Tag: 251120

Surviving and thriving

Six decades on, Jim Messina still playing great

By Michael Witthaus

mwitthaus@hippopress.com

Don’t do drugs. Jim Messina can provide plenty of reasons why.

Probably the most compelling one is the clarity of Messina’s singing voice, at a time when many classic rockers sound like their throats have been sandpapered. On his latest live album, Here There and Everywhere, Messina is in pristine form, his vocals identical to those that helped launch hits like “Angry Eyes” and “Your Mama Don’t Dance.”

The singer, songwriter and guitarist briefly delayed the start of a recent early morning interview to wait for a pot of coffee to brew. It’s probably the strongest substance he uses. From his days in Buffalo Springfield, country-rock pioneers Poco or top-selling duo Loggins & Messina and beyond, he’s steered clear of the hard stuff.

“The only bumps I got in the ’70s,” he joked, “came from falling off a horse.”

One turning point came when a fan overdosed on acid and was medevac’d in Poco’s limousine as they played the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that’s a terrible thing to go through,’” he recalled. Then, at age 27, Messina had his tonsils removed. That’s daunting enough for a vocalist, but what came next was worse.

“I developed the most severe case of allergies,” he said. “My nose was all caked up, it was bleeding, I couldn’t breathe, I was wheezing. My tech, David Cieslak, had been a medic in the Vietnam War. I had to have these shots, so we’re carrying shots around to shows.”

Seven months later, cocaine was in the midst of its rise as rock’s drug of choice. At one show, Messina was offered some from another band’s crew and was appalled to learn they snorted it. “Get that stuff away from me,” he told them. “I don’t want to put nothing in my nose after what I’ve gone through in the last year.”

By abstaining, Messina was able to feed other habits. “The truth is that I took all my drug money and I invested it in real estate, precious metals, guitars and amps,” he said. “To this day I still have the very first Telecaster that I played back in Poco, and my Stratocaster. I just was so fortunate not to go there.”

The ultimate payoff has been health-wise, he continued. Ahead of a Loggins & Messina reunion show at the Hollywood Bowl in 2022, he saw an ear, nose and throat specialist who worked exclusively with professional singers — he’d caught Covid twice during the pandemic and wanted to be sure nothing was damaged.

“He almost pulled my tongue out, and he shoved this camera down my throat. He’s going, ‘Oh, wow,’ and I’m going, ‘oh crap.’ When it was over, he goes, ‘I gotta tell you, I handled most of the vocalists in the world, and your vocal cords look like you’re 25 years old … you have really taken care of them.’”

While he doesn’t need to tour to pay the bills, Messina has no plans to retire; he’s even making new music. A new version of Tommy James & the Shondells’ “Draggin’ the Line” is one song he’s finished.

“I love what I do and I’ve been doing it since I was 13,” he said. “I still have that same inspiration … to do better.”

Messina and his band The Road Runners have two upcoming New Hampshire shows, one in Plymouth on Nov. 20, and another Nov. 23 at the Nashua Center for the Performing Arts. He put together the group a couple of years ago, after he’d moved to Nashville, and found his old band was too far-flung.

“I have to rehearse, I have to be able to call people in and say, ‘Let’s do this arrangement,’ and it was getting to the point where that was going to be impossible financially,” he said. “My agent said, ‘Look, there are plenty of musicians here in town,’ and he said, ‘You know, they’re not all country.’”

First to join was keyboard player James Frazier. “He sings the parts now that Kenny would normally sing,” Messina said. Bassist Ben King, who also has a high vocal range, was next, followed by sax player/percussionist Steve Nieves, who was part of a couple of Loggins & Messina reunion tours and played in solo bands for both stars.

Drummer Jack Bruno has played with Elton John, Tina Turner and Joe Cocker, and when Messina found him on YouTube he was in Delbert McClinton’s band. Then McClinton retired. Messina loves working with the group. “They care enough about the music to perform the charts the way they were originally written and honor the musicians who originally did it.”

Jim Messina and the Road Runners
When: Sunday, Nov. 23, at 8 p.m.
Where: Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua
Tickets: $43 and up at etix.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 25/11/20

• Old friends: Legend is that fiddler Michael Doucet ditched rock and began BeauSoleil after hearing “Cajun Woman” by Fairport Convention in the early 1970s, and began immersing himself in the immigrant music of his native Louisiana. He later met Richard Thompson, who wrote the song. Thompson is currently a special guest on a tour celebrating the band’s 50th anniversary. Thursday, Nov. 20, 7 p.m., Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry, $65 and up at tupelohall.com.

