Tag: 241010

Go with Todd

Rundgren performs in Nashua

A few years ago, redemption came to fans of Todd Rundgren when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, it didn’t culminate years of Rundgren calling “Hello, It’s Me” to the Rock Hall — far from it. He didn’t seek the accolade, and bowed out of the induction ceremony due to a show on the same night, four hours away in Cincinnati.

To call him an iconoclast is an understatement. Rundgren has charted his own course from early in his career. He became a producer when most people barely knew what that was, because he realized the guy his label hired to supervise the first album of his band The Nazz was a bean counter who either didn’t care about their album’s sound or couldn’t bring it off.

One of his first assignments was The Band’s Stage Fright album. He went on to produce Grand Funk, Hall & Oates, XTC and many others. Music became a side hustle for Rundgren as a result, as his main source of income was so lucrative. His take from Meatloaf’s 1978 LP Bat Out of Hell bought him a house in Hawaii.

That said, he’s made a lot of records over the years, and some of them have produced hits like “Bang On the Drum” and “Can We Still Be Friends?” The difference is he does them to please himself, not the critics or label executives.

“I’ve essentially cultivated an audience that helps me survive in the music business,” Rundgren said from his home in Kaua’i. “I’ve never had the expectations that I should be recognized, I do it for my own purposes. I’m grateful to have an audience for it, but I never had the expectation that it’s going to be hugely successful.”

Younger listeners bored with mainstream pop have lately found albums like 1972’s A Wizard, A True Star, and Nearly Human, a 1989 record that was his last with a charting single. For Rundgren, seeing these new fans at shows is equally gratifying and bewildering. “They’re coming at it more from the place I came to it from, which is I’m making a historical document,” he said. “It’ll be there long after I’m gone.”

Rundgren is less sanguine about contemporary music. “The most successful so-called musical artists today are pole dancers,” he observed. “They don’t intend to remain in music, they all want to eventually have acting careers … now you get famous for being famous. In that sense there is a lot of what’s called music that really doesn’t qualify, at least to me.”

He recently re-launched a service begun in the 1990s as PatroNet to help independent artists.

The newly named Global Nation’s goal “is to give creative people a maximum amount of freedom,” he said. “First of all, to create what they want, and have it appear exactly as they’ve created it … we’ve standardized the display to be essentially a virtual HDTV. So it looks the same no matter what you play it on — and you can play it on HDTV.”

Critically, the service helps creators keep most of the money.

“Instead of you getting the short end of the stick after Apple Store takes theirs and the publisher takes theirs and you wind up with 30 percent of the cost of the subscription, we want that to be closer to 80 percent,” he said, adding the Global Nation is presently in soft launch mode. “We are on the air; we’re just not aggressively pushing it.”

At Rundgren’s upcoming Me/We Tour stop in Nashua on Oct. 16, he’ll draw from a deep catalog, while saving his biggest hits like “I Saw the Light,” “Hello It’s Me” and “The Last Ride” for the encore. Fans of deep cuts like “I Think You Know” and “Woman’s World” will be happy with the setlist.

“It’s a fixed set list so people can have the confidence that if there’s a song they want to hear that I played before, they will hear it,” he said. “If they need to know beforehand, they can probably look up the set list and find out.”

Todd Rundgren Me/We
When: Wednesday, Oct. 16, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $59 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Todd Rundgren. Photo by Rex Rundgren.

The Music Roundup 24/10/10

Local music news & events

• Throwback girl: On her 1987 debut “Foolish Beat,” 16-year-old Debbie Gibson became the youngest artist to perform, produce and write a No. 1 single, a feat that likely will remain unmatched in today’s committee-run pop world. She marks the 35th anniversary of her chart-topping Electric Youth album by stripping it down for an acoustic tour stopping in Nashua. Thursday, Oct. 10, 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $39 and up at etix.com.

• Nouveau chapeau: Few New England songwriters have the clever wordplay command of Jake McKelvie. Take two lines from “Eat Around the Pudding,” where he rhymes homeowner, combover and organ donor while still delivering a jaunty tune that’s either a breakup song or musical self-therapy. McKelvie performs at a favorite area venue to celebrate his latest record, A New Kind of Hat. Friday, Oct. 11, 7 p.m., Union Coffee House, 42 South St., Milford. Visit jakemckelvie.com.

