Author: Michael Witthaus

Northlands Music & Arts Fest is a packed affair

An effort that began as crisis management in the pandemic’s early days is poised to be a highlight of this summer and many more. The Northlands Music & Arts Festival is a cultural buffet sure to please many palates. It includes five heavy hitters at the top of the bill: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Twiddle, Lotus, Lettuce and Melvin Seals’ Grateful Revue, a collaboration that promoters believe might not happen again. There’s also a stellar undercard.

After indoor venues shuttered in the dark spring of 2020, Seth McNally and Mike Chadinha of M.E. Productions launched socially distanced Drive-In Live shows at Cheshire Fairgrounds. As restrictions eased the next year, it became Northlands, with audience pods and close to two dozen more events.

This time around, they’re packing an entire season into one weekend. They hope to do two festivals in 2023.

Starting with Russo as a linchpin, the duo built a blend of big-name anchors and curated support acts, like buzzy Jersey jam band Dogs In A Pile, who kick off the show on Friday, June 24, and Blue Star Radiation, a supergroup that includes moe. members Rob Derhak and Vinnie Amico alongside Tim Palmieri of Lotus, and Percy Hill’s Nate Wilson.

Also eagerly anticipated are sets from progressive bluegrass stalwarts Yonder Mountain String Band, and Haley Jane & The Primates playing together for the first time following a long hiatus. Local favorites Dopapod, Lespecial, Pink Talking Fish and Joe Samba — the latter debuting a new album — are other highlights.

Chadinha brought experience organizing the charity-based Uplift Festival in his hometown of Peterborough for several years, and playing drums with circuit veterans Roots of Creation. McNally’s resume includes booking the Flying Monkey in Plymouth and a few other facilities. Professional chemistry is a big part of their success, the two stated in a recent videoconference interview.

“Our dynamic works because we bounce a lot of things off one another,” Chadinha said. “I have the artist angle, he has the back of the house booking angle, and somewhere in the middle of those two, we make things work perfectly for artists and the venue.”

The hope that doing only one event would mean a quicker process turned out to be over-optimistic. “I thought it was going to be maybe a little less work, but it’s the same amount as an entire season,” McNally said. “A hundred times harder than I thought, and 1,000 times more than anybody in the audience knows.”

In an inverse of horn-honking concerts necessitated by the Covid-19 outbreak, scaling back became the only option when the Swanzey facility returned to its normal schedule of fairs and agricultural events. But both McNally and Chadinha are glad things are returning to normal, as they’ve thought about doing an event like this for a while.

“It was the perfect time to take the leap, because a season wasn’t an option,” McNally said. “We decided to pull the trigger almost right after the end of last season and it’s good…. We needed every moment to prepare. Booking alone took four months at least before we got it fully wrapped up. It’s a long process.”

Along with music, there will be a caravan of food trucks, far more than at last year’s Northlands concerts, and more than a dozen craft artisan vendors. There’s also tent and RV camping available. “A lot of unique things are going to be happening for campers; some of them are going to be surprises,” McNally said. “We’re going to keep them occupied and happy the whole time. It’s going to be 24/7 for us as a crew.”

Music will be nonstop, as setup teams quickly transition between two main stages, different from big festivals that force fans to inevitably skip an act or two. “We like being boutique,” Chadinha said. “The stages aren’t far from each other, so you can do a quick shift. With no overlapping sets, there’s no chance you’ll miss anyone.”

The fans in both of them are eager for everything to begin.

“I can’t wait for the music to actually play,” Chadinha said, adding, “I know Dogs In A Pile are going to come out of the gate smoking, because I know the feeling of being the first band on a big festival and thinking, ‘We’re going to get out there and with the first note we’re going to hit it, we’re going to get this started.’ So get there early, and make sure you see them.”

