Category: Nightlife

Rundgren performs in Nashua

A few years ago, redemption came to fans of Todd Rundgren when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, it didn’t culminate years of Rundgren calling “Hello, It’s Me” to the Rock Hall — far from it. He didn’t seek the accolade, and bowed out of the induction ceremony due to a show on the same night, four hours away in Cincinnati.

To call him an iconoclast is an understatement. Rundgren has charted his own course from early in his career. He became a producer when most people barely knew what that was, because he realized the guy his label hired to supervise the first album of his band The Nazz was a bean counter who either didn’t care about their album’s sound or couldn’t bring it off.

One of his first assignments was The Band’s Stage Fright album. He went on to produce Grand Funk, Hall & Oates, XTC and many others. Music became a side hustle for Rundgren as a result, as his main source of income was so lucrative. His take from Meatloaf’s 1978 LP Bat Out of Hell bought him a house in Hawaii.

That said, he’s made a lot of records over the years, and some of them have produced hits like “Bang On the Drum” and “Can We Still Be Friends?” The difference is he does them to please himself, not the critics or label executives.

“I’ve essentially cultivated an audience that helps me survive in the music business,” Rundgren said from his home in Kaua’i. “I’ve never had the expectations that I should be recognized, I do it for my own purposes. I’m grateful to have an audience for it, but I never had the expectation that it’s going to be hugely successful.”

Younger listeners bored with mainstream pop have lately found albums like 1972’s A Wizard, A True Star, and Nearly Human, a 1989 record that was his last with a charting single. For Rundgren, seeing these new fans at shows is equally gratifying and bewildering. “They’re coming at it more from the place I came to it from, which is I’m making a historical document,” he said. “It’ll be there long after I’m gone.”

Rundgren is less sanguine about contemporary music. “The most successful so-called musical artists today are pole dancers,” he observed. “They don’t intend to remain in music, they all want to eventually have acting careers … now you get famous for being famous. In that sense there is a lot of what’s called music that really doesn’t qualify, at least to me.”

He recently re-launched a service begun in the 1990s as PatroNet to help independent artists.

The newly named Global Nation’s goal “is to give creative people a maximum amount of freedom,” he said. “First of all, to create what they want, and have it appear exactly as they’ve created it … we’ve standardized the display to be essentially a virtual HDTV. So it looks the same no matter what you play it on — and you can play it on HDTV.”

Critically, the service helps creators keep most of the money.

“Instead of you getting the short end of the stick after Apple Store takes theirs and the publisher takes theirs and you wind up with 30 percent of the cost of the subscription, we want that to be closer to 80 percent,” he said, adding the Global Nation is presently in soft launch mode. “We are on the air; we’re just not aggressively pushing it.”

At Rundgren’s upcoming Me/We Tour stop in Nashua on Oct. 16, he’ll draw from a deep catalog, while saving his biggest hits like “I Saw the Light,” “Hello It’s Me” and “The Last Ride” for the encore. Fans of deep cuts like “I Think You Know” and “Woman’s World” will be happy with the setlist.

“It’s a fixed set list so people can have the confidence that if there’s a song they want to hear that I played before, they will hear it,” he said. “If they need to know beforehand, they can probably look up the set list and find out.”

Todd Rundgren Me/We
When: Wednesday, Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $59 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Todd Rundgren. Photo by Rex Rundgren.

Juston McKinney returns to the Palace

It’s a long-accepted truth that any New England comedian who hopes to make it needs to move, either to New York or Los Angeles. Juston McKinney went west as a young comic. However, when he and his future wife began house-shopping in 2006, the Portsmouth native got pulled back to his home.

“It was the real estate market’s peak, and a two-bedroom in L.A. cost $500,000, so we started looking east,” he recalled by phone recently. “We went to Barstow, California, and then a little further to Nevada…. We ended up in Newmarket, New Hampshire.”

The forced decision turned out to be fortuitous. Nearly two decades later McKinney is among a handful of regional comedians who rarely need to leave town, though he did recently appear in Florida and Minnesota. The comic has two shows coming up at the Palace Theatre on Oct. 5. McKinney likes coming back to the venue in Manchester; he’s filmed two specials there. He describes it as an opera house with an intimate club vibe. “Everyone’s right on top of you and it doesn’t go too high,” he said. “Just the acoustics and the layout … there’s no room I can think of that I like more, let’s put it that way.”

