The Music Roundup 20/07/02

• Mountain music: A Concord trio consisting of guitar, drums and keyboard, Holy Fool favors smooth soulful grooves with jazzy elements. They play an outdoor show at a ski resort repurposed for summer, their first since Friday the 13th in March at hometown haunt True Brew, just as the world was shutting down. During quarantine the group was part of the Granite State Online Music Festival. Thursday, July 2, 4 p.m. at Pats Peak Ski Area, 686 Flanders Road, Henniker, facebook.com/holyfoolnh.

• Singing, playing: Enjoy a solo acoustic experience with The Lone Wolf Project. Christopher Perkins’ set list includes everything from Queensrÿche to Cyndi Lauper, with sweet tunes like John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” offered as well. Perkins has some nice originals, too, like “Today,” written during lockdown, about keeping family close. Friday, July 3, 6 p.m., Fratello’s Italian Grille, 799 Union Ave., Laconia, facebook.com/ASoloAcousticExperience.

• Laugh again: Though his Headliners downtown showcase room is still shuttered, Rob Steen is promoting shows and performing comedy again in Manchester, as a multipurpose movie house returns to standup. Drew Dunn, who won top honors at competitions in Seattle and Boston, tops the bill at what’s basically a three-headliner show, with Steen and Amy Tee. Saturday, July 4, 9 p.m., Chunky’s Cinema Pub, 707 Huse Road, Manchester. Tickets $20 at headlinerscomedyclub.com.

• Twofer time: In between shows with their band Almost Famous, Jimmy Magoon and Kristin Atkins perform as a duo, covering pop hits and classic rock for every mood. Formed in 2012, the Boston group is popular for whipping crowds into a dancing frenzy, but their talents for chilling a room and keeping an easy vibe going will probably be more welcome in this moment. Sunday, July 5, 3 p.m., Old School Bar & Grill, 49 Range Road, Windham, facebook.com/almostfamousrocks.

In the pocket

Blues rockers return to the stage

Downtown Dave & the Deep Pockets played their last pre-quarantine gig on March 8, so when they booked a late May show outdoors at Broken Spoke in Laconia, frontman Dave Glannon counted the days. Fate, however, had other plans for his blues-rock powerhouse. A broken well pump forced them to cancel, though the owner paid half their guarantee, a reminder of why the Spoke is a favorite venue for the band.

The cash was a comfort, but for Glannon, music is passion first, profession second. He was ready to get down and play his harmonica, to jam with guitarist Paul Size and a rhythm section of drummer Don Boucher and bass player Erik Thomas.

So he moved the show down the road, and turned it into a party.

“Everybody was already there, like right around the corner, and my friend has a place at the lake,” Glannon explained in a recent phone interview. “It just felt so good to get together and play.”

Glannon became a musician at age 41, inspired by the purchase of his first compact disc player, when they were a new thing. He bought two CDs that day, Aerosmith’s Live Bootleg and Muddy Waters’ Still Hard. The latter looked cool, had Johnny Winter backing blues legend Waters on guitar, and was bargain priced.

It changed his life.

“I think I played it for three months straight,” Glannon said. “That’s when I realized this is something I would really love to do.”

Attending an all-star benefit show at the original House of Blues in Cambridge a while later cemented his instinct.

“There were all these great people — Jerry Paquette, Racky Thomas, Jerry Portnoy, a bunch of others. … I went by myself and was just standing there taking in all the action, and I realized I really had to pursue it,” Glannon said. Realizing that learning to play guitar would take a lot of time, “I figured harmonica was the quickest way to get into that.”

In the mid-2000s Glannon practiced in his garage and went to Tuesday night blues jams hosted by Paquette at KC’s Rib Shack in Manchester — always as a spectator. One night, after prolonged prodding by his then-wife, he stepped on stage.

