For this week’s feature “A Charles River Boy,” I spoke to Cow Island Records founder Bill Hunt, who recently moved to the Valley. Many of the bands his label produces make music that’s undeniably country, but also undeniably unlike the meager, half-rock shlock that somehow manages to get dubbed “country” now. Cow Island’s music has a hard-to-express quality, an immediacy and warmth that easily gets buried in over-production.
Checking out Cow Island’s catalogue was a pleasure, one best exemplified in the recent Starline Rhythm Boys release Green Mountain Style. It seems to have been designed as an aesthetic experience as much as a viable record. For starters, it’s a record, as in a big slab of vinyl. The Boys grace the cover with their instruments, and everything is made to look like a vintage LP (thanks in part to the efforts of Valley graphic designer Tom Pappalardo). The record was produced by Sean Mencher, the Maine-based wizard of retro twang, and was mostly recorded straight to tape, just like bands did decades ago. Putting the needle down and hearing the pristine honky tonk sounds rumble out of the speakers feels oddly like a moment out of time.
That’s a goal that’s far from the innovation and originality that most reviewers, this one included, prize. But it’s nonetheless a laudable thing; if a past you never saw tickles your fancy, well, why not try to drag it into the present?
There’s also something more happening on such records. They’re retro, but they’re retro for a reason. Before country (and most every other genre) went upscale with horns, backing vocals, and Top Gun guitar solos, it possessed a grittiness, a roughness that spoke to listeners, whether they could put a finger on it or not. That something, I’ve come to believe, is completely portable across genres. Rock and roll without a bevy of backup singers and a near-orchestra onstage is a channeling of ear-splitting energy that you can feel, viscerally and emotionally. The same holds true for blues—a sloppy, out-of-tune solo can become a work of genius inside the right 12 bars.
All of those elements come from the same source: live music in its simplest incarnations. Recordings like Green Mountain Style try to replicate the happy accidents of performance, even if they do so in a dry studio setting. The horror of modern pop is its perfection: autotuned vocals, choreographed performances and heavily processed sounds are commonplace in concerts now. The metaphorical distance between performers and audiences just keeps growing.
That’s why checking out local musicians is such a fine thing. Rusty Belle doesn’t employ autotuning, and Ed Vadas is guaranteed to follow his nose to an intuitive guitar solo that may well ignore all sorts of conventions. Music seems like a vital force when it’s up close and personal that way, and like a distant soundtrack when it’s all dressed up.
Every year, the Grand Band Slam process unfolds with certain similarities. The nominations arrive, then the votes get tallied. All of it culminates in a big spread in these pages, a spread that brings together in one place a cross-section of Valley bands who play wildly different styles. Perusing those pages is a fun thing to do—a lot of Valley musicians are witty and surprising in interviews. But after the in-print splash, the real reason to love Grand Band Slam arrives: the day of live sets by winners and our editors’ picks.
That day (Saturday, Oct. 9 this year) is never a predictable one, but it always produces moments worth remembering. In recent years, listeners have been able to hear all sorts of sounds within a couple of hours and within a few yards of each other. Wander downstairs at Maximum Capacity, and there might be a carefully played and beautifully structured clarinet solo. Hoof it upstairs a little while later, and there might be a raucous hip-hop band laying down great rhymes over infectious rhythms.
The genre-hopping doesn’t stop, and the setting means you get to see that vital musical energy welling up in all kinds of ways. It’s not necessarily a day for listeners with limited palates, but if you want to get a real sense of the scope and quality of Valley music, it’s a great place to start. That ineffable thing, that rough edge that makes live music so desirable, gets a workout from bands who thrive in the direct kind of experience you can only get up close. That’s powerful stuff.
