Category: Nightlife

Lez Zeppelin plays Manchester

With eyes closed, it’s hard to distinguish Lez Zeppelin from the act they’re honoring. Throbbing rhythm, frenetic lead guitar and ecstatic vocals belie the notion that four musicians are creating this audio juggernaut. Eyes wide open, it is something else entirely; even Jimmy Page couldn’t quite believe it.

As the name suggests, the group is an all-female Led Zeppelin doppelgänger. When Zep’s guitar legend watched them in London he was an instant fan, praising their “superb musicianship” and “extraordinary sensuality.” Post-show, standing with band founder Steph Paynes in an empty arena, Page was blunter.

“He turns and goes, ‘it was so sexual,’” Paynes recalled by phone recently. “It was almost like watching us, he hadn’t even realized … because he’d never seen Led Zeppelin, he was in it. It was this weird, existential moment where he was almost shocked at how sexualized we were, and the music was.”

Paynes believes her band couldn’t exist without that.

“You’re either a sensual being or you’re not,” she said. “You can learn to act a certain way, but that’s not what was happening with Led Zeppelin, [and] playing this music will definitely sexualize you if you’re doing it right.”

What’s remarkable about this she-incarnation is how disciplined they are about Zeppelin’s music, not just their look and feel. As with the original, they are a foursome; no looping or technical tricks to add elements, or special guests. This rigor extends to the studio; in 2010, they recreated Zep’s 1969 debut album with vintage gear — along with producer Eddie Kramer, who engineered five of Zep’s albums, starting with Led Zeppelin II.

Recruiting Kramer “was me with an incredibly giant set of cojones,” Paynes said with a laugh. “Maybe he’ll produce our record, like who does that? It’s moxie, you know what I mean? I’ve been known to have a little bit of that, and it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

Like Page, who sought the band out because of its reputation, Kramer “thought we could do it; otherwise he wouldn’t have done it,” Paynes continued. “Look, I think there are lots of people who feel that they’re great musicians and they can play all the parts. Guess what? That’s not what this is about.”

What it is about is essence.

“To be at that level of musicianship … it’s daunting,” Paynes said, “but [what] underlies it — the feel, the passion, the way you can go into a song and go for it even if you’re gonna hit a million wrong notes, which believe me happens; even if you’re not gonna get the riff — that is where I think our band differs from all the others.”

The latest project for the group — Paynes, singer Marlain Angelides, Joan Chew on bass and keyboards, and drummer Leesa Harrington Squyres — is tackling landmark concerts. The first was a recreation of Zep’s 1970 Royal Albert Hall show in early January.

“Talk about challenging … they were so incredible in their musicianship and dynamics,” Paynes said. “Trying to capture that [is] crazy, but it’s so rewarding when you get close.”

When Paynes started the band in 2004, “it was just an idea to have fun and really get into the playing,” she said, but it took on a life of its own. “The way that it escalated … you can be in the music business your whole life and none of that could happen, and that’s basically the norm, but then if something is meant to be, if it’s meant to strike, then everything happens, and you don’t even know why.”

The current lineup has stayed steady for the past five to six years, though Squyres now has a stand-in due to “physical issues,” Paynes said. The temporary drummer signals a departure. “We actually have a guy, Dave Richmond. Leesa is kind of irreplaceable, it’s really hard to be John Bonham … but this guy is completely and utterly into Zeppelin.”

Such dedication is still the group’s focus.

“It’s about capturing the unknown … the passion, the fury of this music, and the dynamic of it,” Paynes said. “Without sounding obnoxious, if you’re a good enough musician to understand that you really start to get close to what Zeppelin may have done on any given night. I think that when Jimmy saw us do that in London, he wasn’t expecting it. When he saw it, he was just like, ‘Yeah, that’s it; that’s how it should be done. You get it.”

Featured photo: Lez Zeppelin. Photo by Maia Kennedy Photography.

Bobby Rush’s lifetime of the blues

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour covered less than two decades of music. For Bobby Rush a similar endeavor would need to scale up, perhaps to the Epoch level. Rush, who turned 90 last November, boasts that he’s released at least 429 albums over his career, which began in the late 1940s. Along the way he also made too many singles to count. Before long-players were a thing, he even put out a 78.

“I don’t want to talk about that … that makes it sound too old,” Rush said in a recent phone interview. “But life is like — it’s a blessing to get old. Because the only way you don’t get old, you die young. So, I laugh about it.”

Rush’s first band included Elmore James and Pinetop Perkins. In the early 1950s Muddy Waters unsuccessfully tried to recruit him to play harmonica in his band.

“I wanted my own thing,” he said. “He wanted me to play like Little Walter, because that’s what he was used to in his band. I didn’t want to do that because I didn’t want to emulate him.”