“I played one song and started to walk off, but Jerry stopped me,” he said. “He said, ‘You don’t sit down until I tell you to.’ So I kept coming back. … He must have seen something there.”

Glannon spent four years playing in Paquette’s Kan-Tu Blues Band, then set about forming the Deep Pockets in 2010.

“I love the blues and I like that style, but I wanted to do something more up-tempo,” he said.

Band members have come and gone; none remain from the lineup that traveled to Memphis after winning the 2015 Granite State Blues Challenge. Boucher came aboard shortly after the competition. Size, a Texas expat who played in The Red Devils, is the most recent to join. ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons included Size on his 10 Guitarists Who Blew My Mind list, which also included Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.

Glannon thinks the current Downtown Dave & the Deep Pockets is the best ever, for a few reasons.

“These are four people who truly get along, have great respect for each other, great talent, and are in tune with everything that is going on,” he said. “On stage, it’s pure magic, three to four hours of thinking about nothing but the music at hand. It helps keep you sane.”

Their summer calendar is slowly filling, with shows set for July 11 at Pitman’s Freight Room in Laconia, and July 18 at The Anchorage, a restaurant-bar situated on the edge of Lake Sunapee. Pitman’s has long been a favorite stop for the band.

“It’s a great room, and the sound quality is fantastic,” Glannon said. “People are there strictly for the music, and it’s always a very appreciative crowd.”

Featured photo: Downtown Dave & the Deep Pockets. Courtesy photo.

Downtown Dave & the Deep Pockets
When: Saturday, July 11, 8 p.m.
Where: Pitman’s Freight Room, 94 New Salem St., Laconia
Tickets: $20/door – pitmansfreightroom.com
Also: Saturday, July 18, 8 p.m. at The Anchorage, 71 Main St., Sunapee

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (PG-13)

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Take the musical numbers from the Trolls animated movies and divide them by a Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” sensibility and add an earnest Will Ferrell plus Dan Stevens’ dodgy Russian accent (but impressive willingness to go all in) and what you have equals Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, a new comedy on Netflix.

I feel like Ferrell, who stars here and has a writing credit, probably really likes the annual Eurovision Song Contest and wants to find some way of introducing its glorious pop-song ABBA-ness to an American audience. And that actually sounds like a great idea. The competition — which I have never watched but has always sounded to me like the best possible mash-up of American Idol and the Olympics — has been available in America only recently. I hope when it comes back (this year’s contest was canceled), Americans can view it with ease; it feels like exactly the kind of all-ages-friendly bowl of cheese dip that we’re all going to need in our lives. I watched a highlights reel from the 2019 finale and I am sold on this whole deal, don’t change one sparkly bit of it. (It looks like full versions of some years’ final shows are also available on eurovision.tv and now that I know that I suspect my productivity will nosedive.)

So, getting Americans interested in the Eurovision Song Contest? Worthy goal. But are enough people really sufficiently aware of the Eurovision Song Contest that, for example, the many Eurovision-related cameos (which I could identify as cameos because of the way the movie shot and introduced them, not because I knew who anybody was) resonate or that specific jokes about Eurovision register?

Without that layer, what you have is Will Ferrell as Lars Erickssong, a very middle-aged man living in a small town in Iceland who has spent most of his life trying to get a song in the Eurovision competition. He is so focused on this that he has never even pursued a romance with obviously-hot-for-him Sigrit (Rachel McAdams), his friend since childhood and his partner in the band Fire Saga. Sigrit is happy to follow Lars in his dreams, though she writes her own songs and does wish they’d maybe also find time to have a baby.

Due to a series of horrible (but lucky for Lars and Sigrit) events, Fire Saga finds itself as Iceland’s Eurovision competitor. Russia’s competitor Alexander Lemtov (Dan Stevens) and his friend Mita (Melissanthi Mahut), Greece’s competitor, have a better shot at winning the competition than Fire Saga and yet the duo seems to enjoy messing with the team dynamic of Fire Saga, which, with its special effects and iffy wardrobe choices, seems to be doing just fine sabotaging itself.

