Category: Nightlife

Young Dubliners return to Tupelo

In the world of classic rock, there’s a lot of love for the Young Dubliners. One reason perhaps is Keith Roberts, who co-founded the band with a fellow Irishman in the early ’90s, grew up watching Top of the Pops, and decided that home country bands like Big Country and Boomtown Rats were more interesting to him than traditional Celtic reels.

The biggest factor, though, is the number of rock stars who love them.

After Bernie Taupin watched the Young Dubs (what most fans call them) light up L.A.’s House of Blues in the late 1990s, he gifted them with the lyrics to “Red.” It became the title track of a 2000 album, one of their best. However, a certain Sir Elton almost kept that from happening.

Roberts wrote the music quickly, and Taupin loved it, Roberts recalled by phone recently. “Then right as it was recorded and ready to go, Elton suddenly tells Bernie, ‘I’m working on something for that song.’ Bernie said, ‘no you’re not, Elton. I’ve given it to the boys.’ I always joke about how I’ve never met Elton John, but I’ve [screwed] with him.”

Red was helped by a tour opening for Jethro Tull, during which Tull’s front man found ways to make every press avail about the Young Dubliners. “That album blew up massively because of Ian Anderson talking about it, and everything he did. Every interview, he would make me come in and do all the media stuff.”

They’ve toured with a bevy of bands over the years.

“We just became friends with these people,” Roberts said. “Following an appearance at the Deadwood Jam in the Black Mountain Hills of South Dakota, Ed Roland of Collective Soul recruited him for a night of partying, along with Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron.

“Ed said to me in his southern drawl, ‘I hear you like to drink whiskey.’ I said, ‘I’ve been known to,’ and he’s like, ‘Well, why don’t we go do that?’” They headed into the Deadwood Saloon. “The girl just kept putting bottles of Jameson on the table, and we just kept going.”

The next night, Collective Soul’s road manager asked Roberts, “‘Would it be OK if I didn’t take Ed out again?,’ because he was hurting pretty bad. I’m like, oh, crap, really? Then I’m doing it again.”

In August, they will join On the Blue, a cruise hosted by the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward, with acts like Alan Parsons, Dave Mason, Starship with Mickey Thomas and more. This year’s cruise originates in Boston; because of the city’s Irish heritage, the Young Dubliners will play the ship away from the dock and off to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

So, more than six decades down the road, this affinity for the Young Dubs’ anthem-y Celtic rock endures. This may seem at odds with their name. However, they didn’t choose it; it chose them. Roberts moved to Southern California with hopes of becoming a rock journalist, but ended up opening a pub and starting a band instead.

“Me and Paul O’Toole, who started the band, he was from Dublin and I was from Dublin, and people would say, oh, the young lads from Dublin are playing,” Roberts recalled. “They started making backdrops from sheets that they just spray-painted Young Dubliners on.”

They never dreamed of getting a record deal, but when it happened they had to agree on the fan-bestowed moniker, which needed to be cleared by Ronnie Drew, leader of The Dubliners in Ireland and a family friend. “I had to call him and ask him, was it all right, because the label wouldn’t let me change the … name.”

They received his blessings — “Keep the faith,” he said — and later got an even more satisfying validation.

“When my dad passed away, at the funeral, they took a picture of me and my brother and Ronnie Drew,” he said,. It was printed in the local paper. “It said, ‘Old Dubliner and Young Dubliner say goodbye to Charlie.’ It was the biggest gift you could give me, because that made the Irish accept the name.”

Young Dubliners
When: Sunday, March 30, 7 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $35 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo. Young Dubliners. Courtesy photo.

Three Sheets host stops in Henniker

For over a decade, Zane Lamprey traveled the world and drank for a living.

His pub crawl series Three Sheets ran for four seasons starting in 2006. In 2010, Drinking Made Easy launched on Mark Cuban’s HDNet, followed by the crowd-funded Chug. Lamprey’s most recent series, Four Sheets, aired its final episode in early 2020.

Since then Lamprey has done a lot of standup comedy, primarily at places like Henniker Brewery, where his Another Round tour stops on March 22. He began playing the craft beer circuit out of necessity; clubs and theatres were slow to open after the pandemic, and he needed work. He’s now done more than 500 brewery gigs, with 10 in New England on the current run.