• Band stand: The Zajac Brothers, Vanna Pacella and other regional artists revisit The Last Waltz, The Band’s farewell concert held at San Francisco’s Winterland on Thanksgiving Day in 1976, immortalized by director Martin Scorsese. Pacella’s turn as Joni Mitchell performing “Coyote” and backing up Neil Young on “Helpless” is a highlight, along with Dylan and Van the Man. Friday, Nov. 21, 8 p.m., Stone Church, 5 Granite St., Newmarket, $30 at stonechurchrocks.com

• Retro pop: Looking to give Journey, Rick Springfield and other ’80s Top 40 hitmakers their due, Waltham formed in 1999 when such a notion was very uncool. A raucous party changed all that; guests stopped drinking to gawk and the buzz began — “they’re from Waltham, they’re called Waltham, the guy points to girls and sings to them and rips off his shirt.” Donaher and Colleen Green open. Saturday, Nov. 22, 8:30 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, $15 at the door, 21+.

• Not eggmen: Maine-based Beatles tribute act Spencer & The Walrus are now called We Are The Walrus according to an announcement from the Concord venue they’re returning to. Far from a Fab Four recreation, there are many musicians on stage playing strings and keys for an evening of late-period Beatles songs never performed in concert, like “Fool on the Hill” and “Come Together.” Saturday, Nov. 22, 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $36 and up at ccanh.com.

• Christmas croon: Feel-good New Romantic singer Anthony Nunziata brings his annual holiday show to town to give a boost of spirit. Nunziata’s new album, Christmas & You, consists of all original songs. “My Every Wish” is a soulful tune, while “The Miracle” and “Heavenly Father” are “faith-affirming” anthems and “El Regalo Eres Tú” is a Spanish language classical crossover. Sunday, Nov. 23, 2 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $40 and up at palacetheatre.org.

Wreck, by Catherine Newman

(Harper, 224 pages)

When my son was little and found it hard to sit through movies, he once announced in the middle of a showing, “If they don’t start blowing stuff up soon, I’m outta here.”

Even as an adult, he wouldn’t make it halfway through a Catherine Newman novel.

Newman’s success comes not from explosive plots but from the memorable characters she develops and the dialogue she crafts that makes the experience of reading her books not like reading a book but like eavesdropping on your neighbors or the people at the next table at a diner. In Wreck she returns to the family she introduced in 2024’s Sandwich, which was a nod to both the Cape Cod town and to challenges of people caring for both children and parents.

Two years older, 50-something parents Nick and Rachel (who goes by Rocky) are still looking for that empty nest. Son Jamie is married and working as a consultant in New York, and daughter Willa has a university job that involves caring for fruit flies in a lab, but Rocky’s father has moved in with the family after the death of his wife. While prone to missing a beat in a conversation, Grandpa is otherwise in good shape, and things are going well for the family in general.
But then, as Newman writes in a memorable opening in which an horned owl looks down from its perch as a car and a train are about to collide, “a great screeching has begun.”

The young man who dies in the accident, Miles Zapf, was a local; the family knew him, but only casually. But there is an unexpected connection that gradually becomes clever as the investigation continues and Rocky and Willa become increasingly obsessed with the case, and Rocky starts paying attention to Miles’s mother’s posts on social media.

Meanwhile, Rocky has a strange rash that is spreading all over her body, sending her from one perplexed doctor to another and finally into Boston for a spiral CT scan, and into the rabbit hole of the internet, where every ailment is just one click away from being seen as a malignancy.

Again, there is nothing in the way of a hang-on-to-your-seats plot to find here, just a slow unraveling of normalcy, the loss of which no one notices until it’s gone. Newman herself told an interviewer she struggled to find an elevator pitch for the book, “because nothing really happens,” which isn’t exactly true, but the events do unfold, shall we say, languidly. At times, Newman seems reluctant to even let her characters finish a meal, because they are all enjoying being together so much. (More than one chapter is just the family having breakfast and talking.)

And yet how can you not love a writer who uses Godzilla as a verb? As in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, there are surprises around every corner, surprises in packages of words.

