Author: Michael Witthaus

On his latest, Albert Cummings shifts gears

Though firmly rooted in New England, Albert Cummings has an affinity for the South. He made his 2003 breakthrough album, From the Heart, in Austin, Texas, backed by Stevie Ray Vaughan’s band Double Trouble. His longtime producer Jim Gaines is a Memphis native, and with him, 2019’s Believe was recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Cummings’ latest, Ten, was done in Nashville, a city he admits is probably the only one that might pry him from his home in Williamstown, Mass. “I don’t have any plans on leaving,” he said on his way to a tour stop in Reading, Pennsylvania. “But if I do, I’d go there. I love the whole area. You’re in the music world, that’s a pretty good place to go and hang out.”

For Ten, Cummings immersed himself in the spirit of Music City. He worked with producer Chuck Ainlay, whose credits include a who’s who of country royalty, from Conway Twitty and George Strait to Dolly Parton and Miranda Lambert. For a guitarist who once had plans to play bluegrass before shifting to blues, it was a dream come true.

“Oh man, it was such a great experience,” Cummings said. “Chuck is just an amazing guy. He jokes around and says, ‘Well, I’m pretty good at turning knobs,’ but he’s a master of orchestrating everything … to work with him was an honor, and to watch him was just amazing.”

For the project, Ainlay recruited “all the first-call players down there, just the best musicians I’ve ever seen,” Cummings said. If that weren’t enough, Vince Gill was enticed to sing harmony on “Last Call,” a country rocker about a long night of drinking that’s one of the disc’s highlights.

“It’s a pinch-me moment, you know what I mean? Vince Gill, talk about an idol,” Cummings said. “It’s just lightning; how does that happen? I really don’t have any words to describe it … an amazing experience, a beautiful human being.”

Cummings says he dug deep for the songs on his most country-flavored record ever. “What I wanted to do was be honest with what was in my head,” he said.

Not every tune was new. “Beautiful Bride” was the first song Cummings ever sang in front of an audience, in 1989. He’d done a spare version for From the Heart, but “I always wanted to have kind of a little bit bigger sound, a different flavor,” he said. “Give it a little boost … I knew once I was in Nashville I had to put that on the record.”

“Sounds Like the Road” is a solid blues rocker inspired by a hotel lobby encounter with fellow guitarist Robben Ford — “I was checking in, he was checking out,” Cummings explained. It was during a period when he split time between working construction and performing, a late-blooming musician who hadn’t begun to play in public until age 27.

When Ford asked Cummings what he was up to, “I told him, ‘I’m just trying to get things squared away, go out and play.’ He says, ‘Oh yeah? Where are you playing?’ I said, ‘We’re going here, we’re going there, and then we’re flying here.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Sounds like the road to me.’ I was like, ‘Bam, that’s a song.’ I knew it right then.”

Many years and tours later, “it just feels so good to be back playing,” Cummings said, particularly after Covid cut a swath through his livelihood; he released Believe just as the world shut down. “It never had a life; it died before it ever got the chance to even get out.”

He’s buoyed by a new release that’s exciting fans, even drawing new ones.

“I think this record has really brought me a lot of attention, because crowds are way bigger than they used to be,” he said. “I have a feeling that people are just loving to get back out; couple of years away from music made them realize how much they miss it … I really do love it, no matter how hard the road is.”

Finally, though much of the buzz around Ten is it’s “Cummings Goes Country,” the fiery-fingered guitarist who’s shared stages with B.B. King and Johnny Winter and worked with Nashville’s A-Team isn’t tucking himself into any genre. He has opined that the difference between blues and country is beverages — one’s whiskey, the other’s beer. He still feels that way.

“I told that to Vince Gill,” he recalled. “He said, ‘That’s a great analogy — the same three chords, just a different cocktail.’”

Albert Cummings
When: Thursday, July 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $30 at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Albert Cummings. Courtesy photo.

