T housands of votes later, readers have whittled the best bands in the Valley down to four groups that will battle it out for a recording session at Rotary Records in West Springfield, $500 at Falcetti Music of Springfield, and gigs at Falcetti’s new performance space in October and One Bar & Grill. And bragging rights, one of the most savory rewards of all.
A winner will be chosen via live voting by the audience at the band slam Saturday at One Bar & Grill in Northampton. Tickets are $5-$7; show starts at 8 p.m. The Advocate is also raffling off gift cards — one of which is worth $500 — to Off the Map Tattoos in Easthampton. See you there!
Truck Stop Troubadours
Brian Chicoine nods at me from a bar stool, and his worn-in cowboy hat dips to show a leather band stamped with barbed wire insignia. He’s a big, friendly guy with a salt-and-pepper goatee, eager eyes, and a small thoughtful smile. As the bandleader for the Truck Stop Troubadours, he plays guitar, sings, and writes songs.
I meet him at One Bar in Northampton, where the band has played several times, to ask him about their upcoming set here on Saturday night.
Chicoine often stares into the distance, his elbow on the bar next to a tallboy can of PBR, as he reflects on how far the band has come. The songs they will play at GBS will be originals, mostly off the full-length album they released a few months ago. But Chicoine and his three bandmates can play several hundred cover songs on top of that — an impressive result of their more than 100 combined years of practice in the art of old-school roadhouse country music. There’s Junior Cain on the electric and upright bass, Scott Tyler on the telecaster and pedal steel guitar, and Gary Tokarz on drums.
“Country music has become the new top 40,” Chicoine says, and he doesn’t sound happy about it. “There’s a reason Luke Bryan and Rascal Flatts sell millions of records, don’t get me wrong. But people forget about the roots — where this music comes from. And people forget about the legends, especially with a lot of them passing on.”
He is talking about musicians like Chet Atkins and Don Rich, Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Loretta Lynn. Classic rock never forgot its roots, he explains — “You still hear Chuck Berry, The Who, and Eric Clapton on the radio alongside Aerosmith, but how many Florida Georgia Line fans know who Buck Owens was?
“True working class folks: Whether you’re down on your luck, a prisoner in a prison cell, a farmer, a truck driver, a coal miner — those stories are the real deal,” he says.
Country music is based in simple, three-chord songwriting, he adds, but there is an art to being simple. Sometimes it’s knowing what not to play, despite an urge to impress. “What Hank Williams and Johnny Cash did, it’s almost punk rock. We have more in common with The Ramones and Social Distortion than we do with what’s mostly on the radio.” Old-school country can serve up some 4/4 foot-stompin’ and a real rockabilly beat.
As for Saturday’s show, he isn’t worried one bit. The Truck Stop Troubadours won Best Country Band in the Valley Advocate’s Best Of competition in 2010 and 2011, and Chicoine is confident that the fans will show up.
“We can hold our own,” he says, adding that he loves seeing local music of all stripes. Josh Enemy, lead of GBS rival band Pretty Penny, is a close friend. He’s watched the band videos on the GBS website. “I’m not trying to be better than anybody. I’m ready to say: wow, that metal band is really damn good.”
As for their set: “It’s some swingin’ honky tonk, some great ballads, and there you go.”
Banish Misfortune
Call it fate, call it Irish luck, but it most likely was good music that landed Banish Misfortune the gig that rocketed them into their current state of celebrity.
The band plays its own version of traditional Irish music at weddings, events, and at the Northampton Brewery every Sunday.
Band manager and guitar-player David Meuser says Banish Misfortune has a loyal following among ages under six and over 85. “Last Sunday we had five young kids dancing around the band with their beaming parents in the background,” Meuser says. “It’s kind of a thrill ride for us. It’s really become a labor of love for all of us that we look forward to every Sunday.”
Meuser says the six-member band, and the extended list of guest musicians, are comprised of people with other jobs and commitments, and so in that sense they’re “decent amateur musicians.”
Though humble in describing his music, Meuser takes no beats around the bush when it comes to the level of energy they bring at their shows.
“The thing we bring is craic — the Gaelic word for good feeling, good fun, good conversation and humor,” says Meuser. “That we deliver pretty genuinely and that’s what I think people really like the most.”
The band got together in 2007 and has played about 20 weddings. They form lasting relationships from performing at such a special event in couples’ lives, Meuser says. During one wedding at a farmhouse in Worthington, it was pouring rain. He recalls how they all made light of the miserable weather. As the bride and groom are not locals, he says the band hadn’t seen them in years until when they showed up at the Brewery one Sunday a few months back with their one-year-old in tow. “You can’t put a price tag on that.”
Meuser says that though they’re all Irish “to varying degrees,” their love for all things Irish is unwavering. Bandmates were psyched to see that their first album, which they recorded last year, was being downloaded in Ireland, he says. “If we get even the slightest offer for a gig in Ireland, we’re going,” Meuser says with unbridled excitement at the mere prospect.
“Irish literature and Irish culture are so important and I love the fact that we get to keep that alive,” says Meuser.
Fiddle-player David Brule speaks fluent Irish Gaelic. Meuser says concertina-player Tim Donoghue is a deep-souled, gleamy-eyed Irishman who’ll “really crack you up.” Fiddle-player Kira Jewett is an All-Ireland fiddle champion and a teacher at Holyoke High School.
“That’s the luckiest thing ever,” Meuser says of having an All-Ireland champ in the band.
