Category: Nightlife

The good parts of a not great year, and what’s (maybe, possibly) ahead

The year 2020 began well enough, as the ball dropped on a retro-themed party at Bank of NH Stage in Concord and a barefoot Adam Ezra once again lit up Tupelo Music Hall, an annual tradition. Headliners Comedy Club offered laughter up and down the state.

The newly opened Rex Theatre in Manchester slated a wide range of shows in its upcoming calendar; the year’s first was E Street Band saxophone player Jake Clemons. Town Meeting, one of the brightest lights in the region’s Americana scene, debuted a new album at The Rex in early February.

March looked to be even better, with St. Patrick’s Day events scheduled at multiple venues throughout the month. Former Celtic Woman fiddler Máiréad Nesbitt’s appearance at Saint Anselm’s Dana Center on March 14 was among the most eagerly anticipated, but she was interrupted by a Friday the 13^th that confirmed every horror story concocted about the date — especially for live entertainment.

Tupelo CEO Scott Hayward put it succinctly from the empty stage of his venue that night.

“I boarded a plane to come home from vacation, and arrived to find my industry gone,” he said at the time.

The pandemic has consumed every aspect of life, beginning that weekend.

Through it all, however, there have been more than a few so-called Covid silver linings. Foremost among them was the rise of livestreaming. Concord native Dan Zanes launched a daily Social Isolation Song Series with his wife Claudia, a kid-centric effort. Lucas Gallo’s Local Music Quarantine Video Challenge invited musicians to record themselves at home.

There were many, many more, and the best part was hearing original songs from performers best known for playing covers in restaurants and bars. It was a gift that kept giving. When places began reopening in May, patrons were more receptive to local musicians, who were at that point the only game in town. It became a cultural renaissance, born from crisis.

Venues presenting national acts faced a bigger challenge. They responded ingeniously, with drive-in shows at Tupelo — the effort received national press — and at the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey, which kicked off its effort with rock tribute act Echoes of Floyd and offered a massive capacity of 750 cars.

Miraculously, the weather was mostly kind at these and other pop-up events throughout the region. Honking horns took the place of applause from early spring to late summer. The Music Hall booked shows into the streets of downtown Portsmouth, while Concord’s Capitol Center for the Arts took over Fletcher-Murphy Park, and Manchester’s Palace Theatre ran a series of summer events at Delta Dental Stadium, including one starring the Beatles-esque Weaklings.

Plenty of restaurants added tents and used live music as a lure for business. Local promoter Paul Costley saw his bookings spike as a result. “In normal times, I usually have 60 to 80 events a week,” Costley said in September. “I was up to 135.”

Indoor venues offered socially distanced shows, with comedians like Juston McKinney leading the charge by playing multiple sets to reduced crowds. Before returning to the stage, McKinney was playing to a crowd of family members and the ether. “I never thought I would look forward to having four people in an audience so much in my life,” McKinney told the Hippo in June for a Comedy After Covid story. “I would kill for four people right now.”

With new movie releases experiencing a drought, Chunky’s Cinema & Pub welcomed Rob Steen’s comedy acts.

Economically, it can’t sustain.

“Being open is one thing and being able to stay open is another thing,” Hayward said in mid-autumn. “If we don’t have the capacity to do the shows we normally do, it doesn’t work. A good show for us is 500 people. … A big show for a small club is 60 people … but I can’t live on 60 people.”

There’s hope on the horizon. Congress included $15 billion in recently passed legislation to help independent venues, theaters and talent agencies weather the crisis, prodded by the live music industry’s Save Our Stages effort. Though most regional venues are currently closed, live shows are scheduled to resume mid-winter at some of them. A few venues are sticking with more vague reopening plans. Tupelo, for example, sent out an update at the end of November saying that challenges with lower capacity shows in 2020 and shows scheduled for 2021 “are causing all sorts of problems for the artists, patrons and venue,” and it is “all but guaranteed that we will be closed through February of 2021 at least.”

Meanwhile, is still scheduled at Portsmouth’s Music Hall on Feb. 13, along with Vapors of Morphine Feb. 19 and Livingston Taylor Feb. 20. The Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, which announced just before Christmas that it was extending its “pause” and canceling all live shows through the end of February, has comic Juston McKinney set for March 28, followed the next night by Celtic Woman Celebration.

Until then, January is Virtual Month at Manchester’s Palace Theatre, with three Thursday shows: a Carole King tribute on the 8th, local rocker Brooks Young on the 15th and Piano Men which offers classic songs from Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Elton John and others, on the 22nd. Actor and musician Jeff Daniels streams an acoustic concert on Jan. 12, with a Q&A following.

