Joan Baez interview, Providence Journal, June 22, 2013

Singer, activist and artist Joan Baez will perform at Zeiterion in New Bedford June 29 

Joan Baez

 

By Scott McLennan

Special to The Journal

Published: 22 June 2013 12:01 AM

Joan Baez is an activist. But you knew that, as Baez is perhaps as well known for championing civil rights, peace movements and clean energy as she is for her storied music career launched in 1958 from the Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.

And Baez tries to be a musical activist, too, as interested in exploring new music as she is in presenting such signatures as “Diamonds and Rust” and her celebrated interpretations of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and several Bob Dylan songs.

“New songs are not what people want to hear,” Baez says when reach by phone at her California home. “But it’s my job to get them involved in them. I try to cleverly arrange my concerts to include the new, the faves, and that stuff in the middle.”

Her last few records, for example, have featured songs and production by Steve Earle, as well as tunes by Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch and David Rawlins. But Baez laments how she too falls into comfort zones, and even solicits recommendations for new music amid answering interview questions.

“I’ve listened to nothing but Willie Nelson for the last week and a half,” Baez says, though she also enthuses about young folk duo Shovels and Rope.

Performing live is something the 72-year-old Baez still enjoys doing, and has scheduled a run of East Coast dates, including a concert at the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford on Saturday, June 29. Multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell and percussionist Gabriel Harris (who is Baez’s son) back Baez on tour, and the singer credits Powell in particular with inspiring fresh looks into her repertoire.

But even as a 19-year-old folkie just starting to capture the public eye, Baez had an intuitive sense about winning over an audience.

“I saw some footage used in the documentary about me (“How Sweet the Sound”), and it was of me performing in a coffee shop,” she recalls. “I saw myself singing, and the crowd was spellbound. Then a man at one of the tables moved his finger, and my eyes shot right over there. I was so aware of what was going on. My goal is to be in sync with the audience. I’m always making adjustments — consciously and unconsciously — to the settings I’m playing in.”

Baez still performs at benefits and addresses groups dedicated to liberal causes. Her idea of activism, she says, has evolved to a point where there is no real difference between the political and the personal.

“It’s all about the way you carry yourself,” Baez says, adding that is an attitude she learned and adopted from her mother, who died earlier this year shortly after her 100th birthday. “What I do is tell stories, and that’s how information gets out.”

Early in her career, Baez learned “The Death of Emmett Till,” (A.C. Bilbrew’s version from 1955, not Dylan’s rendition from ’62) a song about the murder of black teen accused of flirting with a white woman and subsequent acquittal of the man charged with the killing.

“I learned that song when I was 16,” she says. “It was the first politically conscious song I learned, and it served me well. Hopefully it is serving other people in other places as well.”

And though she describes herself as a perfectionist, Baez is also open to new creative outlets; music itself, she says, is something that found her rather than the other way around. That attitude has most recently led Baez into painting.

“It wasn’t something I was looking to do,” she says. “But I was looking at an art store window and walked into the shop and talked to a woman there. I told her I just wanted to put paint on a canvas. When I started, I had paint up to my elbows.”

Baez has since refined her technique and may start posting completed works on her website.
“No portraits of feet in a bathtub,” she says. “I promise.”

Joan Baez,
8 p.m. Saturday, June 29
Zeiterion Theatre, 684 Purchase St., New Bedford
$49.50, $46.50, zeiterion.org (508) 994-2900
Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter
@ScottMcLennan1

Lenny Lashley, Boston by Beat, June 26, 2013

Lenny Lashley

 Longtime punk rocker Lenny Lashley shows other dimensions to his songwriting and playing on the "Illuminator" album he released as Lenny Lashley's Gang of One. Lashley spoke about his latest endeavors in a piece for Boston by Beat, and you can read what he had to say here.

The Wandas, Boston by Beat, June 23, 2013

 

The Wandas

Boston indie-pop band the Wandas experimented on "The New Interface" album and yielded some excellent results. To listen to the new album and read what the band had to say about making, check out the Boston by Beat blog here.

ii nub, Boston by Beat, June 21, 2013

ii nub is the latest project featuring longtime ambient-music architects Luis Fraire and Sean Carroll. To read about their new album "Gradients" in the Boston by Beat blog, click here.

Channel reunion feature, Boston Globe, June 21, 2013

Bands ready to reconnect with their Channel days

By Scott McLennan

Globe Correspondent   June 21, 2013

Lizzie Borden and the Axes (Matt Lee photo from Boston Globe)

 
Touring as the opener for the J. Geils Band at the peak of that band’s popularity was undoubtedly a huge career boost for the Jon Butcher Axis.

But Butcher really felt like a star when his band played a New Year’s Eve show at the Channel on the heels of that ’82 Geils tour.

“It was an incredible homecoming,” Butcher recalls. “It felt like we were playing to a sold-out Boston Garden.”

Giving homegrown talent a big stage — figuratively and literally — was part of the charm of the Channel, a bunker-like concert venue operated on the South Boston waterfront from 1980 to 1991.

The 1,700-capacity club (notorious for feeling way more cramped than 1,700 people should have felt at particularly popular concerts) presented an array of touring bands that spanned Butthole Surfers to James Brown. And in terms of serving the local music scene, the Channel often had Boston bands open for national headliners. And any local band that gained traction after countless gigs at the Rat and Paradise and some airplay on radio stations WBCN or WCOZ eyed a headlining show at the Channel as a step up the career ladder.

On Sunday, Boston bands who saw their stars rise and shine at the Channel will gather for a concert at Royale in Boston to benefit the addiction-treatment program Right Turn.
Butcher is opening the show, to be followed by New England, Farrenheit, the Stompers, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, Lizzie Borden and the Axes, the Fools, and Woody Giessmann of the Del Fuegos, who founded Right Turn 10 years ago. Surprise guests are also being lined up.

Robin Moran, who tended bar at the Channel, lit the fuse on the idea for a concert featuring Channel regulars and reached out to Hirsh Gardner for some organizational help.