At two hours and three minutes, Fire Saga is at least 35 minutes too long. At times the movie feels more like a collection of extra material for a Saturday Night Live Eurovision sketch than a tightly plotted narrative. It is at its best when the too-old Lars is trying to sell a Viking power ballad or the enjoyably dippy Sigrit is talking to elves — or when it’s just showing us Eurovision. More Eurovision, would have been my studio note. A song-mash-up featuring real-life Eurovision people is charming and irresistible and joyfully silly in the best sense.

In yet another example of grading on a serious curve, this movie is acceptable entertainment because (if you have Netflix) you don’t have to pay any extra money to watch it and because you can feel when it’s slowing down and time your snack runs and phone-checking accordingly. B-

Rated PG-13 for crude sexual material including full nude sculpture, some comic violent images and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David Dobkin with a screenplay by Will Ferrell and Andrew Steele, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is somehow two hours and three minutes long and is available on Netflix.

My Spy (PG-13)

Film Reviews by Amy Diaz

Dave Bautista is another tough guy befriending a kid (see also: The Rock, John Cena, Arnold Schwarzenegger) in My Spy, a movie once bound for theaters but now on Amazon Prime.

JJ (Bautista) is a tough guy CIA agent who is finding the light touch required for successful spy-ery more difficult than the straightforward butt-kicking of being an Army Ranger. You’re actually not supposed to kill everybody and walk away from the explosions without looking back, explains his boss (Ken Jeong), and thus JJ and his fan-girl tech person Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) are given the low-priority assignment of keeping an eye on Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley), the widow of a former arms dealer. Her brother-in-law, Marquez (Greg Bryk), is still active in the selling-nukes-to-bad-guys game so JJ and Bobbi watch Kate and her daughter Sophie (Chloe Coleman), who are attempting to adjust after a recent move to Chicago.

While Kate seems more like a harried nurse and single mom than a woman who has any knowledge of her late husband’s business, Sophie, who is 9, has some solid stealthiness skills. She sneaks up on JJ and Bobbi and records enough of a conversation between the two of them that she can blow their cover. Instead of telling her mom, though, she decides to blackmail JJ into doing things for her, such as taking her to an ice skating rink and teaching her spy stuff. When her mom first sees Sophie with JJ, Kate gives JJ a swift knee to the sensitive spy equipment but Sophie explains that JJ is their new upstairs neighbor and helped her with some bullies. Seeing the possibilities in JJ beyond just his abilities to rent ice skates and teach her to defeat a lie detector, Sophie arranges for JJ and Kate to bump into each other a few times until Kate asks JJ out.

This movie is rated PG-13 and my guess is that this is largely due to the early sequence of JJ killing a couple dozen henchmen, including one whose head goes flying. Common Sense Media pegs it at ages 10 and up and while I might not go that young I think “lightweight family action comedy” is what this movie is for families where the youngest viewers are middle school and up.

And as that, it’s fine. Bautista has the “gruff guy with a good heart” thing ready to go. He maybe isn’t quite as winning as Dwayne Johnson but he’s probably as good, in his own way, as John Cena. His interactions with Coleman’s Sophie feel right for each character — the movie lets Sophie seem enough like a human child that you can just sort of go with the plot, no matter how silly it gets.

I’m not sure how I would have responded to this movie in a theater; the faults of something like this seem to stand out when a movie is on a big screen and has required you to show up at a place on time and pay for popcorn. But as an at-home offering, the low barrier to viewing matches the “light chuckle” level of comedy just fine. B-

Rated PG-13 for action/violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Peter Segal with a screenplay by Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, My Spy is an hour and 39 minutes long and distributed by Amazon Studios. It is available on Amazon Prime.

