Category: Nightlife

Live Free Fest offers music and more

Longtime music fan Dylan Williams is a DIY kind of guy, so when he became frustrated with traveling to Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont for concerts, he decided to launch his own festival.

“I always have to drive an hour and a half to go to any show I want,” he said by phone recently. “It’s really annoying.”

A New Boston native, he was also looking to draw attention to his favorite local music. Williams began last year in his backyard, with four bands performing. There were also games, including a pie eating contest, relay races and something called Beer Olympics. Sixty people, close friends or part of Williams’ extended social circle, came to the party.

The experience gave Williams the confidence to scale up to the local fairgrounds and stage the first annual Live Free Fest. It happens on Saturday, Aug. 3, with a dozen acts performing: Sotah, Just For Kicks, Somewhere In Between, Girlspit, Animatronic The Abolisher, Pointless Culture, The Forest Forgets, The Knightz, Lacquerhead, Cozy Throne, Mugshot Monday and Recession.

Williams is connected to his home state’s music scene through his work as a videographer, and he designed his festival to focus on the creative diversity that he feels is close to home and is sometimes overlooked. Thus, the acts on the bill range across the musical spectrum.

“I want to reflect New Hampshire’s sound the best I can, so everything about this is in-state, and we have something for everybody,” Williams said. “There’s alternative and indie, rappers, metal, punk and a cover band. It’s not a blues festival or a rap festival; it’s literally everything. I chose them because it reflects the state well, and I just think they’re good.”

One of the sets he’s looking forward to is The Forest Forgets, an edgy punk metal band that grew from the breakup of the Manchester group Afterimage. It’s fronted by that band’s former singer, Griffen Romprey. “They’re on the experimental side of things … progressive, longer form,” Williams said. “They only have demos right now, so I’m very excited to hear what they’re going to have at the festival. I think they’ve only played one show so far.”

Rapper Animatronic The Abolisher is another act that Williams expects the crowd will enjoy. He saw him open for The Knightz at a show he was filming in Manchester.

“I didn’t know him at all until he came up; I was shooting him anyway because I was already there,” he said. “And I was just really impressed. He’s got really good lyrics, he’s very quick with the flow and just a very humble guy.”

The Knightz are a favorite, and friends. “They’re a rap group that I’ve worked with probably for about two years now. And they’re just great guys. They flew me out to San Francisco one time; we did a video there. They have such good charisma, and they’re just really good guys.”

Finally, there’s Lacquerhead, “definitely the loudest and heaviest band we have,” Williams continued. “They have really good energy, and I would say if there’s anyone that I feel like is going to really maybe make it, I can see them making it in music in the coming years.”

With help from his partner Justin Kaminsky, Williams is going out on a limb to stage Live Free Fest — “It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done,” he said — but he has high hopes it will strike a chord and hopefully draw a crowd in the hundreds. After years spent experiencing and documenting area music, he feels it’s the next logical step.

“I don’t go to as many festivals as I’d like to, but I go to a bunch of shows, and a lot of them are in Boston,” he said. “So I [thought], let’s try something here. We don’t have anything like … a Lollapalooza or Boston Calling. Because Manchester doesn’t have a super big scene, we all know each other in a way. It just kind of worked that I was able to grab a lot of these people that I already kind of know. That was cool.”

For his New Boston Calling to be a success, Williams continued, “I would love it if for all the bands this was maybe their biggest show ever, and I want all the crowd to have a really good energy with them. Also, I want all the games to go really well. I want to walk around and feel like this is a big community … I just want everyone to have a good time, honestly.”

Live Free Fest
When: Saturday, Aug. 3, noon
Where: Hillsborough County Youth Center, 17 Hilldale Lane, New Boston
Tickets: $15 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Cozy Throne at Bank of NH Stage. The band is slated to play the Live Free Fest. Photo by Jaki Gerulskis.

With new music, MB Padfield returns to New England

It’s a quiet Monday for musician MB Padfield — she has only two shows. The New Hampshire-born singer, songwriter and guitarist is back for her summer sojourn, something she’s done since moving to Los Angeles a while back. This season, she’s booked 130 dates, including a run of 11 gigs over six days at the end of June — a personal record for her.