The key to McKinney’s success is twofold: he’s relatable, and he never performs the same show twice. The comic draws from his life for laughs, talking about the relative absurdities of being a father of two boys who are now teenagers, and the ongoing bewilderment of married life.

As the kids have grown, his jokes have evolved. These days he’s a soccer dad who complains about having to drive close to Canada to play a high school team who’s lifted the New England Patriots name and logo. “This far north, trademark law doesn’t apply,” he said on Instagram, adding later, “If Robert Kraft gets an anonymous email … it didn’t come from me.”

Before he started in comedy, McKinney was a deputy sheriff in rural Maine. He had a rough childhood; his mother died when he was young, and his father reacted by retreating into alcoholism. Gratefully, dad’s been sober for many years now, and his past is a source of humor for the comic. “I once got hit by a drunk driver,” he said. “I mean, my dad reached over from the driver’s seat and smacked me.”

Last May, McKinney appeared at TEDx Portsmouth, where he talked about his personal life. “I stepped out of my comfort zone and talked a little bit about my story and my background,” he said. One of his memories was about a show he did in Portsmouth at a restaurant on Islington Street that turned into a humbling night.

“It went pretty good,” he recalled. “Then my dad goes up. He’s got a long gray beard and a red shirt on, and he tries to grab the microphone from the headliner on stage. Two bouncers have to come and pull him off. The headliner just goes, ‘It looks like Santa went on a binge this year.’ It got a huge laugh, bigger than the one I got on stage.”

McKinney took a serious tone at the end of the interview to talk about the problem of sketchy websites selling marked up tickets to his shows. “It’s one of the things that it’s so annoying right now for performers,” he said, adding, “Always go to the venue site, so you pay face value. I’m not worth $100 a ticket… $32.50 and you’ll get your money’s worth. The next time you go see me, it’s gonna feel like you got a deal.”

Juston McKinney
When: Saturday, Oct. 5, at 5 and 8 p.m.
Where: Palace Theatre, 80 Hanover St., Manchester
Tickets: $32.50 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Juston McKinney. Courtesy photo.

Peter Bradley Adams makes first New Hampshire appearance

In 1999, Robbie Robertson recognized the talents of Peter Bradley Adams and brought his band Eastmountainsouth into the studio to make a critically acclaimed album. Adams went solo a few years later and has produced a steady stream of stellar music since. In the pre-internet era he would headline summer sheds, but this is now and Adams is content to have a dedicated audience that fills up places like the Music Hall Lounge in Portsmouth, where he appears Oct. 2. It’s his first time performing in New Hampshire.

Adams has a storyteller’s knack for pulling listeners into his songs. The title track of his last full-length album A Face Like Mine is a hardscrabble portrait of generational regret, a Steinbeck novella sung like a James Taylor song. Miles Away, a four-song EP released in spring 2024, couples apocalyptic allegory on the title traack with the optimism of “When She Comes” — the latter has a lovely harmony from Ruth Moody of the Wailin’ Jennys and a haunting Mayuri Vasan outro.

One of the most appealing things about Adams is his voice, soothing and understated while also utterly engaging. Which is why it’s strange that he resisted using it for a long time, until the legendary leader of The Band nudged him. Born into a musical family, discovering his dad’s Beatles records at age 5 helped seal his fate as a musician. But at the time he met Robertson, Adams considered himself a composer, not a singer-songwriter.

“I was hiding a bit in the beginning behind Kat, the other half of the duo, and he was like, ‘Man, I really want you to sing more,’” Adams said recently from his home in Nashville. “I would get off the phone and be like, ‘f-ing Robbie Robertson just told you to do this, how can you not?’ I’m really grateful that he got what I was, could kind of hear what I was trying to reach…. We weren’t close friends or anything, but I do feel very connected to him because of that.”

Adams often goes it alone in the studio, building songs track by track, but lately he’s missing the spark of playing with other musicians.

“I realized that it was just killing me, that process, trying to construct something that felt like people in the room together,” he said. “Sometimes it works and a lot of times it doesn’t.”

He’s drawn to working with others. One example is the gorgeous “Rachel’s Song,” co-written and recorded with musician and director Haroula Rose for her film Once Upon a River. In that spirit, Adams reconnected with his longtime friend and collaborator Lex Price when he began to think about making a new album earlier this year.

