Author: Michael Witthaus

Checking in with Paula Poundstone

Paula Poundstone can find something to talk about with just about any audience, anywhere; her act has a handful of jokes and a whole lot of back and forth. The reason for this becomes clear during a 20-minute interview, as the comedian easily moves from topic to topic like a Beetle at a car rally.

She begins with a quick disquisition on her Sisyphean cat litter box duties (“I’m usually sifting”). Next up is her newly found passion for hydroponic gardening, and what it says about her at a certain age. “I eat collard greens, and I’ve been diagnosed with bursitis,” she said. “I’ve become Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies.”

Poundstone lives in Santa Monica “for no good reason” and the recent California heat wave seems to have made her PA a bit mouthy, which prompts her to proclaim, “it’s assistant-firing season.” This boss/underling dynamic’s similarity to the plot of Hacks somehow leads to a discussion about why she’s not ready for binge watching in television’s new golden age.

It’s partly technology, and the rest would definitely take longer than a phone call to enumerate.

“Streaming? That’s stuff they say on Lost in Space; I don’t know how to do any of that, and I’m glad,” she said. “I have 10 cats, two big dogs, and a couple of jobs. How would I ever get anything done with something compelling me to sit down and watch it all the time?”

It’s not hypothetical. When Poundstone was starting out in comedy, she spent a lot of time on buses, rolling from town to town, finding her voice at open mics. It was the late 1970s, and an addiction to M*A*S*H reruns threatened to bankrupt her every time the Greyhound had a layover.

“Back then, bus stations had these little chairs with coin-operated televisions attached to them. I didn’t even have enough money for food, but I’d put my quarters in so I could watch M*A*S*H.” She quit when she realized it was also emotionally draining; a gut punch episode would leave her so bereft she could barely work.

So she missed Seinfeld, avoided Downton Abbey and skipped This Is Us. One exception is Breaking Bad, which she has on DVD. “I’ve watched it probably the whole way through maybe 50 times. So I don’t transition well.” She did watch The Mentalist, but as for the rest? “People look at me like I have two heads, but it’s just too much for me…. I really try to limit my engagement, because I get too upset.”

In her 2017 book, The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness, Poundstone used a made-up metric of “heps and balous” to rate experiences that varied from driving a rented Lamborghini to getting tidy and taking dancing lessons. Asked about her current supply of the units — a bunch of heps adds up to one balou — she admitted she hadn’t been counting lately.

“Like many of us, I feel like I’m just putting one foot in front of the other these days,” she said. “But this last year, I’ve been able to work steadily, and I’ll tell you that really lifts your spirits, being with audiences. I tell my little jokes and … people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, thank you for coming, I haven’t laughed this hard in’ … whatever span of time. It’s funny, because they thank me, and the truth is they were the ones who paid to be there. So the thanks go the other way.”

Growing up in Massachusetts, Poundstone began as a standup in Boston before moving to California and finding success. “I had a feeling that life could be different in a different place,” she said, adding, “In Boston I did a substantial amount of bombing, because everyone does, because that’s how you learn.”

She still thinks of New England as home, and is hoping that her upcoming run there will coincide with the autumn colors, though she’s unwilling to refer to that experience as many New Englanders often do. “The phrase ‘leaf peeping’ has come in my absence, and it makes it sound sort of sinister.”

Poundstone will be in the region as September ends and October begins; she hopes this helps her luck. “Every year it looks like I’m going to be [there] during peak foliage,” she said. “Then I show up, and it turns out it happened earlier, or it wasn’t really that good. … I’m always seeing brown molding leaves. So I’m very much looking forward to getting there at the right time.”

Paula Poundstone
When: Saturday, Sept. 24, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $19 to $39 at ccanh.com
Also Saturday, Oct. 1, 8 p.m., The Music Hall, 28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth, $32 to $45 at themusichall.com

Featured photo: Paula Poundstone. Photo by Shannon Greer.

