Category: Nightlife

Well-rounded comic Steve Hofstetter

Raised in New York City, with a father who watched Dick Gregory perform in Village comedy clubs in the early 1960s, Steve Hofstetter grew up to be a smart comic. Don’t interrupt his set; Hofstetter’s retorts draw blood before an offender even knows there’s a knife in the scene. He has a YouTube page dedicated to heckler management.

Professional comedy wasn’t his destiny — until love leapt up.
“I always enjoyed watching stand-up. I never thought I’d become one,” Hofstetter said by phone in July. “When I was 13 … the girl I had a crush on told me she thought I should join the improv club in school. I was so enamored with the idea that someone I was impressed by thought I was funny enough to do that.”

Over a 20-plu-year career, Hofstetter’s made eight albums and specials; the latest is The Recipe, which debuted on YouTube earlier this year. He has a knack for thought-provoking jokes, like one with a Rorschach test punchline, “I hope you get from life exactly what you deserve.” Broadly, he specializes in observational comedy, drawing inspiration from keeping his eyes open.

“Whenever people say, ‘Where do you get your material?’ I always think, ‘How come you don’t have yours?’ — we all live in the same world and see the same things,” he said. “It’s just about paying attention and processing what’s going on around you … if I see something that’s anachronistic, I can’t not notice it.”
Improv still plays a role in Hofstetter’s comedy, in the form of a Q&A session after every show. He began doing them 10 years ago, mainly to produce content without having to give away new material online.

“I was OK posting bits I wasn’t doing anymore, but I didn’t want to post any of the current stuff,” he said, and the segments resonated, “because, partially they were watching comedy happen on the fly, and isn’t it more interesting to see something getting painted than just see the finished product?”

The sessions became good-natured roasts when he began bringing in fellow comics, the first time after he learned that his dog was dying and would need to be put down at tour’s end. “I was in no shape to think on my feet,” so Hofstetter asked two friends to lend emotional support. “They said yes, and it was great. It was so much fun to be able to bounce back and forth off each other.”

Hofstetter’s work extends beyond comedy. He’s written books and, a tireless baseball nerd, has worked in sports radio as well as writing a column for Sports Illustrated. He runs the nonprofit Steel City AF, a live/work/play environment for comedians based in Pittsburgh, where he’s lived for the past few years.

“It was always a dream of mine to have some sort of comedy-based charity, and when my dad passed, I had this realization of, if you keep waiting for stuff, you might never get there, so I decided to start it,” he said. He moved to Pittsburgh from Los Angeles, finding it was an ideal home base city with a great civic spirit.
“The thing I like about it most is just how passionate about the city residents are; people are really, really proud of it, and want to make it better. There’s this amazing camaraderie that I just really like.” The foundation has given away some scholarships, and opened a performance space in a renovated building, inspired by an experience Hofstetter had at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Beyond that, Hofstetter received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination (really) for a digital comedy club launched during the pandemic. It led to over $1.5 million worth of work for comics that had no other options. “I was also still running my foundation where I was giving out grants to comedians that didn’t have any way to make any money,” he added.

What set the effort apart was that it extended beyond the constraints of livestreaming.

“We let the audience be unmuted, which was very different than most other places, because without an audience a comedian doesn’t have timing, and it feels awful,” he said. They also limited tickets and thus audience size to make the virtual events more manageable.

An upcoming show at Nashua’s Center for the Arts will be Hofstetter’s first ticketed event in the Granite State.

“I’ve done some college shows there early on in my career, and I did some bar shows here and there,” he said. “But that was when people had no idea who they were going to see; this is the first time since anyone has heard of me that I’ll be doing a show in New Hampshire.”

Steve Hofstetter
When: Saturday, Oct. 7, 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $29 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Amythyst Kiah performs in Portsmouth

Those who only knew Amythyst Kiah from Our Native Daughters were a bit surprised by her Rounder Records debut, Wary+Strange. Sure, it contained some rustic elements, but mostly the 2021 record rocked.