“I’ve worked with him really longer than anyone…. He’s one of the reasons why I moved to Nashville,” he said. “We talked about it, and he said, ‘Let’s get an incredible band and go in the studio. And it’s not like it all has to happen live, but get as much as we can live so that all the elements are going down at the same time. I know this is how you’re supposed to make a record on some level. But it was just good for me to actually do it again.”

They went into Nashville’s Blackbird Studio, with Price on bass, Todd Lombardo playing acoustic guitar, electric guitarist Jed Hughes and Jerry Rowe on drums. “These are all the best guys in town, that straddle doing really interesting, creative, independent stuff,” Adams said, adding, “I’ve got almost a full record.”

As icing on the cake, Adams is heading out to his old hometown of Los Angeles to record Greg Leisz on steel guitar for one of the tracks. Leisz is a legend who’s worked with everyone from Joe Cocker to Sheryl Crow as well as Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan. He’s also produced records by Jackson Browne, Greg Copeland and others. “For me he’s like a prophet,” Adams said. “I mean, he is just my favorite musician in the world … there’s just no one like him.”

World Music for Peace – The Meter Maids, Amorphous Band w/ Senie Hunt & EJ Ouellette, and Big Blue World
When: Friday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rockingham Ballroom, 22 Ash Swamp Road, Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at coastalsoundsnh.com (21+)

Senie Hunt Trio appears Thursday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m. at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord, and Senie Hunt plays solo at the Concord Multicultural Festival in Keach Park on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

Featured photo: Senie Hunt.Courtesy photo.Photo by Christine Torrey (Birch & Fern Photography)

Three area shows before Senie Hunt returns to Nashville

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Since moving from Concord to Nashville a few years ago, Senie Hunt has found a lot of opportunities to grow as an artist. What was hard in New England, like driving two hours to pitch his percussive guitar skills to a new venue, is a lot more manageable in Music City.

“In Nashville, you walk down the street and find a place, and if they don’t get back to you, it’s just another walk down the road to go back and try it again,” he said by phone recently. “Trying to stay consistently active, but also trying to find gigs that I want to be doing more, is … easier.”

It’s also a hub to other Southern cities; Hunt has played in New Orleans and in Tennessee cities like Gatlinburg, Knoxville, Murfreesboro and Pigeon Forge, home to Dollywood. He still makes time to return home to play, and when he does it’s often to do a special show. That’s the case with a few upcoming gigs, his last in New England until next spring.

The biggest is a triple bill on Sept. 20 at Rockingham Ballroom in Newmarket. Hunt will perform backed by Amorphous Band, a venerable Seacoast group, with fiddler EJ Ouellette joining in. He has a full band, the electric Senie Hunt Project; it played last June at Concord’s Bank of NH Stage. But this will be the first time he’ll be backed by a band while playing his acoustic guitar and djembe.

“I’m really excited about that,” he said. “Normally if I do an acoustic song with my band, I have them step off and they come back for the electric set.”

However, those looking for a taste of Hunt’s blues rock material can see a trio version of his Project on Thursday, Sept. 19, at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord. Finally, Hunt will play an afternoon solo set at the Concord Multicultural Festival on Sept. 22 in Keach Park.

It’s a regular annual event for Hunt, who built his current schedule around it. When the festival debuted a few years ago, Hunt came away impressed. This year’s lineup includes Nepalese dancers Barranquilla Flavor, Suri Wang performing traditional Chinese music, Irish step dancers, Ruby Shabazz’s old-school soul and R&B, Bollywood from Varnika, and hip-hop and Afropop from Martin Toe, as well as Israeli dancing and Japanese Taiko drumming.

“It really opened my eyes up to how much diversity is in Concord that’s just kind of tucked away,” Hunt said. “Just to know that there’s so much diversity and culture around in their home neighborhood, bringing out the music and food and dancing all in a public space really gives anybody the opportunity to come up and really see for themselves how vibrant the community can be.”

Hunt will wrap up with shows in Rhode Island and Newburyport, Mass., before heading back to his new home. While here, he’s also adding guitar and vocals to “Harmony,” a song by his longtime friend Hank Osborne, at Rocking Horse Studio in Pittsfield.

“I’ve worked with Hank since pretty much Day 1 when I moved to Concord,” Hunt said. “When I heard Hank’s music, there were so many similarities between his and my style of playing. I’m a little rougher on my guitar than him, but he’s one of the few musicians in the town that plays a similar style.”

Then it’s back to Nashville, where Hunt’s original music is getting much-deserved attention.

