Category: Nightlife

Marshall Crenshaw rocks The Rex

By Michael Witthaus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured photo: Marshall Crenshaw. Courtesy photo.

An ’80s revival with Aquanett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured photo: Aquanett. Courtesy photo.

Billy Wylder rises to the moment

“Just hang on to the band,” Pete Townshend sang back when. “You can dance while your knowledge is growing.”

Decades later, this spirit is exuded by the band Billy Wylder and its leader Avi Salloway. Their songs are infectious, full of deep grooves, spirit and kinetic musicianship. At the same time, they evoke more purposeful movement. Salloway’s words inspire souls to stir as their bodies dance, delivering a fierce-hearted call to change.

A singer, songwriter and guitarist, Salloway honed his passion on the front lines of many world crisis points. He brings his activism to songs like “Painter,” which warns against the lure of social media (“We see the world scroll on by / are we demand or supply?”) and offers a call to battle on “Whatcha Looking For,” the title track of the band’s 2021 EP.

“With all this loss and despair, the struggle of the pandemic and the extremes of injustice, our climate crisis, all of these things, it’s a moment to zoom out a bit and really home in on what are we looking for,” he said in a recent phone interview. “What is it that we value? What are our ideals?”

He bemoans the “screen space mindset” and strives through music to “help people break out of this headspace, into their bodies, and reconnect with each other.” In “Santiago,” a slow tango with a nod to his personal hero Leonard Cohen, Salloway dives into the online darkness and declares, “we’re more like our enemies than we believed before.”

The observation comes with an admonition. “Finding that common ground is essential to building any kind of unity and coming together, which I think we’re desperately in need of right now,” Salloway said. “It takes a lot of willpower and creative imagination [but] I feel like people inherently are good. Yet the systems that are tying us together aren’t; they’re not serving their interests, or the eight million species that exist on this planet.”

Fortunately, rather than put their message in a dire toned musical box, Salloway and his mates — polymath Rob Flax and a rhythm section of Krista Speroni on bass and drummer Zamar Odongo — blast it from the cosmos. Salloway and Flax’s frenetic interplay on “Whatcha Looking For” suggests a meeting of the minds between Beck and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Flax, playing guitar, violin and keys, is “on a really cool personal exploration of soundscapes,” explained Salloway. “What he’s been able to do with the violin is groundbreaking … through different pedals, soundscapes, and also synthesizers; it’s been really fun to explore that together.”

Mid-decade, Salloway toured with Bombino, a guitarist often called “Hendrix of the Sahara.” The experience has followed him since. “I think one element that carries over is the force, and the deep, deep groove that was so central to the hypnotic music I played with Bombino, and at the same time, how heavy and dynamic it can be,” he said.

Salloway’s commitment to using art as a social tool continues to drive him.

“I’m trying to collaborate and be part of a revolution of transformation in how we exist and connect,” he said. “Organizing how we really bring more understanding with the way we live our lives, and more joy, and love and equality.”

The band just released “Flower To The Sun,” an upbeat, positive song that’s in many ways opposite to the often somber Whatcha Looking For. Appropriately, it came out as summer began in late June. It’s the first song from a forthcoming album, “release date TBD, but in the next five months,” Salloway said.

In the meantime, Billy Wylder has a busy schedule, a pleasing condition for Salloway.

“I believe in the power of humanity … being able to bring people together under one roof to experience something physical and emotional through musical performance,” he said. “I feel one of my main roles as a musician is to help people break out of this headspace and into their bodies, reconnecting with each other on a person-to-person level.”

Salloway reinforced his thought by quoting an old folk song made popular by the Grateful Dead. “The sun will shine on our back door someday,” he said, “but we have to show up to make that happen. I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Billy Wylder
When: Friday, Sept. 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Bank of NH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $18 at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Billy Wylder. Courtesy photo.