Meuser says each band member has their own personal spin on the Irish airs. He loves that he has such a long list of fill-ins to sit in for a gig and stir things up. Everyone in the group, he says, are class acts.
“If you’re a jerk, you’re not going to make it as an Irish musician,” Meuser says, laughing.
“Back to the craic thing — the people behind the instruments really matter.”
Pretty Penny
For founding band member and composer Josh Enemy, Pretty Penny is more than just the Springfield-based rock and roll band — she’s a character in their songs.
It all started with a vision in Enemy’s mind. With a series of albums, he wanted to tell the story of two troubled, romantically intertwined souls, and Pretty Penny is the female lead in that twisted rom-com. Enemy says in all things Pretty Penny – where the view is dark, and grungy – his name is Josh Enemy. In lighter arenas, he says, he goes by Josh Friend.
“Josh is who I would call the brain child,” says guitar player Kevin Prefontaine, known as Catfish (don’t ask).
Before he’d found anyone to play with, multi-instrumentalist Enemy wrote and recorded Pretty Penny’s music by himself, playing all the parts separately and blending them together. Over the past two to three years he’s devoted a lot of time to finding the right people to make up the band. He says it took many of auditions to find not just the skills, but the artists with “the right feel.”
“I didn’t want to go out hackin’ it, you know,” Enemy says. “So that was important.”
Finding the right drummer, he says, took the longest. He landed Chris Fila just a few months ago. And now it feels complete. There’s Enemy on lead vocals, Catfish on guitar, Dan “Danimal” Long on bass, and just Chris Fila on drums. “We don’t have a nickname for him yet because he’s too new,” Enemy says. “Saying them outloud, I just realized they all sound like cartoon names.”
The guys try to get together every Thursday night for a rehearsal. These self-professed laid-back dudes are all about breaking the macho rock and roll stereotype.
There’s no room for drama in their diva-free space, they say.
“It’s a low-drama band. That’s one of the coolest things about it. It can go a lot of different ways, but we’re never angry at each other,” says Catfish. “We just like to drink and play rock ’n’ roll,” says Enemy.
Enemy may be the man with the plan, but he looks to Catfish to keep him in check. Catfish says he’s upfront if he thinks an idea is too ambitious or otherwise in need of tweaking.
“There’s not a lot of taking things personally,” says Catfish. “We’re seasoned enough to know that those kinds of behaviors end badly.”
Catfish says Pretty Penny thrives in the live environment. Moments before their first big show, he says, Enemy broke the most important string on his guitar. He found “a flimsy little thing” on the floor, plugged it into his guitar, and went with it.
“That seat-of-your-pants feeling comes across with us,” says Catfish.
Problem with Dragons
Robert Ives has three tattoos on his arms: the iconic skull from the ’70s punk band Misfits, the heads of the four members of KISS laid out in a shamrock pattern, and a jumble of connected blocks that Ives explains is an 8-bit dragon from an old Atari game.
“I wanted a dragon tattoo, but everyone has one, and they look stupid,” he tells me over drinks at the Platinum Pony in Easthampton. “So I got the Atari one. It looks like a duck, so it’s actually way stupider. But nobody else has this tattoo.”
That’s Problem With Dragons in a nutshell: a creative trio of slightly hyperactive nerds who riff on a blend of musical genres. The results veer between the cerebral and the imbecilic. It’s nearly impossible to describe them better than they do, which is — according to their Bandcamp page — a combination of “punky, fuzz-laden stoner-rock riffs, sludge-filled bass, droning doom-metal vocals, and science fiction based lyrics.”
On Saturday night, onstage at Grand Band Slam, they plan to play songs off their newest album Starquake, which they released this spring.
Ives plays guitar and sings. Sitting next to him at the bar are bassist Joe Magrone and drummer Eric Cunha. They tend to play a couple of shows a month — “any more than that, and your friends stop coming to see you,” Ives says — and they will head over to the Ohm rehearsal space here in town after this round of drinks.
Ives describes his Grand Band Slam strategy as “a bold push for second place.” Before Saturday night they will brush up on their set list for a few hours, but they’re not going to sweat it until they’re onstage.
And sweat they will. Problem With Dragons plays high-octane metal — you can burn calories just by watching them. “I get excited, and it’s a lot of fun, but it’s usually over so quick that I don’t have time to think about it.”
Cunha explains that his inclination is always to attack the drum set. “I want people to feel the beat in their chests. Then afterwards, I usually want to throw up.”
Magrone deadpans: “You’re just trying to keep up with how badass I am,” then takes a sip of his cocktail.
This is their rapport, founded in soft-lobbed insults and brotherly teasing. Problem With Dragons formed locally in 2007. They have recorded several albums and they are currently working on demos for another, which they say will build on their grunge and stoner rock roots while expanding a bit, perhaps, into prog rock.
Ives describes the rehearsal process as “mostly me showing them riffs and then yelling at them for the shitty parts they come up with.”
Magrone strokes his beard. “Yeah, pretty much.”
Later, Ives says that Cunha “completely slays” on drums, and that Magrone on bass is “devastating.”
As for their rival GBS bands, Ives says he’s a fan. “I think there will be a lot of mutual respect that night.” The event will likely create an eclectic group of music fans, which, for Problem With Dragons, is promising.
“I want the death metal fans to like our music, and I want the rockabilly fans to like it,” Ives says. “Our music’s not too heavy. It’s got pretty parts. It’s heavy and beefy, but we’ve got some grooves and hooks.”