“I have a lot of great relationships at breweries because of the shows I’ve done, and I reached out to them,” Lamprey said by phone recently. “They loved the idea of having me come in and bring attention to their brewery, fill it with people, do a night of comedy, and so it was a very synergistic kind of thing.”

Unlike many who use stand-up to launch a television career, Lamprey took an inverse route, and after he finishes writing a memoir in progress he’ll begin a book about becoming a comedian at age 49. He says it’s all a natural progression: “I’ve always been someone, in all the shows that I’ve done, who needs to understand comedic timing and how to tell a joke.”

Through his years of imbibing across the planet, Lamprey has gathered more than enough material for multiple comedy specials. His latest, The Medium Club, premiered in January. “I’ve made a lot of poor decisions that have led to some great stories,” he said.

He’s also drunk many strange concoctions in his years, like rum aged in a bottle with a drowned snake. He once knocked back 23 shots, each containing a preserved scorpion. Later he realized that “your body is not designed to digest exoskeletons.” The shoot-and-chew experience led to an excruciating, barrel-full-of-monkeys situation.

But Lamprey has never declined a proffered glass, because entertainment.

“I always said that my job in any of the shows I’ve done was creating a water cooler moment,” he said. “Doing those shots are what people talk about. For that reason, I’m happy to do it … to take one for the team.”

Non-liquid challenges can be different, and Lamprey recalled one time he did draw the line.

“The only thing that I said no to is balut.” The popular Philippines snack is a two-thirds gestated duck egg hard boiled and served with salt and vinegar. “Basically a baby duck sitting on the yolk or the amniotic sack…. I was like, absolutely not. I tried drinking enough beers to bring myself to do it, and I couldn’t get to that place. It was too vile.”

Lamprey prefers to remember beautiful moments, like the time he rented out the Eiffel Tower for a Champagne party that wrapped as the sun was rising, or filming in Croatia a decade after their civil war. “It was very eye-opening,” he recalled. “These people weren’t war-torn and bitter because of what they went through, they were … embracing life and moving on — without forgetting about the past.”

While there, he ran into a restaurant owner singing with his friends in the street, and went in for a drink.

“We weren’t even going to shoot there … and it was one of the best experiences of my life,” Lamprey said. “But you could name any episode, and I would tell you about a moment in it that I was so grateful to be doing what I was doing.”

When Lamprey is asked why he left television, his response is that it left him.

“People every night are just like, ‘Please go back and do one of those shows again.’ I would love to.” Networks that ran his shows, like Spike, Fine Living and HDNet, are long gone, supplanted by YouTube and TikTok.

“I’ve had the privilege of being able to go and do some of the coolest things ever and be followed by a camera crew,” he said. “But the landscape of television has changed. Places where Three Sheets would have fit perfectly … no longer exist. They drop the vowels in their name, and all they do is paranormal shows.”

That said, Lamprey’s not about to stop telling jokes to crowds.

“I would actually choose the stand-up over those shows,” he said. “Which is probably why now discussions to do another TV show have resurfaced; but it would have to be perfect for me to do it.”

Zane Lamprey

When: Saturday, March 22, 8 p.m.
Where: Henniker Brewing Co., 129 Centervale Road, Henniker
Tickets: $25 and up at eventbrite.com

Featured photo. Courtesy photo.

From Finland, it’s Frigg

By Michael Witthaus

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With a blend of Celtic, American bluegrass, and a Nordic fiddle tradition designated by the UN as an “intangible cultural heritage of humanity,” Frigg is truly a world music band. As St. Patrick’s Day approaches, a show in Manchester will dip into their Irish roots while showcasing the lively Nordgrass style that’s made their reputation.

Fans of Nickel Creek will enjoy Frigg’s lively all-instrumental sound. The band was founded in 2000 by sibling fiddlers Alina Kivivuori and Esko Jarvela and mandolin player Petri Prauda. The current lineup includes Juho Kivivuori on double bass, guitarist Topi Korhonen and fiddler Tero Hyväluoma, who played his first Frigg gig in 2005.

In a recent phone interview, Prauda, who along with mandolin also plays cittern and bagpipe, discussed the band’s swing through New England and their music.

“The sound of Frigg comes from a fusion of different musical cultures,” Prauda said, “but especially the Kaustinen fiddle tradition.”

That’s the style selected by UNESCO for its singularity, named after the village in Finland that both Kivivuori and Jarvala hail from; Hyväluoma grew up nearby. It originated in the 17th century and has been passed down for generations, music characterized by a rhythmic sound that’s driven by syncopated bowing.

