Author: Michael Witthaus

Well-rounded comic Steve Hofstetter

Raised in New York City, with a father who watched Dick Gregory perform in Village comedy clubs in the early 1960s, Steve Hofstetter grew up to be a smart comic. Don’t interrupt his set; Hofstetter’s retorts draw blood before an offender even knows there’s a knife in the scene. He has a YouTube page dedicated to heckler management.

Professional comedy wasn’t his destiny — until love leapt up.
“I always enjoyed watching stand-up. I never thought I’d become one,” Hofstetter said by phone in July. “When I was 13 … the girl I had a crush on told me she thought I should join the improv club in school. I was so enamored with the idea that someone I was impressed by thought I was funny enough to do that.”

Over a 20-plu-year career, Hofstetter’s made eight albums and specials; the latest is The Recipe, which debuted on YouTube earlier this year. He has a knack for thought-provoking jokes, like one with a Rorschach test punchline, “I hope you get from life exactly what you deserve.” Broadly, he specializes in observational comedy, drawing inspiration from keeping his eyes open.

“Whenever people say, ‘Where do you get your material?’ I always think, ‘How come you don’t have yours?’ — we all live in the same world and see the same things,” he said. “It’s just about paying attention and processing what’s going on around you … if I see something that’s anachronistic, I can’t not notice it.”
Improv still plays a role in Hofstetter’s comedy, in the form of a Q&A session after every show. He began doing them 10 years ago, mainly to produce content without having to give away new material online.

“I was OK posting bits I wasn’t doing anymore, but I didn’t want to post any of the current stuff,” he said, and the segments resonated, “because, partially they were watching comedy happen on the fly, and isn’t it more interesting to see something getting painted than just see the finished product?”

The sessions became good-natured roasts when he began bringing in fellow comics, the first time after he learned that his dog was dying and would need to be put down at tour’s end. “I was in no shape to think on my feet,” so Hofstetter asked two friends to lend emotional support. “They said yes, and it was great. It was so much fun to be able to bounce back and forth off each other.”

Hofstetter’s work extends beyond comedy. He’s written books and, a tireless baseball nerd, has worked in sports radio as well as writing a column for Sports Illustrated. He runs the nonprofit Steel City AF, a live/work/play environment for comedians based in Pittsburgh, where he’s lived for the past few years.

“It was always a dream of mine to have some sort of comedy-based charity, and when my dad passed, I had this realization of, if you keep waiting for stuff, you might never get there, so I decided to start it,” he said. He moved to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles, finding it was an ideal home base city with a great civic spirit.
“The thing I like about it most is just how passionate about the city residents are; people are really, really proud of it, and want to make it better. There’s this amazing camaraderie that I just really like.” The foundation has given away some scholarships, and opened a performance space in a renovated building, inspired by an experience Hofstetter had at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Beyond that, Hofstetter received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination (really) for a digital comedy club launched during the pandemic. It led to over $1.5 million worth of work for comics that had no other options. “I was also still running my foundation where I was giving out grants to comedians that didn’t have any way to make any money,” he added.

What set the effort apart was that it extended beyond the constraints of livestreaming.

“We let the audience be unmuted, which was very different than most other places, because without an audience a comedian doesn’t have timing, and it feels awful,” he said. They also limited tickets and thus audience size to make the virtual events more manageable.

An upcoming show at Nashua’s Center for the Arts will be Hofstetter’s first ticketed event in the Granite State.

“I’ve done some college shows there early on in my career, and I did some bar shows here and there,” he said. “But that was when people had no idea who they were going to see; this is the first time since anyone has heard of me that I’ll be doing a show in New Hampshire.”

Steve Hofstetter
When: Saturday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $29 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Amythyst Kiah performs in Portsmouth

Those who only knew Amythyst Kiah from Our Native Daughters were a bit surprised by her Rounder Records debut, Wary+Strange. Sure, it contained some rustic elements, but mostly the 2021 record rocked.