Marshall Crenshaw rocks The Rex

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Calling his latest tour “40 Years In Showbiz,” Marshall Crenshaw is celebrating the anniversary of his 1982 debut album. However, he started in the business a few years before that, performing on Broadway and releasing his first single on the venerable Shake Records label.

In fact, the song that arguably launched his eponymous first platter, “Someday, Someway,” was born while Crenshaw was playing John Lennon in Beatlemania, during its run in Boston.

When the show hit the city in early 1980, Crenshaw had given notice he was leaving. The cast stayed at the Copley Plaza Hotel, and he’d walk there from the Shubert Theatre every night. “Along the way I would get ideas and energy,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It was my first time in Boston, and I loved it… it was winter, but I loved that too. I just had this great sense of possibility about my future.”

Crenshaw’s affinity didn’t end then. “I kept going back to that hotel every couple of years,” he said. “I wrote part of the songs on Field Day [his second record] there. Because it’s a lucky hotel.”

Among the many projects Crenshaw is currently working on is the reissue of those first two albums, with outtakes, bonus tracks and other rarities. The first will drop in November, on Black Friday, with Field Day due in early 2023. They will be released independently; surprisingly, it cost him nothing to secure the rights from his old label, Warner Brothers.

“God bless America,” he said. “The copyright laws allow the author of a work to reclaim that work after 35 years, if you do it in a timely manner, which I did. I claimed the U.S. rights to the sound recordings and the publishing also. That was a pretty heady day.”

So fans will hear the original versions of “Someday, Someway,” “(You’re My) Favorite Waste of Time,” “Cynical Girl” and other songs for the first time on streaming platforms. “They’re going to be amazing — not to be hyping my own stuff,” Crenshaw said, adding a plug for the physical product. “We worked really hard on going into depth with the packaging, to let your mind step inside the world of those records.”

The sophomore effort remains his favorite. “That one really is golden for me … a really vivid moment in my life, “ he said. “There was bad and good stuff going on. It was the culmination of everything, including my failed relationship with Warner Brothers.”

Late last year he released The Wild Exciting Sounds of Marshall Crenshaw: Live In The 20th and 21st Century. Gathered from 1980s radio broadcasts like King Biscuit Flower Hour and more recent shows, the two-disc set gives fans a good idea of what to expect when Crenshaw plays The Rex Theatre in Manchester on Sept. 22. For the show, he’ll be joined by Fernando Perdomo on guitar, bass player Derrick Anderson and Mark Ortmann on drums.

“We do a cross-section of stuff from over the 40 years, and some old rock ’n’ roll songs just for kicks,” said Crenshaw, who played Buddy Holly in the 1987 biopic La Bamba. “It’s just a good evening. Fernando is a great guitar player, the two of us play together really well. If you like my stuff, or if you’re interested or curious about it, I’m pretty sure you’ll come away satisfied.”

On the non-music front, Crenshaw is close to finishing a documentary film on the life of Tom Wilson. A Black producer, Wilson helmed Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” session and was crucial to the careers of Simon & Garfunkel, Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground, accomplishments that came after he’d run the influential Transition jazz label.

“It was a shock for me when I suddenly realized I was going to do it,” Crenshaw said of the project. “It just hit me like a bolt of inspiration…. I looked at the bullet points of his artistic legacy, and I saw a commonality between Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, free jazz, avant-garde and then with electric Dylan and Sounds of Silence. To me those things all fit together; what made them fit together was this one person’s vision.”

That a Black producer was so vital to white performers was secondary to Wilson’s art, he continued. “At that time, the recording session world was integrated, at least in New York,” Crenshaw said. “People are mystified by it now, but that just says more about people now than it says about people then.”

Marshall Crenshaw
When: Thursday, Sept. 22, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $39 to$49 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Marshall Crenshaw. Courtesy photo.