“I’m not far off from being an endurance athlete,” Padfield said by phone. “I’ve been doing a lot of physical training outside of music to be able to make these shows happen. Doing a lot of nutrition, learning so much about just the body and health and science and how it relates to live performance.”

Though Padfield plays mostly covers at places like The Goat, Wally’s and Margaritaville in Boston, such rigor extends to her original music. Take the video she made for “Waverider,” released earlier this year and part of an upcoming EP. In it, Padfield sang in an ice bath, and she had to repeat the process three times to get the right take.

At the end of the clip, she’s visibly quaking from what looks like hypothermia.

“Yeah, that was an experience … it was great and horrible at the same time,” she recalled. “I filmed over the winter in New Hampshire, in Bedford with my friend Ben Proulx, who is a really incredible videographer. He’s worked on some massive projects. He’s Grammy nominated.”

Impossibly, she managed to lip-sync all the song’s words. “That was a really tricky part … but I drilled it so many times,” she said. “I started with cold showers, and I did cold baths. Then I found a cold plunge in Los Angeles, and I’d sit there the whole song. I just tried to keep my head on straight.”

The song itself is a gem, an electronica-infused slow burn with bracing confrontational lyrics reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s recent work. It addresses the challenges of being an independent musician and facing a world where big acts have massive organizations behind them.

“It can be quite intimidating as an artist just getting started … that’s a bit of what ‘Waverider’ is about,” Padfield said. “It’s funny, everyone is asking me if it’s about a jet ski. It’s not, but I guess a jet ski wouldn’t be a bad analogy. I think everyone has their own Waverider. We all have our own ups and downs and do our best to try to navigate. It’s not necessarily about trying to keep calm waters, but just drive right in the waves where you’re at.”

Padfield’s latest release is “Into the Grey,” a song about letting go that became more poignant when her 96-year-old Meme passed away in May.

“We hospiced her at home, and I was there to the end; it was a wild experience,” she said. “There are people I’ve known who’ve had a hard time functioning through grief…. With the small experience I had, I learned that you have to pick the right memories to hold on to. That’s a big part of what ‘Into the Grey’ was about.”

Two more songs, “Lost at Sea” and “I’ll Be,” will be released in the coming months to complete a four-song EP. Padfield has a full-length album in the works as well and plans to make videos for the forthcoming songs.

“I’ve really come to see the value in communicating not only the music but also the visuals,” she said. “To explore not just what sound sounds like but also what it looks like … which has been a really fun creative adventure.”

In performance, Padfield is a one-woman powerhouse, using looping pedals and samples to produce a full band sound. It makes the most sense for her at the moment, keeping overhead low and her mobility flexible.

“That being said, I do love live looping, there’s such freedom in it,” she said. “I have my recipes for songs and how I make them. The cool part is, at least with the current setup I have, almost no two performances are identical. They’re similar for sure, but not identical, and that is a lot of creative freedom.”

MB Padfield
When: Sunday, July 28, 7 p.m.
Where: The Goat, 50 Old Granite St., Manchester
More: Full schedule at mbpadfield.com/tour

Featured photo: NB Padfield. Courtesy photo.

Lakes Region comedy show

There’s a limerick from a bygone time that begins, “there was a young man from Nantucket,” but this isn’t that kind of story. Brian Glowacki was born on the island off Cape Cod and found humor via Def Comedy Jam specials on HBO. When he realized there were clubs where comics told jokes, he decided to give standup a shot.

Glowacki soon found his secret weapon: a face that telegraphs mischief. When he pauses with a sly smirk during a joke setup, it’s like watching a Mento dropped into a bottle of Coke; audience laughter builds, anticipating what’s next. This sort of thing also happens regularly in Glowacki’s daily life. While he’s holding a microphone, at least he gets paid for it.

There’s a bit about repurposing his wife’s breast pump when their infant grows out of it, and it feels like he worked it out at the Kitchen, to let’s say mixed results.

“Everybody knows that feeling,” he said in a recent phone interview. “It’s like the next thing coming out of my mouth is either going to get me in trouble or arrested.”