Featured photo: A teddy bear audience at Headliner’s Comedy Club helped facilitate social distancing. Courtesy photo.

Three comedy shows celebrate New Year’s Eve

Most years Headliners Comedy Club is a many-headed monster on New Year’s Eve, with shows all over New England. 2020, however, is anything but normal. Maine has a 9 p.m. curfew, and performances are banned in Massachusetts. New Hampshire is still on, though it’s scaling back to three socially distanced affairs at different Chunky’s Cinema Pubs.

Only one event, in Manchester, includes a midnight countdown.

Amy Tee, among a trio of comics appearing in Pelham, is glad for a chance to perform.

“I’m gonna look at the glass half full,” she said in a recent phone interview, “just embrace it, be appreciative of the people that are coming out to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and put 2020 behind us. I’m looking forward.”

Comedy began as a bucket list item for Tee over a decade ago, “something I’d always wanted to do since watching Stand Up Spotlight on VH1,” and grew quickly from there. “That very first time on stage I felt it in my soul … that’s what I was supposed to be doing.”

Tee’s career has two parts; for the last 10 years, she’s been sober. Soon after quitting drinking, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She found the news liberating and wove it into her act.

“By diminishing the stigma of what mental health looks like, I had an opportunity to show people that it looks very different from what people think,” she said. “It was also cathartic. … I created a lot of damage in my earlier years [and] confessing and talking about it felt almost like amends.”

This calling extended beyond the stage, becoming a second career for Tee with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, where she works with dual diagnosis patients.

“I do motivational speaking on behalf of mental health and substance abuse,” she said. “So that was kind of the trajectory. It changed drastically, and actually gave it more passion and purpose.”

Her act is honest and revealing, yes — but also hilarious. Dressed in a tie and suit jacket, she begins most shows by poking fun at her androgynous appearance.

“You’re probably wondering what bathroom I’m gonna use,” she said. “It’ll be the one with the shortest line, I guarantee you that.”

She’ll riff on married life — and being openly gay in her act has never been a big issue for Tee.

“Though in the last four years, I’ve had this sinking feeling of things being mean,” she said. “I’m able to make people feel comfortable about gay people on stage because I joke about it in a stereotypical way. Also, me being married is not a lot different than other people being married. It just happens to be two women. We still have the same challenges.”

Although it’s unclear how long live performances will continue, Tee prefers even smaller crowds to the Zoom shows she did during lockdown. Ever the optimist, she managed to find a bright side to those.

“I had no commute, I was dressed from the waist up, and nobody knew if I was wearing a bra or not. … I almost enjoyed it sometimes,” she said.

Tee credits Headliners CEO Rob Steen for keeping the scene alive.

“With the challenges he’s had, he’s done a really good job … letting us perform, whether it’s been outside this summer, or now as we’ve moved into some of the indoor venues,” she said. “Comedy is my passion and where I get my joy — I need it for my mental health. So it’s been nice to still be able to perform amongst the challenges. The audiences that are coming out are appreciative, and they also need it for their mental health and a night out.”

Amy Tee, Jim Colliton, Jason Merrill
When: Thursday, Dec 31, 8 p.m.
Where: Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 150 Bridge St., Pelham
Tickets: $30 at chunkys.com
Also: Drew Dunn, Jody Sloane, Paul Landwehr at Chunky’s Manchester – 7 and 10 p.m. (w/ Dueling Pianos & Ball Drop)
Kyle Crawford, Matt Barry, Tim Mckeever at Chunky’s Nashua – 8 p.m.

Featured photo: Amy Tee. Courtesy photo.

Dan Blakeslee celebrates Christmas LP with show

It takes real Grinch-iness to resist the ebullient charms of Christmasland Jubilee, the new holiday album from Dan Blakeslee. From the Dixieland-themed opener “Mister Candy Cane” and its story of a “boogie woogie Santa Claus … bouncin’ on the keys, makin’ you believe” to his sincere reading of the disc-closing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” it’s irresistible, one of the best in the genre to come out of New England.

Blakeslee celebrates the release with an afternoon outdoor show at Stone Church in Newmarket on Dec. 19, backed by his three-piece band and plenty of portable heaters. Senie Hunt will open.

A big reason the new record works so well is the way Blakeslee created it. In mid-December 2019, the Seacoast-born and -raised singer-songwriter decided he’d waited long enough to unleash his inner Bing Crosby — and he wanted to do it during the season. Dover producer Chris Chase offered him five hours of time at his Noise Floor studio in the days before Christmas, and the project was set in motion.