Following his stint playing drums in New England, a band that garnered a national hit with “Don’t Ever Wanna Lose Ya,” Gardner pursued work in the production and business sides of music. A Channel Reunion Concert board of directors formed to both organize the concert and set it up as a fund-raising vehicle.

“No money is going to the artists, except to maybe pay for their parking. We decided early that we wanted to make it a benefit, and everybody knows Woody,” Gardner says.

The fact that Right Turn is the beneficiary of this event drew in Stompers singer Sal Baglio, who is now a mentor at Right Turn, which specializes in working with musicians and other artists.

Michael Sparks Keegan

Jon Butcher

That’s not to say that the hard-charging, blue-collar Stompers don’t naturally fit in with this crew.

“I played there so early on with the Neighborhoods that I think the stage was in a different place,” Baglio recalls of those early Channel days. “In ’77, ’78, cover bands were huge. There was a circuit, and they’d travel with smoke machines. But little by little, guys in T-shirts playing original music caught on. People came out to the shows and ’BCN would play your tapes.”

And it wasn’t just guys in T-shirts.

Lizzie Borden says the Channel was a second home for her band the Axes, when it would play there two or three times a month. Among her memorable gigs there were opening slots for Spinal Tap and a show with Cheap Trick and the Stompers.

The all-female Lizzie Borden and the Axes crossed new wave flash with pop song craft and hard-rock edge

“We were the baby band,” Borden recalls, finding inspiration in fellow female rocker Robin Lane and learning the ropes from live dynamos such as the Fools.

“There was a lot of camaraderie despite our differences,” she says. “Before computers and the digital age, you had to talk to someone in person, and there was always a human element to putting together a show. And you had to have a sense of humor.”

The Channel bash marks just the third reunion for New England since disbanding in 1982. Gardner says the band members have stayed friendly over the years and will even join singer John Fannon at his gig Saturday at Passim where he’ll be releasing his first solo album, “Saved All the Pieces.”

Rose Lincoln for the Boston Globe

The band New England: bass player Gary Shea, drummer Hirsh Gardner, guitarist John Fannon, and keyboard player Jimmy Waldo.

Likewise, Lizzie Borden and the Axes haven’t played together but a few times since breaking up 25 years ago.

“I was ’80s-ed out,” says Borden, who went on to other projects. “I couldn’t stand it for a while, but people love it.”

Even as she has led her own namesake band for the past 10 years, Borden says she is still frequently asked about the Axes, who had a hit with “Out of Touch.”

Butcher, who has also stayed active as a solo artist and composer (that’s his music you hear in the Showtime show “Shameless”) is like Borden in terms of feeling ready to revisit his roots, and recently re-recorded songs from his 1983 debut album with the Axis, which he says was a botched, overly slick production.

“About a year ago [bassist] Chris [Martin] and I decided to record the songs the way we intended. Songs like ‘Ocean in Motion’ and ‘Life Takes a Life’ now sound more like the way we play them live,” say Butcher of the “Axis 3” album released earlier this year.

Baglio says that playing with the Stompers now is even more fun for him than it was during the band’s ascent 35 years ago.

“People are coming to remember a certain time,” he says. “The band understands that, and we deliver.”
 

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1.

Fleetwood Mac concert review, Providence Journal, June 21, 2013

Buckingham-Nicks still the romantic soul of Fleetwood Mac

By SCOTT McLENNAN

Published: 21 June 2013

MANSFIELD, Mass. — Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are to classic rock what George Jones and Tammy Wynette were to country music and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell were to rhythm and blues: the everlasting couple.
Though in real life the Buckingham-Nicks romance flamed out long ago, its myth still fed Fleetwood Mac’s nostalgia-laden concert at the Comcast Center on Friday.
After founders Mick Fleetwood and John McVie, plus the hired guns, took the stage, Nicks and Buckingham walked out hand-in-hand to start the show with “Second Hand News.”
Drummer Fleetwood, bassist McVie, and guitarist Buckingham easily recreated their parts from Fleetwood Mac’s mid-70s glory days. Nicks, still the high-priestess of romantic souls, has far less range and power in her vocals. She did not struggle through “The Chain,” “Dreams” or “Rhiannon,” but she also did not deliver those songs with any sort of spark. Applauding her efforts felt more like cheering for memories than finding life in the moment.
Fleetwood Mac can still orchestrate a brisk 21/2-hour concert. After a run through early hits, Buckingham introduced “Sad Angel,” one of two new songs included in the concert. That up-tempo number was far better than the hippie-lite wobble “Without You,” a song Nicks wrote in 1970 and introduced in a story that would have been tolerable at “rambling” but went on to tortuous lengths. Both songs fed the romance storyline in different ways, as did the Buckingham-Nicks embrace at the end of “Sara.”
Buckingham introduced a suite of songs — including “Sara — from the “Tusk” album with a speech about taking artistic risks, which that album was when it followed the monolithic “Fleetwood Mac” and “Rumours” albums. Of course the merits of artistic risk were on display when people streamed toward the concession stands when Buckingham began the “Tusk” deep cut “Not That Funny.” But a turn into that album’s “Sisters of the Moon” proved a treat to older fans, with Nicks noting the song hadn’t been part of the concert repertoire since 1981.
A mid-concert turn into stripped-down acoustic material was a highlight.
Buckingham launched it with “Big Love,” brought it to a peak when he and Nicks aired “Landslide” and gently brought it down with a duo reading of “Never Going Back Again.”
Late into the concert, Nicks and Buckingham each stretched out on theatrical numbers. Nicks went first with an extended “Gold Dust Woman.” Buckingham followed with his tightly-coiled “I’m So Afraid.”
Though Nicks is not the powerhouse she once was, she still has commercial clout, as the band followed her through her solo hit “Stand Back.”
Fleetwood Mac wrapped up its main set with “Go Your Own Way.” The encore portion contained the requisite Fleetwood drum solo (though shortened from past tours).
The final song was “Say Goodbye,” done with just Buckingham and Nicks harmonizing alone on stage, looking very much like a love story to be continued as long as there is an audience for it.

Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration, Boston Globe, June 20, 2013

The Pops pays tribute to Garcia

By Scott McLennan

Globe Staff   June 20, 2013

Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart

 
Trixie Garcia has no idea what to wear to Tanglewood on Saturday.

“Do I wear a dress or a tie-dye?” she asks from her Oakland home when discussing her visits to the symphonies performing the work of her father, Jerry Garcia.

The Boston Pops is one of the eight orchestras around the country presenting Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration. The concerts pair symphonies with guitarist and singer Warren Haynes and a band he handpicked for these shows spotlighting Garcia’s work.

It’s a long, strange trip from Haight-Ashbury to Lenox. As guitarist and guru for the Grateful Dead, Garcia made music for the modern bacchanalia, not necessarily for places where the music of Bach is the norm. And though he could summon a hippie army by plucking the first two notes of “St. Stephen,” Garcia was also a serious musician who collaborated with jazz great Ornette Coleman, bluegrass legend Vassar Clements, and country-rock pioneers New Riders of the Purple Sage. Had he lived longer, maybe Garcia himself would have eventually traded the trademark black T-shirt he wore on stage for a tux and performed with a symphony.

 

Keith Lockhart will be conducting the Boston Pops when Haynes and crew truck into Tanglewood.

 

“This will not be a normal tribute show,” Lockhart says. First, he notes the entire Grateful Dead cultural phenomenon, a time warp of psychedelic imagery and near-obsessive devotion to the music by fans who self-identify as Deadheads. The Tanglewood concert will be one of two Garcia symphonic performances to incorporate the work of the Joshua Light Show, the same crew that made all those pulsing abstract images at the Fillmore East when the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa, and the like played the storied New York City venue during its original run from 1968 to ’71.

The Pops will also have to tackle the improvisation issue.

“Garcia made up a lot as he went along. An orchestra doesn’t make it up as it goes along. There are just too many people for improvisations,” Lockhart says.

But seeing arranger Chris Walden’s involvement in the project sold Lockhart on the Garcia program.

“Chris Walden is a favorite arranger of ours,” Lockhart says. “He did a concerto for cellos for us this season.”

Sean O’Loughlin and Steven Bernstein were the other two arrangers involved in the project.

Cellist Owen Young is as curious as anyone about what will transpire Saturday, as the Pops had not seen the music, nor will the orchestra meet with Haynes and his band until the day of the concert. But he did think that the program challenges preconceived notions about where Garcia’s music belongs, and what a symphony can do.

“We have a tendency to pigeonhole everything,” Young says. “I believe you take away from music if you put it into categories. I have a lot of respect for Jerry Garcia as a musician. I am not a follower of the Grateful Dead, but I respect his abilities.”

Haynes likewise was drawn to the project’s attempt to see Garcia’s work from a fresh angle.

“The power that a symphony offers will bring these songs to places they have never been before,” says Haynes. “And these songs have been to a lot of places.”

After being contacted by the Garcia estate to participate in the symphonic celebration, Haynes drew up a long wish list of songs that Garcia played or covered with the Grateful Dead and his side projects. While Haynes may be best known for his work with the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, he is no stranger to the Garcia songbook.

After Garcia died in 1995, the surviving members of the Grateful Dead embarked on various solo paths as well as reunions. Haynes frequently teamed with Dead bassist Phil Lesh and was the lead guitar player for the last tour that involved all of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Garcia’s work figured prominently in both endeavors.

“It’s not going to be a night of Grateful Dead hits,” Haynes notes, saying that he was drawn to obscure nuggets in the Garcia repertoire as well as the Grateful Dead’s “Terrapin Station” suite, which was recorded with strings and horns, though only a small bit of it was performed in concert while Garcia was alive.

Haynes will look for openings to solo and conferred with the show’s three arrangers on ways to segue in and out of two or three tunes, much like the Grateful Dead did in concert. Bassist Lincoln Schleifer, drummer Jeff Sipe, and singers Alecia Chakour and Jasmine Muhammad will be joining Haynes as the band works with orchestras in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Colorado, and California, including two nights in San Francisco starting Aug. 1, which would have been Garcia’s 71st birthday.

This endeavor is not the first time Garcia’s music has been yanked from its happy hippie home and proven suitable for dressing up a bit. In 1995, jazz composer Joe Gallant created a big-band arrangement of the Dead’s “Blues for Allah” record. The 2007 album “Dead Symphony No. 6” features conductor Lee Johnson’s arrangements of several Garcia songs performed by the Russian National Orchestra.

But in this case, the project originated in the Garcia camp.

Now 38, Trixie Garcia spends a lot of time fielding ideas about things to do with her father’s music and artwork (“He was a prolific painter,” she says).

Garcia says she deferred to music executive and self-professed Grateful Dead fan Coran Capshaw, who served as producer for recently released Jerry Garcia archival concert recordings, and Haynes for making the business and artistic decisions, respectively, on the symphonic shows once she felt they advanced her father’s legacy.

“There may be music lovers who never thought rock ’n’ roll was their thing but will appreciate the music in this setting. Or maybe there are kids who have not been able to experience a symphony or who didn’t see Jerry and will find this a unique experience,” she says.

Garcia’s daughter is attending all of the symphonic concerts, calling herself more of an ambassador than an expert.

“I didn’t grow up a Deadhead,” she says, noting that it took years for her to fully understand her father’s musical and cultural reach. “What kid thinks what their parents do is cool?”
 

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1

Atlas Genius feature, Providence Journal, June 16, 2013

Australian band Atlas Genius plays The Met in Pawtucket on June 17 

Michael Jeffery, left, and his brother Keith Jeffery, of the Australian indie-pop band Atlas Genius.

By Scott McLennan 

Special to The Journal

Published: 16 June 2013 12:01 AM

By focusing on small details, Atlas Genius has gotten a pretty big response.

“I wanted to focus on the minutiae and write about the smaller parts of life,” says Atlas Genius singer, guitarist and songwriter Keith Jeffery. “I’ll leave the big statements to the likes of Bon Jovi.”

