Author: Michael Witthaus

Concord band celebrates debut album

For Andrew North, the stage and the studio are two distinct places, with the latter a place for adventure. Phosphorescent Snack, the debut album from North and his band the Rangers, is a multi-tracked gem, with elements of funk, soulful pop and progressive jazz. It’s Steely Dan meets Frank Zappa at a 1969 Chicago Transit Authority listening party.

“Electrostatic Chills” expresses a solid groove intention, while the instrumental “Epiphone” showcases the four band members’ prowess: North on keys, drummer Dale Grant, bass player Chip Spangler and horn wizard Rob O’Brien. That the song is missing the instrument it’s named after is not lost on North.

“Yeah, there’s no guitar on the album, which has kind of become a point of pride for us,” he said in a recent interview.

Other standouts include “Down the Pipes,” with its echoes of Dixieland jazz, the can-do anthem “Dig Deep” and “Aditi,” the latter sounding like an unmistakable nod to a certain Vermont jam band.

“It’s hard to admit, because when we say we’re Phish-influenced, the reaction can go either way,” North agreed. “But there’s no question I‘ve soaked up so much of that over the decades, and it comes across in what I do. … I’ve stopped trying to downplay it.”

The connection is understandable; North moved from Burlington, Vermont, to Concord five years ago, bringing the energy of his first home along with him. Andrew North & the Rangers is a multigenerational ensemble; Grant has played drums for close to five decades, including sessions with members of Yes, Survivor and Cheap Trick, while the younger Spangler’s resume includes work in far-away places like Alaska.

Like many bands, the quartet planned to complete its debut disc in 2020, but when the pandemic ended live shows, time was used to polish it a bit more. O’Brien, who plays an electronic Roland Aerophone he affectionately calls Dustbuster that can emit a multitude of sounds, opened his laptop and created walls of horns that would please Earth, Wind & Fire.

“Covid-19 gave us a good chance to sit down and work the tracks up with some overdubbing,” North said, “and obviously, if you let Rob loose with a chance to take more than one pass at a song, he’ll take full advantage.”

North and his mates marked the record’s release with an August show at Area 23, a Concord haven for original bands like theirs. They’ll appear at Newmarket’s venerable Stone Church on Sept. 2.

“I was in a jam band in like 2006, and we were dying to get a gig at Stone Church,” North said, “and they never gave us the time of day… so I may be irrationally excited about that one.”

On Sept. 4 they’ll play a late set at the Keene Music Festival, a massive outdoor showcase of regional bands on multiple stages. Along with North’s group, Plague & Pestilence, a side project featuring Dead Harrison’s Jason Skulls and Lucretia X. Machina from Lucretia’s Daggers, will play its first public show.

Jake McKelvie & the Countertops, Jonee Earthquake Band, Kennedy Drive, Tyler Allgood and the Humans Being are among the New Hampshire bands represented at the event, which runs from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“This is our first one and I’m really excited about it,” North said. “We’ve been kind of incubating in Concord for a while, and the music scene here has really started to gel in the last few years, which has been fun. Places like Area 23 really help to nurture it.”

Andrew North & the Rangers will appear again in their Concord hometown later this year, at Penuche’s Ale House on Friday, Oct. 22, and Area 23 on Friday, Nov. 5.

Andrew North & the Rangers
When: Thursday, Sept. 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket
Tickets: $5 – more at facebook.com/andrewnorthandtherangers
Also appearing Saturday, Sept. 4, at Keene Music Festival in Downtown Keene – City Tire Stage, 7:15 p.m.

Featured photo: Andrew North and the Rangers. Courtesy photo.

Cracker headlines Nashua mini-festival

Though he started two bands that found international renown and still tour decades later, David Lowery is an atypical rock star. He’s a trained mathematician who wrote code in Silicon Valley during its command line days, and he’s now a senior lecturer on business at the University of Georgia.

Lowery is also an erudite defender of artists’ rights who successfully spearheaded a class action suit against Spotify, and went before Congress to slam the federal government’s arcane Copyright Royalty Board, which sets streaming payments. In his view, the agency is captive to the industry it’s supposed to regulate.

“They’re saying, ‘we’re able to give music cheaply to consumers,’ but it’s literally starving the music ecosystem,” Lowery said in a recent phone interview. “Either the board that sets the rate needs to be completely overhauled, with new rules set for it, or the whole thing just needs to be abolished, because it’s what people would call crony capitalism at its worst.”

Musicians at his level, playing for 1,000 fans or less most nights, exemplify the gig economy, Lowery told the Radikaal podcast in June, cobbling together multiple jobs in the industry. His first foray as a performer was anything but ambitious; Lowery joked about Camper van Beethoven’s unexpected breakthrough in “Mom I’m Living the Life, 1981,” from his new album In the Shadow of the Bull.

“I had a band / it was a joke,” he sings, “then it was not / we got some real gigs / in San Francisco.”