RoC The Range offers full palette of jam acts

It’s been a long, strange trip for The Range, a Mason driving range, restaurant, and tiki bar that began offering live music outdoors just over a decade ago. The first foray lasted until 2014, when legal challenges shut it down for four years. In 2018 The Range rocked again with a show headlined by Badfish, Roots of Creation and a few area bands, and it has kept going since. With upgrades to the stage and sound, it bills itself as “the greatest live music venue you’ve never heard of in New Hampshire.”

Brett Wilson recalled his group Roots of Creation being the first to play there in 2011. The southern New Hampshire jam band called the event RoC the Range, a name that’s stuck through subsequent years and is back for an extended two-day run, on Friday, Aug. 26, and Saturday, Aug. 27. RoC will play three sets, one drawing from its Dead-inspired Grateful Dub records, and two of original music.

“When we first played the driving range, there was no stage, it was under a tiny little tent,” Wilson said by phone recently. “The next year, they bought a bigger tent.”

Badfish will headline Friday night, with RoC providing the lead-in and promising a full-length set of originals. “Like an hour and half, not a little opening set, because they’re our friends, and they’re cool letting us do that,” Wilson said, adding, “it’s kind of our branded event, but they’re closing it out.”

Saturday will feature a hybrid reggae/jam set, music that has them frequently called Bradley Nowell and Jerry Garcia’s love child, followed by another all-original performance. RoC recently signed with Nugs.net, a concert streaming site, and Wilson is keen to show their variety.

“I think a lot of the jam-band people don’t really know how much we jam and how we try not to repeat songs,” he said. “I was like, ‘We should go there and do three sets with no repeats.’ We have enough material.”

The RoC lineup for the festival includes Wilson and longtime members Tal Pearson on keyboards, and sax player/vocalist Andrew Riordan. Brendan Dillon is on drums and the newest addition is Mathew James, a 16-year-old bassist the group found on Instagram covering their videos. “He knows like almost every single one of our songs better than us,” Wilson said, “and his parents are freaking awesome, they’re Deadheads and supper supportive.”

When Badfish follows with its Sublime tribute, it’s likely Wilson will be back on stage. “They always invite me to jam,” he said. All of the weekend’s performers have more than a musical connection to the band, and that’s the point. Most of the tracks on last year’s Dub Free or Die, Vol. 1 featured guest appearances.

“At this point, I consider the band to be a collective,” Wilson said in an interview last year. Boston reggae star Mighty Mystic, who performs Saturday, appeared on four tracks, and Twiddle’s Mihali, also on the second day’s bill, was on “Arabia,” an instrumental inspired by Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin.

So jamming is inevitable, “but let’s have something where it makes sense,” Wilson said. “I look up to my friends Slightly Stoopid; when I saw them in Boston, they brought up this rapper from Boston, Ed OG, that nobody knows about in the reggae rock scene, and Charlie Tuna from Jurassic 5 is on tour with them, and all the bands are jamming with each other. I like that kind of environment, when spontaneous things will happen that are just here and now to experience.”

Family friend Caylin Costello will open both nights on the side stage, and Wilson is excited the and up-and-coming singer-songwriter is included. “She’s another person that we can bring up and collaborate with in the moment,” he said, “It’s cool, like, she’s been coming to see us since she was a kid, so it’s awesome to see her.”

RoC The Range
When: Friday, Aug. 26, and Saturday, Aug. 27, 6 p.m.
Where: Marty’s Driving Range, 96 Old Turnpike Road, Mason
Tickets: $25 single-day, $60 two-day, $150 VIP at etix.com

Featured photo: Roots of Creation.

Bluegrass with Bella White in Portsmouth

It’s understandable to mistake Bella White’s debut album, Just Like Leaving, for a mid-20th-century episode of Louisiana Hayride. With its layers of honey, hardscrabble and harmony, it’s a throwback that’s only missing the crackle and hiss of a big table radio.

The bigger surprise is it’s coming from a Canadian urbanite who was barely 20 years old when she recorded it at a rustic studio in the Green Mountains. Exposed to bluegrass at an early age by a touring musician father, Bella White became a natural at the genre, and her talent continues to grow.