The latter outcome is less likely than the first; his is a mostly “clean” set. That’s one of the reasons comedian Bob Marley picked Glowacki to open shows for him, something he did for a few years. It started when a Rhode Island club hired him to host for the Maine comic. The gig worked out, and he got the call the next time Marley appeared.

“By that time I had different material, and that showed them I could at least try to have a different set each time we came through a place, which was important to those guys,” he said. “It ended up some of their guys dropped out and I moved up the ranks with Marley. I ended up being one of their two main guys.”

These days Glowacki is hitting much bigger targets. He parlayed a successful run at Boston’s Comedy Connection into a pair of sold-out shows at the prestigious Wilbur Theatre. Glowacki attributes the event’s success to his relatability as a comic.

“I don’t scare anybody away, I don’t ever talk about politics or anything like that, I’m talking about things that we’re all living,” he said, adding that a willingness to bet on himself was a big part of it. “I say all the time, I take big swings … I don’t sulk in the failures, and I don’t get too excited over the victories. I just cross things off my list. Things that excited me as a little kid, now I do them as an adult.”

Upcoming on his schedule are headlining shows at Mohegan Sun, and the comedy club in the MGM Casino in Springfield, Mass. The night after he appears at Beans & Greens Farm in Gilford, Glowacki will play his biggest gig yet, headlining at Cape Cod Melody Tent, a legendary 2,500-seat venue.

“I’m the first local that’s ever been crazy enough to even try to sell that place,” he said. “We’re doing it all word of mouth. I don’t have an agent or credits or any of that. We just spread the word from people having a good time at a show, and they tell their friends, which is the best marketing you can hope for.”

The Gilford show offers the chance for him to prepare for the Cape show and “make sure I’m all dialed in.” Fellow comic Gary Marino co-produced the BGlow & Friends event and will serve as its host. It will be Glowacki’s first time at Beans & Greens. “Usually when I do stuff with Gary, it’s been a home run, so I was like, whatever, I’m in.”

Brian Glowacki & Friends
When: Saturday, July 20, 7 p.m.
Where: Beans & Greens Farm, 245 Intervale Road, Gilford
Tickets: $30 at eventbrite.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Roomful of Blues at Rex with new singer

Over almost six decades as a band, Roomful of Blues has seen its share of personnel changes, but the latest is a biggie.

“Basically, half the lineup is new,” guitarist Chris Vachon, who joined in 1990, said recently. Two members of the horn section and a keyboard player have joined and, crucially, the band has its first female lead vocalist since Lou Ann Barton was a member for a very short tenure in the early 1980s.

New singer D.D. Bastos and Vachon have played together in the Rhode Island band Sons of Providence since mid-decade, so “there’s some history there,” Vachon said. However, the departure of singer Phil Pemberton, who left due to declining health, means that typical set lists will be shifting dramatically.

“We don’t change front people too much, that’s rare…. Phil was in the band for 15 years,” Vachon said. “Having a new person come in as a front person, you’re going to replace a lot of the material to things that are more suited for them. That’s exciting for us, with a new show and all that.”

The RoB horns and drums backed Pat Benatar on her jump blues True Love album, and Bastos will offer a few songs from that when the band stops by the Rex Theatre on July 12, along with some tunes from the Barton era. The latter lasted only three months, ending when the Texas blues chanteuse realized she’d never acclimate to New England winters.

It’s a local show for one of the new members. Sax player Craig Thomas lives just a few blocks from the Amherst Street venue. Another new face on stage will be keyboard player Jeff Ceasrine, though he has a history with RoB, having played occasionally with them since 2008.

“Jeff is a natural to take over where [former keyboard player] Rusty Scott left off,” Vachon said.

The new lineup was in fine form during a recent Extended Play Session filmed at the Fallout Shelter in Norwood, Mass. Bastos shined on the Etta James classic “Good Rockin’ Daddy” and the burning ballad “Please Don’t Go,” while whipping up the crowd on the energetic call-and-response boogie “That’s Right!”