Their latest album, Dreamscapes, released in February, finds Frigg delicately moving in a new direction. On “Västkusten Twist,” the mood is bouncy, atmospheric, rising symphonically, while “Valsette” has a contemporary flow influenced by the American bluegrass bands they’ve long admired. “Troll’s Twilight” offers chamber music elements.

Some of the change is due to a reconfiguration of the original four fiddle band, due to the departure of Tommi Asplund.

“It was a hard decision for him, and of course, hard for us to let go of him,” Prauda explained, “but we decided we try to continue with three fiddles now only…. There’s some arranging work to be done, but we have been touring every now and then a few times with just three fiddles previously.”

The work on the new record began a couple of years ago with informal composition camps.

“We were thinking, what can we do that we haven’t tried yet, so we tried this time a bit more experimental approach,” Prauda said, adding with a laugh that he felt, after a recent relisten, “it just sounded like Frigg to me. So maybe these experiments are quite subtle.”

The band’s name comes from the Nordic goddess of love and wisdom. “Which I think are really great values today … look at the news; it seems like we need more love and wisdom in the world,” Prauda observed. “But the name got picked out just simply. We were looking in a dictionary and it was one of the first names that somehow stuck out there for us.”

Initially they were unaware of how people in the U.S. use the word, but there’s a song on 2017’s Frost on Fiddles called “Friggin’ Polska,” and Prauda acknowledges “there are many things in the world connected to Frigg … yoga, hippie things or cafes, but we didn’t think of that at the time at all. We just thought it’s a cool name.”

Frigg has many Polska dance songs in its repertoire. The lively style had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries and is usually played in three-quarter time, “but there are many different kinds,” Prauda explained. “Slower and faster, and the rhythmic phrasing can be very different…. It became a very popular dance in Sweden, and Finland, especially.”

Though it’s true no one sings in Frigg, Prauda notes, “We have put a lot of effort in thinking and planning and practicing how the energy in the music flows in which direction, so that when you make purely instrumental music, it still has some kind of feeling, a storyline, mental landscapes, images. I think that is quite characteristic to Frigg’s music.”

Frigg

When: Friday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Dana Center (Saint Anselm College), 100 Saint Anselm Drive, Manchester
Tickets: $45 at anselm.edu

Frigg. Photo by Marek Sabogal.

River Sang Wild plays a ski resort weekend

By Michael Witthaus

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A year ago River Sang Wild played an apres-ski set at Pats Peak to a crowd that was so appreciative they’ve been asked to return for a two-day run beginning March 8. Typically, the power trio amps up places like Strange Brew and the Press Room with a big and boisterous sound, but these shows will be closer, sonically and spiritually, to Nirvana’s Unplugged.

“We do a more stripped down set there,” the band’s drummer Harrison Foti said in a recent phone interview. “Because our normal one is pretty high volume, high energy, that type of thing. We can’t really do that in the room they have us play in.”

The band formed during the pandemic, a few years after Danny McCarthy and Foti first connected at a North Shore open mic night hosted by Brian Maes of Barry Goudreau’s Engine Room. When Foti’s band Victim of Circumstance broke up, he began jamming in McCarthy’s basement, along with bass player Brad Hartwick from his old group.

As live music returned, the three began to play out. Concurrently, Foti and Hartwick were the rhythm section of Feverslip, led by ex-Red Sky Mary singer Sam Vlasich. In 2023, Hartwick left to devote his attention to that band. Rainor Vigneault took over on bass, completing River Sang Wild’s present lineup.

Heartbreak Recital, a five-song EP, was released in November 2023. It kicked off with “The River,” written by McCarthy, a bracing rocker that also included the band’s name in the chorus. “I’m actually the jerk that planted that lyric,” Foti said of making it a theme song. “I’ve heard some people do that and I’m like, why not? Personally, it’s one of my favorite songs.”

Other standouts in the collection include the jangly, fuzz toned “Love Train” and “Rewind,” another up-tempo bop with a radio-ready boogie feel. “Bloodlines” is another crunchy gem. The band’s influences include post-millennial rockers like Black Keys and Kings of Leon, but they also cover Cream, and play The Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” with aplomb.

“We definitely thus far have had a classic rock influence upon our music,” Foti said, while adding, “I hope to stray away from that, because my musical tastes have certainly changed, even within rock. I feel a bit the same about the other guys too…. I think that they are very open to exploring other avenues.”

