Tag: 260219

Whole Lotta Zep

Get the Led Out comes to Concord

Paul Hammond has an extra ticket for Led Zeppelin’s reunion show. The caveat is that anyone looking to claim it will have to time travel. Hammond plays lead guitar in Get the Led Out, a band that outflanks other tribute acts via exacting attention to detail. One of his more memorable Zep moments, however, was as a spectator. It was a rock ’n’ roll fantasy come true.

It’s no stretch to say Zep’s one-off 2007 concert was the hardest ticket ever; 20 million fans entered a worldwide lottery to purchase a mere 18,000 seats. Hammond, however, knew someone connected to a charity run by Jimmy Page’s wife at the time, who got him in, and then some.

Prior to the show, he watched soundcheck with Queen guitarist Brian May for company, and the two enjoyed the concert from the VIP section. Also, and what explains the wayback machine requirement, Hammond had access to six additional tickets. Sadly, he couldn’t find anyone able to quickly jet to London and use them.

“I was with the top of the top rock stars, the inner circle of rock royalty,” Hammond said in a recent phone interview. He may perform the music of the gods, and convincingly, but he enjoyed the perks of one that night. “In the A100 section, with Brian May, and then three rows down in front of me was Ronnie Wood and Jeff Beck.”

Hammond also met Page backstage that night. He had another Zep-adjacent moment, courtesy of the band he co-formed in 2003 with singer Paul Sinclair, with a mission to perform note for note songs from the iconic band’s studio recordings. It came as GTLO was preparing to go on stage at Portsmouth’s Music Hall a few years back.

After a phone call, the show’s promoter informed him she’d been speaking to Robert Plant. “He asked her, ‘What band is playing tonight?’ and she said, ‘It’s Get the Led Out,’ and he says, ‘Oh, Get the Led Out, that’s a great band,’” he recalled. “He knows us! Our sound man told us he’d come to our show in Nashville.”

GTLO delivers a concert experience that’s currently rivaled only by Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening. The son of the late Zep drummer was also behind the kit in 2007 at O2 Arena. They play the iconic band’s entire catalog, almost. A few songs just don’t translate well to their arena rock show.

“Like, ‘Hats Off To (Roy) Harper’ from Led Zeppelin III is a bizarre song with the effects, and doesn’t have a lot of crowd appeal,” Hammond said. “‘Carouselambra’ from In Through the Out Door is essentially a John Paul Jones experimental record. I don’t know what Jimmy Page was up to then, maybe hanging out in the pub … but it’s a long and a weary song.”

The good news is GTLO plays everything else in their two-and-a-half-hour show, even Zeppelin’s lone B-side, “Hey, Hey, What Can I Do.” To call the band’s approach exacting is an understatement. Songs are not only transcribed precisely, but they are also true to both key and pitch, which provides a big dopamine hit for true fans.

“It brings back that memory, that sound, because intrinsically people know,” Hammond said. “Some Led Zeppelin bands, if the singer can’t hit the notes, they’ll tune a half-step down, and it just doesn’t sound the same, and the audience knows it, whether they know it or not. Because it’s just been ingrained for so many years, hearing it the way you want to hear it.”

The band grew out of a residency at Bridgeport Rib House in Pennsylvania. Zeppelin was one band they covered in a set that included Aerosmith songs, but patrons there kept asking for a Zep-centric show.

It works because Hammond and his mates revere Zeppelin as much as their audience, and deliver accordingly.

“Basically, we want to give people all the stuff that they know and love,” Hammond said. “When we go into deep cuts, they’re deep cuts that people also would know, that true die-hard Zeppelin fans would be like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe they did ‘In The Light’ or we’ve delved as deep as ‘Sick Again.’”

Get the Led Out
When: Saturday, Feb. 21, at 8 p.m.
Where: Capitol Center for the Arts, Chubb Theatre, 44 S. Main St., Concord
Tickets: $45 and up at ccanh.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/02/19

• Metal moments: The weekend starts early with four bands on the heavier side gathering at Showcase 603. Abel Blood, from Manchester, brings the dirge-y, 11-minute epic “Mental Note” and the sinister “Keeping Pace With the Elephants.” Next is Nashua quartet Stoned Shadows; the bracing “Losing My Mind” is a standout. Rounding out the bill are Mercury Burns First and Project H. Catch them all Thursday, Feb. 19, at 8 p.m., Shaskeen Pub, 909 Elm St., Manchester, abelblood.bandcamp.com.

• Modern country: With a new album, Oklahoma Stars, due in days, Houston Bernard plays at a Nashua craft brewery. The title song is a power ballad sweetened with love and honeysuckle, but when the NEMA-winning country singer gets rocking, he’s even better. Friday, Feb. 20, 7:30 p.m., Lost Cowboy Brewing, 546 Amherst St., Nashua, houstonbernard.com.

