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Go-to guys

Celebrated sidemen share songs at Rex show

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Alone or between them, Jeff Kazee and G.E. Smith have an enviable list of credits. Keyboard player and singer Kazee was Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes’ longtime Music Director. He’s toured with everyone from Dar Williams and Bon Jovi to the Blues Brothers, and occasionally filled in for Paul Schaeffer as Late Show with David Letterman’s band leader.

Guitarist Smith has served as the secret ingredient of superstars dating back to his days with Hall & Oates, where his licks were key to the duo’s run of five straight multi-platinum albums, starting with 1980’s Voices. Beyond that, he led the SNL Band for a decade, and supported big names like David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Tina Turner and Roger Waters.

The two have a history of more than 25 years playing together. They’re in Manchester for an evening that promises spontaneity.

“We get together before a gig and rehearse a set list,” Smith said in a recent Zoom chat. “But in the middle of the gig, one of us will say, ‘Hey, let’s play … boom.’ We’ve never played it together before, but we do it because we know the songs.”

Along with a multi-genre concert that includes favorites from both along with solo songs, the two will share memories of their storied and eventful careers. As Smith has no plans to write a memoir, onstage tales like the one about how he came to appear in Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes” video must suffice.

“A couple times, publisher-type people talked to me about writing a book, but they want to hear salacious stuff … sex and drug stories,” he said. “That’s so boring to me; that’s not the good stuff.” More interesting is talking about rehearsing a band backing George Harrison, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash and other greats for Bob Dylan’s celebration concert in 1993.

Another was how Saturday Night Live’s practice of having the band play bumper music to fill the gap between the end of a skit and commercial became a star-studded segment, with legends like Eddie Van Halen and Muddy Waters making pop-up appearances with Smith, T-Bone Wolk and the rest of their bandmates.

Created by producer Lorne Michaels, the first few used just the SNL Band, until Smith had an idea.

“I went to Lorne and said, ‘When there’s a good guitar player in town, can I have them come and sit in?’ It became a kind of a thing. A lot of bands on the road [told] me that they’d always look to see who was playing that week with the band. That’s a cool thing.”

In a 2006 documentary about Smith, 50 Watt Fuse, he likened himself to Harry Dean Stanton with a guitar. A supporting actor, he reasoned, excels by drawing attention to the best attributes of the people he works alongside. He’s tried to do the same in his musical collaborations.

For that, he’s grateful. He also believes getting his chance is down to good fortune as much as any other factor.

“I was just lucky,” he said. “You happen to meet somebody and then that person gets you on to the next person. That’s the way my … let’s use the word ‘career’ — that’s the way my career went.”

Among his many collaborations, were there any that surprised him? “I think they all did,” Smith replied. “Because you learn from these people. There’s a reason they’re well-known. It’s because they’re talented and they’ve got something to offer, whether it’s Daryl and John or Mick Jagger, Bowie or Bob Dylan, whoever.”

Asked if there were any he’d like to do but hadn’t, Smith answered, “I always kind of wished I could have been in one of Neil Young’s bands. I did get to play with him a little bit here and there, but to really be in his band and go on the road … I think I would have done a good job at that because I love his music, and I love his guitar playing.”

An Evening With Jeff Kazee & G.E. Smith

When: Thursday, Sept. 18, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $35 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: GE Smith. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/09/11

Local music news & events

• Sit dance: Enjoy wine tasting and rootsy music from Alex Cumming & Audrey Jabra. Cumming is an England-born singer, accordionist, pianist and dance caller who now lives in Vermont. Fiddler Jaber hails from San Diego and has toured the world. One critic called them “a wonderful celebration of traditional folk song, dance music and the traditions of England and the U.S.” Thursday, Sept. 11, 7 p.m., Hermit Woods Winery, 72 Main St., Meredith, $15 at eventbrite.com.