“Devil or Not,” released late last year, and another single in the works reflect new member Vigneault’s role.

“I feel that Rainor’s definitely been incorporating more into the songwriting,” Foti said, adding. “Danny’s really the one bringing forth the lyrics, the song ideas…. I partake in helping with arrangements and, of course, laying the drums down.”

Approaching its fifth anniversary as a band, River Sang Wild is upping its profile in a few ways. Christos Alamaniotis, a graphic artist who’s worked with The Misfits, Papa Roach and Car Seat Headrest, is doing their latest cover art, and the band is finalizing plans to record a live session with Philadelphia-based Cart Music soon.

“Essentially, they videotape a whole set [and] give you the audio and video,” he explained. “They reached out to us within the last week and we’re looking to set up a date with them along with a couple of Philly shows, and most likely New York, since it’s kind of right next door.”

Last summer they played a second stage set at Bank of NH Pavilion ahead of the Dave Matthews Band. Hopefully, they’ll be back on the venue’s Hazy Little Stage again next summer.

Beyond that, River Sang Wild is focused on creating new music and refining its sound. They are currently working on new songs, with hopes of recording more material in the coming months. They’re playing the new tracks at shows, Foti noted, but the studio sessions will begin a path to their official release.

Since forming his first band in 2017, Foti is partial to the power trio format, demanding though it may be. “It’s definitely a challenge because you can’t really hide a lot. Everything is out in the open, and everyone’s very much equally responsible for filling in the space when necessary — and knowing when not to fill in the space with a trio is also important.”

River Sang Wild

When: Saturday, March 8, 6 p.m. and Sunday, March 9, noon
Where: Pats Peak, 686 Flanders Road, Henniker
More: riversangwild.com

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

Orleans comes to Concord

By Michael Witthaus

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Orleans’ story is one of hurdles faced and cleared, including one so monumental it’s a miracle they’re still making music.

The first challenge came two years after the band formed in 1972, when the record label didn’t hear a hit on their second album and dropped them. They bounced back after the A&R head at Asylum listened to “Dance With Me” and “Let There Be Music” from the rejected LP. He caught something, and bought the re-recording rights.

Lance Hoppen made the trio his brother Larry co-founded a quartet 10 months after forming. In a recent phone interview, he explained why two enduring hits were non-starters until they landed on the ears of Asylum’s Chuck Plotnick. “With his input, they were re-sculpted,” he said. The first “opened the door at radio, and ‘Dance With Me’ basically went top five.”

The latter, he continued, “was now a hit record, as well as a hit song.”

Now a wedding standard, the ballad began as a riff that guitarist John Hall played at rehearsal.

“Larry said, ‘That’s a good one, you should finish that,’” Hoppen recalled. The song was atypical of a band that got its name from the Allan Toussaint and Meters covers it favored. Hall’s co-writer wife Johanna, who’d later pen the smash “Still The One,” wrote the lyrics.

“John said to her, ‘Is that it? Is that all it is?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is’ — look what happened to that,” Hoppen continued. “Some things just come out of the blue; no way could we have predicted it would be a hit, especially in light of the mainstream of our material.”

Orleans’ biggest hit came two years later, when a neighbor of John and Johanna Hall who was splitting with her husband asked if they could write a song about relationships that didn’t end in breakup. Joanna jotted the words to “Still the One” on the back of an envelope and gave it to John, who said in a 2021 interview that he wrote the music in 15 minutes.

Hall departed for a solo career in 1977, and the band’s final charting single, “Love Takes Time,” came two years later. But label problems of a different kind choked their momentum. Infinity Records made a big bet on an album of live recordings from Pope John Paul II that flopped. MCA took it over, and let Orleans’ 1980 follow-up record wither on the vine.

In July 2012, Larry Hoppen died by suicide. Reeling from tragedy, Lance was at the same time mindful of the band’s many business commitments.

“I just changed the question; it was not, are we going to continue, it was how,” he said. “So I called John.” Hall had wanted back into the band after serving two terms in Congress, and now he was needed, if only to fulfill obligations.

With the help of various alumni, they continued through November, concluding with a memorial concert in Nashville.

“I raised some money for his kids, that’s what that was for,” Lance said. “I was sure we were done, forty years, this must be it … then I got a phone call.”

A promoter putting together a Sail Rock Tour asked Orleans to be the house band for Christopher Cross, Robbie Dupree, Gary Wright and others.