Readers will recognize people in their own lives in Newman’s characters, who are rich in human foibles while deeply empathetic. Rocky’s late mother, for example, appears in one memory in which she is reporting on the health of someone she barely knows. Trying to figure out why, Rocky muses that her mother must have been trying to connect with her, maybe about their own frailty or mortality. “I don’t know why all our tender feelings have to masquerade as news,” she thinks.

In one of my favorite scenes — which takes place at yet another family meal — Rocky mulls over how validated she feels when her adult children take up one of her habits. It feels like a vote of confidence, she thinks, when a child later comes to buy the same kind of olive oil, for example, that you do.

But then she recounts the day that Jamie suddenly announced to his parents, “It turns out, I really like lamb.”

“The utterance was a little more heated than one might expect. ‘You guys have always been like, We don’t like lamb. Like, as a family. We are a people who don’t like lamb!’”

The ensuing conversation is both comical and full of the best kind of family drama, the kind that will one day result in a story, not lingering bitterness.

Combining humor and poignancy can be hard to pull off, but Newman is a master. In the matter of her health, Rocky says, “I’m the kind of kale-eating person who nonetheless has a massive stable of doctors, everybody whinnying and rearing up on their hind legs and neighing out their copay requests.” It is in writing about Rocky’s journey through the health care system that Newman’s gifts shine through, pointing out the frustrations that a patient can have with the system while at the same time being grateful for the technology and the professionals who see us through illness. And, of course, the bewilderment of a once-healthy person suddenly thrust into this strange world:

“One minute, you’re with all the healthy people on the beach, everyone enjoying the sunshine and salt spray, maybe tossing a Frisbee around. And then suddenly you’re alone in the waves, getting yanked out to sea by some medical undertow, the shore receding from view while all the healthy people wave to you pityingly.”

Newman writes about pill organizers and stool samples, and teaching hospitals and patient portals, while making wry observations about the sort of stuff offered on Buy Nothing websites and the aching love a mother has for her children, which subsides not in the least when they move out. In other words, she writes about real life. It is, Rocky says, kind of like the game Chutes and Ladders: “The constant ascending and descending — every good and bad thing seeming, in moments, so random and temporary.” In Wreck, Newman gives us a diversion from our own, reassurance that we are all in this together, and there are laughs to be had even when things don’t turn out the way we hope. Readers will hope they’ve not seen the last of Nick and Rocky. B+ —Jennifer Graham

Newman will read from Wreck at The Toadstool Bookshop in Peterborough beginning at 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 21.

Featured Photo: Wreck, by Catherine Newman (Harper, 224 pages)

Album Reviews 25/11/20

Wayne Wilkinson, Holly Tunes (self-released/Bandcamp)

It’s that time of year when I complain that no one’s been sending me holiday-time CDs, so I requested some from my jazz contacts, and yikes, in no time one appeared in my mailbox, this one. One cool thing about jazz bands is that they try to give credit to super-old songs that weren’t ever copyrighted or the copyright expired in the 1950s, so today I learned that “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” was first popularized by an English lawyer, William Sandys, in his 1833 publication Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern. Anyway, that one’s here, in subtle, quiet, barely-there form, rendered by guitarist Wilkinson and his two-man rhythm section. While we’re at it, I’ll have you know that “Deck The Halls” is a 16th-century Welsh melody whose English lyrics were written by a Scot, Thomas Oliphant, around 1862. That’s here too, but — OK, fine, fine, you want to know what it sounds like, OK, it sounds like what you’d get if Pat Metheny threw together a trio so he could (very lightly and expertly) decorate a bunch of famous Christmas songs. It’s lovely I tell you; I’m keeping this one in the car till the dread of January. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Premik Russell Tubbs & Margee Minier-Tubbs, “The Bells” (Margetoile Records)