• Virtual ELP: With so many tribute acts, Welcome Back My Friends – An Evening with Emerson, Lake & Palmer is special because it’s not. Drummer Carl Palmer, the only surviving member of the prog rock supergroup, mixes footage of Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and himself performing in 1992 at Royal Albert Hall with his live ELP Legacy Band, as all play in sync. Friday, Sept. 12, 8:30 p.m., Capitol Center for the Arts, 44 S. Main St., Concord, $61 and up at ccanh.com.

• Home grown: Fans of local music will enjoy the Third Annual Live Free Fest, a one-day celebration that offers a wide range of multi-genre performers along with games, food trucks and merchant booths. Acts include Cozy Throne, Regals, Seph & the Nomads, The Forest Forgets, Pointless Culture, Animatronic the Abolisher, Faith Ann Band and The Whole Loaf. Saturday, Sept. 13, 1 p.m., Hillsborough County Youth Center, 17 Hilldale Lane, New Boston, $15 at eventbrite.com.

• Axe slingers: Since moving here from Texas over a decade ago, Willie J. Laws has become part of the Granite State’s musical fabric. The fiery blues guitarist and singer headlines at a former ski lodge that’s now the performance space at a unique arts center. Also on the bill is the youthful Nick Spencer, whose fiery playing has earned accolades like “the future of blues.” Saturday, Sept. 13, 6 p.m., Andres Institute of Art, 106 Rte. 13, Brookline, $25 and up at andresinstitute.org.

• Son shining: Starting in 1996 with the multi-platinum Bringing Down the Horse, The Wallflowers have been a band in name only, its singular vision guided by front man Jakob Dylan who once said, “no one lineup … ever made two records [and] one person is actually putting the ideas together … that’s always been me.” Sunday, Sept. 14, 8 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $54 and up at nashuacenterforthearts.com.

The Conjuring: Last Rites (R)

Ed and Lorraine Warren do One Last Job in 1986 Pennsylvania in this final (allegedly) entry in The Conjuring series, though who knows what that means for your Annabelles and your The Nuns.

The Warrens are still out there giving presentations about the supernatural, now to mostly empty auditoriums. Due to Ed’s (Patrick Wilson) recovery from a heart attack, Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) doesn’t want to take on any new investigations. Meanwhile, their now-grown daughter Judy (Mia Tomlinson) is newly engaged to boyfriend Tony (Ben Hardy). The usual family drama about a daughter growing up is heightened because Judy has some of the same spirit-y sight abilities that Lorraine does and she seems to be having more of these intrusive visions lately.

Meanwhile meanwhile, the Smurl family in Pennsylvania is being terrorized by spooky who-knows-whats after grandparents bought a Smurl daughter a clearly haunted (and quite ugly) full-length mirror for her confirmation. It is objectively a terrible gift just for its carved creepy cherub-y figures on the frame and its many obvious dust-collecting nooks. What the Smurls don’t yet know is that we saw the mirror in the movie’s prologue from Ed and Lorraine’s younger days (when they are played by Orion Smith and Madison Lawlor) when the mirror so spooked Lorraine that it sent her into labor with Judy.

These two storylines — the Warrens and Judy’s visions and the Smurls and their terrible in-law gift — stay mostly separate for more than half the movie until the Warrens are drawn in to the Smurls’ haunting. Most of what unfurls throughout is pretty well telegraphed from the beginning and though we get some perfectly respectable jump scares, the who and what and why of the haunting feels very secondary to the Warren of it all. But then, these movies always sort of floated along on the square hotness and cornball chemistry of Wilson and Farmiga in these roles. They are entertaining to watch together and entertaining to watch separately as they approach whatever is causing people to float in mid-air and holy water to smoke. If you need to tell yourself there is more heft to this story, I guess you could make something of a throughline about Lorraine trying to teach Judy over the years to suppress the supernatural side of herself and the way that speaks to a parental desire to fix what you perceive as your flaws in your children. But I think you can also just enjoy the spooky surface, all creepy things in the dark and Patrick Wilson making pancakes. B- In theaters.

Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger

(Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Noah and Lorelei are traveling with their three children, en route to a youth lacrosse tournament in Delaware, when their top-of-the-line self-driving minivan hits a Honda that explodes into flames.

The Cassidy-Shaw family all survive; the couple in the Honda do not. The headline in the local paper: “Lucky five escape crash, two die at scene.”

Noah, a corporate attorney, doesn’t feel lucky — wouldn’t luck entail not being involved in a fatal crash? But the larger theme in this smart novel, the fourth from University of Virginia professor Bruce Holsinger, is encapsulated in the title: Culpability.

It is not always obvious who is to blame in any given tragedy, and the closer you look at the circumstances and the people involved, the muddier things get.

The accident occurred when the Honda drifted toward the minivan’s lane, but because the senior citizens in that car are dead, the investigation centers on the survivors — and the artificial intelligence powering the minivan.

Charlie, a star lacrosse player about to enter college on a full scholarship, was sitting in the driver’s seat when the accident happened and as such was the “de facto driver,” the person charged with monitoring the AI’s navigation. Noah, his father, was next to him, composing a memo on his laptop. The two were the only ones to emerge uninjured, and they are the center of the investigation: Charlie, because he jerked the steering wheel when his sister screamed, thus disabling the AI, and Noah, because he was supposed to be supervising his minor son. Lorelei and the couple’s two daughters, Izzy and Alice, were in the back and seemingly involved.

But as the family recovers from their injuries, both psychological and physical, it is gradually revealed that Charlie and Noah are not the only parties whose actions prior to the crash warrant scrutiny. There is a web of culpability with nearly invisible threads that expand in multiple directions, threads that go far past the family. These become increasingly more apparent as the family decamps to a rental house in Virginia, near the Chesapeake Bay — a place they’d stayed a year before. Noah and Lorelei are hoping that a week of kayaking and board games and hot fudge sundaes will do more to help heal the family than the therapy so far has.

The expectations take a turn as Noah notices dramatic changes on the property across in the inlet where they are staying. It turns out a billionaire tech mogul has bought 90 acres across the inlet and transformed the former rustic horse farm into a high-tech, high-security compound that fills Noah with disgust. A widower whose wife died in a car accident, this mogul has a lissome daughter about Charlie’s age, and the teens become smitten with each other after a chance encounter on the water.

But as the families intermingle, Noah begins to suspect that his wife has a prior connection with Daniel Monet, the billionaire, through her work in the field of “computational morality” — the ethics of AI. He has been distant from her career because of what he sees as a divide, in their education, intellect and luck — a state-school graduate, he comes from a family that struggled to do more than survive, while Lorelei comes from a seemingly gilded family, where the siblings went to Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

In dealings with his wife’s sister, Noah notes “a reflective condescension given away in a certain lift of her eyebrows and the angle of her pretty nose.” And on his first and only time to accompany his wife to a conference, Noah feels diminished, out of his league, experiencing “my own terrifying insignificance.”

“My wife became a different person in that rarefied world, as if her brain had suddenly shifted to a higher plane while I hovered by her side as the interloping cupbearer, unworthy of drinking so much as a sip from whatever Olympian ambrosia she was drinking,” Noah says in the novel’s first-person narration.
As the story unfolds, Holsinger injects excerpts from a book that Lorelei has written, which is titled “Silicon Souls: On the Culpability of Artificial Minds,” as well as text conversations between one of the daughters and her AI friend, a chatbot named Blair that knows in detail everything that is going on, and keeps offering advice.

For a while, these asides seem like unwelcome interruptions in the narrative, but by the novel’s end their significance is clear, and evidence of Holsinger’s skill in plotting a deeply intelligent storyline that blends technology, philosophy and ethics, while also plumbing an essential pain of parenting: “No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”

Like the TV show The Good Place, the novel delivers a crash course in mainstays of secular moral thought, such as situational ethics: “The relative morality of certain actions is determined by the circumstance and context rather than by some absolute, unchanging ethical code. Likewise, our morality as individuals is formed not by innate personality traits but by the variables of our environment.”