“I came in the studio, and I decorated the place like crazy,” Blakeslee said in a recent phone interview. “I feel it reflects in the audio somehow; I get inspired looking at the stuff, it just makes me happy. Then my band came in and we recorded … throughout the winter, while there was still snow on the ground.”

Backed by his longtime group The Calabash Club they produced an ebullient mix of classics and originals that dated back to when Blakeslee began making Christmas songs as presents for his family. One of the first was “We Three Kings” — his version takes the line about “westward leading” musically to heart, giving the song a gentle twang.

The musicianship is stellar; keyboard player Mike Effenberger is especially good, and the vintage rhythm team of bassist Nick Phaneuf and drummer Jim Rudolf is in the pocket throughout. A guest list including Soggy Po’ Boys horn players Chris and Eric Klaxton, New Hampshire pedal steel legend Bruce Derr and string players Tim Moore and Dave Talmadge — among others — provided stellar support.

“I love the guys in my band,” Blakeslee said. “I’ve seen them in so many different musical acts through the years and I’m still blown away whenever I see them play. And whenever I play with them, I feel like I’m in awe the whole time. … I can’t focus sometimes on playing the songs.”

Blakeslee’s timing in making the record was ideal in more ways than his good luck having a winter wonderland to work in.

“We had two things left to record when the pandemic came,” he said. Thus, Derr’s contribution was done in his home studio, and backing vocalists emailed their tracks. “We got most of it, though.”

Other standouts include the whimsical originals “To Be An Elf” and “The Somerville Lights” — the latter provides a nice counterpart to “Silver Bells,” which also appears. The rollicking “Reindeer Boogie” is a nugget Blakeslee unearthed from a Hank Snow Christmas album made in the 1960s.

“Over the past two years I’ve been obsessed with that song,” he said, noting that an alternate take was his template. “It has such grit to it. … I was literally playing it every single day throughout the holiday season.”

A bonus track, “Let’s Start Again” is one of the record’s most endearing. It’s an optimistic ode to better angels, and though it’s over a decade old it fits perfectly with the times.

“Awaken with hope and forgiveness, surprise us with news that is good,” Blakeslee sings. “Together let’s move towards a difference, whether you work in policy or wood.”

The song was born after a painful breakup found him wandering around Somerville on New Year’s Eve in 2009. He ended up at the Lizard Lounge, a Somerville music hub where Tim Gearan was appearing.

“Every time he takes the stage it’s like it’s New Year’s Eve. He just has this delivery on all his songs,” Blakeslee said of Gearan.

Blakeslee taped the New Year’s countdown on a recorder he carried in his pocket.

“It was the most moving thing,” he said. “Sometimes you can listen to a song for two minutes and have your outlook changed; that’s what happened at that show. Then I walked outside and this girl shouts out, ‘2010, let’s start again!’ It just kinda happened. She gave me a hug, and I wrote the song that night.”

Dan Blakeslee & the Calabash Club Christmas Show
When: Saturday, Dec. 19, 1 p.m.
Where: Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket
Tickets: $60/table of 4, $90/table of 6

Featured photo: Dan Blakeslee and personally bedazzled stockings done for his crowdfunders. Courtesy photo.

Will Hatch celebrates new EP with release show

While the making of Will Hatch’s first full-length album For You might be likened to a marathon, his new EP Downtown was more of a sprint. With extensive studio time and a long back and forth between Hatch and producer Immanuel the Liberator, he spent over two years finishing the 2018 disc.

This time around, it took just one day.

Will Hatch & Co. — the singer-songwriter, guitarist Taylor Pearson, mandolin player Brian Peasley and a rhythm section of drummer Eric Ober and bassist Jon Cheney — rolled into Cambridge’s Bridge Sound & Stage in mid-October and knocked out Downtown’s six songs with alacrity.

Financial necessity was one reason for the quick turnaround. Money for studio time came from a single summer show, as the pandemic battered the music business. More than that, the band was primed.

“We’ve been playing together for the past few years. … The lineup’s solidified, we’ve become a tighter unit,” Hatch said in a recent phone interview. “Plus, nobody’s playing a lot of gigs this year so we were just practicing over the summer.”

The approach that day — polish a track, do the take and move on to the next effort — worked perfectly and produced a spirited, capable effort.

“We just wanted to do everything live and reflect what this band sounds like,” Hatch said, “rather than getting into a whole, you know, big studio creation.”