Northlands Music & Arts Festival
When: Friday, June 24, 1 p.m. and Saturday, June 25, 11 a.m.
Where: Northlands (Cheshire Fairgrounds), 247 Monadnock Hwy., Swanzey
Performers
June 24 – Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Lotus, Lettuce, Dopapod, Dogs In A Pile, Blue Star Radiation
June 25 – Twiddle, Melvin Seals Grateful Revue, Yonder Mountain String Band, The Movement, Lespecial, Pink Talking Fish, Haley Jane & The Primates, The Trichomes, Joe Samba Band
Tickets
Two-day: general admission $166.35, VIP $254.95, children $43.76
One-day: general admission $95.62, VIP $201.71, children $25.77
Add-ons: Two-day on-site camping $220.75 (RV or tow $237.07), parking $20 and up

Featured photo: Northlands Music & Arts Fest 2021. Courtesy photo.

Guitarist Jesse Cook marks debut album’s 25^th

It’s easier to follow the puck on a televised hockey match than to discern what Jesse Cook’s fingers are doing on a fretboard. The Toronto-based guitarist defies the laws of physics every time he plays flamenco music on his nylon six-string. Since releasing his debut album, Tempest, in 1995, Cook has captivated audiences across the world.

He’s made multiple PBS specials, received several Juno nominations and earned 10 platinum and gold albums. He was seemingly born to play; Cook can’t remember when he first picked up a guitar but hears stories about jamming with a friend when he was 3 years old.

Cook took his first lesson at 6 and would go on to study at the Royal Conservatory, NYU and Berklee, determined to be a concert guitarist.

“But as I got close to graduating, I started to chicken out,” he recalled by phone recently, reasoning that “everybody would love to be a concert guitarist, but you can’t make a living doing that.”

So he turned to being a composer and working behind the scenes of film and television. But he kept getting noticed when he’d create a guitar piece. “People would say, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful, you should record an album of your own music,” he said. “I was like, ‘Nah … nobody’s going to want to hear that.’”

Finally Cook relented and recorded his first album at home. He reluctantly pressed 1,000 CDs, and worried most of them would end up as coffee coasters. But with help from a couple of key television and radio appearances, the opposite happened. Cook sold them all out within a week.

This success created an unexpected problem; Cook didn’t have any money to make more discs. However, a distributor stepped in and pressed another 2,000 copies to satisfy burgeoning demand at record stores across the country. “Canadians are really supportive of our own, “ Cook said.

All the activity got the attention of labels below the border. and after a flurry of courtships Cook signed with Narada Records. “They swept me off my feet,” Cook said to explain why he chose the Wisconsin independent company over Windham Hill and a few other bigger-name operations.

It was a good decision; Cook’s new label quickly got him added to the prestigious Catalina Jazz Festival, held on an island on the coast of Southern California. Though booked in a small bar that weekend, he played to capacity crowds that spilled out onto the sidewalk. When Cook moved around the tiny island in one of their trademark golf carts, fans chased him like he was musical royalty.

Soon after, Cook’s album was in the Billboard Top 20, and he hasn’t looked back since.

“As soon as I stopped getting in my own way [and] chased my dreams … my life got way easier,” he said. “I had a full calendar, I was doing the things I’d always wanted to do and loving doing them, and there were way less annoying gigs. When you’re kind of a music mercenary you take whatever comes in the door, [but] once it’s your own project you only have to work with the people you like and admire.”

Cook is finally embarking on his pandemic-delayed Tempest II tour, supporting a re-recorded version of the record that started it all. When he appears at Concord’s Capitol Center on June 11, he’ll be joined by Matt Sellick. Cook calls the young native of Thunder Bay “the best flamenco guitarist in Canada,” adding, “he knows my music better than I do.”

Sellick encouraged Cook to revive “Switchback,” a song from his late 1990s catalog, and rework it as a guitar duet piece. Watching the two exchange frenetic runs on the track, now a regular part of shows, is a wondrous sight.