“I get to play my own style, my own thing,” he said. “That’s something I didn’t know I would find while I was down here, because you go downtown and it’s all covers. But there are certain places that are a lot more open, not the country or rock scene, and they want to hear your own original stuff. I’ve been pretty well off with being able to find enough places that are interested in that … it’s keeping me active, that’s a big upside. I’m able to play the music I want to play.”

World Music for Peace – The Meter Maids, Amorphous Band w/ Senie Hunt & EJ Ouellette, and Big Blue World
When: Friday, Sept. 20, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rockingham Ballroom, 22 Ash Swamp Road, Newmarket
Tickets: $20 at coastalsoundsnh.com (21+)

Senie Hunt Trio appears Thursday, Sept. 19, at 9 p.m. at Penuche’s Ale House in Concord, and Senie Hunt plays solo at the Concord Multicultural Festival in Keach Park on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 3 p.m.

Featured photo: Senie Hunt.Courtesy photo.Photo by Christine Torrey (Birch & Fern Photography)

Stephane Wrembel brings Triptych to UNH

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Triptych is the latest album from French guitarist Stephane Wrembel. The expansive 20-song collection is a meditation on life, represented in three musical movements. It’s a collaboration with pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, which came together after Wrembel’s manager suggested that the two connect. Initially, Wrembel was reluctant.

“Piano and guitar are very difficult to marry,” he said by phone recently. “It’s a difficult match because we kind of occupy the same space, and it’s very easy for tones to clash.” He decided to give it a try anyway, and quickly became enamored of the pianist. Pilc is renowned for his improvisational skills and has an impressive resume. His credits include time as music director and pianist for Harry Belafonte.

At the time, Wrembel had a concert series at Joe’s Pub in New York City coming up to celebrate the release of Django l’impressionniste, a collection of 17 preludes for solo guitar.

“Django is also influenced by Claude Debussy, so I wanted to do something around him,” he recalled. That’s when Pilc’s name came up; the two had not yet met.

He was recruited for the shows, and “the chemistry was immediate and so powerful that we decided to record together,” Wrembel said. “I had the instinct that we needed to go to the studio and record a triptych. I had the vision of a triptych. I didn’t know why, but I could see that it was the right thing to do.”

It’s a true collaboration, with both Wrembel and Pilc contributing new songs. Overall, the album is anchored by selections from Django Reinhardt like “Douce Ambiance,” which is transformed by Pilc’s piano flourishes in the intro before settling into a joyous jazzy rhythm familiar to fans of Reinhardt.

Wrembel is a devotee of the legendary guitarist. As David Fricke wrote in 2009, he “studied Reinhardt’s fleet precision and soulful swing the hard way — playing in actual Gypsy camps.” He lived in the Paris neighborhood where Reinhardt spent his final years and considers him an essential musician.

“Django is to the guitar what Bach is to the keyboard,” he said. “When you practice Django, you become a better guitarist; it’s automatic. You will understand the guitar better, you will see things better, you have a better technique, so everything about your playing is going to be better. Django is an archetypal source like that.”

Triptych’s first movement begins with “Ecco Homo” — an introduction, Wrembel explained. “It means ‘here is the man,’” he said. “It’s the birth of the triptych.” The next section starts with “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” a Wrembel composition that provides insight into what informs him beyond gypsy jazz.

The first song Wrembel recalls hearing as a very young child is Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” He’s progressed past rock, but “those sounds are still there, I make no difference between Debussy, Pink Floyd, Chopin,” he said. “All that’s the same for me.”

There’s a link to the ’70s literary touchstone in Floyd’s song “Echoes,” Wrembel continued. “It’s about an albatross hanging motionless upon the air,” he said. This led him to Richard Bach’s novel, and “the idea of a floating seagull that tries to find what’s noble in its own nature rather than just finding food. It’s a beautiful tale.”

The third section of Triptych is its most ambitious, beginning with “Life In Three Stages Part I: The Child and the Desert,” continuing with “Part II: Building a World” and concluding with “Part III: Old Age, Grace and Wisdom.” The last offers an elegiac cadence that’s gorgeous and haunting, with Wrembel and Pilc the only musicians.

The final movement’s tone reflects Wrembel’s own sentiments.

