It ain't easy: Benefit concert leads to CD

Nothing worth a damn comes easy, does it? Just ask Gary Shane. The North Shore rocker, a fixture on the local music scene for, like, evah, decided to put together something for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, a benefit concert. Raise some bucks for the organization, you know? About time, right? I mean, the guy has been living with MS since the mid-1980s, when his band, The Detour, broke with the monster hit "Shadow World," and over the past few years has organizaed multi-band benefits for disaster relief in Japan  and Indonesia, so it makes sense that he would do somethng a little closer to home, so to speak. So, in April, Shane put together a bill that combined local scenesters like EJ Ouelette and Crazy Maggy and Wade Dyce and Imojah and the Skylight Band with the crowd from Tavern at the End of the World, the Charlestown venue, Natalie Flanagan and Trusty Sidekick, as well as the current versions of Shane's Detour and Silvertones bands and the Heygoods, a country-soaked duo featuring Dave Champagne, who goes back with Shane to the pre-Detour days, who played with Boston blues legends, and Morphine prototype, Treat Her Right. And, for whatever reason, and we're not pointing fingers, the benefit didn't do quite as well as everyone had hoped, pulling in only $800. Which, although more than a little bit disappointing, financially, especially considering the amount of work that went into putting the thing together, did help finance a live recording from the show, which will also benefit MS. And that's when everything started falling off the rails and, unexpectedly, opened the door for something truly special.

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In the Cards: TITO's stunning 'Waste Land'

A beautiful fall day in the middle of summer at Maudslay State Park, making this August, however splendid, seem a bit sad, perhaps cruel. Not April cruel, with its false hope, coaxed from the dead land, from the forgetful snow, but cruel nonetheless. We’re walking along a damp, fragrant path to the performance site – on time for once, early, in fact, without a care, so it becomes a lovely, leisurely stroll, a point unto itself. We come across a small crowd where the path veers away, lazily, towards the river. Which is strange. Usually you walk right to the “stage” and pull up a bit of lawn. Something else is going on. Obviously. So we wait with the others. As the minutes pass, we debate whether this is part of the production, our wait a metaphor for the uneasy, potent concept of not knowing, about uncertainty, about the future, about life, about death, which lies at the heart of “The Waste Land,” the T.S. Elliott poem, perhaps the most celebrated poem in Western literature, one that has been re-imagined for the stage by Theater in the Open and directed by Stephen Haley, probably best known for his productions of all things Beckett, but whose edgy, vivid, stripped-down production of Sartre's “The Flies” last year set an impossible standard for the future. And this production, an adaptation of a dense, modern poem that is about everything, including nothingness, that, in itself, does not cry out for the stage, that is all wrong for the stage, would certainly pose the same sorts of challenges. Perhaps more, seeing how it's just 400-plus lines, including the Latin opening and the Sanskrit ending, one that takes maybe 20 minutes to read and a lifetime to understand, with no immediately obvious narrative.

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Fan-tastic: Bruisers back together ... for one night

Face it, it’s a fact of life. Sooner or later, you’ll have to drive too far and pay far too much money to see a band — you know, someone from back in the day, one of those bands that struck a nerve, that makes your heart go thumpa-thumpa still, that makes you grit your teeth and  feel those feelings again, the ones that made you feel alive, lighting you up in a way you barely remember now, with the mortgage and health insurance to deal with, right? Even if you weren’t really there, like Dropkick Murphys frontman Al Barr intimated in an interview about, among other things, the Bruisers, the Portsmouth/Newburyport punk band he founded back in 1988, a band that bashed its way out of regional obscurity with a brutal, punishing, as-hard-as-you-can-get street punk sound, a band that built a name for itself here and a virtual cult-status in western Europe. Which is not to say they ever achieved mass popularity of any sort, because they didn't. Despite the legion of fans the Bruisers have now. Which was Barr’s point exactly when he was talking about the last Bruisers reunion. Which was seven years ago, at this point, when the band filled the Roxy, drawing close to 1,000 fans — unheard of in the day, like five times what the band would get, on a good day, back in the day. ”It's cool to like a band when they don't exist anymore, as long as they're not popular," he said earlier this year in an interview for the gimmenoise blog.