Book Review 20/07/02

Shakespeare for Squirrels, by Christopher Moore (William Morrow, 271 pages)

In one of the more memorable songs from the musical Something Rotten, a character named Nick Bottom seethes “God, I hate Shakespeare — He has no sense about the audience / he makes them feel so dumb / The (expletive) doesn’t care that my poor (expletive) is getting numb.”

The same could be said of Christopher’s Moore Shakespeare for Squirrels, only it wasn’t so funny.

The third in a series of comedies derived from Shakespeare’s plays, the novel is a raunchy retelling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, populated by characters that will be familiar to anyone who has seen what is considered to be the Bard of Avon’s most performed play.

The main characters were introduced in Moore’s 2009 novel Fool, a satirical take on King Lear, and later embellished in 2014’s The Serpent of Venice. They are Pocket, a court jester; Drool, his dimwit companion; and Jeff, a monkey. In the opening, they are near death, adrift in a boat, Drool so delirious from hunger that he is begging to lick the monkey. “Just one wee lick,” he pleads.

Lucky for the monkey, land appears, and the three crash onto the shores of 14th-century Athens and into the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its fairies and players and royals, which in Moore’s hands are even more lewd and profane than Shakespeare wrote them. They are also somehow funnier. Shakespeare himself might have wished he had written this book.

Compare the dialogue of Shakespeare, when Nick Bottom’s transformation into a centaur with a donkey head is revealed — “O Bottom, thou art changed! What do I see on thee?” — with that of Moore: “Bottom,” said I. “Thou art transmogrified. How happened this change?”

A quick summary, with a necessary spoiler: Soon after landing in Greece, Pocket encounters the dying Robin Goodfellow (also known as the Puck), and is mistakenly apprehended as the killer. In order to save his own skin and that of his slow-witted but good-hearted companion Drool, he obeys twin royal commands to venture into the fairy-infested forest to find the true assassin.

With killer dialogue and exquisite timing, Moore is generous with the jokes, both Elizabethan and contemporary. (A frequent callback referring to Pocket’s diminutive size — “Not an elf” — is wickedly funny and seems to derive from the TV show The Good Place.)

Moore writes with his tongue firmly in cheek, when it is not exploring naughtier territory, as it frequently does. If the novel had to be assigned a rating by the Motion Picture Association of America, it would have had to fight for an R. As such, one of the novel’s failings is the sense that it was written by a teenage boy with a really high IQ. Which brings us to its other problem, foreseen by Nick Bottom in Something Rotten — Moore makes us feel so dumb.

Shakespeare for Squirrels demands much of its readers, and having seen A Midsummer’s Night Dream once 10 years ago doesn’t cut it. (Painfully, I can attest.) From the beginning, when our heroes are rescued by the fairy Cobweb, the casual reader is taunted by what he or she doesn’t know, never encountered or doesn’t remember. For a full 263 pages there is the sense that we are missing the best jokes. It’s full-on FOMO (fear of missing out) until we reach the afterword, when Moore explains how the book came about. Even then, people who are only conversant with a handful of Shakespeare’s 36 plays can get lost as he recounts the origins of Hippolyta, Theseus and Oberon.

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,” Shakespeare wrote in a line just as good as “though she be but little she is fierce.” The same can be said of Moore’s brain, which operates on a plane higher than that of the average reader and seems as conversant with Shakespeare as the typical American is with the McDonald’s menu. This doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy Shakespeare for Squirrels without having read the two previous installments, Fool and The Serpent of Venice. It can stand alone as a story, as even A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not required prerequisite reading.

But without this base of foreknowledge, reading Moore’s latest book is the literary equivalent of eating pistachios that haven’t been shelled. There is pleasure, yes, but it seems like an awful lot of work to get to it. The mental gymnastics required to get into the flow of the dialogue alone are exhausting on a midsummer afternoon. (“The fairies, I thought, surely they will offer some unexplored gem of myth that I can festoon with knob jokes!”)

