Tag: 250731

Southern Rock

Atlanta Rhythm Section at Tupelo

Known for ’70s hits like “So Into You” and “Imaginary Lover,” Atlanta Rhythm Section began as the house band at Studio One in Doraville, Georgia. It would be where Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded “Free Bird” and “Sweet Home Alabama,” and a diverse group of artists ranging from Ronnie James Dio’s pre-Sabbath band Elf to Journey and Joe South all made albums.

Rodney Justo was one of the musicians there when Studio One opened in 1970. His association with the others stretched back to the Candymen, a group that included future star Bobby Goldsboro. It was formed to play with Roy Orbison when the British Invasion shifted the focus from solo singers to bands like The Beatles.

If you believe the internet, the Candymen backed Orbison on his biggest hit “Oh Pretty Woman,” but in a recent interview Justo countered the legend. “That’s not true,” he said by phone, but added, “it’s not a rumor we try to stop, you know what I mean? We have lied so much about being on that set that we almost remember the session.”

The rest of ARS was drawn from the Classics IV, whose song “Spooky” would later go Top 10 for them. With Justo on vocals, guitarists Barry Bailey and J. R. Cobb, Dean Daughtry on keyboards and a rhythm section of bassist Paul Goddard and drummer Robert Nix, the group began working on its own music soon after the studio opened.

When their first album failed to dent the charts, Justo left for session work in New York City.

“I had a daughter that had some physical problems, and like all stupid musicians in those days, none of us had insurance,” he said. “I left because I didn’t see anything happening, and I had opportunities in New York. But so you understand, I didn’t leave on bad terms.”

The proof is that he readily helped out in 1983 when asked to sing on a few dates and did it again a few years later. He’d be back permanently in 2011, always feeling he belonged.

“The fact is the band was built around me and Barry Bailey; it’s that simple,” he said. “So I never came back feeling like a stranger.”

That said, there is a line in Atlanta Rhythm Section’s first chart hit, “Doraville,” that could be a comment on his departure. “Singing, ‘Friends of mine say I should move to New York / New York’s fine but ain’t Doraville,’ I thought they might be taking a little shot at me,” Justo said. “But I didn’t care. We were friends to begin with, and I didn’t leave as enemies.”

Justo is now the last remaining ARS member and has no plans to retire.

“A lot of people are very grateful that I’ve kept the band going, including the band members when they were alive,” he said, “Barry was happy, and J.R. was happy, he said, ‘Man, that’s so great you’ve come back, and you keep doing it.’”

On Saturday, Aug. 2, the band will return to Tupelo Music Hall, where they have a strong following. The current lineup consists of Justo, guitarists David Anderson and Steve Stone, keyboard player Lee Shealy, along with Justin Senker and Rodger Stephan on bass and drums, respectively.

There’s no typical ARS show, though Justo is quick to point out one obvious fact.

“You’ve got to understand that there’s probably six or seven songs we have to play,” he said, “In addition we do some deep tracks, and we finally have learned enough songs that we can play any type of venue. We change the show based on where we’re playing, but they’re going to get the six or seven hits.”

Atlanta Rhythm Section
When: Saturday, Aug. 2, 8 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $60 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Atlanta Rhythm Section. Photo credit: Courtni Meadows.

The Music Roundup 25/07/31

Local music news & events

• Tricky tribute: With no chance of a reunion, Panorama: A Tribute to the Cars is the next worthy choice for fans of the band. They impressively tackle everything from their eponymous debut to 1984’s Heartbeat City (the last-gasp Door to Door doesn’t really count). The variety and complexity of songs like “My Best Friend’s Girl” and “Hello Again” are quite challenging for any musician. Thursday, July 31, 8 p.m., LaBelle Winery, 14 Route 111, Derry, $35 at labellewinery.com.

