cycles we’ve woven ourselves into nationally and on a global level. It kind of ebbs and flows between getting really, deeply personal, those themes, and zooming way out to the beginning of time, and kind of how we all got here.”

Her longtime band — Jean and drummer Heidi Tierney — will work with Doran in the studio. “We’re going to really try and keep it true to our trio live show, but also play with the skills that we bring to the table,” she said, noting that Tierney also plays a variety of instruments. “I’m kind of blown away to have them, and so excited about these 10 songs.”

A songwriting retreat with Ben Folds a few years back helped Doran find her voice as a songwriter, and she’s come a long way since. During the pandemic she assisted Folds with a Zoom version. “That was a neat throwback,” she said. “First, it was the scared Wyn showing up for the start of my songwriting, then jumping into this role where I wasn’t just pouring out sweat, I was interfacing with it. He’s releasing an album this year, I’ll be releasing an album this year — who knows?”

Seeing Habeeb’s documentary gave her a sense of camaraderie, albeit bittersweet.

“I don’t want to put a negative slant on this, but there are people who think we’re the bassist’s girlfriend, just carrying the amp, and we really have to step up and advocate for who we are as a musician,” she said. “One of the special parts of the film was Dave showing that experience back to back to back … these things I used to feel so alone in experiencing; all of a sudden, you realize we’re all together, going through this collective struggle.”

Wyn Doran w/ George Barber & Paulie Stone
When: Wednesday, Jan. 25, 8 p.m.
Where: Stone Church Music Club, 5 Granite St., Newmarket
Tickets: $10 at stonechurchrocks.com

Featured photo: Wyn Doran. Photo by Devin Perry.