The clearest example was her version of “Black Myself,” a song that won a Grammy for the all-women-of-color supergroup she’s formed with Allison Russell, Leyla McCalla and Rhiannon Giddens. Kiah’s re-recording growled with an electric urgency akin to Gary Clark Jr.’s 2019 scorcher “This Land,” and landed a country mile beyond the banjo-punctuated original.

Kiah decided to revisit “Black Myself” because it felt fuller when she wrote it.

“It was inspired by a line from the Sid Hemphill version of ‘John Henry,’ and that became the hook,” she said by phone recently. “I put the guitar part underneath and I was kind of like, ‘This feels like an anthem.’ It became part of the Our Native Daughters sound, but my music is in a lot of ways a modern take on roots music, so we explored bringing myself back in.”

It’s a side of Kiah that will be on display at her upcoming shows in Portsmouth, part of a tour that started on Sept. 27.

“I’m bringing a full band on this run, drums, bass and lead electric guitar,” she said. “Everybody sings background vocals on quite a few of the songs. It’s definitely a much bigger sound than what some people might know me for.”

Equally powerful is her raw honesty as a songwriter. “Wild Turkey” is a spare acoustic song from Wary+Strange that dealt with her mother’s suicide when she was 17. The experience led to her first public performance, at the funeral. Asked how she found a way to write about it now, her answer provided a clue to Kiah’s creative spark.

“Being a child of the ’90s, and getting into alternative music, I was really leaning into things that were on the darker side,” she said. “Dealing with feelings like anger and loss. Songwriters being willing to dig down in the depths and really talk about how they feel, that’s something that’s always resonated with me.”

It still does; her most recent EP, Pensive Pop, contains reimagined covers of Tori Amos, Green Day and Joy Division.

Still, “Wild Turkey” took Kiah years to write. “It was dealing with such a tragic event in my life that I never really properly processed, and it wasn’t until I started going to therapy that I realized there’s some unresolved grief here,” she said. “It took so long to write simply because it took a while to unpack all those feelings.”

She stretched the process by constantly tweaking with the song’s mood. “In the beginning, I was trying to make it … more upbeat, like I wanted to juxtapose the subject matter with the music,” she said. “Sometimes you just have to get out of the way and let the song be what it’s gonna be. That’s what I had to do, [because] it’s a really sad song.”

Many fans have thanked her for the “Wild Turkey,” telling Kiah that it helped them process their own grief. She’s heartened by the response.

“If there’s anything I can leave behind in this world, it’s art that people were able to turn to when they felt alone or like they didn’t have anybody,” she said.

“It’s really an honor to have the opportunity to share that with people. … it means a lot.”

Kiah will unveil new songs at her show, the products of some recent cowriting efforts. “Empire of Love,” written with Sean McConnell, is “about my spiritual connection to the mountains where I live, in Appalachia,” while a co-write with Butch Walker is a “straight ahead rock song” called “Never Alone.”

She also collaborated with Avi Kaplan and Jeremy Lutito, who both worked on Kaplan’s LP Floating on a Dream, which Kiah called “probably my favorite album of last year.” Their writing session was inspired by the Old Gods of Appalachia podcast, which led her to read more horror and fantasy stories. “I’m returning to sounds of Appalachian folk music, still with a modern take and it’ll sound a little weird, like all my music sounds.”

An album she hopes to finish by year’s end will reflect this latest direction.

“There’s going to be some spooky songs on there and then some autobiographical songs and more of what I usually write about, but with some other things thrown in,” she said. “That’s the new stuff coming down — a spooky Appalachian vibe, with some rock and blues influences. It’ll be fun; I’m excited about it.”

Amythyst Kiah
When: Wednesday, Oct. 4, at 6 and 8:30 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $30 and up at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Amythyst Kiah. Photo by Sandlin Gaither

Rollins believes in the young

As a teenager Henry Rollins would show up with his pal Ian MacKaye on Sunday mornings at Yesterday & Today Records in Rockville, Maryland, ready to buy singles by The Buzzcocks, Stiff Little Fingers, The Adverts and other punk bands. Rollins always bought two to MacKaye’s one, having earned more money in his after-school job every week.