• Comedy tonight: A local brewery with a nice saison collaboration hosts a comedy show headlined by Corey Manning, a motivational speaker who helps others beat challenges by day and keeps it funny when the sun goes down. Joining him is a deep lineup of area comics including Mona Forgione, Bill Douglas, Joe Nahme, Ryan Ellington and Nathaniel Allen. Saturday, Feb. 21, 7 p.m., Sunstone Brewing Co., 298 Rockingham Road, Londonderry, $15, eventbrite.com.

• Classical beats: Their 2020 release Take The Stairs earned Black Violin a Grammy nomination. Led by Kev Marcus on violin and Wil Baptiste on viola, the group mashes up classical music and hip-hop. Saturday, Feb. 21, 7:30 p.m., Nashua Center for the Arts, 201 Main St., Nashua, $57 and up at nashuacenterforthearts.com.

Album Reviews 26/02/19

The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe (self-released)

The focus of this Boston-based act, which has had a rapidly revolving door-load of short-term members, is bridging the gap between Americana and indie-rock, which, it seems to me, has been handled quite well by Wilco to name just one band. These tunes are full of great sounds and some very deft musicianship, but there’s more twee here than indie, and not enough bluegrass to qualify as high-grade Americana. That pretty much sums up the failure — or resistance — on the part of critics to “classify” them properly, not that that’s as important as being recognized as a band that has great songs, but knowing that these guys are happily well-entrenched in the Boston scene, (still) with all its Evan Dandos and Morphines, should answer some people’s questions. Their fatal flaw is singer Paul Hansen, whose unflustered, bland tenor doesn’t do the songs much justice, but that’s a matter of taste of course. In the end it’s a Boston alt-rock band that’s a cross between Guster and, jeez, I don’t know, Yo La Tengo; I can’t feign enthusiasm for it. B- —Eric W. Saeger

Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide (self-released)

The middle of the Americana/alt-country road — and I mean right in the middle, where it doesn’t pay to remain very still because a zillion other artists might run you over — is where this New Yorker finds her comfort zone. She’s been out of it for 15 years until this album, which is said to exhibit “southern charm meets New York grit, with a healthy dose of heart,” which might describe Sheryl Crow, to whom Arnau’s been compared, but nah, I’d say the tunes feel like a more organic Waxahatchee. The instrumentation is another matter, an all-hands-on-deck affair that runs the gamut from Sade-tinted yacht-pop (“Sail Away”) to Lucinda Williams cowboy-waltzing (“Mabel”) to Smoke Fairies banjo-folk (“The King”). “Young and Alone,” the pensive but wispy focus track, is an honest labor of love calling into question the broken system that’s resulted in countless school shootings across the country; she’ll be donating proceeds from the song to Everytown for Gun Safety. B+ —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Yay, new albums coming out on Friday, Feb. 20! The new-album race is heating up as we speak, now that the holidays are over and Valentine’s Day is over and the most pathetic Super Bowl performance by the New England Patriots since their 46-10 loss to the Chicago Bears in 1986 is over, like, there’s really no days off for you slackers to look forward to until Memorial Day, unless you choose to finally surrender a few of the 300 comp days you’ve hoarded or, in the case of most workers, just quit your job and move back in with your ex! It’s all good, do whatever feels right is what I say, and maybe a few of these new albums will cheer you up, who knows, but of course the biggest “music news” of February was the Super Bowl halftime show led by Puerto Rican reggaeton-rapper Bad Bunny, because no one could shut up about it on their social media whatevers! For no reason whatsoever, it turned into a controversy, because Bunny sang and rapped in Spanish, which one would normally expect, given that that’s, you know, what he does; to me it was a cool thing for the NFL to do again, recognizing Latin culture as a major component in the country’s DNA, and that’s really about it. I didn’t find the music to be all that groundbreaking, like, there’s all sorts of great reggaeton, merengue, salsa and mambo to be found if you spend a few seconds looking, for instance there’s the five-hour ¡Con Salsa! show on WBUR radio (90.9 FM in Boston) every Saturday starting at 10 p.m. if you could use some perfect afterparty ambience (you can also stream the whole show on the station’s website), but either way the vibe is almost universally positive, so what’s the harm? Sure, some people took the halftime show as an affront somehow, but they probably didn’t mind that Chubby Checker and The Ronettes played at 1988’s halftime show or that Gloria Estefan and Stevie Wonder played 1999’s “Celebration of Soul, Salsa and Swing” halftime show, and so on and so forth. Now, one conservative buddy of mine on Facebook said he simply didn’t like Latin music and could leave it at that, which I commended him for. I mean, in the end, it’s younger people who buy albums, so trotting out the Rolling Stones again like they did in 2006 in order to trigger nostalgic feels in people who can barely remember the last time they had a legitimate Billboard No. 1 hit song (they didn’t come close that year) would be a bit of a disservice to the record-buying public, don’t you think? Whatever, I’m sure people will flip out over whoever plays next year’s Super Bowl halftime show, but for the record I’d be fine if they went country-indie-rock, like, say, with Mumford & Sons as the headliner, since they’re so much more relevant than Kings of Leon now. In fact, the Mumfords release their new LP, Prizefighter, this week, featuring the pretty-epic-pretty title track and “The Banjo Song,” which is similarly sweeping and epic. I like them, the end.