Celtic crushers Rebel Collective hit Bank of NH Stage

Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts continues its happy trend of bringing homegrown acts to the smaller Bank of NH Stage when Rebel Collective appears there on July 23. The raucous, Celtic-infused sextet started out at True Brew Barista, a nearby Bicentennial Square hub for local bands before the owners retired and closed it in July 2020.

At that time, 2015, the group consisted of three cousins on main instruments and a rhythm section, and was a casual affair. “We’d always joked about doing a pub band,” guitarist and singer Michael Green said by phone recently. “One year, we decided to throw something together and have a show, and we had a lot of fun.”

After True Brew, they went on to play St. Patrick’s Day events, at Manchester’s Shaskeen and Salt hill Pub in the Upper Valley. Their sound was informed by Green’s roots. “I am about half Irish, with my grandmother being straight off the boat. That said, it wasn’t part of my upbringing really, and it was through the music of the Pogues and Dropkick Murphys that I started getting into the history of Ireland and my own ancestry.”

When the band got booked to play the New Hampshire Highland Games, Scottish songs were added to their set, creating a boozy hybrid that sets them apart. They’ve opened shows for the Dropkicks, Flogging Molly and Derek Warfield, all the while writing original songs, a few of which appear on 2018’s Old Sad State.

The title cut of that EP is a true, if half remembered, story of a wild night “with a bottle of Pogues whiskey, singing for the fair maidens and hoping they’ll feel frisky” that ends “out in the street, singing for salvation in the moonlight.” Though the hooch is named after Green’s “favorite band forever,” he’s no fan, not by a long shot.

“It’s god-awful and I don’t recommend it,” he said, but he is thankful that, as Shawn Colvin once noted, he got a tune out of it. “We weren’t feeling too good the next morning, but I’m lucky in the fact that I might make bad decisions, but at least they usually make good songs.”

Rebel Collective changed significantly when accordion player and high harmony singer Brian Waldron moved to Florida in 2021. Brought on board were fiddler Esther Bostick and guitarist Jordan, whom Green calls Granddaddy SG for his 1960s vintage Gibson. With Green, Ross Ketchum on mandolin, guitar and vocals, and Pete Provencher and Connor Veazey on drums and bass, the new direction is “really similar in a lot of ways” to what they were doing before, Green said, but with an edge that comes from swapping a squeeze box for a rocking ax.

“It’s not heavy, but it’s not clean, and it really fills up the sound … we’ve committed to making a bigger, cohesive sound,” he said. “It’s led to having more fun [and] while we miss having Brian’s beautiful voice we gain by having other singers. Our gang vocals are a little bit thicker. We’re the same, just different.”

After releasing one studio effort, they’re not in a hurry to make another record. They have plenty of other novel pursuits to fill the time, including a Flag Hill Whiskey release party in the fall, along with another Highland Games. Besides, given their Celtic Crush repertoire, audiences often can’t tell the band’s own material from cover songs, which pleases Green.

“I’ve had people come up and thank me for playing this old traditional song, and they’re talking about one of my originals; I don’t correct them,” he said. “It’s a kind of a barometer; if you’ve written a song and it immediately resonates like they’ve heard it before, you know you really wrote a good one. I let them say their piece and take it as a compliment.”

The Concord show will benefit Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) of New Hampshire, a nonprofit the band has been helping out for years, including playing their annual fundraiser and tasking one of their dancers to high step crowds into filling a tip jar at shows. “We were able to raise a couple thousand for CASA last year,” Green said. “So we’re really excited to take this great opportunity at this great event and use it as a way to continue doing our work for them.”

Rebel Collective
When: Saturday, July 23, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Rebel Collective. Courtesy photo.

Rock legend talks music, photography and politics

Though he’s happy a live re-recording of his first two solo albums is doing well, Graham Nash often wishes that the music on 1971’s Songs For Beginners and 1974’s Wild Tales didn’t still resonate the way it did in the Watergate era. A vocal opponent of the previous administration — he has an upcoming record with a track called “Golden Idol” aimed at proponents of the “Big Lie” — Nash isn’t optimistic about the country he became a citizen of in 1979.