His biggest success came late in life. He received his first Grammy nomination in 2001, and won in 2017 for Porcupine Meat and in 2021 for Rawer Than Raw. All My Love for You, his latest album, is a gem, but Bobby Rush is more interested in talking about what he’s doing than what he’s done.

Case in point is a work in progress that has contributions from Kenny Wayne Shepherd and others.

“I tell you now, get on top of Bobby Rush [for] the next two, three albums going to come out,” he said. “This is it for me. I don’t mean it’s the last one I’m doing, but I’m putting everything I have into it. I think it will be the best material that I ever recorded.”

Beyond Shepherd and some North Mississippi pals, Rush won’t say who he’s working with on the new material, other than promising there are some big names.

“These guys I’m recording with,” he said, pride beaming in his voice, “they just come to play with me and hear me. They’re not really asking to bring anything to the table other than themselves.”

Rush spent most of his career based in Chicago. “I wanted to be there because Howlin’ Wolf was there, and B.B. King was there, and Muddy Waters was there, Little Walter was there — all the guys that I looked up to,” he said, adding that being in the city made it easier to “steal some ideas; I just wanted to be in what they call The Loop, man, you know?”

Over the following decades he earned the nickname King of the Chitlin’ Circuit, for his time playing the network of mostly Black clubs in the South. The moniker was cemented in Martin Scorsese’s documentary The Blues. In 1968 he connected with ex-Vee Jay A&R head Calvin Carter and made his biggest hit, “Chicken Heads,” a song he re-recorded in 2021 with Buddy Guy, Gov’t Mule and Christone “Kingfish” Ingram to mark the 50th anniversary of its release.

On the autobiographical “I’m the One” from the new album (released last November), Rush sings about how he “put the funk in the blues” on songs like “I Wanna Do the Do,” a dance-y rework of Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” from his 1979 LP Rush Hour.

“I tried to do that because it’s nothing new under the sun, everything’s been done,” he explained. “It’s the way you approach it, you have to modify what you do.”

Rush has longevity in his bloodline. “My grandfather passed at 107, my grandmother was 111, and my mom was 89,” he said. “My dad was 96 and he had brothers and sisters, 21 of them lived over 100.” Still, that doesn’t fully explain the fire in the blues singer, harmonica player and songwriter’s soul that keeps him walking on stage night after night, even as he enters his 10th decade.

“God gave me the strength to keep going,” he said. “I’m still enthused about the blues and the work that I do, and that keeps me motivated. I know a man can live a long time without water or food, but you can’t live long without hope. I still have hope, man. Out of all my ups and downs I’ve been through in life … I still am enthused about the things that I’m surrounded by and the things that I do, and I am just glad to be here.”

Featured photo: Bobby Rush. Courtesy photo.

Gibson Brothers bring Darkest Hour tour to Rex

If great musicians wanting to get in the studio with a performer is a measure of success, the Gibson Brothers are a breed apart. The bluegrass duo has been produced by Ricky Skaggs, Dave Ferguson, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys and most recently Jerry Douglas, on Darkest Hour, released in early 2023.

They even recorded a soundtrack album with T-Bone Burnett, a project that was shelved with the never-made movie.

“My brother says that we’re the Forrest Gump of bluegrass,” Eric Gibson said in a recent phone interview. “I mention something like that [Burnett] to people, and they look at me like I’m lying. I’m like, ‘I don’t have any proof, the record never came out.’ … but some of those records did.”

While 2018’s Auerbach-helmed Mockingbird had a burlier tone and modern touches like a cover of REM’s “Everybody Hurts” with the Flaming Lips’ Derek Brown on slide guitar, Darkest Hour featured more of the sound that’s made the Gibsons a force in bluegrass music for over three decades.

A new wrinkle, though, was a focus on the duo’s songwriting. Before starting recording in early 2020, Douglas asked them to bring their best tunes that hadn’t made it to other records. Among them was “I Feel the Same Way as You,” which became an album standout, with Alison Krauss providing a backing vocal.

Leigh Gibson wrote the song in 2000. Eric remembers wondering, “Why the heck did we wait so long to record that? Then I thought, if we’d done it earlier, Jerry Douglas wouldn’t be playing Dobro on it, and Alison Krauss wouldn’t be singing harmony … it was meant to be later.”

The Dobro master’s presence spurred the two to reach musical heights, as on “Dust,” when Eric follows Douglas’s soaring solo with a blistering banjo run. “You cannot help but be inspired,” he said, calling it “a pinch-me moment — that’s Jerry Douglas, and we’re playing with him right now.”

A big chunk of the LP was done live in the studio.