The clearest example was her version of “Black Myself,” a song that won a Grammy for the all-women-of-color supergroup she’s formed with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Rhiannon Giddens. Kiah’s re-recording growled with an electric urgency akin to Gary Clark Jr.’s 2019 scorcher “This Land,” and landed a country mile beyond the banjo-punctuated original.

Kiah decided to revisit “Black Myself” because it felt fuller when she wrote it.

“It was inspired by a line from the Sid Hemphill version of ‘John Henry,’ and that became the hook,” she said by phone recently. “I put the guitar part underneath and I was kind of like, ‘This feels like an anthem.’ It became part of the Our Native Daughters sound, but my music is in a lot of ways a modern take on roots music, so we explored bringing myself back in.”

It’s a side of Kiah that will be on display at her upcoming shows in Portsmouth, part of a tour that started on Sept. 27.

“I’m bringing a full band on this run, drums, bass and lead electric guitar,” she said. “Everybody sings background vocals on quite a few of the songs. It’s definitely a much bigger sound than what some people might know me for.”

Equally powerful is her raw honesty as a songwriter. “Wild Turkey” is a spare acoustic song from Wary+Strange that dealt with her mother’s suicide when she was 17. The experience led to her first public performance, at the funeral. Asked how she found a way to write about it now, her answer provided a clue to Kiah’s creative spark.

“Being a child of the ’90s, and getting into alternative music, I was really leaning into things that were on the darker side,” she said. “Dealing with feelings like anger and loss. Songwriters being willing to dig down in the depths and really talk about how they feel, that’s something that’s always resonated with me.”

It still does; her most recent EP, Pensive Pop, contains reimagined covers of Tori Amos, Green Day and Joy Division.

Still, “Wild Turkey” took Kiah years to write. “It was dealing with such a tragic event in my life that I never really properly processed, and it wasn’t until I started going to therapy that I realized there’s some unresolved grief here,” she said. “It took so long to write simply because it took a while to unpack all those feelings.”

She stretched the process by constantly tweaking with the song’s mood. “In the beginning, I was trying to make it … more upbeat, like I wanted to juxtapose the subject matter with the music,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to get out of the way and let the song be what it’s gonna be. That’s what I had to do, [because] it’s a really sad song.”

Many fans have thanked her for the “Wild Turkey,” telling Kiah that it helped them process their own grief. She’s heartened by the response.

“If there’s anything I can leave behind in this world, it’s art that people were able to turn to when they felt alone or like they didn’t have anybody,” she said.

“It’s really an honor to have the opportunity to share that with people. … it means a lot.”

Kiah will unveil new songs at her show, the products of some recent cowriting efforts. “Empire of Love,” written with Sean McConnell, is “about my spiritual connection to the mountains where I live, in Appalachia,” while a co-write with Butch Walker is a “straight ahead rock song” called “Never Alone.”

She also collaborated with Avi Kaplan and Jeremy Lutito, who both worked on Kaplan’s LP Floating on a Dream, which Kiah called “probably my favorite album of last year.” Their writing session was inspired by the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast, which led her to read more horror and fantasy stories. “I’m returning to sounds of Appalachian folk music, still with a modern take and it’ll sound a little weird, like all my music sounds.”

An album she hopes to finish by year’s end will reflect this latest direction.

“There’s going to be some spooky songs on there and then some autobiographical songs and more of what I usually write about, but with some other things thrown in,” she said. “That’s the new stuff coming down — a spooky Appalachian vibe, with some rock and blues influences. It’ll be fun; I’m excited about it.”

Amythyst Kiah
When: Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $30 and up at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Rollins believes in the young

As a teenager Henry Rollins would show up with his pal Ian MacKaye on Sunday mornings at Yesterday & Today Records in Rockville, Maryland, ready to buy singles by The Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, The Adverts and other punk bands. Rollins always bought two to MacKaye’s one, having earned more money in his after-school job every week.

“Ian might do five hours of part-time minimum wage work, and I would do 20, just because I’m that guy,” Rollins said in a recent phone interview. “It was cool, the pain of having to do something dull and repetitive to hear seven minutes of freedom.”