Vachon pumped out some hot licks on his Gibson SG during the cool groove number “I’m Tryin’” and the horn section’s latest additions, Chris Pratt on trumpet and Thomas on tenor sax, had a long stretch to show off, all in preparation for a big month ahead.

“We’re going to be full steam and we’re all pretty excited about it,” Vachon said.

The idea has remained steady even as players come and go, with a style that can feel like big band but find a rock groove when called for while staying true to its namesake and playing the blues. Their schedule has changed, however.

“My early years in the band, we were gone all the time,” Vachon said. “It’s mostly weekends now.”

Their last album is 2020’s In A Roomful of Blues, a fun effort with songs like the snarky “Phone Zombies” along with the B.B. King-esque title cut. As with a lot of records made that year, the band didn’t get many chances to perform it early on — it’s hard to be in a roomful of anything while staying six feet apart.

Eventually, they took it on the road, and Vachon said they’re ready to add to their 20-plus collection soon. Meanwhile, they continue to be the band that plays blues to make folks forget their blues.

“We don’t do too much of the weepy stuff,” Vachon agreed. “We do happy, swingy things you can dance to. I mean, we’re going to do stuff that’s uplifting and fun.”

An Evening With Roomful of Blues
When: Friday, July 12, 8 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $29 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Badfish is back for annual show

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Some things never change, like the annual return of Badfish to Casino Ballroom for a Fourth of July show, a tradition that began in 2007. What started near the end of the ’90s as a few URI students responding to the passing of Sublime lead singer and creative force Bradley Nowell has evolved into more than a tribute act.

They’re still performing songs from the short-lived ska-punk band, like “Santeria” and their namesake deep cut, but now a few original songs are part of their sets. Last December they put out a single called “High With You.” Badfish drummer Scott Begin expects more tracks will be released “strategically” in the coming months.

“We tried in fits and starts to do some original music over the years, and it was always a fun experiment, but nothing ever really felt like it stuck,” Begin recalled by phone recently. That changed when singer Pat Downs and Danny Torgerson, a multi-instrumentalist and Badfish’s newest member, did a few writing sessions together.

“They came up with some demos that we were really grooving on,” Begin continued. The latest is “FYPM,” a slow, steady growler of a kiss-off that’s definitely NSFW. It’s now on Badfish’s SoundCloud page. The group also performed a few of the new songs live during an appearance on the Sugar Shack podcast in January.

All the creative activity hasn’t changed their primary mission.

“We promote ourselves as Badfish – A Tribute to Sublime,” Begin said. “We certainly don’t want any confusion … people are still going to hear Sublime songs. In the future, if some of our originals gain some traction, that could be a reason to say, ‘Well, now we’re just Badfish’ and then maybe you’ll be hearing a good chunk of [those] as well as some Sublime songs — and maybe others from influences we like.”

In May, Sublime was back in the news when Bradley Nowell’s son Jakob appeared with a reunited band at Coachella. The event captivated both fans and the members of Badfish, who watched it from the green room in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, before a show. They’re now touring, with a stop at the Elevate Festival in Marshfield, Mass., scheduled for July 7.

“We were really excited to see it,” Begin said, noting Sublime drummer Bud Gaugh once sat in with Badfish, and that they even appeared with Nowell’s band Law at a few shows. “We were huddled around the TV like little kids, it was a really exciting moment. So, we’re really just excited to see that happening. I mean, it’s a huge thing.”

With Gaugh and fellow original member Eric Wilson now playing with the younger Nowell, the reunion effectively ended Sublime With Rome. Led by Rome Ramirez, it blended elements of a tribute act with new music. However, Ramirez is continuing the name using a different set of musicians, much to Nowell’s consternation.

“For there to be some other band out there performing shows without any original members and without anybody on the crew or management or performative side that even knew my dad or anybody in the scene, it’s mind-blowing to me,” he told the Boston Globe in a June 25 story. “I can’t tell you how angry it makes me.”

The re-emergence of an official Sublime didn’t put Badfish at a similar crossroads, however.

“Our approach has always been the same; we love the music of Sublime, and we want to perform it as best we can,” Begin said. “If anything, it feels like Sublime is a little bit more in the public consciousness now [and] it makes us excited that maybe more people will be turned on to Sublime that maybe had not been prior to this reunion.”