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It's in with the new at NCMF

What's new with the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival, the intimate classical music series with a rock and roll attitude, as it digs into its second decade? Plenty, says NCMF Artistic Director David Yang in an e-mail exchange from Calabria, Italy, in the Bay of Naples, where the violist chills, so to speak, every summer before the Port music series kickoff, at Festivale d’alla Musica da Camera d’Ischia, a week-long chamber music festival and intensive workshop where Yang has been a coach and performer for years — a cool retreat, he says,  but “hot as hell, actually,” he says, “but a dry heat,”  not that dry heat is much of a comfort. New? There will be new players, in the festival quartet, which will feature two new violinists, and at large, with two hired guns in the house to perform the much-loved Brahms Sextet, among other pieces. There will be new venues, as organizers reach across the river into Carriagetown for its first-ever non-Port concert, a performance benefiting the steeple restoration fund for the historic Union Congregational Church, as well as an open rehearsal at the 14 Cedar Street Artist Studios.  As in the past, there will be a world premiere, another piece highlighted by local texts, this one with Port poet Rhina Espaillat’s  “Three Tenses of Light,” inspired by the paintings of Ipswich artist Andrew Anderson-Bell, which will be lit up by Philadelphia composer Andrea Clearfield, who composed  it specifically for the Port-based  Candlelight Chorale, a 30-voice chorus. Which is certainly new for NCMF.

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The (classical) beat goes on at NCMF

You never really know what the Meehan/Perkins Duo is going to throw at you, or even what instruments they might be playing, until the program is in your hand — and even that might not help because the music tends to be, well, either a bit obscure, or so aggressively modern that it’s not even on the pop culture radar. The music could be anything from Joanna Beyer, the grand dame of American percussion music, or, for that matter, anyone from that circle of, sadly, largely unknown composers from the ‘30s, to new music guru/composers like David Lang, best known for his work with Bang on a Can All Stars, or the “superstars” of new music, people like Steve Reich or John Cage, both of whom will be represented when the duo pulls into town this weekend to kick off the second decade of the Newburyport Chamber Music Festival with a slightly stripped-down concert at St. Paul’s Church, a decision based on the size of the venue — or, more accurately, "how big of a box it is, how many of my toys I can fit on the stage," says Todd Meehan.  The instruments could be marimbas, could be gongs. Could be congas, could be flowerpots. Could be anything they can get their hands on. Could, in fact, be their hands. The duo has a “big tent” view of percussion. Anything is possible. 

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Marco Badot: Getting in touch with his inner monkey

It's important not to overthink "The Geshe Gorilla Drawings," the new and, sadly, short exhibit by Marco Badot, because you lose the whimsy, the playfulness, the nostalgia of the work, which looks and feels like comic book art, and, perhaps, could, or should, be. It's also important not to take the artist  at his word when he's explaining the genesis of the series, suggesting, essentially, the work is little more than monkeyshines, fleeting, inconsequential, that it's just what comes out these days  and, instead of relegating it to some dark corner somewhere and being somewhat embarrassed by it, he simply decided to embrace his inner monkey and show the work. While there may be some truth in that self-observation — the Belgian-born Badot trained at Ecole nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre, one of Belgium’s leading art schools, after all — there’s nothing revolutional or earth-shattering going on in the exhibit, just a gorilla trying to get by in a complicated inner and outer world, this is more than just empty calories. It's playful, it's fun, it’s nostalgic, recalling youth and comic books, but, at the same time deals with the big three: sex, death and what the artist  calls “our apeness,” our basic animal nature, which we all like to believe we have transcended, but, as we are reminded every day, have not and cannot. 

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The funny thing about signal2noise?

Doug Blair and John Anthony hope to bump up
the signal2noise profile ... well, maybe after Blair
gets back from the 30th anniversary W.A.S.P. tour.

Funny thing about this band? There’s lots, actually. Like the name, signal2noise, with its stubborn insistence on the lower case. Or, more significantly, how frontman Doug Blair who, since 2006, has been playing that mad, custom-made guitar with the buzzsaw blade and lasers that track his fretwork with W.A.S.P. — that in-your-face metal band with a perfect PMRC pedigree, a band that has been scaring the dickens out of American mommies and daddies for three decades — ever ended up leading an essentially progressive classic rock act, heavy but “Beatles-ish underneath,” in the first place. Or how s2n (hmmm, the name even looks funny when it’s abbreviated) started out as an ambitious, if ultimately, neglected side project of not one, but two bigger acts, shunted aside before getting out of the musical gate. Which, and this is kind of funny, may have been a good thing, the delays giving the band a chance “to develop, to percolate,” says Blair. Or, how it started out as a power trio, facing all the problems associated with that form, like trying to fill the space after the guitarist takes off to solo, but fixes the “problem” by morphing into a power duo. Or how s2n has put out one album, “Fight Mental Illness,” and has done most of the grunt work for a follow-up, but has no firm plans about what to do with the final product when it’s done: Maybe doing it the old-fashioned way, maybe linking directly to metal news websites, getting the music directly to the fans. 