Also in Cook’s band, which formed a little over four years ago, supplanting his decades-old former group, are Portuguese drummer Marito Marques, bass player Van Mitchum and Fethi Nadjem on violin and other instruments. Cook spotted Algerian-born Nadjem while watching videos of friends on YouTube, and got an introduction through mutual friends.

“Once we finally got together, it was just this great collaboration,” Cook said of Nadjem, who provided integral support on Cook’s latest album, Libre. “I just love the way he plays, the way he hears music. He’s super talented.”

Jesse Cook
When: Saturday, June 11, 8 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $35 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Jessie Cook. Courtesy photo.

After country detour, Lit returns rocking

“My Own Worst Enemy” could be the post-grunge era’s “Free Bird.” Released by Lit in 1999, the raucously rocking tale of misadventure is a fitting touchstone for that cultural moment. With its staccato opening guitar riff and a wailing chorus of “please tell me why” that’s both desperate and arrogant, it provided just the right coda for a musically chaotic decade.

The song also changed the lives of the band that made it. Lit began in a Southern California living room with a bunch of teenage pals chasing rock ’n’ roll dreams. The core group — brothers Jeremy and A. Jay Popoff, Kevin Baldes and Allen Shellenberger — formed in 1989 with a now long-gone member as Razzle, toiled in L.A. clubs and looked for a record deal.

Ten years later, the hordes at Woodstock 99 were singing along to their song.

They’ve haven’t lost sight of how special that is. “The song has legs of its own, it’s its own animal,” Kevin Baldes said by phone recently. “But we’re still rock fans, we still buy albums. We still love listening to new music and old music, and we can’t believe that we’re a part of the … Americana fabric. ‘My Own Worst. Enemy’ is in there. It feels good; we don’t take it for granted at all.”

It’s an iconic track, but far from their only one. The band’s punkier-than-thou tour manager said it wasn’t even their best. Lit’s major label debut, A Place In the Sun, recently reissued on white vinyl, had great songs like “Miserable,” “No Big Thing” and “Zip Lock.” Their upcoming album Tastes Like Gold furthers the case that Lit might be selling out stadiums today if Napster and file sharing hadn’t crippled the music business right after the world first noticed them.

Due for release June 17, the first three singles from the new disc show the band in full stride. “Mouth Shut,” the latest, takes their most famous song and reworks it for the internet age. “I don’t regret what I said, I just regret hitting send,” sings A. Jay. “I shoulda stayed in my head.”

Baldes is eager for fans to hear more. “If you like A Place in the Sun, Tastes Like Gold is like right there for you, man,” he said. “It’s awesome. There’s some great stuff. I can’t wait for it to come out and people to hear all the songs … friends that have heard the new album have come to me with their favorites, and it’s all over the place.”

It’s their first studio effort since These Are the Days. That album was a detour into modern country that confused many, The Popoff brothers currently reside in Nashville, and the 2017 record reflected that.

For Baldes, it feels good to be back to old-school Lit. “I got ‘Johnny Cash’ tattooed on my arm [so] I got a couple of drops of country blood in me,” he said, adding “Someday Maybe” was a particular favorite. “Jeremy and A. Jay … accumulated quite a few songs and [said] let’s try this out as Lit, these are kind of fun. Something different … that’s how it all evolved.”

He concedes they may have enjoyed it more than some fans. “That particular album kind of went sideways a little bit — I think in a good way. A lot of people loved it, but some were scratching their heads,” he said. “We felt it, and we were like, alright, this next record has to be in the hard rock arena.”

It’s perfectly consistent for a band that went from sounding like Motley Crue in their days as Razzle to punk metal on their indie debut Tripping the Light Fantastic while on their way to the version that struck “My Own Worst Enemy” gold.

“People know Lit as being what it’s always been, a rock band,” Baldes said. “But if you’re a huge fan, you know that we duck and weave quite a bit — there is no road map for us. We just kind of blindly get in the driver’s seat and go wherever it takes us.”

Lit w/ Chad Perrone
When: Friday, June 3, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $38 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Lit. Courtesy photo.