“Ian might do five hours of part-time minimum wage work, and I would do 20, just because I’m that guy,” Rollins said in a recent phone interview. “It was cool, the pain of having to do something dull and repetitive to hear seven minutes of freedom.”

His work ethic continues; Rollins often jokes about “putting the ‘punk’ in punctuality.” Though he’s stopped doing music, his schedule as a professional raconteur is packed and is surrounded by a myriad of other projects. During the pandemic, he wrote — his most recent book, Sic, came out in December — hosted an NPR radio show and did voice work for Netflix and Nickelodeon.

“It was challenging, but in a way, not a place I had not been to before,” he said. “Instead of getting all down in the mouth about it, I choose to approach all these things with a sense of humor and let’s see what happens…. I’d rather be the first in line for the new thing rather than dragging my feet.”

Rollins finally got back on the road. His current tour, dubbed Good to See You, is well into its second year. Usually his shows have a recent travel story as the centerpiece, but lockdown prevented that.

“Luckily or unluckily enough, crazy stuff happened in that time, where I was able to get interesting material,” he said, including a mentally unstable stalker from Finland, and the death of his divorced parents.

The show “is pretty well dialed into the front of my brain pan, but a lot of new stuff, as usually is the case, comes in,” Rollins continued. “It’s just basically a big stew pot, and as things develop, or people I know die, I can throw more things in…. By the end of the tour, the material is not necessarily nearly the same as what I started with.”

One constant, though, is an unwavering faith in America’s youth.

“A whole generation will eventually go to rest peacefully, and a younger one will come in its place,” he said. “Keep eating your Wheaties, you might live long enough to see someone like AOC become president…. I’ve never felt more confident or at least more ruggedly optimistic about the future and young people doing the right thing than I am right now.”

For one thing, the old order — “people like me, Joe Biden and Dick Cheney” — is rapidly fading away. “I’m not trying to hasten anyone’s demise, but physiological limits are what they are,” he said. “When the bug is dying, the most furious seconds are right before death. The legs are kicking frantically towards the sky; that’s the white power structure in the United States.”

Moreover, the futility of trying to change a red-hat-wearing senior citizen’s mind runs both ways.

“You’d be hard pressed to convince a 17-year-old who will be of voting age when the next presidential election rolls around that homophobia is a thing they want to accept and use in their lives,” he said. “Racism? There’s no such thing. One more George Floyd, and there’ll be some parts that will be very hard to put back together again. I don’t think the infrastructure is built for too much more turbulence.”

That said, Rollins is quick to point out that his show isn’t some scary TED talk.

“It’s my job to artfully connect some dots and make it kind of funny,” he said. “I make a point of not ending on a bummer, or if I do, offer five ways out of it. I learned that from, of all people, President Clinton. The Dimbleby speech is a great example; he goes, ‘climate change is bad, but here’s how you can start attacking it.’ Here’s the problem and five ways to innovate out of it.”

Hard times like the present require hard lessons, but Rollins tries to avoid pedantry.

“I used to go to this Quaker summer camp where they didn’t teach you not to steal, they just told you the story about when Timmy stole a quarter from his friend’s mom’s house and bought candy with it and the candy didn’t taste good,” he said. “I’d rather point at things rather than point them out.”
He also has no stomach for reliving his punk rock youth.

Rollins leaves no doubt that he’ll keep sharing his own point of view, night after night, for as long as he’s able.

“I’m not one of those who takes to the streets, because the people who are going to meet you have their opinion. They’re going to knock you out; it’s not for me,” he said. Instead, he tries to find common ground, while acknowledging that it’s often elusive. “I think if you can try to get an understanding of where someone’s coming from, you cannot be so immobilized by someone else’s opinion.”

“My job is to sling hash every night,” he said, “but it has to be of the highest nutritional quotient I can generate. I mean well, and I want to do good. I’m at least on second base, and maybe I can steal third and get lucky. This sounds like, ‘Oh, he’s such a nice guy,’ but I’m not all that nice all the time. I’m mainly angry and awake.”