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Straight outta NYC: A 'Screaming' fundraiser

You scribblers out there might want avert your eyes or turn the virtual page because this might be a little too much to take, this whole Jack Rushton situation. You know him. He’s an actor, among other things. He’s been in a lot of shows, but the roles that stick out are Mr. Lucky, a completely over-the-top operator, a French ladies man, Pepe LePew come to life, complete with the very European (and tres elegant) hand-lick, at the New Works Festival a couple of years ago, and Dan, the self-emasculated, late-in-life newlywed whose, um, penis gets up and walks away because he’s not getting any attention in “The Richard Cycle,” the centerpiece of Michael Kimball’s “I Fall for You,” a collection of short works the playwright staged at the Firehouse three years ago. He’s also a writer. He started scribbling seriously a couple of years ago after getting a seat with The Group, a Port writers’ group that includes Kimball as well as Joshua Faigen, whose most recent play, “A Book of Snow,” served as appetizer for this year’s Boston Theater Marathon, and Raymond Arsenault, who will be rolling out “A Secret Remedy,” his new play, at the Actors Studio in a couple of weeks. It’s a productive group that, as Faigen has said in the past, whose name is either cool or stupid, depending on your mood. And Group member Rushton is apparently hard-wired directly to the Muse, who is totally crossed off my Christmas list since she is spending way too much time with this guy. I mean, in the past two years, he’s written 50 to 65 pieces. Yeah, so many that the guy can’t even keep track of them — and they “keep coming out,” he says. And you thought you had problems, right?

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Onore: Busy guy with a new "Baby"

Jeff Onore abandons 'a profound sense urban loneliness'
for modern farce in 'Robotic Baby,' his new full-length.

Jeff Onore is a funny guy. Meaning, um, that he’s a little off his rocker.  Of course, that’s not quite the spin Bonnie Lake puts on it, is it?  No, the Port actress, who plays the Mom in “Robotic Baby,” Onore’s latest, says the guy has “a unique point of view” — and an equally singular way of getting that point of view across. Which means that he’s a little … well, it’s been said, right? Which is fine. At least he’s not still churning out work filled with a “profound sense of urban loneliness,” which is how one Canadian critic described “A Busy Guy With Lots of Problems,” his one-man show and entry to the 2009 Atlantic Fringe Festival, a play that’s about ... well, it’s difficult to nail down, but explores themes of obsession and failed relationships. “Got to admit it sounds pretty good, whatever it means,” he says, “but I think I’ve moved past that.” Which is a good thing, turning away from that profound sense of urban loneliness, that is, because, like existential dread, a little urban loneliness, profound or otherwise, goes a long way.

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Lesllie Powell: No rest for the weary

Port playwright Leslie Powell.

If you see Leslie Powell and she seems somewhat, um, unresponsive, don’t jump to the conclusion that she’s suffering from, you know, that well-known affliction of playwrights. Chances are that she’s not even lightly toasted, whatever a comfort that might be, no matter how loud a martini might be calling her name. No, she’s probably just taking a nap, whether her body agrees or not. The Port playwright hasn’t been sleeping well, hasn’t been sleeping through the night. She keeps waking up to deal with crises involving the new production of “The Way Life Should Be.” Whether they have actually happened or not. Stress. Everything that could go wrong, plus everything that has gone wrong. Like having two actors from the original production, people who know the work, pull out at the last minute. When she was 2,500 miles away, in Tucson, her winter hide-away. And the dreams — sleep-shattering nightmares about everything that could possibly go wrong. All these things banging around her brains. She’s thinking about hypnosis to help calm her down. She's not joking.  Stress: It’s a monster. You’d think the she would be used to it by now. After all, the Merrimac Street resident isn't exactly a rookie. She’s the one of the founders of North Shore Readers Theater Collaborative and Readers and Writers, INK. She’s a playwright who always seems to have something going on. Later this year, for example, she going to be attending a production of her play “Backfire,” about a young woman who seeks revenge on a man who bullied her in high school, at the Inspiration Festival in Toronto. Then she and her hubby, Ron Pullins, also a playwright — and owner of Focus Publishing in Newburyport — will be checking out “Ice Dancing” at the Last Frontier Conference’s New Play Lab in Valdez, Alaska.  But that’s different. Sitting in the audience, watching a play you wrote, the only real worry in the world is not being too deep in the wine line for intermission. That’s not exactly true, says Powell. She recalls Port playwright Gregory S. Moss fielding a question during a talkback session, someone asking what it’s like sitting in the audience watching someone do one of  your own plays. His response? “It’s like having your skin flayed off ... while you’re alive.”

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