• Summer songs: Possessing “the heart of a poet and the voice of a storyteller,” Katie Dobbins performs a First Friday set at a Lakes Region museum. Take in the singer-songwriter’s set while saving some time to check out the oldest fully preserved textile mill in the country, the Threads of Innovation and works from rug hook artist Pam Bartlett, who uses landscapes and animals in her pieces. Friday, Aug. 1, 5 p.m., Belknap Mill, 25 Beacon St. East, Laconia, belknapmill.org.

• Blues bash: There’s a solid lineup for this year’s Granite State Blues Festival. The Chris O’Leary Band tops the bill, led by the “devastatingly soulful vocalist, dynamic harmonica master and superlative songwriter.” Boston stomp box and slide guitarist Danielle Miraglia, Misty Blues Band, All Night Boogie Band, Craig Thomas & Bluetopia and TJ Wheeler round things out. Saturday, Aug. 2, 11:30 a.m., Veterans Park, 723 Elm St., Manchester, $35 at bit.ly/gsbluesfest.

• Dynamic duo: Two distinctive Americana voices team up as Mary Chapin Carpenter & Brandy Clark share the stage. Clark is coming off a Grammy win for her song featuring Brandi Carlile, “Dear Insecurity,” and Carpenter just released a new LP, Personal History. Sunday, Aug. 3, 7 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $66 and up at etix.com.

• Country couple: Balancing elements of old-school and new country, Martin & Kelly made such a strong impression at last year’s al fresco concert series that they’ve been invited back. Jilly Martin and guitar slinger Ryan Brooks Kelly have chemistry on stage, with sweet harmonies and deft instrumental interplay; they’ve opened for stars like Willie Nelson and Alison Krauss. Wednesday, Aug. 6, 7 p.m., Town Common, 265 Mammoth Road, Londonderry, martinkellymusic.com.

Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

In 2011, one of the most destructive tornadoes to hit the U.S. touched down at 5:34 p.m. in Joplin, Missouri. Although the area had been under a tornado watch for more than four hours and tornado warnings were issued shortly after 5 o’clock, 161 people died and more than a thousand were injured.

In the aftermath, researchers wanted to learn not only all they could about the tornado’s formation, but also why, with ample warning time, there were so many casualties. Among others, they interviewed a man who “was aware that storms were likely, but wanted to get something to eat,” writes Thomas E. Weber in Cloud Warriors, his examination of the past and future of weather forecasting. The man — who was turned away by one restaurant but found another that let him in and served him with the storm bearing down — was lucky to survive despite his “optimism bias,” the idea that when bad things happen, they likely won’t happen to you.

Optimism bias is but one of the challenges of the people who try to keep us safe from tornados, hurricanes, flooding and other catastrophic weather. Weber calls them “cloud warriors,” people whose job is ostensibly to forecast the weather but who have a larger purpose: keeping us safe from Mother Nature.

“Weather predictions are impressively good, so much so that their accuracy may surprise you.” Weber writes, noting that today’s five-day forecasts are as good as a 24-hour forecast was in 1980. While everything from artificial intelligence to the weather balloons that the National Weather Service launches every day (in every state) will continue to improve forecasting, forecasts have limited value if people don’t heed them, which is why Weber, a journalist, wants everyone to improve their weather literacy, especially about four types of weather-related threats: tornadoes, wildfires, extreme heat and hurricanes.

For the tornado chapter, he travels to Norman, Oklahoma, home to the National Weather Center, which, in addition to being populated by very intense and learned meteorologists, pays homage to the Twister movies with its Flying Cow Cafe. Like the stars of those films, Weber goes storm chasing in a tricked-out truck but doesn’t encounter anything more exciting than an ominous wall cloud (a sign of potential tornado formation) and some aggressive hail. (We do learn, however, that the Twister movies didn’t exaggerate the storm chasers on the plains of Oklahoma — a dozen or so companies will take tourists’ money in exchange for putting them in harm’s way.)