She deftly draws from the hill country music that captivated her as a youngster, while staying aware of the dichotomy of it and her Calgary, Alberta, upbringing. “I was growing up going to public school in the city, taking the C train … this very urban kind of lifestyle,” White said by phone recently. “Then singing all of these really troublesome, ‘woe is me’ songs; I always found it really interesting.”

That said, she can evoke the pain of her own lived experience. “Broke (When I Realized)” recalls the dissolution of her parents’ marriage when she was a child. It’s devastating, as she recounts overhearing her father deliver the news and thinking it’s a bad dream, only to have a dawning awareness: “I’d yet to fall asleep.”

White can also express romantic longing with startling maturity. “Now I’ve chased your love ’cause I thought it might feel woolen/like a dram on a damn cold winter’s night,” she sings on Just Like Leaving’s title track. The line, oft-quoted by admiring writers and critics, would be at home on an early Joni Mitchell album.

The likening delights White. “That means a lot, she’s my favorite,” she said, adding, “we’re both from the Prairies.”

The characters in many of White’s songs are on the move, a state that often mirrors her life. At 19, she came to Boston after hearing about the city’s roots scene. “I kind of just took a leap of faith,” she said. Settling into a dorm-like, musician-filled dwelling called Brighton House, she gained a Berklee education by osmosis, auditing the music college’s American Roots class and jamming whenever she could.

Better still was hanging out with many others who were close to her in age. “I wasn’t really exposed to that growing up; I felt like I was always the youngest person at the jam,” White said. “I started to meet people through going to bluegrass festivals who went to Berklee…. I thought, how funny that there’s this mecca for old-time bluegrass and country music in Boston, of all places.”

She hung around New England long enough to make her first serious record — a studio recording done in her teens remains unreleased — at the urging of old home country friend Patrick M’Gonigle. The multi-instrumentalist, known for his time in the Lonely Heartstring Band, produced, and led her to Guilford Sound, a facility built into a southern Vermont hill.

Fortune smiled when they entered the studio just as lockdown began in mid-March 2020. “We were in this little box in the woods, kind of oblivious to what’s going on,” she said. “It created this really interesting dynamic … the best quarantine I could have ever asked for. Definitely some divine intervention or something.”

White then decamped to Nashville, keeping a home base there while touring a lot. She’s opened for Sierra Ferrell, Molly Tuttle and others, while becoming a steady presence on the festival scene. One day after her show at Portsmouth’s newly renovated Music Hall Lounge, she’ll be at the Green Mountain Bluegrass Festival in Manchester, Vermont.

Lately she’s been “kind of just quietly” staying in Victoria, British Columbia. “I’ve lived in Nashville kind of on and off for the past three years or so, but have been mostly in Victoria these days,” she said.

Ahead of a run that continues through mid-September, White released a new single. “The Way I Oughta Go” finds her voice with a Lydia Loveless edge as she rambles from city to city. It’s part of an upcoming album done with Jonathan Wilson, a producer who’s worked with Father John Misty, Billy Strings and White’s friend Erin Rae, among others.

A big fan of the country music history podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones, White sees herself evolving beyond her bluegrass roots into something a bit more raucous.

“In the fall, I plan on having some electric guitar and maybe some pedal steel coming into the mix,” she said. “There are so many other elements of country music that are not acoustic, that are electric … that’s a huge part of the history as well. It’s really fun to broaden your horizon and play with it all, you know?”

Bella White
When: Saturday, Aug. 20, 8 p.m.
Where: The Music Hall Lounge, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth
Tickets: $15 advance, $17 day of show, $25 premium seating at themusichall.org

Featured photo: Bella White. Photo Credit Morgan-Mason

Greg Fitzsimmons brings his comedy to Manchester

It was inevitable that Greg Fitzsimmons would find his way into comedy. His father was a revered New York City radio host who knew guys like Henny Youngman and emceed Friars Club roasts. “It was sort of the family business…. It’s like when your father’s a doctor, you think, ‘OK, Dad did that, I could do it,’” Fitzsimmons said by phone recently.