I think the last modern original holiday original song my stomach could tolerate was Aimee Mann’s “Calling on Mary”; you know how it goes, modern Christmas tunes are so awful that they’ve become memes, like I’m sure you know at least one person (if not you) who’s praying to avoid the usual awful suspects, George Michael’s “Last Christmas” and Mariah Carey’s sanity-destroying “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (I’m always more concerned with avoiding “O Holy Night,” but you do you). Now, what we have here is a husband-wife team with a holiday song whose lyrics are inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (yeah, I know, how goth, but this is the time of year I read M.R. James’s ghost stories, so it is proper in my opinion). They’re from Connecticut, but once I got past that I was interested enough to see if this was any fun, and it is. After a few lines of banter between the principals, multiple Grammy-winning violinist Zach Brock goes full-on merry fiddler while Margie and some friend of hers named Patrick trade spoken-word verses filled with Connecticut-y words like “mellifluous” and “raconteur” (in the same sentence!), and then they start talking about why the season is so wonderful, which isn’t very Poe-esque, but whatever, it’s fun, we’re all obviously doomed at this point, I got a kick out of it. A —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Our next new-release-Friday is Nov. 21, which happens to be the anniversary of two major events. For one, the first ARPANET connection was made on that date in 1969, marking a crucial step in the advancement of the internet, which gave us such technological miracles as Twitter and Skynet (I know, I know) and led to your breaking all ties with your uncle forever because of a Facebook argument over his totally medically plausible theory that if you’d just stop being a bratty know-it-all and guzzle Clorox out of the jug you’d never contract monkey pox or whatnot. More to our point, though (assuming there’s been any point to rock ‘n’ roll at all lately, at least since the Rolling Stones licensed their song “Start Me Up” to Bill Gates to serve as Windows 95’s theme song, thereby erasing any remaining doubt that computer use isn’t cool), in 1877, Thomas Edison announced the invention of the phonograph (basically an early version of Pandora) on that date. Since then, quite a few albums have been released, so if you want to blame someone for Corey Hart’s records and Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars” and all the other absolutely terrible music you’ve been subjected to over the decades, it’s too late to post an anti-Thomas Edison rant on Facebook, his account is closed! Now, meanwhile, I’m sure I’ll have good stuff to talk about this week, because look who has a new album coming out on Friday, none other than Danko Jones, with one titled Leo Rising! Now, who exactly is Danko Jones? I have no idea at all, so let’s discover this person together! Ah, I see, he has a hard rock band based in Toronto, Canada, which is already frozen over until late July, let’s proceed to the part where I listen to their stupid new song, “Everyday Is Saturday Night.” OK, it sounds like a cross between Hellacopters and late-career Thin Lizzy, which isn’t actually stupid; it’s safe to say that they are a lame, modern-day Thin Lizzy similarly to how Buckcherry is a lame, modern-day Spinal Tap. Who even ordered this, send it back, oh look, lol, the first YouTube comment sums up this thing perfectly: “When I was getting my vasectomy, this song was playing in the background at the hospital,” let’s please just move on to the next horror.

• Neo-folkies Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover release their second collaborative album this week, What Of Our Nature. They love Woody Guthrie, whose Facebook account is also closed, so I assume the new single “Fluorescent Light” sounds like your grandpa singing a Stephen Foster song. Nope, it’s more like an unplugged Norah Jones/Amos Lee collaboration, it’s neat if you’re a folkie.

• As we discussed when she released her last album two months ago, Kara-Lis Coverdale is not a nepo baby, but — waitwhat, TWO MONTHS AGO? Whatever, I give up, Changes In Air is the new one, not that you’ll be able to tell the difference, because “Curve Traces of Held Space” is, like her last single, a sparse, aimless exploration of harp samples and cheap synths, but at least it’s melodic.

• And finally, it’s a new album from classical-folkie Keaton Henson, titled Parader. Now, I know what you’re thinking, but this fellow is not an obvious nepo baby; he isn’t related to Jim Henson of the Muppets, he’s more of a “stealth nepo baby,” given that he’s the son of actor Nicky Henson, who, among other roles, played a Shakespeare-looking trooper dude in the idiotic 1968 Vincent Price tomato-soup-soaked horror film Witchfinder General! OK, now that you know, grab your box of Raisinets and let’s go listen to the new single “Insomnia.” OK, it’s a cross between Sigur Ros and Smashing Pumpkins, let’s just escape from this week with our lives. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Wayne Wilkinson, Holly Tunes (self-released/Bandcamp) & Premik Russell Tubbs & Margee Minier-Tubbs, “The Bells” (Margetoile Records)

A view to a kielbasa

Holy Trinity holds its annual frozen food sale

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

For the parishioners at Holy Trinity Cathedral in Manchester, one of the food high points of the year is their annual Frozen Polish Food Sale, which event coordinator Karen Sobiechowski says is probably Holy Trinity’s most important fundraising event of the year.