Henry Rollins
When: Friday, Sept. 22, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: ccanh.com

Featured photo: Henry Rollins. Courtesy photo.

Shinedown returns with concept album

With the title track from 2022’s Planet Zero album, Shinedown brought its record-breaking total of No. 1 Billboard Modern Rock hits to 19. Later they topped the pop charts for a second time with the power ballad “A Symptom of Being Human.”

Their current tour stops at Gilford’s BankNH Pavilion on Sept. 19. Fans can expect favorites like “45,” “Enemies” and “Second Chance” mixed in with selections from their latest disc, a dystopian concept album narrated by a Big Brother-sounding robot. Drummer and founding member Barry Kerch discussed a variety of topics in a recent phone interview. You’re heading out on the road with Papa Roach and Spirit Box.

What are you looking forward to about it?

Any time we get to tour with our friends in Papa Roach it’s a great thing. We’ve done many tours over the years, and I consider them brothers of ours. It makes us work hard for our money because they put on such a high-energy show as well, and it becomes that friendly competition.

Planet Zero is a concept album … how are you bringing that to the stage?

It’s a very intensive visual show with lots of pyro and fire and video to give the fans what they paid for; it costs a lot of money to go to a show, so we want to give fans a hell of a show…. We also know that fans are there to hear our catalog of songs. We have a lot to choose from and to make a cool set list that satisfies all those out there.

What catalog songs do you enjoy playing the most, and what gets the crowd excited?

That’s a funny question. After 20 years of doing this in Shinedown and 19 No. 1 singles, it’s always hard to pick those songs. I think for me personally it goes audience to audience, night by night. Some nights you play ‘45’ and you connect with that one person in the crowd … you can hear him when the guitar comes in. That’s the song for that night.

Do you guys still get excited when you go into the studio to make a new album?

The excitement now is having a little bit of wisdom under your belt. You’ve learned from being in the studio many different times [how] to be more effective and as a musician maybe try different things, and you understand how things work better…. It’s easier now to go, ‘I know what this song means,’ and to play for the song instead of the ego. Planet Zero is about the anxiety of a world gone wrong through a particular set of eyes.

Who do you expect would be most reached and impacted by its message?

I would hope the masses that are angry at the bitter divisiveness in our culture right now. It’s sad; it saddens us. It was [written] at the height of that, but it hasn’t gone away, and it’s kind of a warning, a 1984-esque type of thing. If we keep going this way, we’re just gonna fall apart. We’ve got to accept each other with our differences and not always get along but to at least be able to find our humanity again, which I see being lost, especially through social media.

Slave to the algorithm.

Right…. I hate it. Having a 12-year-old daughter makes it even harder.

I know Brent Smith wrote it, but can you comment on ‘America Burning’ from Planet Zero? He says ‘hope’ is not a four-letter word in one song but ‘woke’ definitely is in that one. Are you concerned about how some fans might react?

We talk about these things. When ‘America Burning’ was sent to me in demo form and I heard those lyrics come out for the first time, we immediately had a band phone call. Like, ‘are we doing this?’ Because if we are, we gotta go full bore and support it, but it’s pretty on the nose…. It was a difficult thing, but now it’s probably one of my favorite songs on the record, because it is so just in your face and forceful.

Did you have any idea when it all began that you’d be here today?

I hoped and I didn’t know. To still be here and relevant and still making creative music — I pinch myself daily. And to still enjoy it and still get along with the guys, we still all ride the same bus together, we still eat dinners together, we still laugh together. I really do cherish it even on those days when it is a grind. We don’t rest on our laurels; we don’t look back or congratulate ourselves. If we’re lucky enough to get 20 No. 1’s or we get an award for something we go, ‘Oh, that’s cool. What’s next?’

What was your life like when you started this thing in 2001?

I had almost given up…. My brother lives here in Jacksonville, he’s a radio guy [and he helped me find] a job cleaning lakes for the state of Florida, spraying them to kill the feral weeds without killing the wildlife. It paid a teacher’s salary, if that, but I got it because I had a little bit of a chemistry background from my degree, [which] was enough…. I moved up here and that was it…. I was going to get married. I’d played in a bunch of bands in Orlando, did small tours, but nothing ever happened. My brother, being a radio guy, said, ‘Hey, I got this demo of this kid, he’s here in Jacksonville looking for a drummer. You should go try out.’ That was Brent, before Shinedown. So I went, and the ‘45’ on the first record was actually my audition recording.

