Author: Michael Witthaus

Marshall Crenshaw rocks The Rex

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Calling his latest tour “40 Years In Showbiz,” Marshall Crenshaw is celebrating the anniversary of his 1982 debut album. However, he started in the business a few years before that, performing on Broadway and releasing his first single on the venerable Shake Records label.

In fact, the song that arguably launched his eponymous first platter, “Someday, Someway,” was born while Crenshaw was playing John Lennon in Beatlemania, during its run in Boston.

When the show hit the city in early 1980, Crenshaw had given notice he was leaving. The cast stayed at the Copley Plaza Hotel, and he’d walk there from the Shubert Theatre every night. “Along the way I would get ideas and energy,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It was my first time in Boston, and I loved it… it was winter, but I loved that too. I just had this great sense of possibility about my future.”

Crenshaw’s affinity didn’t end then. “I kept going back to that hotel every couple of years,” he said. “I wrote part of the songs on Field Day [his second record] there. Because it’s a lucky hotel.”

Among the many projects Crenshaw is currently working on is the reissue of those first two albums, with outtakes, bonus tracks and other rarities. The first will drop in November, on Black Friday, with Field Day due in early 2023. They will be released independently; surprisingly, it cost him nothing to secure the rights from his old label, Warner Brothers.

“God bless America,” he said. “The copyright laws allow the author of a work to reclaim that work after 35 years, if you do it in a timely manner, which I did. I claimed the U.S. rights to the sound recordings and the publishing also. That was a pretty heady day.”

So fans will hear the original versions of “Someday, Someway,” “(You’re My) Favorite Waste of Time,” “Cynical Girl” and other songs for the first time on streaming platforms. “They’re going to be amazing — not to be hyping my own stuff,” Crenshaw said, adding a plug for the physical product. “We worked really hard on going into depth with the packaging, to let your mind step inside the world of those records.”

The sophomore effort remains his favorite. “That one really is golden for me … a really vivid moment in my life, “ he said. “There was bad and good stuff going on. It was the culmination of everything, including my failed relationship with Warner Brothers.”

Late last year he released The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: Live In The 20th and 21st Century. Gathered from 1980s radio broadcasts like King Biscuit Flower Hour and more recent shows, the two-disc set gives fans a good idea of what to expect when Crenshaw plays The Rex Theatre in Manchester on Sept. 22. For the show, he’ll be joined by Fernando Perdomo on guitar, bass player Derrick Anderson and Mark Ortmann on drums.

“We do a cross-section of stuff from over the 40 years, and some old rock ’n’ roll songs just for kicks,” said Crenshaw, who played Buddy Holly in the 1987 biopic La Bamba. “It’s just a good evening. Fernando is a great guitar player, the two of us play together really well. If you like my stuff, or if you’re interested or curious about it, I’m pretty sure you’ll come away satisfied.”

On the non-music front, Crenshaw is close to finishing a documentary film on the life of Tom Wilson. A Black producer, Wilson helmed Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” session and was crucial to the careers of Simon & Garfunkel, Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground, accomplishments that came after he’d run the influential Transition jazz label.

“It was a shock for me when I suddenly realized I was going to do it,” Crenshaw said of the project. “It just hit me like a bolt of inspiration…. I looked at the bullet points of his artistic legacy, and I saw a commonality between Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, free jazz, avant-garde and then with electric Dylan and Sounds of Silence. To me those things all fit together; what made them fit together was this one person’s vision.”

That a Black producer was so vital to white performers was secondary to Wilson’s art, he continued. “At that time, the recording session world was integrated, at least in New York,” Crenshaw said. “People are mystified by it now, but that just says more about people now than it says about people then.”

Marshall Crenshaw
When: Thursday, Sept. 22, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $39 to$49 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Marshall Crenshaw. Courtesy photo.

An ’80s revival with Aquanett

Lakeport Opera House opened in June 2021 after a $1 million renovation, the first of three restored performance spaces in Laconia. The Colonial Theatre and Recycled Percussion’s The CAKE followed later.

“We have the opportunity to turn this part of New Hampshire into a musical hub,” Opera House owner Scott Everett said at the time.

Now in its second season, the 220-seat room is making good on that promise. A packed calendar of events has included Zac Brown Band’s Clay Cook, hitmaker Taylor Dayne and a bevy of tribute acts. Last July the ’80s-centric Aquanett played such a strong show that they were asked to return only two months later. They’ll appear again on Friday, Sept. 9.

The southern New England sextet has been mining the MTV era for over two decades. In a recent phone interview, Matt Macri, who joined Aquanett on bass three years after it formed in 1999, called the effort a labor of love. In the words of a song on their setlist, “it ain’t nothin’ but a good time.”

“We very sincerely enjoy playing this music, and it doesn’t feel like a job,” he said. “We acknowledge that it is a job and we take it very seriously from the business standpoint, but it’s just flat-out fun to do.”

Aquanett started at a time when conventional wisdom held that ’80s rock was passé, replaced by grunge and pretty much anything without bombast and big hair.

“Super heavy metal was the flavor of the moment,” Macri recalled, “so I thought it was kind of daring to do … nobody was really acknowledging that music anymore.”

A teenager in that decade, Macri was a big fan of the music, including a lot of acts that aren’t on Aquanett’s set list. “The stuff I like is a little bit more obscure,” he said. “I like digging a little deeper [and] we don’t get to do those kinds of things. But once in a while we’ll pull out a deeper cut that people will recognize, and that’s always fun.”