Atlas Genius is having a breakthrough year with the February release of its full-length album “When it Was Now,” which houses the hit “Trojans” and fueled enough road work and interest to finally allow the Australian indie-pop band a headlining tour of the U.S. after previous visits opening for Imagine Dragons and Silversun Pickups.

Atlas Genius is at The Met Monday before wrapping up a string of U.S. dates in July and heading back to Australia for what will be the band’s first proper tour of its country of origin. “We go home for three days, see our families, then leave again,” Jeffery said when reached in transit between Columbus and Nashville, noting that music is now a “24/7” endeavor.

It didn’t start that way for Jeffrey and his brother Michael, Atlas Genius’ drummer. The two built a studio to work on songs, pulling in money playing covers at local bars. In the summer of 2011, the brothers posted the song “Trojans” online to little fanfare. But the music blog Neon Gold found the song and wrote a glowing review that caught the attention of management companies, booking agents, and record labels.

The song became a hit in Australia and migrated to alt-rock programs carried on U.S. satellite. “It was the first song we finished,” Jeffery says of how the lean, urgent “Trojans” became the band’s calling card. “We didn’t expect this reaction to it.”

By early 2012, Atlas Genius had a deal with Warner Bros. Records, which primed the pump with an E.P. released a year ago, and then put out the full-length “When it Was Now.” The 11-song outing is beguiling as it combines artistic flourish with broadly catchy melodies. Lyrically, Jeffery stays true to his aim with songs that manage to hit pop’s favorite targets of romance and angst with stories that seem sprung from small bits of conversation or fleeting observations.

“Life is never absolutely terrible or absolutely amazing. It’s usually OK, with some good and bad. My lyrics reflect that middle ground,” Jeffery says. “I feel I’m successful if I’ve written a song that feels like something you’d see in one day.”

These days, much of what the band sees is through a windshield, but Jeffery isn’t complaining.

“We’ve seen a lot of America and a lot of Europe,” he says. “It’s a privilege to do it.” But clearly the band will be coming at its next album from a place far different from the isolated environment where it created its first batch of songs, and Jeffery is preparing for that.

“It can’t help but change the music,” he says of how current experience will affect the next Atlas Genius record. “I know I’ll just write the best songs I can. It’s interesting being a fan and watching a band grow, and different when you’re doing it yourself. I think a lot of bands get slower when they grow. When a band gets to the stadiums, you can see how it has changed.”

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1

 

Songwriters band together, Boston by Beat, June 11, 2013

Five Boston songwriters who specialize in pop (of the indie variety) put together a song-swap to showcase their work and stylistic differences, and to just get out of their song labs. Scott Janovitz (pictured) and Emeen Zarookian talked about the gathering for Boston by Beat, and you can read the post by clicking here.

Rolling Stones review, Providence Journal, June 13, 2013

At 50, Rolling Stones still have the power to start us up 

Kris Craig/The Providence Journal

Charlie Watts, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, and Mick Jagger perform at TD Garden Wednesday as their tour celebrating 50 years as a band hits Boston. They perform Friday also. 

By Scott McLennan
Special to the Journal

 

BOSTON — Forget the band members’ ages. Forget the ticket prices. Forget the number of times that the band has played “Honky Tonk Women.” The only question that mattered at the Rolling Stones concert Wednesday at the TD Garden was this one: Did the Stones own the building?

Yup.

The Rolling Stones “50 and Counting Tour,” which returns to the Garden Friday, is a scaled-down affair by Stones standards, and in spots during the show it was apparent that the energy and fire of yore are somewhat diminished.

But there were plenty of transcendent moments — 1970s-era guitarist Mick Taylor rejoining the band for “Sway” and “Midnight Rambler,” a deliciously sleazy “Emotional Rescue” — and no outright fumbles. Even the inclusion of two new, non-hits seemed an act of defiance worth cheering.

After an aggrandizing intro film loaded with celebrity hosannas, the band hit the stage with “Get Off of My Cloud.” The tempos through that and “It’s Only Rock ’n Roll” were noticeably taken down a notch, and lithe and limber singer Mick Jagger had a few moments of slipping out of the groove.
But an early turn into “Gimme Shelter” seemed to right the ship, with Jagger and back-up singer Lisa Fischer generating sparks as guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood constructed the song’s ominous atmosphere.

The tour has featured special guests most nights, and in Boston guitarist and singer Gary Clark Jr. joined the band for a romp through Freddie King’s “Goin’ Down.”

It was as freewheeling trip back to the blues as you could hope from the Stones at this point, with Jagger stepping back to let Richards, Wood, and Clark revel in solos.

The top half of the show is where the Stones were less scripted. A boozy “Beast of Burden” benefited from the band’s more wily than wicked stage attack. And the first appearance of Taylor on “Sway” tapped deeply into the catalog in a way diehards wished the Stones would do more of. For his customary bit as lead singer, Richards even went not with the obvious “Happy” but instead played the acoustic “You Got the Silver” and “Before They Make Me Run.”

The band trod down the path of well-known hits for the concert's second hour, though Taylor returned to spice up “Midnight Rambler.”

But the deliveries on “Miss You,” “Tumbling Dice,” and “Start Me Up” were not perfunctory, and led up to an incendiary “Sympathy for the Devil.”

For all the temptation to bash the Stones for having the audacity to keep doing what they do, shows like the one the band played Wednesday remind that this is a game —
spectacle matched with commercial clout matched with musical ingenuity — that the Stones pretty much invented.

And own.

 

Tommy Malone feature, Providence Journal, June 9, 2013

Writing just comes naturally to Tommy Malone

 

 

Tommy Malone is best known for fronting the Subdudes.

By Scott McLennan

Special to The Journal

Published: 09 June 2013 12:01 AM

Tommy Malone wrote many of the songs for his new record “Natural Born Days” with drummer and longtime friend Jim Scheurich. But this was not some sort of Brill Building exercise of sitting around the piano.