“We had some separation; if we messed up, we’d go back and fix it, but he’s about capturing the feeling and capturing the moment,” Gibson said.

“What a Difference a Day Makes” was the first track recorded. Gibson called it “real meat and potatoes bluegrass … kind of a Jimmy Martin-feeling kind of song.”

A Northeast tour in support of the album kicks off Jan. 13 in Manchester.

The brothers will be joined by Mike Barber on bass and drummer Sam Zucchini, with Eric O’Hara on Dobro. O’Hara was their first music teacher while the two were growing up on a dairy farm in Ellenburg Depot, in upstate New York.

“He’d just graduated from college, we were 12 and 11, and he started showing us how to play the banjo and guitar,” Eric recalled. “All these years later, he’s playing music with us.”

There’s more history in the onstage configuration. Their longtime bass player is the son of Junior Barber, who played Dobro with the Gibson Brothers when they were starting out. “Jerry went on and on about him when we recorded with him,” Gibson said of the elder Barber, who died in 2017. “He was a legend in this area, and people like that would take an interest in us.”

It’s testament to their talent that two players from a town just below the Canadian border could rise to the top of a genre dominated by Nashville pickers, but Gibson recalls a collective purposefulness in their far-flung milieu. A memory of one band preparing to go on at an American Legion years ago is still fresh.

“They took it as seriously as if they were gonna go play the Opry,” he said. “That stuck with me… wherever, whatever that stage is, you make it count.”

The Gibson Brothers released their first album in the mid-’90s; years later, Eric Gibson is happy to be part of his genre, and sees bright days ahead.

“I think the roots scene is very strong,” Gibson said. “Every so often you hear, ‘oh, bluegrass is dead.’ How is it dead when you have Billy Strings playing bluegrass? Molly Tuttle has found a heck of a big audience. Hopefully, there’s a trickle-down effect for the rest of us, but I feel like that old John Hartford song. I’m still here, we’re still doing it. We must be doing something right.”

Featured photo: Gibson Brothers. Courtesy photo.

Mia x Ally take viral act on tour

The curious lockdown revival of a 600-year-old folk tradition was the catalyst for an inventive pairing that has, among other things, produced a recasting of “Free Bird” for violin and bagpipes. In late 2020 a Scottish singer posted a pair of sea shanties — collective songs from the maritime trades — to TikTok. Another vocalist added a bass harmony layer, and soon more began stitching in parts.

It caught the attention of electric violinist Mia Asano, who dueted on a subsequent batch of videos. Bagpiper Ally Crowley-Duncan was also taken by “musicians adding their parts and creating this massive session-style experience with all this instrumentation.” She collaborated on a few with a mutual musician friend.

Out of this digital milieu the two became mutual fans and eventually collaborators. The world of rock music has never seen anything like Mia x Ally, but the duo’s unique approach to their instruments has won kudos from some of the genre’s best, including Metallica. It’s also amassed that most coveted of modern currencies, internet virality.

Before joining up, both were building big audiences on TikTok, Ally on her traditional bagpipes with a custom key-extending chanter (the note-producing tube at the bottom of the bag) that she helped design, and Mia with her seven-string Flying V electric violin. In a recent Zoom interview, the two discussed how they came to see their instruments in a different light.

Mia was classically trained from age 5.

“I had a deep love for classical music, but a deeper love for alternative styles,” she said. “In middle school I discovered electric violins; after that I knew what I was going to do for the rest of my life.”

The violin, she added, “is a really gate-kept instrument, and the classical community is really intense. Both Ally and I have a lot of similarities in those ways with our upbringing and our experience with our instruments, so we both have a deep love for showcasing everything they are capable of.”

Also the product of a musical household, Ally played multiple instruments growing up, taking up bagpipes at age 12 as a way to bond with her Scottish stepfather after he legally adopted her. “I’ve been able to see the saxophone, piano and flute transcend their more traditional and classical roots,” she said, “but there aren’t a lot of avenues where the bagpipes have been able to do that.”

In high school she transcribed Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train” to bagpipes and played it with a rock band she’d formed.

“The reaction kind of flipped my brain around into wanting to see the bagpipes in that light more often,” she said. “I love that style of music, always have, and it was really cool to be able to offer it to people on an instrument that I love, but in a way that they weren’t expecting.”

After an extended TikTok friendship, the two performed together for the first time in Boston, on St. Patrick’s Day. Mia was attending Berklee, and Ally had a show sponsored by Barstool Sports. “She messaged me and said, ‘Would you like to meet up and record some collaborations together?’ and of course I said yes,” Mia recalled.

Their version of “Shipping Up to Boston” was a viral smash, and they soon hit the road for a run named after the Dropkick Murphys song, their first release as a duo.