That said, you will emerge from Shakespeare for Squirrels armed with a new collection of Shakespearean-style insults, which may alone be justification for your time, thou unctuous little hedgehog. (Said affectionately.) B

BOOK NOTES
As Americans gear up for a long weekend of quiet reading and deep thinking about democracy and its responsibilities, Project Gutenberg might come in handy.
The oldest digital library, it provides free access to more than 60,000 books that are in the public domain, so it’s a particularly good source for finding titles appropriate to the celebration of American independence. Here’s a sample of reading you can download onto your computer or ereader at gutenberg.org:
• The Memoirs, Correspondence and Miscellanies from the Papers of Thomas Jefferson(decidedly dry in places, but it’s always interesting to get a glimpse of personal letters of history’s giants).
• Speaking of which, there’s also Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution
• George Washington’s State of the Union Addresses (other early presidents are there, too).
• George Washington’s Rules of Civility (an adaptation of Richard Brookhiser’s Rules of Civility, which was said to greatly influence the first president)
• The Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, which may be the first American self-help book
• Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men — this was issued in 1882 and has nothing to do with American independence. But how could we not? An excerpt: “Forty years ago, when Manchester, now the metropolis of New Hampshire, was little more than a wasting waterfall and an unpeopled plain, a few young men who had the sagacity to see, the courage to grapple with, and the strength to control the possibilities of the location, made it their home.” Thank God for that, eh?
• The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (as well as his inaugural addresses)
• Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America
• G.K. Chesterton’s What I Saw in America
Of course, you could also just buy them, because in this day and age, there is no greater civic responsibility than shopping.

Album Reviews 20/07/02

Limousine Beach, Stealin’ Wine + 2 (Tee Pee Records)

More than any other record company that sends me stuff, the Tee Pee imprint is the most like a box of chocolates, at least as far as the noisiness goes. They’ve released LPs from Warlocks, High on Fire and Brian Jonestown Massacre, to name a few, and that’s a pretty diverse spread if you think about it. As for this little three-songer (and I do mean little, clocking in at six minutes total), it’s something fresh, at least as far as its throwback nature. It’s three lead guitarists from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, trying to make the genre “sizzle rock” catch on. Thing is, this sound already caught on 45 or so years ago. Their spazzy but precise vibe recalls Sweet more than anything else (sidetrack: did anyone ever decide if that band was supposed to be called “The Sweet” or just “Sweet,” not that it matters anymore?), but I suppose you could always throw Manchester Orchestra into the discussion, mostly because the recording is comparatively low-rent. It’s Electric Light Orchestra-level fun for its entire shrimpy duration, anyway; I’d be interested in hearing more. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Permanent Collection, Nothing Good Is Normal (Strangeway Studios)

You’ve heard of musicians branching out to painting and film, but this is a new one for me, a guy who’s so thoroughly, well, human, that you can find a review of him as an apartment tenant from one of his past landlords in Oakland. This is only the second full-length in seven years from Jason Hendardy’s one-man Permanent Collection project, as he’s been tied down with running his Strangeway imprint (all the company’s records, mostly 7” EPs and cassettes, are out of print), doing video stuff, showing his bum on Impose magazine’s site, and generally being rad. This LP starts out with a doom-metal bliss figure made of pure fuzz, which had me expecting some sort of Sunn(O) trip, but then it suddenly became awesome, dousing me in unkempt Big Black drone-metal with a black-metal guitar sound and “In Bloom”-mode Kurt Cobain vocals with the reverb absolutely pegged. What I’ve just described is something too cool for human ears, and it’s that way through the whole set. If the songs weren’t so melodically repetitive, I’d be this thing’s most wild-eyed groupie. A- — Eric W. Saeger

Retro Playlist
Eric W. Saeger recommends a couple of albums worth a second look.