“I’m 55 years old now, and I’ve known Jim since I was 14. He’d come over, we’d put on a pot of coffee and have a conversation,” Malone recounts when recently reached by phone while on tour in Colorado. “We’d talk about family, politics, God, flowers, whatever. Sometimes ideas would just come out. I’d say, ‘Wait, what’d you just say?,’ and that would be the start of something.”

“Natural Born Days” is the second solo album from Malone, who is best known for fronting New Orleans’ freewheeling roots-rock band the Subdudes, which began in 1987 and has been on hiatus since 2010. Malone will be performing Monday at The Met, and says he’ll dip into his first solo record, the Subdudes catalog, songs from his stint in the short-lived band Tiny Town, as well as “Natural Born Days.”

In queuing up this solo record, Malone first started working with his brother Dave after he retired from the Radiators.

“We were rehashing old material. It’s not what I wanted to be doing,” Malone says.

After reconnecting with Scheurich, Malone began airing some of his new songs during a Tuesday night residency at the Chickie Wah Wah club in New Orleans. Record producer John Porter, who has worked with Taj Mahal, Keb’Mo’ and others, routinely turned up at those Tuesday shows and approached Malone about making a record.

Malone didn’t box himself in stylistically, recording songs that span blues to country to rock. Most of the songs are kept pretty lean, letting the emotional resonance of Malone’s writing, singing and guitar playing shoot to the foreground.

Malone sounded pretty unconcerned about the record’s zig-zagging flow, saying he just made an album that emulates the kinds of records he liked when he first got into music.

“When I was growing up, you’d get a Stones or a Beatles record, and you didn’t know what was going to be on it,” he says. “And you didn’t care, as long as it was interesting.”

And Malone definitely keeps it interesting here. He cuts close to the bone on the mournful rejection song “Didn’t Want to Hear It” and the measured title track, spun from his own mother’s pill addiction.

“It’s about her struggles, like myself and my father struggled with alcohol,” Malone says. “She is also very religious and has a lot of faith. I tried to paint a picture of somebody who has human characteristics. There’s all that pain and all that hope, too.”

There also is a fair amount of fun and joy on the album, with the swamp rock of “Mississippi Bootlegger” and wry “Hope Diner.” And Malone takes us to church on “No Reason” and “God Knows.”

“Natural Born Days” may not shy from sorrow, but is an overall comfortable-sounding piece of work, perhaps the result of Malone returning to New Orleans after decamping to Nashville following Hurricane Katrina.

“That song ‘Home’ is all about coming back. Even with all its nastiness and problems, it just feels like where I belong,” Malone says. “It’s beautiful to me, though it’s hard to describe. I guess when I was in Nashville, I never felt like I could sit all the way down in my seat.”

Tommy Malone will be at The Met, 1005 Main St., Pawtucket, Monday, June 10, at 7 p.m. $15, themetri.com, (401) 331-5876

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1

 

Black Sabbath CD review, Boston Globe, June 11, 2013

Album review | Heavy metal

Black Sabbath, ‘13’

By Scott McLennan

Globe Correspondent, June 11, 2013

Tolling bells and falling rain are the last things you hear on the new Black Sabbath record, just as they are the first things you hear on the band's 1970 debut. That’s not the only echo on “13,” the first full-length Black Sabbath studio album since 1978 to feature singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, and bassist Geezer Butler. The Rick Rubin-produced reunion of the classic Sabbath lineup — minus drummer Bill Ward, with Brad Wilk in his place — rekindles the tones and themes of the band's first few albums. Iommi and Butler construct brooding, monolithic riffs and Osbourne trains his funeral sing-talk vocals on epic struggles between good and evil, God and Satan, and sanity and madness. The generic gloom of “Loner” is the only flat spot among the eight songs. And “13” ends strongly with the furious “Damaged Soul” and damning “Dear Father,” the former a grim resignation and latter an indictment of abusive priests and the churches that protected them (a “War Pigs” for the clergy). (Out Tuesday)
Essential “Damaged Soul”

Black Sabbath plays Aug. 12 at the Comcast Center.

Ducky Boys CD review, Boston by Beat, June 3, 2013

The Ducky Boys released its latest street-punk manifesto on June 4. To read a review in the Boston by Beat blog, click here.

Mass interview, Boston by Beat, June 7, 2013

The Boston band Mass flourished in the 1980s with a pop-metal sound, then felt the crush of grunge. The band has been active in recent years with shows and new recordings. I profiled the band in the Boston by Beat blog ahead of a fund-raising concert. To read the piece, click here.

Cast Iron Hike feature, Boston Globe, June 6, 2013

Cast Iron Hike reunites

By Scott McLennan

Globe Correspondent   June 06, 2013

Chris Pupecki, left, and Mike Gallagher of Cast Iron Hike (Aram Boghosian photo)

 
Bassist Pete DeGraaf recalls singer Jake Brennan wearing a Billie Holiday T-shirt to his tryout for a spot in Cast Iron Hike, a band with aspirations to merge hardcore punk’s intensity and honesty with heavy metal’s groove and dynamics.

“It wasn’t weird because all the people in the band listened to a lot of different kinds of music and listened to music really closely,” DeGraaf says.

Brennan got the job, joining guitarists Chris Pupecki and Mike Gallagher, drummer Dave Green, and DeGraaf for a run that began in 1994 and was over by 1998, leaving in its wake two EPs, the full-length “Watch It Burn,” a bunch of tours, and a devoted fan base.
“People have been asking for a reunion since 1999, the year after we broke up,” says Pupecki.

And they’ll finally get one, as Cast Iron Hike reunites for four shows beginning June 13 at O’Brien’s in Allston, followed by appearances at Ralph’s Diner in Worcester on June 14, Great Scott in Allston on June 15, and wrapping up at St. Vitus Bar in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 16.

Before Cast Iron Hike, Green and Pupecki played together in the hardcore band Backbone. Green says he and the guitarist had a good chemistry, and their musical tastes were expanding beyond their hardcore roots.