Fire isn’t weather, but is driven by wind, which is why Weber travels to an emergency operations center in San Diego to look into how meteorologists and firefighters try to keep people safe from fires that burn at up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and spread at six miles an hour. In this chapter, he examines the Camp Fire, which destroyed much of Paradise, California, in 2018, explains the infamous Santa Ana winds, and delves into why so much of the country is indifferent to the danger of wildlife. He quotes one meteorologist who says: “They don’t comprehend what happens when you have low humidity and wind on a fire. Or when you have a drought or a normal dry summer, what that does to vegetation. They know what it’s like to be thirsty, but they don’t understand what it’s like for vegetation to be thirsty.”

Those of us who pay even fleeting attention to meteorologists like Dave Epstein on social media are familiar with the “European models” that compete with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Strangely enough, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is best-known for its hurricane models, even though hurricanes are rare in the 23 nations and 12 “cooperating states” that it serves.

To learn more, Weber takes us to the town of Reading, England, where the ECMWF’s supercomputers sit; they can, he tells us, conduct more than four quadrillion calculations per second. And yet, “They’re just rows of big metal cabinets; they look like a bunch of refrigerators placed side by side.”

While many of the questions that Webster poses are really interesting — for example, how do you get emergency weather notifications to the Amish, who shun technology — the book often lacks electricity, it moves sluggishly, bogged down by an unfortunate impulse embedded in every journalist’s DNA: to include every last piece of information you gathered in telling a story.

Therefore, when we learn about why accurate weather forecasting is so important to the people launching delivery drones at Walmart, we are tempted to put the book down and go to the Walmart website and try to order by drone, which is much more exciting. In other words, Weber tells us interesting stories, but not always in the most interesting way. This is not necessarily his fault. He is, after all, interviewing the geekiest of weather geeks and is one himself, being one of your fellow Americans who have their own personal weather station installed in their backyard so they can, among other things, get a phone notification if it starts to rain.

Me, I’m still astounded that the weather app on my phone can announce that it will start to rain in 14 minutes and will rain for 24 minutes, and pretty much be right. Weber tries to explain how that happens, and frankly I still don’t fully get it after 200-plus pages. I’m not fully convinced that I need to be as weather literate as Weber and his sources, so long as my iPhone is. Cloud Warriors, though well-reported, may be a deeper dive into the subject than most readers want or need. B

Featured Photo: Cloud Warriors, by Thomas E. Weber

Album Reviews 25/07/31

Tchotchke, Playin’ Dumb (self-released)

So I said to the public relations lady, three cute 23-year-old babes from New York City on a retro 1960s-pop tip, where do I sign, and 10 minutes later there it was, in my emailbox, this, their second album. Their 2022 debut full-length was a little scattershot, a mishmash of everything from the aforementioned era, from beehive-hairdo girl-group to random Dolly Parton/Harry Nilsson-influenced radio stuff, all with too much cheese in its sound, but this is a little more serious, or at least as serious as you’d want from a pop-vocal-oriented trio who think life must have been a lot more fun when Nixon was president (probably was, given that it was merely the beginning of the end for America). This is more 1970s-centric, beginning with “The Game,” in which the group drapes intricate ELO-like harmonies over Randy Newman-style piano-pop lines, and then it’s “Did You Hear,” a listenable but too flatly produced glam-influenced thingamajig that will make your grandparents think of Big Star and Sweet. “Kisses” is twee-ish proto-pop in the manner of Ben Kweller meets Versus, and so on; altogether the effect is like Au Revoir Simone with three singers who don’t suck. Not to be an annoying production-snob, but someone text me when they grow up, stop obsessing over filling the Brooklyn nightclubs and get an actual studio budget, that’d be great. C+

John Yao, Points In Time (See Tao Recordings)

Sorry that I’m a little lost here; I’m informed I gave this elite New York-based trombonist/bandleader a big thumbs-up in your Hippo for one of his recent albums but I can’t find it for the life of me. That’s OK, though, because he and his 17-count-’em accomplices are all about big-band jazz, a genre that’s always guaranteed a glowing review on this page unless I sense the slightest bit of incompetence, which I don’t at all here. This full-length reflects upon what Yao’s learned and experienced (and stars many of the musicians he’s accumulated) over the 20 years that’ve passed since his first big-band album, Flip-Flop, which All About Jazz pronounced, in their inimitable obfuscatory writing style, as heralding the arrival of “a strong compositional voice and effective band-leader able to use his 17-piece band to paint across a wide spectrum and infuse his complex…” blah blah blah (someone needs to introduce AAJ’s writer-nerds to the word “awesome”). So yeah, this is awesome, from the pensive “Early Morning Walk” to the irrepressibly upbeat “Song for Nolan”; if you like big band (and you should, I tell you), you’ll definitely want this. A+