Shinedown w/ Papa Roach and Spiritbox
When: Tuesday, Sept. 19, 6:30 p.m.
Where: BankNH Pavilion, 72 Meadowbrook Lane, Gilford
Tickets: $25 and up at livenation.com

Featured photo: Shinedown. Photo by Sanjay Parikh.

Jon Pousette-Dart Trio performing at the Rex

In the second half of the 1970s, the Pousette-Dart Band was one of Boston’s most ubiquitous acts. Songs like “Harder,” “Amnesia” and “What Can I Say” were staples on rock radio, and leader Jon Pousette-Dart’s connection with concert promoter Don Law and his Premier Talent company had them on the road constantly, appearing in concert halls, arenas and stadiums supporting some of the decade’s biggest names.

Opening for acts like James Taylor, Peter Frampton, Billy Joel and Journey got them a lot of exposure, though not every pairing worked; one harrowing 1976 night in Jersey City opening for Yes, loutish fans tossed fruit and other projectiles on the stage. Mostly, it was just fun playing in a world with few rules, where a folksy act like PDB could be a last-minute substitution for raunch rockers Black Oak Arkansas on a tour with the jazz prog Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“It was really kind of uncharted territory,” Pousette-Dart said in a recent phone interview. “It wasn’t defined and cut and dried as it is now. You would have this real cross-section of bills, and Don really threw us out on all kinds of things.”

The band broke up in 1981, reunited 10 years later for a series of shows and released a final “best of” album in 1994. As a solo artist, Pousette-Dart has released 10 records. The most recent is 2015’s Talk. When he performs in Manchester with guitarist Jim Chapdelaine and bass player Steve Roues, he’ll draw from the breadth of his career.

“I go through all of the songs that really have had legs, that people respond to,” he said. “It’s decades’ worth of material really, and I do like to throw in a few obscure covers that are kind of off the radar. I always like to find songs that I have an affinity toward … it runs the gamut from rock ’n’ roll, country, blues and folk, all kinds of influences; because that’s just the nature of who I am.”
There’s Little Feat’s “Roll Um Easy,” a Woody Guthrie song and “an old Louvin Brothers tune I picked up,” but as for the rest, Pousette-Dart is coy. “There’s a few more, but I’ll keep them in suspense.”

His trio is a time-tested unit. He’s known Roues since he was a kid — “we literally grew up and played in high school bands together,” he said. Pousette-Dart and Chapdelaine have collaborated for nearly 25 years, most of them based in Nashville, where the first PDB album was made in 1974.

The making of 1976’s Pousette-Dart Band, with Boston mime Trent Arterberry on the cover, is an interesting story that eventually led him to become a permanent resident of Music City.

Legendary label exec Al Coury signed the group to Capitol Records, then quit 10 days following a power struggle. The label’s new regime didn’t know what to do with them, so they were dispatched to work with producer Norbert Putnam in Nashville. They arrived at the same studio where Dobie Gray was just finishing up recording “Drift Away.”

“That made a big impression on me,” Pousette-Dart said. “It was the beginning of my relationship with Nashville, and through the years, I’ve made a lot of really close friends that I’m still attached to. … It’s been a very long-term dialogue and relationship for me since the ’70s.”

His most recent release harkens back to that decade. “I Remember You” was inspired by “In a Silent Way,” a song that Mahavishnu John McLaughlin played on as a member of the Miles Davis Group. It’s unlike anything Pousette-Dart has done before, inspired by his initial reaction to the Davis song.
“Certain records just stopped you in your tracks,” he said. “That was one of those.”

He brought an improvisational approach to the song’s delicate, pulsing melody, adding lyrics about being spellbound by a chance meeting, and his fear that it was fleeting. “I remember you like the first star I ever saw,” he sings. “I was so scared I would never know who you were.”