Offbeat songs like “Take the Skinheads Bowling” and “ZZ Top Goes To Egypt” earned CVB a cult following that carried them away from their Northern California punk rock beginnings. It dissolved in 1990; he formed Cracker with Johnny Hickman, the name a nod to Lowery’s Georgia roots, and released a slew of country-leaning alt-rock hits led by “Low” and “Get Off This.”

Cracker tops a bill with the percussive Entrain and rootsy Muddy Ruckus at the upcoming Gate City Music Fest on Aug. 27 at Nashua’s Holman Stadium. The current touring band includes Hickman and a pair of players from their 2014 album Berkeley to Bakersfield. Lowery said recent set lists reflect a musical dichotomy.

“We are doing this tour with kind of the band that did the country disc, but they’re actually pretty much rock players,” he said. “So it goes from rock to sort of our pseudo soul or pseudo blues rock and then to the country stuff. It’s all over the place.”

The snarky definition of Cracker’s non-genre reflects “our unique stamp,” Lowery said. “We’re not trying to do exactly soul, or exactly blues rock, or any of these things. We’re borrowing parts, and bringing it into our format.”

Lately, they’ve twanged up a few songs from their nascent Bay Area days.

“Some of them fit really nicely into what we’re doing; adding the pedal steel to it, the songs are a little different,” Lowery said, adding that a reworked version of “Skinheads” will probably be ready for the Nashua show.

“The early straight-ahead simple Camper van Beethoven songs ended up being pretty interesting,” he said. “We try to play a good cross-section of stuff from across our catalog. We don’t leave out the hits.”

He’s keen to hit the road after the pandemic stopped the world for over a year, even more so because his wife is a promoter who books Atlanta’s 40 Watt nightclub and other venues.

“Here’s a lesson I told my kids — never marry someone in the same business you’re in,” Lowery said. “If things go wrong, everybody’s screwed. It was pretty crazy for us, because there were no concerts. She’s only really going back on salary Sept. 1, basically 18 months with no work. … We really had to get clever.”

Gate City Music Fest
When: Friday, Aug. 27, 3 p.m.
Where: Holman Stadium, 67 Amherst St., Nashua
Tickets: $25/reserved seat, $150/six-person pod at gatecitybrewfestnh.com

Featured photo: Cracker. Courtesy photo.

Hampton Beach Comedy Festival returns

Through the years, some things haven’t changed at the Hampton Beach Comedy Festival. Rule No. 1 is that every comic there has to make Jimmy Dunn laugh. Rule No. 2 is that he has to like them — after all, the whole thing began as a hang in 2009, when Dunn, a year-round beach resident, invited a bunch of his friends for a barbecue that ended with a show at Ashworth by the Sea.

It grew to four nights, with many of the same faces, and a few new ones every year working the crowds, then repairing to Playland Arcade for a highly competitive hybrid of cards and skee-ball, followed by after-hours poker — basically a comedy festival that’s an excuse for a rolling party.

“I got my crew of comics, my friends, and it’s sort of how comedy works in New England,” Dunn said in a recent phone interview as he ran down this year’s lineup. “I try and mix it up, bring in some comics that I don’t generally put on shows with me … give some other people opportunities and mix it up for the fans.”

Making their debut are John Reiman, a comedy veteran who spent several years as a writer on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

“He’s been around forever, we just never were able to get him,” Dunn said. “He’s very funny, and he grew up in North Hampton, so he’s also a hometown guy.”

Another newcomer is Peter Martin, a Boston comic whom Dunn calls “explosively funny … I did a show with him; I was watching him just destroy a room, and I went, ‘Oh, man. I don’t know if I could follow this kid tonight.’ That’s how he got my attention. Since then, I’ve seen him a bunch of times.”

Will Noonan was a newcomer in the festival’s early days who’s grown into a regional headliner. Dunn remembers Noonan as an eager-to-please youngster when he first arrived.

“He had this Elvis Costello suit on, and he went up and absolutely killed it,” he said in 2019. “I was like, ‘Who is this kid? This is awesome!’ We’ve become really good buddies.”

Among those also returning are longtime favorite Lamont Price, Kelly MacFarland, Mark Riley, Dan Boulger and Chris D, who first performed in 2019. There are seven or eight comics on each show, making for a rapid-fire night of laughs, and special guests are always a strong possibility.

As in past years, Dunn will close each night, and Dave Rattigan will host.

That the festival is happening at all is a minor miracle. A last-minute offer from Tom McGuirk, who owns the eponymous Ocean View Hotel & Restaurant, saved the long weekend.

“He said, ‘Hey, we’d love to have it down here,’ and we looked at it and said, ‘This would be really cool,’” Dunn said. “I guess he’d been to a few of the festivals in the past at the Ashworth and is a comedy fan.”

The Ashworth was “in over their heads with staffing issues and trying to get all the weddings through that they could, and they just couldn’t accommodate us,” Dunn said. “We lucked out, because I thought we were done.”

Dunn’s best friend Tony V. will perform. The two have a podcast called Two Boston Guys Whack Up A Pie.

“The premise was we’d get together and get some kind of pie, apple, blueberry, sit there and have a slice. That’s just such a Boston expression — ‘You want to whack up a large pizza pie?’ But we found out pretty quickly that people didn’t like hearing us eat at the same time we’re talking.”