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• This week’s “new CD release Friday” falls on Aug. 1, summer’s just about over and it happened so fast, why did we even bother, and now for a mindless tangent in which I congratulate myself for reviewing Black Sabbath’s second-worst album, Never Say Die, the other week, given that the band’s been a trending internet topic for what feels like 40 years now, between the farewell concert and then the tragic passing of the band’s singer Ozzy Osbourne just a couple-three weeks later. I feel like I deserve a gold sticker for indulging in current-month’s hottest pop-culture-trending thing, which, as you know, I don’t usually do, but in this case, Sabbath was my favorite band during my boyhood days. I’ll have you know I even commented on social media about his passing, which I also never do, considering that everyone does that so I feel like I can’t; as a wise person once said (and I’m editing this quote for consumption by a more general audience), “Every time a celebrity dies, Twitter turns into 5,000 people trying to flush the same gum wrapper down the same toilet.” I mean, it’s not illegal to be the zillionth person to post “thoughts and prayers” about someone they never met even if it should be, but what amazed me was how all sorts of people leapt out of the woodwork five seconds after Ozzy’s death announcement to condemn him for his politics (seriously, go look). I sympathize with his critics for what they were trying to illuminate, but honestly, one would think we’ve got more important fish to fry these days than trying to posthumously cancel a fellow who once bit into an actual fruit bat for the entertainment value of it, but you do you, and meanwhile I digress, because we need to talk about The Starrr Of The Queen Of Life, the second album from Nigerian-Canadian techno artist Debby Friday, who in 2023 won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize, which comes with a lump-sum cash award of $50,000, did you even know what a Polaris Music Prize is, I didn’t either! Arcade Fire won it in 2011, which is something of an unsettling omen for Ms. Friday, but regardless, let me try to get my train back onto its rickety tracks by listening to this album’s new single, “Lipsync.” Hm, I don’t mind it, it’s like a cross between Goldfrapp and some underground goth band — yikes, the more I listen to it, the more it sounds like Birthday Massacre covering a Kylie Minogue song. It’s pretty boring, but the overall feel is okey-dokey.

• Reneé Rapp is an actress-singer who played the part of Regina George in the 2019 Broadway musical version of Mean Girls and starred in last year’s film adaptation of same, all of which is news to me, why didn’t any of you people inform me about all that nonsense? Bite Me, her second album, spotlights its title track, a drank-addled sleaze-a-thon whose video features scantily clad models having a pillow fight, in case you’ve never seen anything remotely like that in all the years you’ve been online.

• The Armed is an experimental hardcore punk band whose members are anonymous, but they’ve had so many famous guests on their albums (people who are well aware of who they are, obviously) that they might as well drop that whole “anonymous” shtick, don’t you think? The band’s new LP, The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, includes the single “Well Made Play,” a messy mess of a tune that combines black metal and ad-lib noise just to be weird.

• Lastly it’s Australian hip-hop miscreants Hilltop Hoods with their new album, Fall from the Light. Focus track “Don’t Happy Be Worry” is a fun-enough tune.

Pink Kazoo

A friend of mine was going through a difficult time so I wrote her a story. This story involved a heroine with her name, who was also going through a sort of anti-Mardi Gras, only to discover she had magical abilities. She was able to work magic through music — a fairly well-established fantasy trope. The twist to this story is that the main character of the story learned to warp the fabric of reality ever so slightly by playing a kazoo.

As my stories go, this one turned out pretty well, and my friend was pleased with it.