“I wasn’t listening to hardcore at all anymore, probably with the exception of staples like the Cro-Mags, Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and Black Flag that I still listen to regularly. I was listening to a lot of Swans, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits stuff then. I was always looking for heavy, Sabbathy, groove-oriented music, but the vocals of most metal were silly, and a lot of heavy hardcore was dumb, macho posturing with screaming vocals that did nothing for me anymore,” Green wrote in an e-mail.

The two were stumbling into what was then a fresh brand of heaviness courtesy of such bands as Kyuss, the Melvins, and Helmet, and wanted to put together a band along those lines. In separate interviews, each member of Cast Iron Hike in some fashion said that the band was neither hardcore nor metal, yet somehow drew from both camps to simply be “heavy.”

Once Gallagher, DeGraaf, and Brennan joined, the band bashed out its ideas in Clinton and played around Worcester, eventually branching into Boston. The fledgling Big Wheel Recreation record label released Cast Iron Hike’s debut, “The Salmon Drive E.P.,” in 1995, then the larger Trustkill Records put out the band’s self-titled four-song CD the following year. In 1997, Victory Records, at the time one of the bigger independent labels for heavy music, released “Watch It Burn.” The band relentlessly toured, doing mostly DIY club shows plus the occasional festival; Pupecki recalls how both Blink-182 and Limp Bizkit preceded Cast Iron Hike on two different festival bills.

“We went from playing in garages to touring with Sick of It All pretty quickly,” Pupecki says. “It was pretty awesome.”

Even though the traditional hardcore camp gave Cast Iron Hike what Pupecki calls the “skunk eye” because of Brennan’s clean, no-shriek vocals, others picked up on what the band was striving for with its blend of heaving riffs and tightly coiled melody lines.

“The people who told us, ‘We like your riffs but your singer sounds like Steven Tyler,’ were five years later listening to the exact same kind of stuff we were making,” Pupecki says.

The reunion is so long in the coming for a variety of reasons, mainly ones having to do with post-Cast Iron Hike commitments. Brennan left the band to pursue an interest in roots music awakened while the band toured through the South. Gallagher joined prog-metal band Isis. Pupecki, Converge’s Nate Newton, and others formed Doomriders, which has its third album coming out this summer. DeGraaf has played in various bands and is working on an album with power-pop band Clear the Way. Green went back to school after Cast Iron Hike dissolved and is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Gallagher (left) and Jake Brennan during a band gig at Sir Morgan’s Cove in Worcester in the mid-1990s.

“I was young in Cast Iron Hike, and like a lot of young adults, you start digging deeper into music. AC/DC and Led Zeppelin records bring you to the blues,” Brennan says of the move from Cast Iron Hike to his next band, the Americana-oriented Confidence Men. “I was listening to a lot of music by the Band, and thinking ‘They’re Canadian guys doing this. I can do this.’ ”

Brennan later moved to the indie-pop world of Bodega Girls and now focuses mainly on his music production company, BrenBurg Media.

“Being in Cast Iron Hike taught me how to be in a band and how to work with other people,” Brennan says. “Those were strong personalities in Cast Iron Hike, and I sought that out in my future projects.”

The reunion ball finally got rolling after Isis disbanded in 2010. Gallagher, who now lives in Los Angeles, called Pupecki to say he was open to a reunion if the other members were.

“I didn’t want to do it for the longest time,” Gallagher says. “It just didn’t feel right.”

But like the others, Gallagher credits his tenure in Cast Iron Hike as an important time of learning and is still proud of the music the band made.

“We had a good run,” he says. “We enjoyed it. We did it, and who knows what would have happened if we stayed together any longer?”
 

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com.

Portugal. The Man CD review, Boston Globe, June 4, 2013

ALBUM REVIEW | Prog Pop

Portugal. The Man, ‘Evil Friends’

By Scott McLennan

 |  Globe Correspondent     June 04, 2013

If Billboard magazine had a chart for “Hallucinatory Pop,” Portugal. The Man’s “Evil Friends” could enter at No. 1 with a bullet. Working with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, Portugal. The Man creates a fresh kaleidoscopic pattern of moods and textures. While the writing has a tight focus and singer John Baldwin Gourley sounds like he’s whispering his thoughts directly to you, the rest of the record bursts with all manner of sonic color. The contrast suits the album’s to-and-fro between calm and confusion. “Evil Friends” is not a concept album, per se, but themes and images — toy soldiers, holy rollers, sea and shore — recur in songs to form an impressionistic lattice that hangs over the work. Gourley’s detached falsetto belies the subversive rush of “Modern Jesus,” “Hip Hop Kids,” and “Creep in a T-Shirt.” Before the air gets too heavy with grimy street-level stories, the album pivots outward with the spiritual paean “Sea of Air” and peacenik protest “Waves.” “Someday Believers” is an atypical (like the band itself) anthem that acknowledges despair as it reaches for hope. “Evil Friends” is as methodical as it is psychedelic, as the last song, “Smile,” loops back to motifs from the opening track, supplanting the first swipe’s elegant piano part with a wiry electric guitar that sparks more intrigue than resolution. (Out Tuesday)

Essential “Creep in a T-Shirt”

Gov't Mule feature, Providence Journal, May 31, 2013

Gov’t Mule tackles it all, from reggae to metal 

Gov't Mule

 

By Scott McLennan

Special to The Journal

Published: 31 May 2013 02:11 PM

Next time you’re about to say, “I’m too busy to do that,” just think of Warren Haynes.

Haynes is the indefatigable guitarist who’ll be leading Gov’t Mule into the Newport Yachting Center on Thursday as part of the Sunset Music Series. Then Haynes heads off to Mountain Jam, a music festival he helped found in 2005 that takes place annually in New York’s Catskills, to perform Saturday, June 8, with Gov’t Mule and again on Sunday, June 9, in a band led by Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. Then sandwiching a Gov’t Mule tour of Europe, Haynes collaborates with orchestras in eight U.S. cities for symphonic presentations of Jerry Garcia’s music (including a June 22 date at Tanglewood with the Boston Pops).