• Florida power-pop band New Found Glory release their 11th album Listen Up this week. They haven’t charted for at least six years, because boring, but the new single “Beer and Blood Stains” has a pretty filthy guitar sound and actually has a pulse.

• Also this week, electroclash icon Peaches releases No Lube So Rude, and of course the title track is awesome. It is made of dubstep, goth-industrial and diva-pop smothered in pure lunacy.

• We’ll close with Hilary Duff, aka Lizzie McGuire to people who are around 35. The new record, Luck Or Something, includes the single “Roommates,” which is pretty and pleasant, sort of like a kinder gentler Alanis Morissette. — Eric W. Saeger

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

Featured Photo: The Grownup Noise, No Straight Line in the Universe and Jennie Arnau, A Rising Tide

Chlorophyll Sour

Some drinks are worth devoting some time to.

Herbal Green Gin

  • 2 cups (16 ounces) London dry gin
  • 1 large handful (1 ounce)/30 g) fresh parsley

Blend the gin and parsley together in your blender, slowly at first, then working your way up to its highest setting. After 30 seconds or so cut the power and let the green gin sit for an hour or so. Pour it through a fine mesh strainer, then run it through a coffee filter.

Then, start your cucumber syrup.

Cucumber Syrup

  • One large English cucumber
  • An equal amount by weight of sugar

Wash but don’t peel the cucumber, then chop it into medium dice. Move it to your freezer and freeze it solid. Clearly this will take a few hours. If you check in on the gin you will see that it still has some time before it is completely filtered. We’ll get to the actual cocktail tomorrow.

Tomorrow

Cook the frozen cucumber pieces and the sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. By freezing the cucumber, you have poked holes in its cell walls with ice crystals. As it thaws, everything will collapse into a surprising amount of liquid mush. Bring it to a boil briefly (to make sure that the sugar has completely dissolved), then remove it from heat, and let it steep for about an hour. Strain the syrup through a fine-mesh strainer, and you can get started on your actual cocktail.

Your Actual Cocktail

  • 2 ounces parsley-infused gin
  • 1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • 3/4 ounce cucumber syrup

Combine all three ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, and shake thoroughly, then strain into a chilled, stemmed glass.

At this point you’ve put two days into making this drink. Is it worth it?

It really is. Like many utility cocktails, this is at its best when it is skull-shrinkingly cold. It is sweet but with a complex flavor. The herbiness is there, but so is the cucumberality. Interestingly, while you can find each of those flavors — both of which go really well with fresh lemon juice, by the way — if you look for them individually, a fusion of the two is elusive. Your palate flips back and forth between them but doesn’t settle on a combination flavor — a parscumber, if you will. Nevertheless, it is delicious.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Speakeasy reopens

CodeX B.A.R. finds a new (secret) spot

“You should have seen this place when we walked in the door,” MaryBeth Carcellino said. “It was full of old appliances, and it looked like an old retail store.” Actually, it was a former plumbing supply store.

Carcellino is one of the owners of popular speakeasy CodeX B.A.R. which recently relocated from Elm Street in Nashua to Main Street.

“Our lease was up at the other location,” she said, “and we had debated for a long time whether this was something that we wanted to do. We really, really, really wanted to be on Main Street; It’s been very important to us, and we saw an opportunity. The owner of Local Street Eats [Nashua restaurateur Eliza Drift] approached my partner and told him that she really liked that location, so it all fell together. We found this location and when we came in here for the first time, my partner looked at the space and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a vision!’ I looked at the space and saw a bunch of dead washing machines.”

The partners spent the next 11 months renovating the space into their vision of a speakeasy — a “secret” bar that depends on word of mouth to build a clientele.