Begin and his mates are keen to hit the beach this Fourth of July weekend.

“I think I can speak for the band; this is definitely one of our favorites to play,” he said. “It feels like a real event, because it’s become a tradition. I don’t know how many times it’s been a sellout, but it certainly has several times, and it’s great to play in a historic kind of venue like the Ballroom. And it’s always a complete rager; people come out and they’re ready to party. It’s one of my favorite gigs of the whole year for sure.”

Badfish – A Tribute to Sublime
When: Saturday, July 6, 8 p.m.
Where: Casino Ballroom, 169 Ocean Blvd., Hampton Beach
Tickets: $27 at casinoballroom.com

Featured photo: Badfish. Courtesy photo.

Manchester emo night celebrates a birthday

From disco nights to Taylor Swift sing-alongs, attempts to cash in on musical trends are legion. However, Live Free or Cry, a bimonthly emo-themed night at the Shaskeen Pub in Manchester, is and always has been a passion project. It’s lasted eight years, but since the pandemic ate one of them, 2024 is technically the seventh anniversary.

“The people running it and the people in the bands genuinely have been in the scene for 20-plus years,” founder Aaron Shelton said by phone recently. “We’re not following bandwagons, we’re playing songs that we listened to; we watched all these bands, even toured with some of them…. It comes from a really honest and heartfelt place.”

In the early days, bands like Taking Back Sunday, Paramore or Panic! at the Disco weren’t lumped together as emo.

“We always called it The Scene, which included emo, pop punk, hardcore, metalcore, all offshoots of, I guess punk rock would be the father of it all,” Shelton said. “One of the beautiful things about it was it always felt like a place for all the people who didn’t have a home, the outcasts, quote unquote. All the punk rock kids who didn’t know where to go.”

It’s an inclusive milieu.

“The emo image is always Hot Topic, black hair and nail polish, [but] I see nu-metal kids show up and metal kids and goth kids,” Shelton said. “It’s born out of a genre where the Get Up Kids and Bane would play the same show, and everyone would be psyched about it. It really is a place for everybody.”

Shelton worried the first Shaskeen emo night in 2016 would be a one-off. It included a set from The Nintendos and a pair of Boston DJs. Six months later The 603 Emo Collective performed; it included Shelton and members of a few other area bands. When it fell apart, Shelton started Early 2000s, which became Dangerous Nights, and something of a house band.

“That’s been kind of the constant,” Shelton said. “We’ve played 80 percent of the Emo Nights at this point.”

The effort has evolved and grown. Shelton promotes emo nights in Concord, at Tandy’s, as well as Lowell and Salem, Mass. It’s become a community along the way.

“Between the bands and the audience, it’s kind of found itself,” Shelton said. “In the first years, the crowds were rarely the same. Now I see a lot of repeat people; you can almost predict the type of audience that will show up at this point.”

The celebration on June 29 will include two bands. My Chemical Chungus, a Worcester area band, will be making its LFOC debut. “They’re normally a My Chemical Romance tribute band,” Shelton said. “They recently started branching out and playing more songs. I spoke to them, and they were excited about the set that they had.”

The second act, A Blockbuster Summer, “is your all-encompassing cover band; they do ’90s, ’80s, emo, basically whatever the show calls for,” Shelton said. “They’re just a very talented group with really incredible harmonies out of two singers…. I think it’s going to be musically a very strong night.”

Asked what has surprised him most over the past seven years, Shelton had a fittingly emo response.

“I joke with my band and my fiancée that every time we do one, it’s going to be the last,” he said, “and it just sells out again and again. I think there are four other emo nights in New Hampshire because it works so well. That’s been the surprise; not that I thought it was going to phase out immediately, because it’s been a constant in my life for over two decades, but I didn’t expect it to be this successful for this long. I’m constantly surprised year after year that it just keeps working and working.”

Live Free or Cry w/ My Chemical Chungus, A Blockbuster Summer
When: Saturday, June 29, 9 p.m.
Where: Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester
Tickets: $10 at the door, 21+, facebook.com/LiveFreeorCryNH

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.