“I’m pleased that my music seems to have lasted a couple of decades, but at the same time it’s a pain in the ass that we have not learned from our history,” he said by phone recently. “I think what I’m seeing now, unfortunately, is the fall of the American Empire. I think that we are completely divided as a people, and a divided nation can’t last very long.”

Nash is a two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, with his first band The Hollies, and with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Despite their acrimonious 2016 breakup, the supergroup reunited earlier this year to demand that Spotify remove their music in protest of Joe Rogan, who frequently hosts vaccine deniers and Covid-19 skeptics on his podcast.

In early July, CSNY was back on Spotify. The interview with Nash happened earlier, on June 24. At that time, he spoke of steps taken by the streaming service that hint at reasons for the group’s eventual reversal. “They have put genuine Covid-19 information on a million podcasts and that is a great step forward,” he said. “They’re now recognizing that people like Rogan and his guests were spreading misinformation and disinformation.”

Last November, Nash published a book of photographs called A Life In Focus. His passion for pictures dates back to the first one he took, of his mother, in 1953, and learning darkroom technique as a child from his father. The shot of his mom, in repose and unaware of her son’s camera, is among the collection’s best.

Pictures of icons like Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, even ’60s supermodel Twiggy, are equally candid. It’s the only way, asserts Nash. “Having had probably hundreds of thousands of photographs taken of me, I know … the face that you put on because you want to look cool,” he said. “I give that face sometimes when people are taking pictures of me [and] I don’t like that face. So my best portraits of people are taken when they have no idea that I’m there.”

Nash also has a skillful eye for street scenes, like a shot of a well-dressed woman staring into the window of an expensive jewelry store as a homeless man sleeps mere inches from her. “I use a camera to capture surreal moments that happen in front of me,” he said. “Which they seem to do a lot.”

That said, he believes social media trivializes the art. “There are [millions of] smartphones in this world and maybe only a hundred photographers,” he said, adding, “I don’t use my camera as my memory. I don’t want a picture of me in Mickey Mouse ears at Disneyland, I don’t take pictures that match my couch, or kittens with balls of wool. I don’t take landscapes — I’d rather remember the landscape.”

He loves gear — an IRIS 3047 printer he bought in 1989 for his company Nash Images is now in the Smithsonian — and he also enjoys playing with the process of photography. There’s a distinctive shot of fellow musician Dave Mason in the book that’s basically a smudged Polaroid, taken in his suite at New York’s Plaza Hotel in the mid-1970s. “In those days, if you had a ballpoint pen, a sharp instrument or something, you could move the emulsion around,” he explained. “As a matter of fact, Elton John just bought that picture.”

Politics are intertwined with both his music and photography. In the Wild Tales track “Prison Song,” Nash alludes to his father spending a year in high-security lockup for unknowingly buying a stolen camera from a co-worker to give him as a gift. It made Nash a lifetime foe of unjust authority, along with his ire at being spanked by his school principal for ditching class to buy Bill Haley concert tickets in 1958.

With him at the Haley performance was best mate Allan Clarke; the two would later start The Hollies. Years later, they’re working together again, on Clarke’s solo record. “I’m very pleased to be able to sing with Allan after all this time,” Nash said. “He had to leave the Hollies because he had throat trouble, but it may have been psychosomatic … his excuse to be able to leave. Because right now, he’s singing very well.”

Nash has no regrets about skipping school that day. The experience both confirmed, to quote his 2013 autobiography, that “justice was malleable and subjective … too much politics involved,” and launched him on a lifetime of music. “The truth is … I’ve lost houses, and I’ve lost relationships; I have not lost my ticket to that show. I have it in my wallet as we speak.”

An Evening with Graham Nash
When: Wednesday, July 20, 8 p.m.
Where: Colonial Theatre, 609 Main St., Laconia
Tickets: $50 to $100 at coloniallaconia.com

Featured photo: Graham Nash. Photo by Amy Grantham.