• Hard rocking: With a new album just released, Texas Hippie Coalition — THC to their fans — are back on the road, with an upcoming Lakes Region date. Playing a hybrid of Southern rock they call “red dirt metal,” the quintet’s latest, Gunsmoke, owes a debt of gratitude to John Wayne, the band’s lead singer Big Dad Ritch said. Its lead single “Bones Jones” is a scorcher. Saturday, Oct. 12, 7 p.m., The Big House, 322 Lakeside Ave., Laconia, $25 at eventbrite.com.

• Dynamic duo: A pair of formidable folksingers share the stage. Patty Larkin and Lucy Kaplansky have recently been part of the On A Winter’s Night reunion tour with John Gorka and Cliff Eberhardt. For Larkin, it was a miracle comeback; in summer 2022 she tripped and fell during a family vacation and suffered a near-paralyzing spinal cord injury that forced her to re-learn the guitar. Saturday, Oct. 12, 7:30 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $35.75 at ccanh.com.

• String power: With a mix of funk, rock and blues, Ana Popovic has a few famous fans. Bruce Springsteen called her “one helluva guitar player,” and she was the only female guitarist on the all-star Experience Hendrix tour that ran from 2014 to 2018. Popovic also has magnetic stage presence, and she can belt out a song as well. She appears with members of her Fantastafunk big band Sunday, Oct. 13, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $39 at tupelomusichall.com.

Joker: Folie à Deux (R)

Joaquin Phoenix returns as the scrawny Arthur Fleck, a sad man who set Gotham aflame with his violent chaos as Joker a few years earlier, in Joker: Folie à Deux, a movie where Lady Gaga is also present.

Apparently the time between the events of Joker and now has, in the world of the films, been spent with the authorities of Gotham — such as assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) — trying to figure out if Arthur is sane enough to stand trial. Arthur’s lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), wants to argue that as a result of childhood abuse Arthur has split personalities and the “Joker” is a protective alter. The Joker killed people but Arthur isn’t criminally responsible, is her argument. A somewhat zonked out Arthur doesn’t seem to have an opinion on this or anything really until a chance meeting with Lee — Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga) — an inmate at the more mental-health-focused side of Arkham. He is instantly enamored with her, and she with him, and they engage in a romance of dream-sequence musical numbers and occasional real-life (maybe) meetings that lead to Lee being the queen fan of Joker’s supportive public. With Lee’s encouragement, Arthur lets the Joker come out more — but he isn’t ultimately any more comfortable as the poster boy for societal discontent than he is as the damaged Arthur.

This movie doesn’t seem to fully invest itself in any one thing. The Lee/Arthur relationship feels like it could be something, but it deflates before we really get a whole lot of “Deux” out of their “Folie à Deux.” I could live with how little we get of Harleen and her personality and motivations if the movie did something interesting with her in Arthur’s story, but it doesn’t.

I also wondered for a while if the movie was trying to subvert the expectations of the last movie. The last movie was all modern red-pill-internet bleakness in a fancy “gritty 1970s film” wrapping; there were times when I wondered if this movie was trying to say “all that stuff you thought was so cool was actually really horrible and sad.” But the movie seems only half in with this idea.

While the movie tells us that Lee loves the fame aspect of it all, we don’t really see that either. Most of the media about Arthur and his crimes — a book, a TV movie — feels very off screen. We never know what, if any, role Lee has in the Joker mythology. There’s a mention of her doing a lot of interviews. Is she just a Joker cheerleader, an entertaining focal point for the Joker-loving malcontents in her own right or is she, like, the Yoko of his legend?

And if the movie is trying to Say Something about crime as entertainment or how we filter our stories through the beats of movies, it doesn’t really stay with that either. I didn’t love the first Joker, but I understood the story it was telling and how it wanted to tell it. Here I feel like the movie had its centerpieces — Joker but sad! Lady Gaga! Surprise, it’s a musical, sort of! — but didn’t know how to construct a story around those. I feel like there is an interesting story here about the After of a burst of societal anger and violence. What becomes of the leader, what becomes of his followers when the leader doesn’t live up to their ideal, what fills the vacuum left by the original focal point of all that energy? But there’s also a lot of unnecessary junk getting in the way of that.