“We like to say it sold out our first tour — that’s how a lot of people found out about us, and the first time we realized how many people love us,” Mia said. An accompanying video, shot across the city at Fenway Park, City Hall and other landmarks, was “essentially a love letter to Boston.”

The current tour, which stops in Derry on Jan. 6 and includes shows in Boston and Vermont, comes in the wake of their debut, Mia x Ally: The Viral Hits. The EP includes their distinctive reimagining of the Lynyrd Skynyrd hit that’s arguably the most requested song in rock history. Both released it solo before recording it together.

“We realized there was actually an appreciation for hearing ‘Free Bird’ in that way,” Ally said. “We knew that we wanted to make it something bigger.”

Playing live, the duo is about more than classic rock covers, even playing some original songs. “Our shows have every kind of music from pop, rock and Celtic,” Mia said. “We have jazzy moments; I play a classical piece at one poin t… we throw everything in there. It’s to showcase our diversity. Music is the most important thing to us; it’s not just about the showmanship, but that’s also important. We have a lot of musical integrity.”

Featured photo: Mia x Ally. Courtesy photo.

Dawes returns to New Hampshire

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

When Dawes steps on the Music Hall stage Dec.30, it will be only their fourth appearance in the Granite State, and their first in almost five years. Taylor Goldsmith, Dawes guitarist, lead singer and main songwriter, hopes the night-before-New Year’s Eve scheduling will add to the impetus for locals to check them out.

“I’m very excited for that; I mean, obviously, it’s good to get back to anywhere we haven’t been for a while,” Goldsmith said by phone from his home in Altadena, California. “I feel like everything is kind of shut down that week, and no one ever has anything to do. So I’m kind of eager to see how that feels.”

Goldsmith is a creature of the road.

“When I’m standing still, I seem to disappear,” he wrote over a decade ago in “Time Spent in Los Angeles,” but these days that notion is tempered by new fatherhood. With his wife, This Is Us actress Mandy Moore, he has two sons; Gus, born February 2021, and Ozzie, who arrived in October of last year.

“Back in the day it was, ‘How do we stay on tour, how do we not keep a house at home?,’ and now it’s, ‘How do I make these tours as fast as possible?’” he said. “I definitely feel like an essential part of myself … only comes to life on stages [and] I’ve never had the inclination of, ‘maybe I’d like to step away from this’ — I just need to be a little more strategic. Because when I’m away from the guys, even the first hour hurts really bad.”

The change has impacted his songwriting — up to a point.

“My world is so much smaller, and that is cool; I think it’s something to be embraced rather than rejected,” he said, while noting that he’s not keen on writing an entire album about being a dad. “Even though that’s very much what I think about and deal with on a minute-to-minute basis, I definitely have to make sure that I’m thinking outside of that.”

That said, his worldview has shifted.

“When I was young … those Jackson Browne songs about heartache were all I wanted to hear,” he said. “That’s not my experience now, and it’s a little harder for me to jump into that place. Now I want to hear observations on culture, politics … the existential crisis that goes beyond romance.”

With fewer and longer songs, Dawes’ most recent album, Misadventures of Doomscroller, was a departure. Musically adventurous, it was recorded following a tour backing Grateful Dead bass player Phil Lesh. More than a few likened it to so-called jam bands, but for Goldsmith it really wasn’t that at all.

“We went in with an objective and more or less accomplished it,” he said, adding that it was different from past albums where plans for a certain mood — more ballads, a softer sound for instance — were waylaid. “I like that the record tells us what it is rather than the other way around, more or less. But with Misadventures, it was like, let’s go for one of those five or six songs, yet 45-minute, albums, like so many rock ’n’ roll bands that we love.”

Goldsmith shrugged off the label given to them by some critics. “There are bands that deserve the moniker but don’t have it,” like Pink Floyd and Dire Straits, he said. “I don’t see us as a jam band in the same way that I see the Grateful Dead…. I almost feel like that’s more of a cultural observation [that] has more to do with who shows up than what we’re doing on stage.”

Missing from the upcoming show will be founding member Wylie Gelber, who left the band last year to focus on his handmade guitar company, and keyboard player Lee Pardini, who announced his departure earlier this month.

“Things change, and I’m excited in a way about embracing this newer identity,” Goldsmith said.

It’s an interesting response from someone who wrote, “I hope all your favorite bands stay together” a while back.

“Well, people have said that to me before … so much for that,” he replied. “That song is more about the REMs and the Replacements, bands that truly are not playing shows … there’s heartbreak there. Dawes is on tour … I’m singing these songs, Griffin’s playing the drums. We were there on Day 1, and we’re still here. I think that is still the thing worth celebrating that that song tries to speak to.”

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.