I opened a can of worms the other month when I accepted a certain PR person’s request to send me jazz material. Like all soldiers at the front lines of jazz publicity, she is absolutely overloaded with new albums of which she wants to raise the public’s awareness. Over the past few weeks, my snail-mailbox has been crammed with her stuff.

As I’ve said many times here, jazz players have a tough enough time as it is. Trying to get the attention of an American public that gains alarmingly little (if any) musical training in public schools is a tough nut to crack when your product — jazz music — is geared toward well-rounded palates. It doesn’t help that many jazz records are too cookie-cutter, of course, a handicap common to all musical genres but completely untenable in jazz. It’s always better to hear something that’s actually new, at least to me, like Jean Chaumont’s 2018 LP The Beauty of Differences, whose greatest power stems from the guitarist’s non-standard setup, specifically a close-miked Eastman hollow-body guitar armed with steel and nylon strings. The tunes themselves are nice too, chilly modern doodles that don’t strain themselves.

Last year I mentioned Subtone’s then-new album Moose Blues, another one worth revisiting for the piano lines of the seemingly everywhere Florian Hoefner alone. Even if you aren’t a fan of ’70s-era post-bop, you still have to hand it to them for the insane amount of touring the band puts in. That kind of thing really makes a crew appreciate their studio time, which is very evident here.

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Email [email protected] for fastest response.

PLAYLIST
A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Oh great, the next general release date for albums is July 3, and at this writing I’m going to have to dig deep to find new records that’ll come out that day. Like basically at this point, it’s just Paul Weller (no, he didn’t play Robocop, that was Peter Weller), whom I know nothing about, and Willie Nelson, so who wants to hear about new albums made by rich people when there’s no work, and plus, coronavirus, can’t we all just move to communes and forget about mowing the lawn? But whatever, since no one but Willie and Not The Robocop Guy is releasing CDs, it’s the perfect time to fill this space with a retraction, for an error I made weeks back! Yes, the impossible did happen, and my friend Gary P. noticed it, because he actually reads these words instead of doing what you do, going right to Amy’s movie reviews and then the Sudoku, and then it’s time to wash the plague germs off your hands again, and then you forget that I might actually be worth reading because I have won two awards for writing snark grenades. What did I mess up? Well, the other week, I wrote in my expert-level, Pulitzer-worthy review of Suzi Quatro’s new album that she played Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days, but I was wrong, and it bummed Gary out, because Suzi Quatro actually played Leather Tuscadero, not Pinky. So he texted me, all like “Dude!” and I was like, “This is how much I care about this career-destroying error: See that atom-sized dust-mite foot on your screen? No, next to the super-teeny spot of old Taco Bell slime, to the left.” It was wicked tense, but then we had a laugh about it.

• So, right, Willie Nelson has a new one coming out on the 3rd, called First Rose of Spring! I dunno, I don’t know anyone who buys Willie Nelson albums, do you? Usually people just Spotify his one-off duets with whoever, Johnny Cash or Death Grips, isn’t that right? No? Well, then, I will now see how much I can tolerate of this billion-year-old’s new song, the title track. Bet you anything it starts with slow acoustic guitar. Yup, it does, and sleepy dobro. He’s singing about a girl, and butterflies and flowers. There’s harmonica, and dobro, and Willie sounding a billion years old, and it just makes me think of the scene in Blazing Saddles when the guys are eating beans and passing gas. Aren’t fart scenes the funniest? I wonder if people would buy an album of Willie burping while playing harmonica and dobro. I bet they would.

• Jane, stop this crazy thing, let’s just wrap up this week with On Sunset, the new LP from Paul Weller! Oh for cripes sake, we already talked about this album the other week, so the release date was moved, and that’s why you couldn’t buy it on June 12. Only other new music to talk about is London punk band Dream Wife’s So When You Gonna, and its single “Sports,” a riot-grrrl type song that’s awesome and bratty, like you will love this band if you are a girl who enjoys randomly breaking stuff. — Eric W. Saeger

Local bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

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