“We were resurrected in that manner, and the years kept flowing,” Lance said. “It was a really high hurdle, under duress, and we made it.”

More than a dozen years later the band soldiers on. The current lineup includes Lance Hoppen and his brother Lane, Brady Spencer, Tom Lane, and Tony Hooper. Hall retired from touring due to health concerns but still joins on occasion. Lance hopes he and his longtime band mate will return to the studio one more time before calling it a career.

“We have … a retrospective collection and some new cuts,” he said. “John and I are kind of like, ‘Well, it’s come up again, are we going to finish this thing or what?’ There are a couple of tracks that … have been there for a long time. If we just finish them, we’ll have something to put out, and it’ll probably be the last thing we do.”

Orleans
When: Thursday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m.
Where: BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St.,
Concord
Tickets: $69 and up at ccanh.com

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

The Man In Black is a convincing Cash

By Michael Witthaus

[email protected]

Shawn Barker walked into auditions for the rock ’n’ roll origin musical Million Dollar Quartet sporting a rockabilly haircut with his eyes on the Elvis Presley role. The show’s director had a different idea, however, and his decision pointed Barker down a new path, and a multi-decade career starring in his tribute act, The Man In Black.

“There’s a million guys that audition for doing Elvis for this play, and we can pick any of them,” Barker, in a recent phone interview, recalled being told. “There’s nobody that we can pick that would do Johnny Cash except for you. You’re the one guy that we found that was like, this is the guy.”

Once that was settled, the musical’s producers encouraged Barker to take an immersive approach for his role.

“I went to where he was buried, to his house — anything I could do to associate myself with Cash,” he said. His efforts ultimately benefited The Man In Black. “It ended up getting so popular that I never took stage with the Million Dollar Quartet; I got too busy and I had to drop out of the Broadway production.”

Barker’s show begins in the Sun Records studio where Cash cut his first songs, and continues chronologically through the ups and downs of a career that found him at one point banned from the Grand Ole Opry for kicking out stage lights in an intoxicated rage, and welcomed back a few years later to host a weekly television show from the Ryman Auditorium stage.

The Johnny Cash Show, which ran for two seasons from 1969 to 1971, was an incubator for the crossover genre of music now called Americana, and Barker takes time to focus on it during his show.

“We talk about how groundbreaking it was,” he said. “He had people like Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Linda Ronstadt … it was a very eclectic group he brought to his show. And he was doing the folk festivals and stuff like that at the time when the whole hippie movement was going on. He was a pretty diverse cat, man.”

It concludes with the series of American Recordings albums that Rick Rubin began producing in 1994. Covers of songs like Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” and “Rusty Cage” from Soundgarden helped bring Cash to a new, younger audience, driven by his music and stark, moving videos played on MTV and VH1.

“He’s one of the only stars that I can think of that had that far-reaching of a fan base,” Barker said, adding he sees evidence of this whenever he performs. “We get little kids at the show sometimes and then we’ll get the people that were there when he was at Sun Records. Eight to 80 years old is our crowd age;it’s pretty wild.”

Barker took a winding road to becoming a convincing doppelgänger for the country legend. Growing up in Missouri, he sang in the church choir and joined school band in fifth grade. When he started playing with friends in the basement, it was lots of rock music, from Skid Row and other popular groups.

After high school, he was in a working band called Nothing Yet, doing everything from early Stones to Rage Against the Machine — not exactly Pentecostal fare.

“Oh, yeah, it was a total departure,” he said. “Church was one of the things I grew up in as a kid, and probably went about as far from as you can, and then came back to as an adult.”

To hear Barker tell it, becoming Johnny Cash was bound to happen.

“My dad and his family are all from Arkansas like Cash, and grew up doing the same things,” he said. “Even as a kid, my dad worked on a cotton farm and pulled the big sacks. He’d talk about how his hands would be cut up from reaching in and popping the cotton off the plants.”

The Cash look was a gift from above, but the rest came naturally, and since launching the act in 2003, Barker’s come to see it as his destiny. Fans clearly love it. “The accent was something I already had in genetic makeup,” he said. “I didn’t really think it was going to be that long-lasting … but it turns out that this is probably what I’m going to do until I die.”

The Man In Black: A Tribute to Johnny Cash
When: Sunday, Feb. 23, 7 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $29 and up at etix.com

Featured Photo: Shawn Barker. Courtesy photo.