Weekly Dig Previews Saturday's Tom Waits Show

Last week I sat down with Ryan Bray from the Weekly Dig to talk more about our 2012 kick off show and tribute to Tom Waits. Check it out below and remember advance tickets are still available so pick 'em up HERE.

FEEDBACK: PATRICK COMAN

Posted on February 10, 2012 by RYAN BRAY Email

Cover bands? Naw, son. That shit’s for the burbs! And if you don’t believe me you’ve never been to Players in Rockland.

Any group of uninspired wannabe Springsteens can walk up on stage, beer guts and AC/DC t-shirts in tow, and slop their way through a painful rendition of “Livin’ On A Prayer.” Patrick Coman recognizes this, but that hasn’t kept him from trying to free the cover song from the dreaded shackles of cheap sentiment and lazy barroom balladry. As the founder and chief organizer of Boston’s ongoing live music series For The Sake Of The Song, Coman has done the seemingly unthinkable by reinventing cover songs into something fresh and novel. By dedicating each show to a specific artist or album and allowing a slate of bands to take their best shot at reinterpreting the music,

FTSOTS manages to celebrate its music of choice with the kind of honesty and introspection you won’t find from your neighborhood rock stars playing at Chotchkies.

Coman blew up our (read: my) phone last week to talk shop in the midst of preparing maybe the most ambitious FTSOTS installment yet: a Tom Waits themed show at The Armory in Somerville on Feb. 18 alongside Ryan Fitzsimmons, Brendan Hogan and Chris Hutchison-Jones.

For The Sake Of The Song is very collaborative. Did you spend a lot of time immersing yourself in the local music community prior to launching the series?
Patrick: I moved to Boston … I guess two years ago now? I was living in Germany for a couple of years with my girlfriend, and when I came to town I was looking for ways to meet more people and more musicians. We had a house in Allston, so I started hosting house parties. It was a great way to not just hear great music, but to also become part of the scene and to get to know people around town. We did about a year of house concerts, but then it got too big for the living room, so we moved it over to the Armory. It took on more of a church format that you see now, and we’ve just been going from there.

Where did the idea of refocusing the shows around specific artists and albums come from?
Patrick: Well when we got to the Armory, we started thinking ‘Well, what else can we do?’

We sort of felt we had to kind of up the ante,

but also give people a chance to experience original local music. I think it was around Christmas 2010, we got a crazy idea to get a bunch of musicians together to play music fromBob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks with the idea of playing all the songs in the same key. It ended up working really well. There were a lot of fans of the album, fans of Bob Dylan but also fans of the different artists we got to play.

Does it surprise you looking back that the series has had the staying power that it has thus far?
Patrick: Yeah. It started as a way of ending the year on a high note and just doing something crazy.

But people were like yeah, I want more of that.

So at that point we thought hey, let’s just make this a regular thing. We didn’t want to run around and find 10 people to play a different album every month. It just wouldn’t work. So we focused more on monthly shows built around specific artists, where there’d be covers from that artist as well as original songs by the bands and artists playing them. Then we typically do an album-specific show once every six months.

 The process of pulling these shows together must be crazy. How do you decide which albums/artists to cover? Is it tough paring everything down?
Patrick: I try to keep the suggestion format as open as possible. Some of the shows I knew I wanted to do from the very start. Bob Dylan was one, then we did a Neil Young show last March because he’s one of my all time favorites. But then there are other artists I would have never even thought of if someone hadn’t been like ‘Hey, this would be great for the series.’ The Willie Nelson show we did in November worked out that way. Someone suggested it and said he knew a few bands, and I knew him and trusted him and just kind of went with it.

It’s like they almost develop themselves.
Patrick: Yeah, sometimes they develop themselves, but other times you have to plug them in. Right now we’re finishing up our 2012 schedule, and there’s a couple of months where I’m gonna have to pick the artist first and then find people who are a good fit.

Either way it’s kind of an adventure.

There’s so much room for taking the music in different directions, do you ever find yourself reevaluating the music or seeing it in a different light when a show ends?
Patrick: Definitely. I think that’s the greatest thing about it. There’s obviously a familiar starting point for everyone, but people take the songs in so many different directions. We’ve had instrumental Neil Young songs. We had one group do a minor key version of “Shelter From The Storm.” It’s really fun to go back to an album after we’ve just done a show.

So now you’re doing a Tom Waits show….
Patrick: Yeah. Hopefully we’ll get songs from all over the Tom Waits catalogue. There’s just such a diverse number of songs he’s written over the years, it’s going to be fun to see what people pick.