The band has seen a few lineup changes over the years. Two founding members remain, guitarist Dave Ward and keyboard player Rick Thompson, and drummer Ed Dupont is a near original. “He joined about 10 months in,” Macri said. Dupont took over for someone who “saw that it was going to explode and knew he wouldn’t be able to handle the rigors.”

Guitarist Michael Abdow came on board in 2008, but the biggest shift happened when Tina Valenti became lead vocalist and the group went from male to female fronted. However, apart from adding more Pat Benatar, Quarterflash and Scandal material to their shows, “the adjustment was very smooth,” Macri said.

“Because she very obviously had what it took to front the band … she handled all the songs with absolutely no problem at all. We said, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ No, it didn’t matter what gender we chose as the singer; it only mattered that the person could handle it, and she could.”

Some tribute acts have written their own homage-like songs, but not Aquanett.

“We all do our own things when time allows, and but as far as the band goes, this is just what we’re all about,” Macri said. Abdow, for example, plays in the band Fates Warning, and recently released his own album, Heart Signal, and Macri does solo gigs as a singer and guitarist.

The group has a varied schedule. Recent gigs included a campground and an all-day SunFest with other tribute acts from their home area. Macri recalled playing an upstate New York show called Harley Rendezvous. “It was pretty outrageous, because for that one weekend every summer bikers took over this resort area and they did whatever they wanted,” he said, adding with a chuckle, “I won’t go into the details.”

The group was surprised by the elegant Laconia opera house when they arrived for their first show there, and are excited to return.

“We’re past the point of dive bars, but we play anywhere we’re wanted,” Macri said. “This place wanted us, and holy cow, it’s very nice.”

Most gratifying was the response they got playing for a crowd so far from their home base.

“We went over really well [even though] we didn’t have any of our local fans there,” Macri said. “It was strictly for brand new folks that hadn’t heard us before and it went fantastic. We were very pleasantly surprised, and from what I understand they were glad that it went so well too. Obviously — they booked us again.”

Aquanett
When: Friday, Sept. 9, 8 p.m.
Where: Lakeport Opera House, 781 Union Ave., Laconia
Tickets: $25 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Aquanett. Courtesy photo.

Billy Wylder rises to the moment

“Just hang on to the band,” Pete Townshend sang back when. “You can dance while your knowledge is growing.”

Decades later, this spirit is exuded by the band Billy Wylder and its leader Avi Salloway. Their songs are infectious, full of deep grooves, spirit and kinetic musicianship. At the same time, they evoke more purposeful movement. Salloway’s words inspire souls to stir as their bodies dance, delivering a fierce-hearted call to change.

A singer, songwriter and guitarist, Salloway honed his passion on the front lines of many world crisis points. He brings his activism to songs like “Painter,” which warns against the lure of social media (“We see the world scroll on by / are we demand or supply?”) and offers a call to battle on “Whatcha Looking For,” the title track of the band’s 2021 EP.

“With all this loss and despair, the struggle of the pandemic and the extremes of injustice, our climate crisis, all of these things, it’s a moment to zoom out a bit and really home in on what are we looking for,” he said in a recent phone interview. “What is it that we value? What are our ideals?”

He bemoans the “screen space mindset” and strives through music to “help people break out of this headspace, into their bodies, and reconnect with each other.” In “Santiago,” a slow tango with a nod to his personal hero Leonard Cohen, Salloway dives into the online darkness and declares, “we’re more like our enemies than we believed before.”

The observation comes with an admonition. “Finding that common ground is essential to building any kind of unity and coming together, which I think we’re desperately in need of right now,” Salloway said. “It takes a lot of willpower and creative imagination [but] I feel like people inherently are good. Yet the systems that are tying us together aren’t; they’re not serving their interests, or the eight million species that exist on this planet.”

Fortunately, rather than put their message in a dire toned musical box, Salloway and his mates — polymath Rob Flax and a rhythm section of Krista Speroni on bass and drummer Zamar Odongo — blast it from the cosmos. Salloway and Flax’s frenetic interplay on “Whatcha Looking For” suggests a meeting of the minds between Beck and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Flax, playing guitar, violin and keys, is “on a really cool personal exploration of soundscapes,” explained Salloway. “What he’s been able to do with the violin is groundbreaking … through different pedals, soundscapes, and also synthesizers; it’s been really fun to explore that together.”

Mid-decade, Salloway toured with Bombino, a guitarist often called “Hendrix of the Sahara.” The experience has followed him since. “I think one element that carries over is the force, and the deep, deep groove that was so central to the hypnotic music I played with Bombino, and at the same time, how heavy and dynamic it can be,” he said.

Salloway’s commitment to using art as a social tool continues to drive him.

“I’m trying to collaborate and be part of a revolution of transformation in how we exist and connect,” he said. “Organizing how we really bring more understanding with the way we live our lives, and more joy, and love and equality.”

The band just released “Flower To The Sun,” an upbeat, positive song that’s in many ways opposite to the often somber Whatcha Looking For. Appropriately, it came out as summer began in late June. It’s the first song from a forthcoming album, “release date TBD, but in the next five months,” Salloway said.

In the meantime, Billy Wylder has a busy schedule, a pleasing condition for Salloway.

“I believe in the power of humanity … being able to bring people together under one roof to experience something physical and emotional through musical performance,” he said. “I feel one of my main roles as a musician is to help people break out of this headspace and into their bodies, reconnecting with each other on a person-to-person level.”

Salloway reinforced his thought by quoting an old folk song made popular by the Grateful Dead. “The sun will shine on our back door someday,” he said, “but we have to show up to make that happen. I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Billy Wylder
When: Friday, Sept. 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Billy Wylder. Courtesy photo.