Come August, Haynes takes his spot in the Allman Brothers Band for concerts with the legendary psychedelic blues troupe through mid September. Then it’s back to touring with Gov’t Mule as the band supports a new record coming out later this year.

Gov’t Mule, which Haynes formed with drummer Matt Abts and bassist Allen Woody in 1994, hasn’t released new music since 2009’s “By a Thread.” Haynes says the new record was made during short breaks in between other projects.

“It fell together quickly and easily,” Haynes says. “Once we started writing, a lot of songs were completed quickly, and that just spurred the album.”

Haynes figures the project went smoothly because at this point even the “new guy — bassist Jorgen Carlsson — has been in the band for five years, which is about how long his predecessor, Andy Hess, had been in the group. Original member Woody died in 2000, and Haynes and Abts soldiered on with several guest replacements before settling on Hess. The post-Woody era also brought keyboard player Danny Louis into the fold, which helped expand Gov’t Mule’s sound beyond the heavy blues rock of its early years.

“When it comes time to make a record, I look at the catalog and see what’s missing. That helps me find a direction. I’m interested in exploring styles that I have not quite captured yet,” Haynes says.
That’s why you’ll find everything from soul to reggae to heavy metal given a ride on the Mule once you start digging around the band’s catalog of originals and myriad covers; this is a band as comfortable putting its stamp on a Beatles song as it is on a Black Sabbath track.

Haynes wasn’t revealing too many details about the new project before its official arrival announcement, but he says that Gov’t Mule will be airing its new songs live and that he’s happy how each song on the record sounds different from the others.

“We took a year off, and everyone came back rejuvenated,” Haynes says of the burst of ideas from his band mates. (And by year off, Haynes means he spent that time leading a new band that accentuated his R&B leanings).

And while Gov’t Mule is gearing up to promote a new studio album (maybe even making its first music video in the process), that will not deter from the way it handles itself on stage — oh, there will be lengthy jams on songs new and old.

“The stage and records are completely different and not to be confused,” he says. “Our songs tend to be longer than other artist’s songs, that lets us really open up live.”

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1

Gov’t Mule is performing Thursday at the Newport Yachting Center, 4 Commercial Wharf, Newport at 5:30 p.m. Tickets $35.50 in advance, $45.50 day of show, newportwaterfrontevents.com (401) 846-1600.

The Stranglers feature, Boston Globe, June 1, 2013

UK punk stalwarts the Stranglers return to the States

By Scott McLennan

Globe Correspondent   June 01, 2013

 

 

The Stranglers

 
You know that old friend you haven’t called in a while? The weeks between contact turned into months, then turned into years, and, well, picking up the phone to reconnect just seemed silly.

“You feel embarrassed,” is how the Stranglers bassist Jean-Jacques “JJ” Burnel described the situation, using it as an analogy to explain what happened in the relationship between his band and North America.

It has been about 17 years since the Stranglers, a group associated with the UK’s first wave of punk rock, last had a tour in this country. The arrival of “Giants,” the band’s 17th studio album, changed that.

“We had offers to tour before, but we turned them down for various reasons,” Burnel says when reached last month in his manager’s UK office. “But now we have an album we feel justified defending.”

“Giants” came out last year in Europe and slowly developed a groundswell of support, both critically and commercially.

“Last year was just mad,” Burnel says. “There was no scheduled North American release for the record, but then people pricked up their ears.”


All My People/Fontana/INGrooves gave “Giants” a North American release on May 28, just ahead of an eight-city tour around the United States and Canada that brings the Stranglers to Brighton Music Hall on Tuesday.

The Stranglers first album, “Rattus Norvegicus” came out in 1977, landing milestone singles “Peaches” and “(Get a) Grip (on Yourself).” And though it was a punk band, the Stranglers proffered a broader sound, especially with keyboards prominent in song arrangements and horn sections in the live shows.

“The term was hijacked,” Burnel says of punk rock. “Initially, it was a word denoting freedom, but we quickly saw it straitjacketed and people created rules. Who makes these [expletive] rules? I wanted to try stuff out. When you love music, you’re not tribal about it. You try and assimilate. That’s the whole evolution of rock ’n’ roll in the first place. British bands listened to black music and resent it back to where it came from.”

Burnel and Hugh Cornwell were the Stranglers songwriters, generating such signature tunes as “No More Heroes,” “Golden Brown,” and “Skin Deep.” In 1990, Cornwell left the Stranglers to pursue a solo career. The band continued on with Burnel and fellow original Stranglers drummer Jet Black and keyboard player Dave Greenfield. After a couple of other post-Cornwell singers and guitarists, Baz Warne joined the band in 2000, and today he and Burnel split the vocal duties.

“Giants” is the seventh Stranglers album since Cornwell’s departure, and has become the band’s most successful outing since its first wave of hits in the 1970s and ’80s. The Stranglers took a broad view on the disc, blurring the political and personal in songs that embrace everything from icy New Wave tones to burly gutter rock (there’s even a rock ’n’ roll tango).

The six-minute “Freedom Is Insane” is the Stranglers’ estimation that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been monumental screw-ups

“The West feels it must impose democracy on a people. Why? Didn’t we see how imposing our world view was a mistake before in Africa?” Burnel asks.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Time Was Once on My Side,” a song that simply acknowledges that “we have fewer years ahead of us than behind us,” says Burnel “That’s just a fact.”
But songs such as “Giants” and “Mercury Rising” — pointed and critical as they are — make clear that the Stranglers are not easing quietly into old age.

“I’m from a generation that felt music was a bit important,” the 61-year-old Burnel says. “I saw the power of music in the ’60s. It’s been diluted, but music can still have the same value and depth.”
Early in their career, the Stranglers were compared to the Doors, and Burnel noted the passing of Ray Manzarek by saying the Doors provided an important soundtrack to social movements, such as the protests against the Vietnam War.