The show is usually Dunn and Tony V. commiserating about current events and comedy, but recently they hosted Bobcat Goldthwait, who’s been a friend of both since their open mic days in Cambridge at the Ding Ho and other clubs.

“He eats like everybody else,” Dunn said. “He’s getting back out on the road doing stand-up and wanted to plug some dates up here in New England. We get along great with Bob, so we had him on. Technically, it was not our best episode, but he’s a really funny man.”

Hampton Beach Comedy Festival
When: Thursday, Aug. 19, to Sunday, Aug. 22, at 8 p.m.
Where: McGuirk’s Ocean View, 98 Ocean Blvd., Hampton
Tickets: $20/show at happsnow.com

Thursday
Jimmy Dunn
Chris D
Dan Boulger
Mike Whitman
Dan Crohn
Liam McGurk
Graig Murphy
Dave Rattigan

Friday
Jimmy Dunn
Will Noonan
Jeff Koen
Steve Scarfo
Tony V
Janet McNamara
Dave Rattigan

Saturday
Jimmy Dunn
Steve Bjork
Lamont Price
Dan Miller
Carolyn Plummer
Andrew Della Volpe
Don Zollo
Dave Rattigan

Sunday
Jimmy Dunn
Kelly MacFarland
Mark Riley
Jason Merrill
Peter Martin
Jon Rineman
Dave Rattigan

Featured photo: Jimmy Dunn. Courtesy photo.

Honeysuckle brings live music back at beloved Nashua venue

Released in early spring, the latest album from Honeysuckle is called Great Divide. It’s a title with multiple meanings: a reference to today’s fractious national mood, evidenced by cover art of a house cracking to pieces, as well as a nod to the line between normal life and the masked, distanced one people came to live in the past year and a half.

The pandemic shaped the band’s art, Holly McGarry said in a recent phone interview. A planned EP stretched to 10 songs when she and bandmate/boyfriend Chris Boniarz got stranded at his parents’ house when lockdown began and ended their tour.

“That kind of forced indoor reflective time,” she said. “Then it changed a little bit of the tone.”

The title is also a reference to personal — and personnel — changes, McGarry said. In late 2019 Ben Burns left after seven years, changing Honeysuckle from a trio to a duo.

“We’ve had divides in every part of our lives. I mean, I lost jobs, and we lost gigs. We lost a bandmate. … There’s just been a big separation from what was and what is, for better or worse.”

Honeysuckle began at Berklee College of Music, when McGarry and Burns began writing together for school projects, and she started dating Bloniarz; the two men were in a band together. One day Burns played a harmonized line in a song and Bloniarz jumped in with his instrument, and an ‘aha’ moment happened.

“As sad as we are to not be able to play his songs, have him with us live and on records, everybody has to do what’s right for themselves, “ McGarry said of Burns’ departure. “Music is a passion and it’s a multi-layered thing, but it’s also a job. Everyone’s entitled to move on to whatever that next phase of life is that they want. So it was amicable.”

Great Divide is Honeysuckle’s fifth record, following the debut EP Arrows in 2015, an eponymous 2016 disc, Catacombs in 2017 and 2019’s Fire Starter. On the most recent LP, Boniarz and McGarry were co-writing more together, and shifting the band’s sound in the process.

“It’s been really interesting because Chris comes from a little different musical background, a little more rocking, I guess,” she said soon after it was released. “He loves Metallica. … It’s brought a slightly different flavor to things.”

Producer Benny Grotto, who worked with them on previous projects, proved invaluable on the new record, in a difficult time to work.

“If we had to involve more people than just Benny, it probably wouldn’t have been possible to do it over the pandemic,” McGarry said. “Because he was able to engineer, produce, mix and play drums and percussion, we were able to just have that little pod of the three of us.”

Now that they’re a duo, Boniarz is stretching out, McGarry said.

“It’s empowered him to … bring new parts of his multi-instrumental abilities to the group. We have a synthesizer that we’ve been using to fill in those lower frequencies. We’re having fun being a little bit more experimental with what we can do in the studio, and what we can do live,” she said.

This new direction is apparent on Great Divide’s dreamy title track, which McGarry names as one of her favorites on the new release, along with “Cycles,” a rollicking song with Boniarz on lead vocals.

“Chris is doing more looping now, and with the synthesizer we can add percussive beats to certain songs,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to transition into … seeing if we can adapt and layer more things with the mandolin.”

They’re repurposing their studio tricks for live shows like the upcoming one at Nashua’s Riverwalk Café. Sponsored by Symphony New Hampshire, it’s the first in-person show at the venue since it stopped doing regular live music events in 2019. Honeysuckle was a frequent guest in those days.

“We’ve always really loved playing Riverwalk, and we were very sad when they stopped doing music there,” McGarry said. “So it’s going to be nostalgic and special to be back.”

Honeysuckle
When: Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Riverwalk Café and Music Bar, 35 Railroad Square, Nashua
Tickets: $20 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Honeysuckle. Photo credit: Crhis Cruz.