Author: Michael Witthaus

Mother Iguana plans release show

Restlessness animates many artists; insomnia can cripple more than a few. For a Concord guitarist and singer-songwriter it does both. On the new album Eyeball Planet, Mac Holmes, performing as Mother Iguana, has created a song cycle about sleeplessness. The music isn’t comforting, but it brilliantly conveys the experience of the struggle to finally rest, both sonically and lyrically.

Though well-ensconced in the local music scene, Holmes recruited 22 musicians from around the world for the project. Each was given a loose outline to work with. Their tracks were emailed and assembled, collage-like, for each song. Frank Zappa and Charlie Mingus are named as influences, and the complex, textured results evoke both. Holmes explained his approach in a recent phone interview.

“My process was to write detailed prompts and briefs … including a number of reference tracks,” he said. “I encouraged people to bring their own ideas to the table and if something contradicted my idea, I’d love to hear that as well. My thinking was, they know what they do best, better than I do.”

International collaboration wasn’t the plan when Holmes began writing a few years ago.

“My initial vision for it was to do fairly dense, psychedelic arrangements with a lot of moving parts. And I can’t play most of those instruments,” he said. “Once I started along that path, I figured I should push that as far as I could go with it and just layer those things up … that’s the aesthetic I was trying to work with.”

Brazilian percussionist Tom Andrade appears on every cut, playing an exotic list of instruments too lengthy to catalog, including guizo, udu, agogô, seeds and, more prosaically, bongos. “I just love what he did so much,” Holmes said. “I wanted him on the whole thing.”

Carina Bruwer, a flute player from South Africa, offered a standout performance on “It Must Always Be Night,” which leads off the album. “She sent four or five takes of her just shredding the flute, and I felt compelled to use as much of it as I could,” Holmes said. He set them into multiple places in the mix, “kind of weaving in and out in different parts. Midway through the song, they’re kind of all going at once.”

Another Holmes influence is songwriter Van Dyke Parks, best known for his collaborations with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “Lights Out” is reminiscent of Parks’ work. The touchstone song hints at the ambivalence of being on the line between waking and dreaming. “I watch the crack beneath the door, and every breath I take reminds me I’m awake, reminds me I’m alive,” Holmes sings over bouncy chords, and a swampy swell of horns, cello and vibraphone.

A release show for Eyeball Planet will happen Saturday, May 27, at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord. Singer Kelsie Collins, who contributed to the album (and is Holmes’ girlfriend), will be in a band that includes Zane McDaniel on bass, fiddlers JD Nadeau and Audrey Budington, along with multi-instrumentalist Brian Burnout.

Collins, who plays jazz standards and vintage country songs with Holmes in the duo Mac & Kelsie, will do a few of her own songs.

Missing from the group will be drummer/percussionist Killian Venman, who died suddenly on May 12. At the time of his death Venman was working with Holmes on a project at Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield, where Eyeball Planet was mixed. Holmes considered postponing the show, but encouragement from others who knew Venman compelled him to carry on with the date.

“I’ve repeatedly heard from friends that he would have wanted me to do that,” he said, “because he was very supportive. He was also a very ambitious, creative guy, who always had crazy art projects going on. That resonates with me as being the truth.”

Losing his close friend and collaborator does, however, cast a pall over what was supposed to be a celebration. That said, he’s glad to put the finishing touches on a project that’s consumed years of his life.

“It was already having a weird impact on my mental health, just in terms of orienting so much of my mental real estate,” Holmes said. “I indulged my mania working on this thing way past the point where anyone would even notice little things I was changing. I’m definitely proud of it, and the response to it so far has been good. A number of people whose opinions I really respect have said nice things about it.”

Mother Iguana
When: Saturday, May 27, 9 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: motheriguana.bandcamp.com

Featured photo: Mac Holmes. Courtesy photo.

Chadwick Stokes plays party at Rex

Matt Wilhelm was elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2018, and became House Democratic Leader after last year’s midterms. Wilhelm’s first campaign, however, was centered on culture. In 2015 he led what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to reopen Manchester’s Rex Theatre as Old Sol Music Hall.

He doesn’t regret failing; it launched him in politics. “It got my vision out there; I was able to connect with members of the community,” he said recently. “They understood what my values were and were willing to stick with me.” The Palace Theatre would ultimately buy the venue, and the renovated Rex held its first show in October 2019.

Wilhelm is happily throwing a birthday party at the Rex on May 18. It’s a fundraiser for Strong Circle PAC, which supports House Democrats in their efforts to retake the State House next year. Chadwick Stokes, of the activist bands Dispatch and State Radio, will perform a solo set at the soiree.

Wilhelm and Stokes are friends and colleagues. They met at UNH on Election Day in 2001, after Dispatch featured at a show there. A year later, the group began its first U.S. tour. Wilhelm, then a sophomore at Plymouth State, joined as an intern.

“Their career had kind of skyrocketed over the course of that last year,” Wilhelm said. “This was a real DIY band, a grassroots, word-of-mouth, Napster-driven, independent success story.” He did marketing, street team work, and some videography for Under the Radar, a DVD released in 2002.

This marked the beginning of a decade-and-a-half career in the music industry. Along with managing tours, lighting and concert merch, he co-directed Calling All Crows, a nonprofit organization named after a State Radio song. This felt a lot like community organizing to Wilhelm, providing a foundation for leading his party in the House.

“I’m a cultivator of that community … saying, here are our priorities, here’s how we rally around them, and here’s how we make progress on the issues that we care about,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it set me up for Old Sol, then set me up to launch a campaign.”

Wilhelm grew up listening to his parents’ Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young records and continues to believe in music’s power to affect change. “There’s a lot of folks that will say that was done in the ’60s, that music and activism went away,” he said, “but it’s pretty clear it didn’t.”