That prediction has been borne out by a career lasting over 30 years. He’s won accolades for his writing skills, including four daytime Emmys working on the Ellen DeGeneres show, and his standup, which comes to Manchester for two shows on Aug. 12 and Aug. 13. However, Fitzsimmons’s first foray into comedy happened in Boston, not the Big Apple.

In the late ’80s, while attending BU, he tested the waters at places like Nick’s Comedy Stop, one among a rich crop of new comics.

“Joe Rogan and I started at the exact same time,” he said. “We spent a lot of time in cars together, going to gigs all over New England. Dane Cook, David Cross, Marc Maron, Louis C.K., Bill Burr, Patrice O’Neal…. Those were all the guys that were around when I was coming up. It was just crazy that there was this much talent.”

One luxury they shared during that time was access, even if there were plenty of what Fitzsimmons termed “hell gigs … true saloon comedy where it was never assumed that the comedian was the funniest one in the room” — a hard but valuable proving ground. Today’s young comics are encountering a different terrain.

“It’s so competitive at the entry level, trying to get seen and get stage time,” Fitzsimmons said. “I was fortunate enough to make a living when I wasn’t even very funny just because there was a ton of rooms and they needed warm bodies. Because of that, I was able to log my 10,000 hours and get to a more proficient place.”

Fitzsimmons was one of the first comics to launch a podcast, in the mid-2000s. It grew out of a radio show Howard Stern gave him for his Howard 101 channel. “I would get these really great guests, like Bill Burr, Adam Carolla, Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, and then it would be over so fast,” he said. “So we’d continue with the same guest for another hour.”

The Fitzdog Radio podcast marks its 1,000th episode in a few weeks. Along with Ellen, he’s also written for HBO’s slice-of-standup-life series Crashing, The Man Show, Politically Incorrect and Lucky Louie. The latter was his favorite. “I just had so much respect for Louis [C.K.],” he said. “We started in Boston together, we’ve always lived in the same city, and we have kids that are the same age. We’d drive to work together and just talk about ideas … very organic, I didn’t have to imagine anything. We just had to tell stories from our life.”

An unconventional show with a dour disposition, Lucky Louie only lasted one season, though HBO ordered a second one that wasn’t made. “I think the show was aesthetically unappealing … done to look like The Honeymooners,” Fitzsimmons said. “With the drabness of the characters, it became something people [who] watch sitcoms weren’t used to. They wanted a bunch of people in a bright coffee shop.”

The comic’s onstage act doesn’t suffer similarly. Fitzsimmons is quick and instinctive, adept at crowd work and able to mine his own life for comedy gold. Lately, as he noted in a recent Fitzdog Radio episode, he’s hitting on all cylinders.

“I’m very funny right now; it goes in waves,” he said. As to why, “it’s all about being in the moment. … There are times where you’re caught up in your thoughts and second-guessing, trying too hard, worrying about whatever you’re doing wrong. Then there are times you just get in the pocket … it’s money. Even the same jokes you’ve been doing for a long time have new life in them for some reason.”

If it sounds easy, it’s not, he continued, offering advice to aspirants: “Comedy is a game of inches; each joke lives and dies on a turn of a phrase, losing a word or adding a little tag line,” he said. It starts with finding a voice. “Some people are storytellers and it doesn’t hinge on the words as much. But life for most comics really is about rolling up your sleeves, really honing the material. Because people are seeing a lot of comedy; they know the difference. They can feel it when somebody has put in the work.”

Greg Fitzsimmons
When: Friday, Aug. 12, 8:30 p.m. and Saturday, Aug. 13, 9 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 707 Huse Road, Manchester
Tickets: $30 at chunkys.com

Featured photo: Greg Fitzsimmons. Courtesy photo.