Which brings us to this movie’s final moments. After what felt like a forever of watching the movie search for a purpose for its visuals of Gaga in Harley Quinn makeup or the duo on a ’70s-style variety show — elements that feel like they haven’t yet made the jump from “idea board” to “part of the story” — we get to the very end when the movie bows out with a “ha made you look” beat of self-satisfied cleverness that made me think “shut up, movie.” Well, things other than “shut up” but “shut up” is the only one that can be printed in a newspaper. This is maybe this sequel’s greatest failing — when it’s not boring, it’s needlessly annoying. C-

(I thought about going lower but there isn’t even an “interesting failure” aspect about this movie. It’s solidly in forgettable “meh” territory. Its most lasting impact is probably forcing me to learn how to make the “à” character — alt 0224, my fellow character map aficionados.)

Rated R for some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Todd Phillips with a screenplay by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips, Joker: Folie à Deux is two hours and 18 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

William, by Mason Coile

William, by Mason Coile (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 224 pages)

Earlier this year, Ray Kurzwell gave us a cheery picture of the coming world under artificial intelligence in The Singularity is Nearer. A bone-chilling alternate view is offered in Mason Coile’s novel William, a stand-out in the nascent genre of “AI horror.”

You probably won’t want to read it right before you go to bed, but it is a perfect autumn read as the story transpires on a single day: Halloween.

The titular “William” is a half-finished robot that is the project of Henry, a brilliant agoraphobic engineer who can’t leave his home without dissolving into panic — fans of the Breaking Bad universe might think of Chuck McGill in Better Call Saul, just with a different illness and profession.

Henry has built several robotic creatures, including a dog and a creepy little magician riding a small bicycle. But William is to be his ultimate creation — the robot appears to have developed consciousness — and Henry’s preoccupation with the project seems to stem not so much from personal ambition but from distracting himself from his crumbling marriage to Lily, a wealthy computer engineer.

“Things are bad between them, but not too bad,” Henry keeps reassuring himself, even though “he worries that his assessment of the bridgeable distance between himself and his wife is an error of judgment — the same made by millions of husbands right before the end.”

Things have regressed to the point where he is sleeping in the spare room of the couple’s old but cutting-edge Victorian home, a place where windows open, water heats and doors lock via voice command, in a neighborhood where drones “buzzing like honeybees” fly overhead with deliveries all day. Lily wears glasses that are connected to her computer, allowing her to access email by blinking.

It’s the sort of smart house we can envision not too far in the future. Henry created it, like he created William, who spends his time locked in the attic reading books and listening to NPR and Broadway show tunes on a transistor radio. While he can learn and converse with Henry, his body consists only of a torso, arms and head, and he is valiantly trying to make himself mobile, even to the point of attaching wheels to his chair while Henry is away.

It’s clear that Henry’s mental illness — the onset of which is not initially explained — is contributing to the couple’s marital problems, although Lily seems to be trying to help him as best she can. On this day, she has invited two former coworkers, Paige and Davis, to the house for lunch, and as they meet we see that he’s not only agoraphobic but seriously antisocial, the kind of person whose conversation always seems awkward or haughty. (One of the first things he says to Paige, while internally noting “the wasted efforts that have gone into her appearance,” is “your sleeves are too long.”)

After a bit of this uncomfortable interaction, Henry decides the best way to get through the visit is to introduce everyone to William. Even Lily hasn’t seen him, or even been allowed into the attic at this point — she only knows that her husband has been working on conscious AI.

Henry goes up first, to warn William that he is having guests, asking him to behave — the robot has a tendency to make somewhat snarky contents, to try to psychoanalyze Henry, explain his problems. “‘Don’t worry, I’ll be sweet as pie,’ the robot says, drawing a cross over its nonexistent heart’.”

Of course, he is not. And what transpires when the four go up to the lab sets in a motion a cascade of tension that leads to full-blown horror, which is not typically the kind of fare I enjoy, either in literature or in film. But I took one for this team, and was ultimately glad I did, as a series of shocking twists in the story, and the existential questions the novel raises more than made up for the unpleasant scenes.

Mason Coile is a pen name for Canadian author Andrew Pyper, who seems to be channeling Stephen King in this story. He packs a lot to ponder in this short book, which some have described as a one-sitting read. (True only if you tend to sit for long periods.)

Pyper has said that he originally wrote William as a short story, then tried to sell it as a screenplay without success, and only turned it into a novel after the first iterations failed to sell. He seems to have found the perfect length — the novel is tightly coiled, like a snake, with just the right amount of exposition, and a punch-perfect ending. It is the sort of book you have to read twice — the second time to go back and see all the foreshadowing of events that you might have missed the first time.