Culpability moves slowly at times — it’s told by a corporate lawyer, after all; no offense to corporate lawyers except to say that Noah’s musings on corporate acquisitions right before the crash seem designed to dull our senses. Also at times the book seems overly long, continuing after what seems a natural ending. But Holsinger, as it turns out, knows exactly what he’s doing, and his ending is nothing short of genius. A —Jennifer Graham

Featured Photo: Culpability, by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel and Grau, 341 pages)

Album Reviews 25/09/11


Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records)

This Australian band describes itself as “sort of a blend between electropop and disco-soul” with a lot of ’70s and ’80s influences, which immediately had me thinking, “How adorable, they’ve invented either Daft Punk or Scissor Sisters.” Oddly enough, Daft Punk produced this group’s 2017 hit “Overnight,” which was basically the former’s Kool & The Gang-inspired “Get Lucky” in a fake beard and Sherlock Holmes hat (it was also the last song Daft Punk ever produced, take note) (yes, “Overnight” is all new to me, but give me a break, there hasn’t been a legitimate dance club in Manchvegas since when, the 1960s?). Anyway, let’s take care of this: “Summerinlove” is like a cross between Sade and Jamie Lidell with a sleep-inducing José González vocal that makes it mildly listenable; “Yougotmefeeling” (yes, every song uses that no-spaces gimmick) is Klaxons with an iron deficiency; “Safeandsound” is antiquated AM radio makeout tuneage for smoke-filled taxi cabs. It’s decent-enough chillout stuff I suppose; again, the singer’s González-like tenor makes it more or less worthwhile. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Speaking of stuff I missed out on in the past, I dearly hope I’m the only one who slept through this British dark-post-punk band (if my buddy Gary is reading this, investigate these guys immediately). They made a good (and well-deserved) dent in the U.S. charts with their 1986 Geffen-issued LP Strange Times, which was full of agitated, haunting melody; think the Cure mixed with Bauhaus/Lords Of The New Church and fronted by David Byrne — what a rare treat their wall-of-sound was to find. Cut to now, since we must, where we find two-fifths of the band carrying on, led as always by bassist/singer Mark “Vox” Burgess and guitarist Reg Smithies. Although it’s transparently more commercial-minded than what they were doing in the ’80s (and one critically acclaimed album in 2001), it’s all seriously hummable, adventurous stuff. What a crime it is that these guys haven’t done anything in 24 years; they’d surely be as much of a household name as The Damned. Hop on this one, I beg all you Gen Xers. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

• Hold thine hands, my hardy and valiant trolls, and let us sing a song of Sept. 12, the second new-CD-release Friday as our 14 crazily frozen post-summer months commence, I hope you can get to your snowshoes quickly as the descent into frostbite season begins! Let’s try not to think about it and proceed right to the albums, where we find a new one from famous folk-pop ginger Ed Sheeran, who is part British and part Ewok (the Ancestry.com sequencer eventually gave up trying to sequence his DNA, but not before wild-guessing that he also might be part Teen Wolf). Whatever he is, he has a new album out this week, which he titled Play just to make Moby realize that he hasn’t been relevant since Bill Clinton was in the Oval Office. This non-Moby Play album leads off with a tune called “Sapphire,” an arena-indie jam with a reggaeton beat that is of course very catchy and everyone will like it. I’m sure it rips off Bruno Mars and/or Imagine Dragons, but Sheeran’s already getting a lot of hate on the internet for, among other things, and I quote, “Doing nothing more than making up words and putting music to them.” I must confess that I was under the naïve impression that that’s how one is supposed to write songs, so really, if there are other newfangled rules of rock ’n’ roll that I’ve been missing, I do hope one of you SnapChat kids will contact me soon so I’ll understand how all this music stuff works.