His music seems almost tailor made for what you guys do. It’s so avant and off the wall that it begs for that kind of open interpretation.
Patrick: Exactly. You have to, right? Nobody can do it like Tom Waits did it, so you have to find your own path to make the song your own. I think it’ll be a good challenge, but musicians, I think they like that challenge. There’s some pressure there, like ‘I really wanna try and learn some Tom Waits tunes.’

There’s really no way to learn his songs unless you have, like,  an old oil drum lying around.
Patrick: (Laughs) Right.

Or if you have a rooster in your front yard or something.

Are there any songs in particular you’re looking forward to hearing?
Patrick: I would love to hear someone do “Come On Up To The House,” that would be cool. I think anything from Rain Dogs would be great, which is my favorite Tom Waits album. I’ll probably do something from Rain Dogs, but i haven’t decided which one yet.

What’s your personal process for preparing to perform for these types of shows?
Patrick: It’s tough. Often times I’ll let our other artists pick their songs first, so I try not to get attached to anything just in case someone else slips it in. But I’ll zero in on a specific album and find a song that I can relate to personally so I can interpret it in a way that’s true to the song but also unique to me.

It also helps if I can figure out how to play the tune and sing it.

Sounds good. Anything else coming up?
Patrick: In March we’re doing a St. Patrick’s Day show, so we’re gonna do something a little different. We’re gonna do like a sessions night and have people come in and do a roundtable, which should be fun. In April we’re doing Ryan Adams. He’s kind of a newer guy but I feel like he’s definitely influenced a lot of people my age who are songwriters. I guess people have pretty strong opinions about him, but there’s certainly not a lack of songs there to pick from. We’re going to do a Van Morrison show, we’re gonna do Johnny Cash and we’ll probably do aTownes Van Zandt again in October, because For The Sake Of The Song is named for aTownes Van Zandt song.

And we don’t have a date yet, but our next full album show I think will be Exile On Main Street, which I’m pretty excited about.

It’ll be pretty epic.

FOR THE SAKE OF THE SONG PRESENTS A TRIBUTE TO TOM WAITS
WITH PATRICK COMAN AND THE LO-FI ANGELS, RYAN FITZSIMMONS, BRENDAN HOGAN AND CHRIS HUTCHISON-JONES
SAT 2.18.12
THE ARMORY
191 HIGHLAND AVE SUITE 1A
617.718.2191

ARTSATTHEARMORY.ORG

2012 Winter/Spring Schedule Announced!

Gather round boys and girls, we are very excited to announce the dates and artists to kick off our 2012 season of For the Sake of the Song! We've got some good ones for you, such as ....

Feb. 18th - Tribute to Tom Waits (Buy Tickets HERE)
2012 Kick Off Show! w/Brendan Hogan, Ryan Fitzsimmons, and Dressing the Debutantes!

Mar. 17th - Special St. Patrick's Day Show
w/special guests tba, acoustic jam, and more!

Apr. 14th - A Tribute to Ryan Adams
w/Brian Carroll, Dan Zinder, and Patrick Coman

May 19th - A Tribute to Woody Guthrie

Jun. 16th - A Tribute to Johnny Cash

Hope to see you there and stay tuned for summer and fall show listings!

Weekly Dig Review of Music From Big Pink!

In case you missed our excellent end-of-year event; here is a great recap from the Weekly Dig. Thanks to Ryan Bray for checking us out!

Some time back I wrote my inaugural Feedback entry, where I spieled on about the importance community plays in Boston’s local music culture. Remember? It got I think three “likes” or something on Facebook.

I could probably rewrite that whole column again when talking about For The Sake Of Song, the ongoing local live music series that brings a host of Boston musicians together to pay homage to various artists and their recorded work. The event is the embodiment of the word “communal.” From start to finish, bands jump in and out of each other’s songs, the grand finale being a big ass singalong where each of the performers take turns in front of the mic.

But it takes a special kind of record to really rally a whole host of bands and musicians to come out in service of it. I don’t care what you say, nobody’s coming out in droves to play their respects to God Shuffled His Feet by the Crash Test Dummies. But there is another Canadian band more than worthy of the reverence. When The Band recorded their 1968 debut Music From Big Pink, they didn’t make a record.

They made an album that froze itself in time, a stone cold fucking classic boasting some of the most powerful and intricate Americana, soul, folk and roots rock songs ever written.

Forty three years after its initial release, the songs still ring as true now as they did then. Evidence of such was plentiful at Great Scott, where a host of bands including Greg Klyma, Dressing The Debutantes, Autumn Hollow, John Colvert and the Great Brighton Fire, Patrick Coman and the Lo Fi Angels and Sam Otis Hill and Co. pulled together to get their Levon Helmand Rick Danko on.

Full disclosure, I’d never heard anything from any of these bands before heading over to the venue. And yet I still got the feeling I had them all pegged. When you’re part of a show playing tribute to the Band, it kind of narrows down your expectations.