The essence of simultaneous discovery and creation lends a magical feeling to the song. “It felt like the way they came upon it and how it landed,” Pousette-Dart said, adding “usually, I tend to write things out and know where I’m going. That song was just really putting it out there.”

He continued, “I really enjoyed doing that piece … it’s nice when you find those connections to things that go back to that era [when] you first heard Hendrix, The Beatles, Muddy Waters. Certain things, you put them on, and you go, ‘Oh my God.’ You can remember exactly where you were standing when you first heard it. There are certain things in your life that are like that.”

Jon Pousette-Dart Trio
When: Thursday, Sept. 7, 6 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Jon Pousette -Dart. Courtesy photo.

Brooks Young counts his wins ahead of Thorogood tour

Most people who meet their musical idols are grateful if they get a bit of face time and an autograph, but Brooks Young aims higher. Beginning with B.B. King, whom he met as a teenager, the fiery blues guitarist has shared the stage with a still-growing list of performers that includes Bryan Adams, Los Lobos, The Wallflowers and Huey Lewis & The News.

Last year he received a personal invitation from Sammy Hagar’s management and flew out to the Midwest to play solo for stadium-sized crowds ahead of the Red Rocker’s band The Circle, a supergroup that includes Jason Bonham and Van Halen’s Michael Anthony.

“It was quite a rush … very surreal,” Young said by phone recently. “You walk out there holding a piece of wood with six strings on it and 20,000 people in front of you, what are you going to do?”

Young’s success has come from a combination of talent and tenacity.

“Keep pushing forward and the things that you love in life will come to fruition,” he said. “That’s all I care about — just stick with things.” His latest triumph is a tour with George Thorogood & the Destroyers that begins Oct. 21 in Pennsylvania and winds its way through the South, ending Nov. 10 in Mobile, Alabama.

Thorogood was also part of the Hagar run, and the two connected during the brief tour.

“We just became friendly with each other,” Young said. “It spurred George to ask me to come out on tour this fall.” The nearest show is in New York, a four-hour drive from his home town of Concord, but fans will have an opportunity to catch a full Brooks Young Band show at Penuche’s Ale House on Sept. 1.

“I’m really excited about that,” Young said. “I’m going to be out there on the road, in a bunch of places that I don’t know, with a bunch of people I don’t know around me, and I want to leave home feeling good.” He’ll also play a few solo gigs before heading out, including one at Foster’s Tavern in Alton Bay on Sept. 15.

His Penuche’s full band set will feature material from Supply Chain Blues, a solo blues album released last October. It has a mix of originals, like the title track and “Working Man,” along with several tasty covers — Freddie King’s “Going Down,” Howlin’ Wolf’s “Forty-Four,” “Ventilator Blues” from the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, and Buddy Guy’s “Five Long Years,” the musical twin of Derek & the Dominoes’ cover of “Have You Ever Loved a Woman.”

He’s working on a follow-up to the record, which garnered a burst of attention when it came out. For a while, Supply Chain Blues was No. 1 on the iTunes blues charts, sitting atop Buddy Guy. “The day I woke up and saw that, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Young said. “I pinched myself and went, ‘I’m sorry, Buddy, it won’t be very long; maybe a week or two.’”

Now 41, Young is no less giddy than when he was starting out and meeting Ben Folds in the hall of a Manchester hotel elevator was a cool moment. These days there are bigger achievements, like recording Eric Clapton’s song “Promises” with his daughter Ruth and attending Clapton’s Boston Garden show courtesy of the legendary guitarist’s management.

“I’m so thankful that after all these years this guy from New Hampshire that’s not even close to all these other folks is part of that circle,” he said. “Guitar icons like B.B. King and Robert Cray and Jimmy Vaughn and Eric Clapton, playing with them, or going out and hanging out with them, was a dream of mine since I was a kid growing up in Concord, and I decided this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to stick with it until the day it doesn’t work; it still gets better every year.”

Brooks Young Band
When: Friday, Sept. 1, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: brooksyoung.com

Featured photo: Brooks Young. Courtesy photo.