• In positive news, Canadian techno lady Kara-Lis Coverdale isn’t a nepo baby, since she’s not related to David Coverdale, which was what I’d expected to find. What’s even cooler is that she’s been releasing albums for 12 years now, but all of them have gone unnoticed by the public! But her new LP, Series Of Actions in A Sphere Of Forever, has changed that even before its release, because at least Wikipedia has made the album’s title a separate hyperlink on her biography page. Now that’s all well and good, but something’s gnawing at me about the album’s push track, “Turning Multitudes,” oh, I know what it is, it’s because Coverdale bills herself as an alternative/dance musician, but this tune is a sparse, melancholy, downtempo number that’s more like a modern classical-piano piece than anything else. OK, since we can’t do anything about that, let’s move on.

• Sacramento, California,-based math/post-hardcore band Dance Gavin Dance releases their 11th album, Pantheon, this week. The single, “Midnight at McGuffy’s,” is a pretty fierce little jam, an amalgam of Black Veil Brides, Panic [sorry, I won’t add the silly punctuation mark] At The Disco and early emo, all mixed into a Dillinger Escape Plan slow cooker. What this means is that it’s fast, aggressive and complicated in spots, with enough Thursday-ish melody in there to maybe entice one or two actual girls into attending one of their shows, but they’ll promptly leave after one song when they realize there’s nothing even remotely My Chemical Romance-ish about the band.

• We’ll call it a week with an indie-pop nepo baby, Mikaela Mullaney Straus, who goes by the stage name King Princess! Her obligatory nepotism connection is having Isidor Straus as her great-grand-pop, the guy who owned Macy’s and died on the Titanic, if you’ve ever heard of that incident, so if you don’t buy this new album (no one bought her last one, but her first one did OK) she might sic the IRS on you, just sayin’. Her new album, Girl Violence, features the tune “RIP KP,” a song that starts out like a Chappell Roan ripoff and then turns into Nine Inch Nails (no, I don’t know why).

Featured Photo: Parcels, Loved (ANTI- Records) & Chameleons, Arctic Moon (Metropolis Records)

Kentucky Mai Tai

Let’s say you are in the mood for a tropical drink — a tiki drink, if you will — and you crack open a cocktail guide or look up a recipe online, only to be intimidated. Many — not all, by any means, but many — recipes for well-known tropical drinks call for two, three or even four types of rum.

You didn’t even know that there was more than one type.

In theory, these recipes call for dark rum for flavor, white or silver rum to keep the drink from tasting like molasses, and maybe a float of some over-proof rum to add an eye-opening kick to it. Then, maybe some spiced rum to—

At any rate, this is all well and good if you have a really sophisticated palate, or you’re a professional rum taster, or maybe a pirate — but for most of us, the drink tastes like a variety of fruit juices, syrups and, you know, rum. If we want to taste a contrast between the alcohols in a mug shaped like a parrot getting a tattoo, we’ll need to head in a slightly different direction:

2 ounces rum – Whatever type of rum you like or have on hand. If you’re making a run to the liquor store, probably don’t go overboard. Buy something middle-of-the road. If you splurge on a $70-a-bottle-sipping-rum, its subtleties will be lost in a drink with more than two ingredients.

½ ounce bourbon – Again, probably not your best stuff, but not something that tastes like corn and kerosene, either.

½ ounce orange curacao

1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

½ ounce orgeat – a type of almond syrup used in tropical drinks to give a fruity backnote.

¼ ounce simple syrup

Crushed ice

Fill a cocktail shaker about 1/3 full with crushed ice.

Add all the cocktail ingredients, as well as half of your spent lime to the crushed ice, shake for 10 to 15 seconds and pour — unstrained — into a rocks glass. Drink to “Babalu” by Desi Arnaz.

Mai tais are popular, because they thread the needle of sweet and sour, exotic and comforting, and boozy and fruity. This version adds the complexity of bourbon. Bourbon can be a bit of a prima donna and, unless kept firmly under control, can easily take over a cocktail. It makes itself known in this drink, but in such a small amount it plays well with everyone else on the team.

Now, go shoo the children away from the television and call up 1989’s The Mighty Quinn with Denzel Washington. You won’t be sorry.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

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