I’m just saying there was no way Autumn Hollow was going to be a Scandanavian thrash metal band, ya feel me?

Part of me worried that such predictability would sour the experience, but the bands threw just enough of a monkey wrench into Big Pink’s cozy, folksy rock and roll to keep my attention from drifting. Let’s break it down song by song, shall we?

1. Tears of Rage as performed by Greg Klyma

Taking the stage with an acoustic guitar and what was presumably his finest fedora, Greg Klyma clearly didn’t spend a great deal of time orchestrating a grand production, preferring to just let the music carry itself. And because we’re dealing with some of rock music’s greatest songwriters and musicians in The Band, Klyma’s stripped down approach not only worked, but served as an appropriately warm introduction to the show and the album.

2. To Kingdom Come as performed by Chris Hutchison Jones

After explaining how a google search can prove how Robbie Robertson is an asshole andLevon Helm isn’t (personally I think you could figure that out by watching The Last Waltz), Chris Hutchison Jones of Dressing The Debutantes also went the solo acoustic route, but with a rasp-voiced punch to it. His acoustic breakdown during the chorus kind of reminded me of G Love. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or not.

3. In A Station as performed by Autumn Hollow

Finally, a full band steps up to take a crack at shit. Equipped with an upright bass, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, drums and vocals, Autumn Hollow’s take on In a Station was by and large pretty faithful to the original. But considering that the original is pretty tight, there’s no use trying to find any fault in playing it straight.

4. Caladonia Mission as performed by John Colvert and the Great Brighton Fire

Not a lot to say here about the song/performance itself, but I have to address the elephant in the room and say I don’t remember anything about some great fire that may or may not have happened in Brighton. Or am I crazy? This one looks like it did some damage, but I doubt it’s the same fire they’re talking about.

5. The Weight as performed by John Colvert and the Great Brighton Fire

Ok, now we’re talking. There had to be one band on the bill ready to shoulder the burden of carrying not only the best song on the album, but arguably the best song in The Band’s epic catalogue, and Colvert and co. stepped up to carry the weight (wordplay!). Colvert’s country rock sound carries the album’s most timeless and resonant track, and at points they almost made it look easy. They also weren’t shy about deviating from the scirpt, drawing out the song by filling in the middle parts with ample fiddle, guitar and even organ solos. Take that Garth Hudson.

6. We Can Talk as performed by Greg Klyma

On to side two, and back to Greg Klyma, who once again took to the stage with little more than an acoustic guitar and the vocal backing of Amy Kucharik (who also did a kick ass job designing the event’s Big Pink-themed program). As one of my favorite tunes from the disc, I would have probably preferred to see We Can Talk get the full band treatment, but oh well. Klyma also dished out a sweet story about trying to call Levon Helm and accidentally phoning Rick Danko.

7. Long Black Veil as performed by Patrick Coman and Autumn Hollow

For The Sake Of Song founder Patrick Coman, not content with simply emceeing the festivities, took the stage to pay his musical respects himself. Backed by the fine fellows in Autumn Hollow, Coman helped deliver one of the more amped up performances of the night, giving the easy going sounds of Long Black Veil a healthy dose of shitkicking alt-country. Probably the best performance of the night thus far….

8. Chest Fever as performed by Patrick Coman and the Lo-Fi Angels

…that is until Coman tooled on Chest Fever. Admitting the song to be his favorite from the album, Coman, now backed by his own band mates in the Lo-Fi Angels, did the song justice by rubbing its nose in some angsty roots rock. It might have just become one of my favorites too.

9. Lonesome Suzie as performed by Sam Otis Hill & Co.

Sam Otis Hill made his turn at the mic count, leading things off with a suitably rootsy cover ofLonesome Suzie. Admittedly it’s not one of my favorite tracks on the record, so it didn’t quite do it for me the way some other songs did. But that’s hardly Hill & Co.’s fault. Dude’s voice slips into a pretty sweet Rick Danko impression at times.

10. This Wheel’s On Fire as performed by Sam Otis Hill & Co.

Hill makes a bold move and decides to play the song in a lower key than the original. Hey man, whatever you want. It’s your world I just live in it. Backed by Coman and Jones on vocals, Hill & Co. stretched the tune out some, leaving plenty of room for solos and improvisation in the middle.

11. I Shall Be Released as performed by , uh, well, everybody.

I realize they’re playing the album in sequence, so of course I Shall Be Released will cap everything off. Even still, it really is the perfect song to stand as a finale. Everything from the song’s tempo to the dynamics work, and it fits the mood for a farewell song perfectly. With everyone jumping up onstage and belting out the lyrics, it was a fitting way to wrap up the night.