“I’m 50, I’m entering old age,” he said. “That’s the third stage, where I believe that as an artist, if you keep working and concentrating and studying philosophy, it’s possible to reach very high levels of consciousness. You don’t think the same when you are 50 than when you are 20, and probably you don’t think the same when you are 80 than when you are 50. Every time there is more and more wisdom coming.”

Triptych – Stephane Wrembel Band with Jean-Michel Pilc
When: Friday, Sept. 13, 8 p.m.
Where: Johnson Theatre, 50 Academic Way, Durham
Tickets: $10 and $12 at stephanewrembel.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Rocking up the blues with Anthony Gomes

Anthony Gomes stands where many tributaries meet to feed a river. “Painted Horse,” originally released in 2009 when the guitarist was a member of Nashville-based New Soul Cowboys, is indicative of this. The power trio paid tribute to country music in a decidedly rocking way, while keeping the blues influence front and center. In late 2021 he revived the song for a new album.

Gomes, in a recent phone interview, remembered a time when detractors from both sides called him either too rock for blues or too blues for rock, and deciding then to use that to his advantage. Now he’s signed to a new label that includes several heavy metal bands. To celebrate, he went into the studio with Korn’s drummer Ray Luzier and Billy Sheehan, a bass player whose resume includes David Lee Roth, Mr. Big and The Winery Dogs.

“Painted Horse” was one of five old songs that Luzier and Sheehan helped rock up for High Voltage Blues, though Gomes chose to leave in the banjo — twang on that! Last year Gomes’ new label, Rat Pak Records, remixed 2018’s Peace, Love & Loud Guitars, adding three bonus tracks. The guitarist is wrapping up work on a new album called Praise the Loud.

There’s a rocking message behind all of this, and Gomes delivers it on tracks like the AC/DC doppelgänger “White Trash Princess” and “Fur Covered Handcuffs,” though the latter, a chugging boogie punctuated by fiery solos, provides clues to the Toronto-born blues rocker’s origins.

His big break came when someone from B.B. King’s staff heard Gomes playing at an open mic where good players were given a beer, and invited him to meet the blues legend. “It was a two-beer night, I was playing really well,” Gomes said. “This guy came up to me and said, ‘Who’s your favorite guitar player?’ I could have said Jeff Beck or Jimi Hendrix, but I just said, ‘Oh, that’s easy, B.B. King.’ He said, ‘I thought so. I’m his bus driver.’”

Given the locale, Gomes was a bit skeptical, but he went to the show and found four front-row tickets waiting for him and his friends. He was prepared to meet his idol after. “I made business cards; I wore dress pants and dress shoes. It was like I was going to meet the Pope,” he said. King would become a lifelong mentor. “He was so gracious with his time, such a gentleman, so humble.”

At the time, Gomes was attending the University of Toronto, completing a master’s thesis on the racial evolution of blues music that was later published as “The Black and White of Blues,” but the next day he quit school, telling his parents that he wanted to be a professional musician.

He discovered music via Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, but songs like “Train Kept A Rolling,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” only made him more interested in the music that informed those classic rockers.

“I started to go back to Stevie Ray Vaughan, then to B.B. King, then Muddy Waters,” he said, adding that this experience was leading him to where he’d end up eventually, straddling both genres.

“In some ways, I felt like if I listened to blues, I was only getting half the picture. If I listened to rock, I got the other half,” he said. “Both these musics coexist and have a shared DNA, but oftentimes there’s a strict line dividing them. Maybe that was based on marketing to a certain race initially. To me they’re just two sides of the same coin.”

That’s one reason why Gomes was drawn to Rat Pak, which is based in New Hampshire.

“The president of the label heard our stuff and said, ‘Hey, I know this is blues, and you’ve been marketed [that way], but I really feel that there’s a wider audience here in rock. How would you feel about that?’ I was like, ‘Throw me in, coach, let’s go!”

From his 1997 debut, Primary Colors, to High Voltage Blues, which spent 58 weeks on the Billboard charts over 2022 and 2023, Gomes has successfully blurred the lines between traditional and contemporary blues and rock, purists be damned.

“What I’ve come to realize is that what you may perceive as a liability is actually your superpower, and the more I focused on being who I was and less interested in fitting in … it resonated true to people and to our audience,” he said. “It’s been an interesting journey, and by doing this we’ve created our own lane — and it’s an open road, which is a lot of fun.”

Anthony Gomes
When: Friday, Sept. 6, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $39 at tupelomusichall.com

Featured photo: Bees Deluxe. Courtesy photo.