Stokes is proof of this sentiment; his music and politics are intertwined. That’s why he’s doing the benefit.

“As a musician, I want to use the platform I have most effectively to help people like Matt do the real nuts and bolts of policy change and legislation,” he wrote in an email. “My music is political like Matt’s politics are musical.”

The Rex set will likely range across Stokes’ career.

“I’ll probably be playing a lot of solo stuff, like ‘Chaska’ and ‘Pine Needle Tea’ and then a smattering of State Radio and Dispatch, and hopefully some new ones,” he wrote. He also expects to unveil one or two songs from a rock opera he’s working on, tentatively titled American Refugee.  

Wilhelm is pleased to be mounting a show at the venue he once hoped to turn into an arts hub. “It’s exciting, and in so many ways a long time coming, having Chad here in Manchester at the Rex,” he said. “The campaign wasn’t initially successful, but a bunch of different partners came together, including the mayor and the Palace, and made it a reality. Now I’m working on political campaigns, and so it’s kind of fun to bring it all together.”

There will be birthday cupcakes and a cash bar at Wilhelm’s birthday bash, and benefactor packages are available. Wilhelm approaches the evening buoyed by the energy he saw from Gen Z and millennial voters last November.

“I’m more hopeful knowing that there are young people coming of age right now who aren’t willing to accept the status quo and will be pushing for progress in all sorts of different ways,” he said. “I think this next generation isn’t going to let us … rest on our laurels.”

Matt Wilhelm’s 41st Birthday with Chadwick Stokes
When: Thursday, May 18, 7 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $50 and up at bit.ly/518concert

Featured photo: Chadwick Stokes. Courtesy photo.

Seventies Dead from Rainbow Full of Sound

The Grateful Dead have continued to have a rich afterlife since their final show in 1995. First as Furthur, then as Dead & Company, most of its remaining members resumed touring a few years after Jerry Garcia died. Tribute acts reinvent the group’s songs in a myriad of genres, like local jam band Roots of Creation, with its Grateful Dub franchise.

Then there are the faithful re-enactors. Best known is Dark Star Orchestra, which will pull a setlist from the vault on any given night and let Deadheads guess the time-traveling destination. Rainbow Full of Sound takes that idea a step further, taking on whole tours.

Waynard Scheller put RFoS in 2012, to recreate the Dead’s 1980 run at New York’s Radio Music Hall. It was supposed to be a one-time deal. Fans loved it, though, and RFoS became a staple in Scheller’s home base of New Jersey.

In early 2020 they embarked on their first national tour, this time doing every date from the legendary 1972 European tour — almost. “We got about nine shows in, and then Covid shut us down,” Scheller said in a recent phone interview. When lockdown ended, they were finally able to finish. “Song by song, show by show, in different cities around the country. It was a huge success.”

This time around, Scheller and his shifting cast of close to 30 musicians are stretching out even more.

“It’s evolved into retracing the ’70s,” he said. “We’re starting with Europe ’72 and ending with Terrapin Station.” An upcoming show at Newmarket’s Stone Church will have Scheller on keys, guitarists Steve Bernstein and Jim McGuigan, Alan Lerner on drums and bass player Jair-Rohm Parker Wells.

RFoS is no ordinary cover band. In their hands, songs like “Eyes of the World” and “I Know You Rider” can rise above the original versions. Scheller suggests how the Dead might have sounded if Bruce Hornsby had been in the piano seat instead of Keith Godchaux in the 1970s.

Schiller is quick to point out that Godchaux was playing in the band when he was first drawn to the Dead, and that his successor Brent Mydland cemented them as a favorite band.

“When I saw them for the first time in 1978, it was Keith,” he said. “The second show was Brent. I caught like 200 shows with him on keyboard, but Keith was my first influence.”

He is a big Hornsby fan and covers many of his songs as a solo artist. Much like the band he emulates, instinct guides Schiller when RFoS performs.

“It comes out organically,” he said. “It’s not like I plan to sound like this one or that one; I just allow my influences … between Keith, Brent and Bruce … to come out on any given night.”

This is not the first Dead tribute Schiller has been part of. He initially worked with members of venerable Long Island band the Zen Tricksters, touring as Jam Stampede. He then played with Dark Star Orchestra founding guitarist John Kadlecik. One memorable night, he did a show in a New York City crypt, and in the process met Zach Nugent, of Garcia acolytes JGB, and Kenny Brooks.

Brooks played with Dead guitarist Bob Weir in RatDog, and the introduction led to an invite for Schiller to co-produce a benefit show in San Francisco, where he played in Weir’s band. “It was definitely surreal,” he said of the night. “I was kind of in shock … I wouldn’t say starstruck, because I didn’t get his autograph. It was an honor to work with him.”

That experience with the Jerry Garcia Foundation, raising money for the Yoko Ono-founded charity Imagine There’s No Hunger, led to his path crossing with Hot Tuna’s Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, and, subsequently, to Jason Crosby and Grahame Lesh of the Lesh Family Band.   

It all rests on a love of the Grateful Dead. As to why the seminal jam band excites him so much, “it’s a combination of a lot of things,” he said. “I like the improv part, where we can create music within the music. Every night we perform, it’s a different experience, and that’s interesting and stimulating as a musician.”

Finally, Schiller said, “the songs are just amazing … country, blues, bluegrass, jazz, rock and reggae, they just mixed it all together — and the big picture is the Grateful Dead.”

Rainbow Full of Sound w/ Schells & Vine
When: Saturday, May 13, 8 p.m.
Where: The Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at stonechurchrocks.com

Featured photo: Waynard Scheller. Courtesy photo.