The title cut, an upbeat country rocker about relationship breakdown, illustrates the group’s chemistry, while providing a template for the album, Hatch said.

“While my solo performances are more melancholic, the band thrives on raucous crowds and barroom antics,” he said. “Late-night Concord is a theme that runs throughout the tracks.”

Another high-energy highlight is a cover of “They’re Red Hot (Hot Tamales)” — perhaps the most rollicking song in blues legend Robert Johnson’s catalog. Hatch calls it one of his favorites on the new record.

“We’ve been playing it a long time and it’s not an easy one, so I was pretty proud that we pulled that off,” he said. “It’s a fun song with a lot of weird changes and I was happy we were able to do that.”

The EP’s other cover is “Waterbound,” a traditional folk song. The band also enjoyed laying down the last track of the day, “Beer Bottle Blues.”

“It has electric guitars on it, so it’s a little more rock,” he said. “I think we were all happy with how that one came out; it’s real clean and nice.”

The anchor of Downtown is the ballad “Kid From Holden” is based on a real tragedy, the 2015 drowning death of Plymouth State University student Jake Nawn. Hatch describes friends leaving books by Nawn’s favorite writers with notes inserted in them to try and lure him out of the woods, and the frantic desperation of his family as the search dragged on. It’s a spellbinding story song.

“How many times did I pass him? / I never will know,” sings Hatch of Nawn, an aspiring writer beloved by classmates. “A poet he lived and a poet he died, but the river just came and it went.”

Hatch spoke of his need to “keep retelling stories about local tragedies and keep them alive through folk music.”

A release show at Penuche’s Ale House will have a smaller, socially distanced crowd. With the recent spike in cases, it’s still scheduled to happen.

“I don’t want to jinx anything, because everything is getting canceled,” Hatch said. “We’re just happy to have the opportunity to play out , even if it’s a small crowd. It’s just still nice for us to keep playing.”

Will Hatch & Co.
When: Saturday, Dec. 12, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 6 Pleasant St., Concord
More: willhatchmusic.com

Featured photo: Will Hatch & Co. Courtesy photo.

Dual platform comedy show

On more than one level, Mike Koutrobis knows the strange reality of entertainment in the Covid era. Most Sundays he’s on the sidelines of New England Patriots home games, doing various jobs, from camera assistant to holding a sound dish, for whatever network is broadcasting the game. Right now, the stands are largely empty as fans watch the action safely from home.

“They pump in crowd noise. It’s an illusion,” he said. “It’s weird, but amazing to be there.”

The veteran comedian found a similarly novel way to share his act. For an upcoming show at Zinger’s in Milford, he’ll share the stage with Kelly MacFarland, as a live audience of a dozen or more people watches along with a virtual crowd. The latter will face Koutrobis from two giant flat screens in the back of the room.

“I’m literally looking at the Zoom crowds as if they’re in the audience,” he said, likening the experience to watching the opening credits of The Brady Bunch. Hecklers aren’t a problem, but crowd work isn’t impossible. “You can go, ‘Hey, left corner with a weird couch.’ … You can use it in your act, and it feels like you’re interacting with them.”

How to talk about the virus is “a million-dollar question,” he said. Comics are obliged to say something about it, but the truth is people come to comedy shows to escape that. It’s a high-wire act.

“I think the big phrase is making people feel OK that they’re not the only ones going through it — here’s how to think about it in another way,” he said.

Still, the pandemic gave Koutrobis plenty of new material.

“One of my first jokes is not even a joke,” he said. “I said, people lost a lot — jobs, family and friends. I’ve lost something very dear to my heart, and that’s the ability to button my pants since April.”

On the other hand, Koutrobis’s act has always focused on relationships, evolving from dating to marriage and parenthood. The quarantine simply added another wrinkle.

“I’m 50 years old with an 18-month-old kid, and I’m stuck in the house, so I’ve got a lot of that to go off,” he said. “I don’t care how much you love somebody, if you’re stuck in the same place, you gotta learn to adjust. So I have jokes showing my frustration but also how we’re making it work.”

Koutrobis was one of the first comics to work after quarantine ended in May, playing the kickoff drive-in show at Tupelo Music Hall in Derry, an experience he described as “disconnected. … I didn’t feel the flow like I usually do when I’m doing it every weekend.”

Later, shows got more comfortable.