Because I rarely know when to leave well enough alone, I asked my friend’s permission to make a video version of her story for my internet channel. Out of, I suspect, a sense of morbid curiosity to see where this would go, she said to please, by all means, go ahead. One thing led to another — as it frequently does with my projects — and I ended up commissioning a musician in Guatemala to record a 30-second kazoo cover of “Livin’ la Vida Loca.”

As one does.

So, you know how sometimes you get a song stuck in your head, nothing you do manages to dislodge it, and you just have to let it run its course, until your brain fixates on something else? It turns out that this sort of situation is only exacerbated by hearing that same song performed on a kazoo.

Which, in a round-about way, is how we find ourselves making a cocktail inspired by this state of affairs:

1½ ounces pineapple rum

½ ounce Aperol – this is a bright red, bitter-sweet Italian liqueur

½ ounce elderflower liqueur – I prefer St. Germain. It gives a cocktail a lovely floral taste and comes in one of the prettiest bottles you are likely to run across.

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

1 dash of the bitters of your choice. I like to use homemade caraway bitters.

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, and shake for 30 seconds or so, or until your hands start to hurt.

Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Garnish with a kazoo.

This is one of those multi-stage cocktails, in the sense that each flavor presents itself to your consideration individually. The flavor of caraway elbows its way to the front of the line, followed by the acidity of the lemon. The rounded flavor of the rum is there, if you look for it, as are the flavors to the liqueurs. This might be an inspired choice to have with brunch; it would pair well with an omelet and an arugula salad. This would be an excellent alternative to prosecco, with the added advantage that after three of these, it would take a person of enormous personal character not to launch into a kazoo rendition of the William Tell Overture, or “Big Spender.”

Featured photo: Pink Kazoo. Photo by John Fladd.

Eats for the art-lovers

The Currier’s new cafe gets a new menu

Developing a new menu for the Currier Museum of Art’s new café came with a number of challenges that required creative work-arounds, but for Chef Meghan Barry, that played to her strengths.

“Being creative,” Barry said, “is probably one of my strongest points.” But working around the constraints of putting the new Tidewater Café in an art museum was tricky, she said.

Because of the need to keep the air in the cafe more-or-less grease-free — giant, high ceilings and delicate, priceless pieces of art pretty much require this — Barry had to build her new menu without anything fried or sauteed to order.

“There’s a separate kitchen downstairs,” she said, “where we can precook our bacon. We have two ovens down there. But during service there’s no way we can go from the downstairs to the upstairs. There’s a small induction burner downstairs and we only use it just to grill our chicken. We have a little grill. Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

A partial solution to these restrictions, Barry said, was to focus on brunchy foods.

“At the Currier, it’s breakfast all day,” she said. ”So it’s a brunch menu and lunch. We have breakfast burrito, we have avocado toast, we have teas, all of it.” Barry is particularly proud of the sophisticated cold dishes that she and her staff have come up with. “I definitely want to say our marinated tomato and burrata salad is super-popular. It’s made from fresh romaine lettuce, marinated red and yellow tomatoes, and burrata cheese, with a balsamic reduction, with a no-nut pesto.” Burrata, she explained, is a ball of fresh mozzarella, with heavy cream inside. “That cream is called stracciatella.”

Ali Goldstein, the Currier’s director of marketing and communications, said creating a sophisticated and comfortable atmosphere has been a high priority for the new café.

“If you can imagine a neighborhood café,” Goldstein said, “where you love going there, you love the menu, everything’s fresh, but it’s at the heart of a world-class art museum. That meeting in the middle is where Tidewater Café at the Currier comes in. It’s equal parts neighborhood cafe and art museum, if you can imagine those two things together. [Visitors] can enjoy a meal or a cookie or a coffee alongside visiting the cafe. People more and more want that full experience of not just checking out the latest show, but also being able to sit down halfway through, get something to drink or have lunch with your family. And really the hope is that this will be a beautiful gathering place to do that.”

The Tidewater Café
Where: inside the Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester, 669-6144, currier.org
Hours: open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
View the menu at currier.org/tidewater-cafe.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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