An ’80s revival with Aquanett

Lakeport Opera House opened in June 2021 after a $1 million renovation, the first of three restored performance spaces in Laconia. The Colonial Theatre and Recycled Percussion’s The CAKE followed later.

“We have the opportunity to turn this part of New Hampshire into a musical hub,” Opera House owner Scott Everett said at the time.

Now in its second season, the 220-seat room is making good on that promise. A packed calendar of events has included Zac Brown Band’s Clay Cook, hitmaker Taylor Dayne and a bevy of tribute acts. Last July the ’80s-centric Aquanett played such a strong show that they were asked to return only two months later. They’ll appear again on Friday, Sept. 9.

The southern New England sextet has been mining the MTV era for over two decades. In a recent phone interview, Matt Macri, who joined Aquanett on bass three years after it formed in 1999, called the effort a labor of love. In the words of a song on their setlist, “it ain’t nothin’ but a good time.”

“We very sincerely enjoy playing this music, and it doesn’t feel like a job,” he said. “We acknowledge that it is a job and we take it very seriously from the business standpoint, but it’s just flat-out fun to do.”

Aquanett started at a time when conventional wisdom held that ’80s rock was passé, replaced by grunge and pretty much anything without bombast and big hair.

“Super heavy metal was the flavor of the moment,” Macri recalled, “so I thought it was kind of daring to do … nobody was really acknowledging that music anymore.”

A teenager in that decade, Macri was a big fan of the music, including a lot of acts that aren’t on Aquanett’s set list. “The stuff I like is a little bit more obscure,” he said. “I like digging a little deeper [and] we don’t get to do those kinds of things. But once in a while we’ll pull out a deeper cut that people will recognize, and that’s always fun.”

The band has seen a few lineup changes over the years. Two founding members remain, guitarist Dave Ward and keyboard player Rick Thompson, and drummer Ed Dupont is a near original. “He joined about 10 months in,” Macri said. Dupont took over for someone who “saw that it was going to explode and knew he wouldn’t be able to handle the rigors.”

Guitarist Michael Abdow came on board in 2008, but the biggest shift happened when Tina Valenti became lead vocalist and the group went from male to female fronted. However, apart from adding more Pat Benatar, Quarterflash and Scandal material to their shows, “the adjustment was very smooth,” Macri said.

“Because she very obviously had what it took to front the band … she handled all the songs with absolutely no problem at all. We said, ‘Where have you been all this time?’ No, it didn’t matter what gender we chose as the singer; it only mattered that the person could handle it, and she could.”

Some tribute acts have written their own homage-like songs, but not Aquanett.

“We all do our own things when time allows, and but as far as the band goes, this is just what we’re all about,” Macri said. Abdow, for example, plays in the band Fates Warning, and recently released his own album, Heart Signal, and Macri does solo gigs as a singer and guitarist.

The group has a varied schedule. Recent gigs included a campground and an all-day SunFest with other tribute acts from their home area. Macri recalled playing an upstate New York show called Harley Rendezvous. “It was pretty outrageous, because for that one weekend every summer bikers took over this resort area and they did whatever they wanted,” he said, adding with a chuckle, “I won’t go into the details.”

The group was surprised by the elegant Laconia opera house when they arrived for their first show there, and are excited to return.

“We’re past the point of dive bars, but we play anywhere we’re wanted,” Macri said. “This place wanted us, and holy cow, it’s very nice.”

Most gratifying was the response they got playing for a crowd so far from their home base.

“We went over really well [even though] we didn’t have any of our local fans there,” Macri said. “It was strictly for brand new folks that hadn’t heard us before and it went fantastic. We were very pleasantly surprised, and from what I understand they were glad that it went so well too. Obviously — they booked us again.”

Aquanett
When: Friday, Sept. 9, 8 p.m.
Where: Lakeport Opera House, 781 Union Ave., Laconia
Tickets: $25 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Aquanett. Courtesy photo.