“I was able to hook up with Amherst Country Club, and I found a couple of breweries,” he said. “People brought lawn chairs and I set up a portable stage; that way, people can sit as far away as possible. It started becoming … I’ll never say normal, but almost normal. We had enough people in the room or in the grass to at least feel like a crowd was there.”

He’s had his share of surreal moments, however, like one show done at a Milford retirement home as a favor.

“It really was only like 12 people, all sitting in a huge room, 15 feet away from each other,” he said. “I’m at the front on the stage, but because of the place I was in I had to wear my mask. So I’m telling jokes to senior citizens who can barely hear in the first place, with a muffled mask on.”

That’s not to say Koutrobis wouldn’t do it again.

“These are the things we’ve had to adjust to,” he said. “It’s a lot, but I can’t not perform. So I kind of take what I can.”

Mike Koutrobis & Kelly MacFarland
When: Friday, Dec. 4, 8 p.m.
Where: Zinger’s, 29 Mont Vernon St., Milford
Tickets: Live $20 and Zoom $10 at tinyurl.com/yy8sjsdn

Featured photo: Mike Koutrobis. Courtesy photo.

Americana band Raid the Larder performs

Raid the Larder perfectly illustrates the intersectionality of Concord’s music scene. At its core are Taylor Pearson and Brian Peasley, two friends who started playing punk rock together 10 years ago in high school. When Pearson introduced Peasley to the Grateful Dead and its all-acoustic cousin Old & In the Way, he picked up a mandolin and the two morphed into a younger version of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

They called themselves Hometown Eulogy. The moniker came from a song by Tristan Omand, a local rocker turned folkie who inspired their rustic turn.

“His albums seem to come to me in certain places in my life where I need it the most,” Peasley said in a recent phone interview. “Me and Taylor were really loving that first album of his. We’re like, ‘Hometown Eulogy just sounds like a badass name.’”

A couple of years ago Peasley heard Ryan Nicholson playing with a band called Oddfellows Way at a craft beer festival. Learning the guitarist also played banjo, he suggested an impromptu jam session; the two clicked immediately. Later he discovered that Nicholson would soon be moving to Concord.

Peasley connected with guitarist Mac Holmes after watching him play in Plymouth, where he lived.

“I was like, ‘This guy’s amazing — I need him. I wanted a full bluegrass band,” he said.

Holmes ended up traveling to Concord so frequently that he eventually relocated to the city.

“The bass player was the hard part,” Peasley said.

He knew Scott Heron and his wife, fiddler Betsey Green, from their time jamming with singer-songwriter Will Hatch.

“Will was starting to get a band together when he moved back up here from Virginia and he found Scott and Betsy.”

As the two grew occupied with their own project, Green Heron, Hatch cast about for new players.

“Me and Taylor were playing in a band called the Graniteers with our friend Nick Ferrero from high school. … We ended up playing shows with Will,” Peasley said.

He suggested a jam session with Hatch.

“Will’s like, ‘Oh yeah, that’d be fun,’ and it ended up being a Pizza Tapes kind of thing,” he said.

They became friends with Heron and Green in the process. So, when an upright bassist was needed, Heron agreed to join. Raid the Larder played its first show in December 2018, with Green guesting on fiddle. Travel to and from Kingston made it too much for the couple. Heron left, and Nicholson recruited Adam Martin, who’d just left Oddfellows Way to take his place. The band’s lineup now consists of Peasley on mandolin, guitarists Pearson and Holmes, Nicholson playing banjo and Martin on bass.

For now they’re all about playing together whenever they can, and haven’t made a record — yet.

“I want to get together and play these songs that I’ve been covering for years, but with a full band,” Peasley said. “We do everything from old Carter Family tunes to Modest Mouse to Jimmy Buffett. I would love to do a recording because we all bring originals from the different bands we’ve come from; it’s a big collaboration. I think Mac doesn’t care if we recorded or anything. He just wants to play.”

Peasley also hosts the weekly open mic at Penuche’s, where Raid the Larder will perform two days after Thanksgiving. He and Pearson also appear regularly at another Concord hub for local music, Area 23. They two co-led a weekly songwriters night a while back, inviting local performers over to play their originals.

Pearson and Peasley always join in, and the evenings often provide a full flavor of one of the state’s most burgeoning and enjoyable scenes.

“Me and Taylor, learning people’s songs,” Peasley said. “It’s just what we do.”

Raid the Larder
When: Saturday, Nov. 28, 8 p.m.
Where: Penuche’s Ale House, 16 Bicentennial Square, Concord
More: facebook.com/raidthelarder

Featured photo: Raid the Larder. Courtesy photo.