His work ethic continues; Rollins often jokes about “putting the ‘punk’ in punctuality.” Though he’s stopped doing music, his schedule as a professional raconteur is packed and is surrounded by a myriad of other projects. During the pandemic, he wrote — his most recent book, Sic, came out in December — hosted an NPR radio show and did voice work for Netflix and Nickelodeon.

“It was challenging, but in a way, not a place I had not been to before,” he said. “Instead of getting all down in the mouth about it, I choose to approach all these things with a sense of humor and let’s see what happens…. I’d rather be the first in line for the new thing rather than dragging my feet.”

Rollins finally got back on the road. His current tour, dubbed Good to See You, is well into its second year. Usually his shows have a recent travel story as the centerpiece, but lockdown prevented that.

“Luckily or unluckily enough, crazy stuff happened in that time, where I was able to get interesting material,” he said, including a mentally unstable stalker from Finland, and the death of his divorced parents.

The show “is pretty well dialed into the front of my brain pan, but a lot of new stuff, as usually is the case, comes in,” Rollins continued. “It’s just basically a big stew pot, and as things develop, or people I know die, I can throw more things in…. By the end of the tour, the material is not necessarily nearly the same as what I started with.”

One constant, though, is an unwavering faith in America’s youth.

“A whole generation will eventually go to rest peacefully, and a younger one will come in its place,” he said. “Keep eating your Wheaties, you might live long enough to see someone like AOC become president…. I’ve never felt more confident or at least more ruggedly optimistic about the future and young people doing the right thing than I am right now.”

For one thing, the old order — “people like me, Joe Biden and Dick Cheney” — is rapidly fading away. “I’m not trying to hasten anyone’s demise, but physiological limits are what they are,” he said. “When the bug is dying, the most furious seconds are right before death. The legs are kicking frantically towards the sky; that’s the white power structure in the United States.”

Moreover, the futility of trying to change a red-hat-wearing senior citizen’s mind runs both ways.

“You’d be hard pressed to convince a 17-year-old who will be of voting age when the next presidential election rolls around that homophobia is a thing they want to accept and use in their lives,” he said. “Racism? There’s no such thing. One more George Floyd, and there’ll be some parts that will be very hard to put back together again. I don’t think the infrastructure is built for too much more turbulence.”

That said, Rollins is quick to point out that his show isn’t some scary TED talk.

“It’s my job to artfully connect some dots and make it kind of funny,” he said. “I make a point of not ending on a bummer, or if I do, offer five ways out of it. I learned that from, of all people, President Clinton. The Dimbleby speech is a great example; he goes, ‘climate change is bad, but here’s how you can start attacking it.’ Here’s the problem and five ways to innovate out of it.”

Hard times like the present require hard lessons, but Rollins tries to avoid pedantry.

“I used to go to this Quaker summer camp where they didn’t teach you not to steal, they just told you the story about when Timmy stole a quarter from his friend’s mom’s house and bought candy with it and the candy didn’t taste good,” he said. “I’d rather point at things rather than point them out.”
He also has no stomach for reliving his punk rock youth.

Rollins leaves no doubt that he’ll keep sharing his own point of view, night after night, for as long as he’s able.

“I’m not one of those who takes to the streets, because the people who are going to meet you have their opinion. They’re going to knock you out; it’s not for me,” he said. Instead, he tries to find common ground, while acknowledging that it’s often elusive. “I think if you can try to get an understanding of where someone’s coming from, you cannot be so immobilized by someone else’s opinion.”

“My job is to sling hash every night,” he said, “but it has to be of the highest nutritional quotient I can generate. I mean well, and I want to do good. I’m at least on second base, and maybe I can steal third and get lucky. This sounds like, ‘Oh, he’s such a nice guy,’ but I’m not all that nice all the time. I’m mainly angry and awake.”

Henry Rollins
When: Friday, Sept. 22, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: ccanh.com

Featured photo: Henry Rollins. Courtesy photo.