“It’s the only fundraiser that we have for our church here during the year,” she said, “so it’s all-around a great thing for people to enjoy good food and fellowship and that sort of thing.”

“Our church is known for its delicious Polish food,” Sobiechowski said. “We make pierogi — both the potato and cheese pierogi and the cabbage pierogi. We make stuffed cabbage — they’re called golabki — and we also sell kapusta, which is a cabbage dish with some pork in it.”

To buy frozen food, customers order it ahead of time, either on the telephone or online, and pick it up on a given day — Dec. 6 this year. Sobiechowski said pierogi (Polish dumplings, a little like ravioli filled with potatoes or cheese) are the sale’s most popular items each year.

“I think that people appreciate the pierogi just because it’s a laborious process to make them,” she said. “You have to make all the dough, you prepare the filling, there’s multiple ingredients to put together and if one tries to do these things at home, their kitchen looks like a hurricane blew through, with a lot of flour everywhere. But we enjoy getting together. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a labor of love. We have parishioners and volunteers from the community. Some of them are just friends who like to eat Polish food but would like to learn how to make it.”

Sobiechowski said coordinating volunteers on the days when they cook some of the dishes can be challenging; there are a lot of moving parts in play at any given time.

“So, yeah, you have to prepare the ingredients before you can actually assemble the pierogi, for instance,” she said. “You have to cook potatoes, cook onions, [and] mix all these things together. The filling has to cool, and then different volunteers will come and portion things out into the individual servings you would use for an individual dumpling.” She said the filling-portioner uses a small disher like an ice cream scoop to measure out the pierogi filling. “We do that for the pierogi,” she said, “and we also do that for the stuffed cabbage when we make those, so that all of the products are similar and consistent.”

“And then people will come and make the dough in the evening,” Sobiechowski continued, ”and then the next day we’re putting everything together. You have a couple of people in the kitchen that are cooking and some people that are cooling the product and then there are others who are packing and putting those items in the freezer. So it’s a lot of different things happening all at once.”

By the time the frozen dishes are picked up, Sobiechowski admitted, even the most enthusiastic volunteers are a little golabki-ed out.

“We’re going to be doing the stuffed cabbage next week, and then the other volunteers will come and make the kapusta, which we sell by the pint. That will all be done before Thanksgiving, thankfully. We’re just looking forward to getting this good food out to the people that are nice enough to support our parish.”

Frozen Polish Food
To order dishes from the Holy Trinity Cathedral Frozen Polish Food Sale, download an order from at holytrinitypncc.org/downloads or call the rectory during business hours at 622-4524.

Food pickup is scheduled for Saturday, Dec. 6, between 10 a.m. and noon. Holy Trinity Cathedral is at 166 Pearl St. in Manchester.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo

The Weekly Dish 25/11/20

• Zonta holiday auction and dinner: The Zonta Club of Concord, NH (zontaclubofconcordnh.org) will hold its 33rd annual Holiday Auction and Dinner Thursday, Nov. 20, beginning at 5:30 p.m. at the Pembroke Pines Country Club (45 Whittemore Road, Pembroke, 210-1365, pembrokepinescc.com). This event will feature a hosted cocktail hour, a plated dinner, live music, and silent and live auctions. Tickets are $75 through the Zonta website.

• Dinner in the Emerald City: Defy gravity at Evening in Oz: a Wicked-Inspired Wine Dinner at LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) on Saturday, Nov. 22, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. This four-course meal will feature a curated dinner menu that pays homage to the Broadway production and the new films, with LaBelle wine pairings served alongside each course, and Oz-themed decor in the Vineyard Ballroom. Tickets are $85.

• The Soup Kitchen: To Share Brewing (720 Union St., Manchester, 836-6947, tosharebrewing.com) will host The Soup Kitchen: A Drag Show and Food Drive, described on To Share’s Facebook page as “a night of camp, glamour, and community giving,” Saturday, Nov. 22, at 8 p.m. Featuring hostesses Glamme Chowdah and Sybill Disobedience, this event will help stock local free stores and food pantries before the holidays. Admission is at least one non-perishable food item or a cash donation of $10 to $20 at the door. All proceeds go directly to support local families in need.

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