“I associate music with big events. How many big events are we living through right now? Look what just happened in Boston, look what just happened in London,” he says referring to the Boston Marathon bombings and the gruesome murder of a British soldier by suspected terrorists. “I think we can still have a soundtrack and comment on what’s happening. I don’t want to ram anything down your throat, but just sugar the pill.”

And while “Giants” is a victory for the rock band,Burnel says the tour will take an expansive look at the Stranglers songbook.

“It would be disingenuous to just come over and promote the new album. We’re not on a commercial treadmill,” Burnel says. “We have an embarrassment of riches, and we’ll try and cover all of the bases for fans.”

The show Tuesday will be similar to the Stranglers’ first Boston appearance in that once again the Nervous Eaters will be opening.

Back in 1978, the Stranglers played at the Rat in Kenmore Square, and the club’s owner, Jimmy Harold, was also managing the Nervous Eaters at the time.

And like the Stranglers, Boston’s Nervous Eaters earned the punk tag even though to singer, songwriter, and guitarist Steve Cataldo he was playing rock ’n’ roll.

“Because people were looking to describe what was going on they just called it punk,” Cataldo says. “It was just that everything sounded really original at the time.”

“Boston is a good music town,” Cataldo says. “When the Stranglers and the Police came here they were really well received, and they were not really punk rock. It was just good rock ’n’ roll.”
 

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1.

Tomahawk feature, Boston Globe, May 30, 2013

Tomahawk keeps it slow, steady, hard, and heady

By Scott McLennan

Globe Correspondent  

May 30, 2013

Tomahawk

 Tomahawk falls somewhere between supergroup and working band.

Its members have superb experimental-hard-rock pedigrees: guitarist Duane Denison is from Jesus Lizard; singer Mike Patton was in Faith No More; drummer John Stanier used to be in Helmet; and bassist Trevor Dunn, Tomahawk’s newest member, was in Mr. Bungle and Fanto-mas with Patton, and recently toured with the Melvins. And the time between Tomahawk projects is supergroup in length, tempting the use of “hiatus” and “reunion,” though the band itself does not.

But unlike traditional supergroups, which usually deposit an album or two and disperse, Tomahawk has a rich and varied catalog of music as it chases ideas beyond the realm of each member’s most identifiable work with other bands. This is either despite or because of the pace of Tomahawk’s output, which amounts to four records over the past 13 years, each title offering a distinctly different twist to the band’s sound. The albums may be tumultuous, but they are also methodical. Tomahawk’s 2007 release, “Anonymous,” for example, was based on Denison’s assimilation of traditional Native American music into underground rock.

In January, Tomahawk released “Oddfellows,” the follow-up to “Anonymous,” and is touring for the first time in a decade. The band’s next leg of concerts begins on Saturday with a sold-out show at the Paradise in Boston, one of five US cities Tomahawk is performing in before heading to Europe for the remainder of the summer.

Denison is Tomahawk’s main songwriter, and he calls the band his primary focus, though he does participate in the occasional Jesus Lizard reunion, and in recent years worked with Hank Williams III, Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers, and Empty Mansions.

“I just accumulate ideas and stay in touch with the other guys,” says Denison when reached at his Nashville home. “I’ll record demos and form the structure of the songs, but I don’t map out everything. I let the other guys personalize their parts,” Denison says. “They are so good at what they do. When I started this with Mike, I told him I wanted this to be a collaborative project. I expect him to send the vocal lines.”

As “Oddfellows” evolved, it took on an air of social commentary, though the messages are more subtle than overt.

“If you read between the lines, there’s a fair amount of social commentary. The title track is about judgment and critics. You can’t do anything today without it showing up on YouTube with a bunch of comments. And they’re all hostile comments,” Denison says.

In “White Hats/Black Hats,” the band blurs immigration and gang discourse; “I.O.U.” is a love song and a prison song.

The ambiguity suits the sound of “Oddfellows.”

“In Tomahawk, I try to balance things. You have the artsy and ambient and cinematic and the very driving, heavy, and hard. There’ll be some dissonance and angular stuff in there,” he says.

In other words, “Oddfellows” fits into the ever-growing catalog of Ipecac Records, the label Patton founded in 1999. The imprint has become home not only to Patton’s many projects but also several other independent-minded bands that tend to be simultaneously heavy and heady.

“Any of the labels that become successful have that stylistic imprint and just give off an impression of the music it releases. You see that with Epitaph and Drag City,” Denison says.

Tomahawk’s range seems a function of the players’ versatility. Patton sings everything from shrieking hard-core to opera, and his Tomahawk work falls in between those poles. Denison likewise experiments with tones and textures in his playing, and Stanier can both drive a song with a pounding rhythm and make it list with an off-kilter beat. Dunn, who has known Patton for 35 years, replaced original Tomahawk bassist Kevin Rutmanis in 2012 when the band started making “Oddfellows.” Dunn works in an array of musical settings ranging from John Zorn jazz ensembles to his own rock projects.

“I heard the previous records, and the style of Duane’s writing falls within a specific place,” Dunn says of working with Patton in both Mr. Bungle and Fantomas, yet finding a fresh sound with the singer in Tomahawk.

And while he could both follow Denison’s direction and find a way to apply his own style to “Oddfellows,” Dunn says his induction to Tomahawk’s live lineup was more frenzied.
“I had just done a tour with the Melvins where we played 50 shows with one day off. It ended in Hawaii and I had just planned to stay there and decompress. But Tomahawk called and said it was going to start playing shows,” Dunn recalls of his debut with the band in October at Nashville’s Exit/In.

Dunn arrived in Tennessee from Hawaii at 4 a.m., slept until noon, then met up with the rest of Tomahawk members, who themselves had not played a show together in nearly 10 years.

“We were all hyper attentive,” he says of that first night Tomahawk was back onstage.
Since then, Tomahawk has done sporadic dates around the country and traveled to South America for a run through festivals there.

Tomahawk’s concerts thus far have featured a cross-section of the band’s catalog, and Denison says the audiences have been clamoring for older songs.

“Eventually, a couple years from now, people will cheer for ‘Oddfellows’ too,” he says.
 

Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com.