There is no sign outside CodeX announcing where it is. It is disguised as a dusty antique bookshop from the outside, though if you look carefully you’ll see a small arrow labeled “Speakeasy” that points to the door — the locked door. To get inside guests need to pick up the receiver of an old-fashioned pay phone next to the door, which will ring a matching one inside. “We try to keep everything on the DL a little bit,” Carcellino said. “You pick up the phone when you get to the door, and you have to say, ‘I have business with the Duke.’ The Duke is our resident bouncer. It’s kind of tongue-in-cheek — he’s actually my husband. He’s not really a bouncer. But he’ll get to that door, and he’s like, ‘What do you want? What’s your business with me?’ And people love that.

Inside, the bar is filled with comfortable chairs and sofas. In one corner there is a viewing area facing a big-screen television that only plays old black-and-white movies. There are seats at the bar, but the total capacity for the bar is 35 to 40 people.

“If you come in here on any given night, Carcellino said, “we have two fabulous mixologists, Stretch and Rusty. They can pretty much make you anything that you would like, but our most popular drink here is called a Whim. You might come in and say, ‘I feel like gin, maybe something floral, and I’d like something a little tart, too.’ And they’re going to create something that doesn’t even exist. They just make something especially for you. That’s our specialty. We love our food, but our focus is most definitely the cocktails. We have Tiki Wednesdays. Our mixologist Andy [Stretch] is a big tiki guy, so the guys dress in tiki attire and boy oh boy those cocktails are absolutely fabulous.”

CodeX B.A.R.
29 Main St., Nashua
Open Tuesday through Saturday, beginning at 5 p.m.
Phone number – It’s a secret.
Web page – It’s a secret.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Dine out with Restaurant Week

Downtown Manchester is setting the table

For the second year, the Palace Theatre has organized a Restaurant Week in Manchester. KD Lovell is the Theatre’s Director of Operations and Corporate Development.

“The Palace Theatre started Restaurant Week two years ago,” she said. “We typically do it around the same time frame at the end of February. We feel as though it’s a great time to encourage people to get out of the house. A lot of Manchester’s restaurants share some sentiments of coming out of the winter slump. … Our production of Cabaret opens on Feb. 27, and we thought it’d be a perfect tie-in with the play. We’re calling it ‘Cabaret and Cuisine: Manchester’s Restaurant Week.’ The Palace Theatre is collaborating with downtown restaurants in Manchester to bring people downtown and come see a show, get dinner, have a drink, a cocktail or a mocktail, and spend some time downtown. So it’s a big celebration of performing arts and our dining community and just community in general.”

Participating restaurants will offer dinner or drink specials with a tie-in to the play, she said. “We’ve asked the restaurants to … come up with a three-course menu. We have three different price points, so $28, $38 or $58. So that covers most restaurants, lunch or dinner.”

Lovell gave an example: “Diz’s Cafe is doing a specialty cocktail for $13. It’s going to be a cabaret theme, and they’re leaning into the cabaret theme again for their three-course meal. It’s $38, and they’re doing warm pretzels and beer cheese for the first course. And then for the main course, it’s a classic German sausage dish, then the final course is a red velvet cake and then you could add a specialty cocktail for $13.”

While the specific menus have not been finalized, the Palace Theatre has posted a list of participating restaurants at palacetheatre.org/restaurant-week. This includes bars with special cocktail promotions, such as 815 Cocktails & Provisions (815 Elm St.), Industry East (28 Hanover St.) and Campo Enoteca (969 Elm St.). Sub Zero (119 Hanover St., subzeroicecream.com) will have a specialty ice cream, the website said. A few restaurants are listed with plans still up in the air. Restaurants listed with meal specials include these:

• Boards & Brews (941 Elm St., 232-5184, boardsandbrewsnh.com), with a specialty dessert sundae as well

• Bravo (73 Hanover St., bravonh.com)

• The Current Kitchen and Bar (700 Elm St., find them on Facebook)

• The Crown (99 Hanover St., 218-3132, thecrownonhanover.com)

• Diz’s Cafe (86 Elm St., 606-2532, dizscafe.com)

• Fratello’s (155 Dow St., 624-2022, fratellos.com)

• Hooked on Ignite (110 Hanover St., 644-0064, hookedonignite.com)

• Harpoon Public House (Queen City Center, 215 Canal St., 945-3797, harpoonbrewery.com/manchester-brewery)

• Thirsty Moose Taphouse (795 Elm St., 792-2337, thirstymoosetaphouse.com)

• The Wild Rover Pub & Restaurant (21 Kosciuszko St., 669-7722, facebook.com/WildRoverPub)

Cabaret and Cuisine: Manchester’s Restaurant Week
When: Feb. 27 to March 8
A list of participating restaurants can be found at palacetheatre.org/restaurant-week

Featured photo: Sleazy Vegan Concord location. Courtesy photo.

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