It’s also the sort of book you’ll want to share and talk about it, as it raises interesting questions about the nature of AI and whether artificial intelligence is something around which human beings can really install guardrails. Even God didn’t seem to do that, as Lily observes at one point — God just created without thought to the consequences, she thinks. “If beauty or discovery was the result — if chaos was the result — it didn’t matter. It only mattered that something astonishing was born.”

I don’t like horror, but I loved this absorbing, disturbing little book. A

Album Reviews 24/10/10

The Bruce Lofgren Group, Earthly And Cosmic Tales (self-released)

Apparently it’s already the start of Grammy-voting season, given that I’ve been asked to vote for this record in the first round of the Best Alternative Jazz Album category. It’s very flattering that these people think I have some sort of say in the Grammy process, but if anyone’s listening (no one is), as far as alternative jazz albums go I’d consider this one, sure. Lofgren is a southern California-based guitarist who’s been around for quite a while and built a sturdy following for his very colorful tuneage, which this certainly is. He’s not trying to frame himself as a rock bandleader at all, which is a nice break; the instruments that join him here are legion, including clarinets, fretless basses, vibes and cellos. Rather than break this down track by track I’d prefer to paint the release as something that speaks to the album cover, which has become a lost art these days: if anything, it’s a lot like Spyro Gyra in mellow mode, evincing lush, exotic landscapes rather than smoke-filled rooms. I don’t get many like this dropped on my desk; very pleasurable, deeply thought stuff. A+

Ian Gindes, Rachmaninoff Piano Works (Navona Records)

As you probably assume, classical piano music is the beluga caviar of sound. I grew up with it; my mom would bash away at her baby grand every single day (if you want to know how good she was, go listen to the YouTube of Maria João Pires performing Franz Schubert’s Impromptu D.899, Opus 90 – No. 4. That was a daily staple; mom’s version was close to that, bang-on when she was angry enough). Over the years I’ve grown to love Johann Strauss’ and Vivaldi’s symphonics, but the classical piano works of Sergei Rachmaninoff were never my bowl of Fritos really. Such desperate mawkishness, the depthless agony of the Russian proletariat, hard pass. This SoCal doctor loves him some Sergei, though, so I figured I’d let him know that someone other than the PBS arts critic and the bluebloods who’ve watched him play at Carnegie Hall are out there. Gindes’ playing is exquisite of course, and convinced me not to become an active fan of the virtuoso but to admit that his romances were indeed very pretty, non-depressing and not so angst-ridden (Op. 21: No. 5 in A-Flat Major for instance). Gentle reminder that this isn’t art that exclusively panders to snobs, you guys, it’s for everyone. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Holy vampire bats, Batman, Halloween is on the way, and there are new albums coming out on Friday, Oct. 11, to celebrate Samhain or whatever the goths like to call it when they’re trying to sound worldly! I wanted my holiday to be super special, so for the first time since Covid-19 first appeared on the scene, I contracted it this week during a trip to Concord to try to mine some antiques out of a barn. It’s the absolute worst folks, do your due diligence or you’ll be sorry, I sure am. But anyway, we’re not here to talk about drama in real life, we’re here to chat about albums, so let’s start with Supercharged, the new one from California skate-rock hooligans The Offspring, you remember them, right? No, no, not the ones who did the Malcolm in the Middle song, that was They Might Be Giants, try to keep up even though there’s really no difference at all, that’d be great. (Yes, it has come to this, my next task in this life at this writing is to go listen to a band that’s been completely irrelevant for more than 15 years as I try to fend off the urge to curl up on the couch with my lovely little XEC Covid virus gremlins and dream of being normal and non-cough-y again someday.) No, The Offspring are fine, I remember when emo was a new thing to people who hadn’t been listening to it for years already, let’s go have a listen to this new album; I think we should start with “Light It Up,” a really fast little pure-punk number that has nothing wrong with it, as opposed to the nauseatingly poppy “Make It All Right,” which makes They Might Be Giants sound like Slayer. Good lord, there’s even a Partridge Family-level “Ba ba ba ba baaaa” singalong in there. How did anyone allow this to happen?

• I’d place scary high odds that most times when they hear an Alter Bridge song most people think it’s actually Creed. That’s not a compliment, of course, but the punchline is that during one binge-drinking episode Slash, of Guns N’ Roses fame, hired Alter Bridge’s singing person Myles Kennedy to join his new band, and thus a new wrestler-metal act hit the streets, called “Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators!” I don’t know why Slash thought it would be a good idea to make his new band sound more like Creed, but that’s the state of the genre now, and besides, Kennedy has his own band, whose new album, The Art Of Letting Go, is being loaded into the delivery trucks as we speak! Let’s go see! Right, so the first song to come up in my YouTube is “Nothing More To Gain,” which, oddly enough, is more Guns N’ Roses-like than I ever would have expected, perhaps our hero has learned a lesson about the benefits of not sounding like Creed! Yes, yes, the tune starts off with an unintelligible blues-metal mess, mostly a bunch of random notes that’ll make you think of hairy men in Abraham Lincoln hats, and then Kennedy starts singing like Axl Rose! Funny how the circle of life works, isn’t it, fam?

• The Linda Lindas are an all-girl “punk-pop” band from Los Angeles, but that’s not their fault! The title track of their new album, No Obligation, is surprisingly interesting; unlike the tedious emo nonsense I was expecting, it’s like a cross between Black Flag and Hole. Recommended if you want to tick somebody off for no reason.

• And lastly it’s dream-popper Caroline Sallee, who goes by the stage name Caroline Says, with her latest oeuvre entry, The Lucky One! She covered a Spacemen 3 song once, indicating she likes them, which explains why her new single “Faded And Golden” is strummy, spacey and uneventful.

Apple Fritters

Start with 3 apples – whatever kind you like; ideally, they should be crisp; I like Fuji or Braeburn, but if all you have are some sad, mealy Red Delicious, use them, you’ll be doing them a favor

Dry ingredients

  • 1 cup (120 g) all-purpose flour
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 Tablespoon + 1 teaspoon sugar

Wet ingredients

  • 1 cup (227 g) apple cider
  • 2/3 cup (152 g) more apple cider
  • 1 egg, beaten, or egg substitute
  • 3 Tablespoons melted butter or vegan butter
  • oil for frying
  • thermometer for checking the oil temperature

Peel and dice the three apples. Soak them in a cup of cider, and set aside to soak anywhere from an hour to a day. A 1-pint plastic takeout container is very useful for this.

Add all the dry ingredients to a large bowl, and whisk to combine.

Fill a medium-sized pot 3 to 4 inches full of vegetable oil, and place it over medium-high heat, while you finish mixing your fritter batter.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients in your bowl, and stir to combine. Drain the diced apple, set 2 Tablespoons of that drained cider aside, then drink the rest.

Stir as much of the apple into the batter as you can. Force the issue if you have to. “Yes, I know it’s crowded,” you can tell the apple. “Think of this as a pajama party with destiny.” (I’m not sure what that means either, but the apple chunks will be a little confused after soaking in cider all day and will probably be happy to have somebody act like they know what they’re doing.)

Check the temperature of your oil. You’re shooting for something in the neighborhood of 365°F. When the oil is hot enough, scoop 1/3 to 1/2 cup of fritter batter into it. A large ice cream scoop is about the right size.

This is the point where recipes will tell you not to crowd the pan. This means that you want to keep the oil hot enough that the fritters will cook crisply and evenly on the outside. You will probably notice that as you add fritter batter to the pan, the temperature of the oil will drop. It’s a good idea to fry one or maybe two fritters at a time. Hot oil will create a crust to keep the oil out of the inside of the fritters. If the oil drops in temperature too much, the fritters will end up greasy.

After about two minutes, flip the fritters with a slotted spoon or a pair of tongs to submerge the other side in the hot oil. When they are deeply golden brown, remove them from the oil and drain on a towel or paper towels. Wait for the oil to come back to 365°F, then gently scoop more batter into the pan. Repeat this until you use up all the batter.

Once the fritters have drained and cooled a little, glaze them.

Glaze

Mix 1 cup (114 g) of powdered sugar with the 2 Tablespoons of cider you set aside a few minutes ago. Whisk it to combine, then drizzle it over the cooling fritters and leave them to get to know each other for 10 minutes or so.

There is a jazz classic called “Green Onions” by Booker T and the MGs. I maintain that while there is some music that is as good as “Green Onions,” there is almost nothing better. A warm apple fritter, fresh from the fryer — crispy, tender, sweet, and fruity — is much the same. There are a few things as good — the laughter of a small child, seeing Casablanca for the first time (but wait until you’re at least 30, first), or drinking a perfectly made and chilled cocktail after a hard day — but very few things are better.

Especially with some vanilla ice cream.

Serving suggestion: Eat these with vanilla ice cream, while listening to “Green Onions.”

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!