Day 1: “Manchester Punk and the Irish Douche”
Last week, I wrote a piece about the Manchester-based pop-punk band Donaher and interviewed their frontman Nick Lavallee, and they kindly placed my wife Liz and me on the guestlist for their show Friday night at The Shaskeen.
Against my better judgement, I agreed to meet Liz for cocktails at Chelby’s Pizza[1] in the afternoon, and we then took an Uber downtown[2] for the Donaher show at 9 p.m. Unlike me, Liz is not as seasoned at holding her alcohol and cracks were already showing in the vase.
We arrived at The Shaskeen around 8:30 p.m., and while Donaher was doing their sound-check, a young Irish dude with the obligatory Millennial beard—who also claimed citizenship in England, Canada and Australia[3]—began talking to us at the bar, explaining—for reasons I still don’t understand—why Cork was Ireland’s equivalent to Texas.
Buzzed, my wife took offense to this statement for some reason as the beer worked its magic on her inhibitions.
Meanwhile, I zoned out, sipping a Guinness[4] as they argued.
Conflict averted, Liz and I then moved into the backroom of The Shaskeen[5] and ordered more drinks as The Graniteers’ bassist Monica Grasso played a soulful acoustic guitar set. Maybe it was the drinks making me nostalgic, but she touched a Gen-X grunge-nerve in me—think Kim Deal or PJ Harvey.
And when she serenaded her boyfriend and The Graniteers guitarist Nick Ferrero, I made a mental note to profile their band in the near-future.
Next Lowell’s Colleen Green—a national rock star in her own right—took the stage and flat-out rocked out with all the bad-ass bravado of Joan Jett as the audience watched in awe.
Donaher then tore through tunes from their recent album “Gravity and the Stars Above” as well as cuts off their first record. They were exactly as I expected after my interview with Lavallee—playing with energy and verve and the passion of a teenage boy belting out the songs he wrote for his first real-love.
Meanwhile, another young bearded guy in the crowd tried to live out his MILF fantasy with my now-glowing wife on the dance floor, and I had to kindly ask him to temper his exuberance.
At the end of the night, my boozy bride and I settled our tab and took an Uber home where she enjoyed her beauty sleep, and I prepared for the next day where I would be attending a Tom Waits Tribute that my good friend Rob Azevedo had organized at the same venue—a day that my wife greeted with humor and resignation and a simple phrase: “You’re going to hang out with Rob,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Oh brother.”
Day 2: “Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night”
Nothing prepares a person for a day celebrating the troubadour Tom Waits, the poet-laureate of the dive bar, quite like breakfast at The Red Barn[6] on Elm Street.
For the uninitiated, the Red Barn is one of the last veritable working-class diners. The food is cheap and fast and delicious, and the waitresses call you “honey.”
And after our bibulous night—which I’ve been explicitly told to not write about,[7] under any circumstances—my wife welcomed the greasy spoon.
When we got home[8], I did what I deemed appropriate in the spirit of the day: I poured a Guinness and put on “Small Change” as a primer.
I next met Rob at Chelby’s Pizza[9] again for a few beers before boogying downtown to The Shaskeen for the 4 p.m. show.
Many of the musicians had already arrived and were crowded around the bar in the back room. The one thing I can say about Rob’s tribute shows—and I’ve covered a good number of them over the years[10]—is that Rob has a way of corralling immensely talented performers.
And Saturday afternoon was no different.
With Rob playing the role of gregarious host, he introduced Joel Clark Beaupre and his back-up band, who kicked off the show with a bluesy cover of “Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night.”[11]
Then Rockwood Taylor, who came up for Newburyport, Mass. for the gig, grooved through a couple of deeper cuts from Waits 1999 album “Mule Variations,” including a funky rendition of “Chocolate Jesus” that included a kazoo.
Manchester’s Alfredo Benavides followed a soulful acoustic cover of “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis.
The crowd continued to file in as the tunes kept on, mixing up electric and acoustic versions of Tom Waits’ classics, including noteworthy performances by Mike Gallant and Eric Seldon Ober and their respective bands.
But what stood out to me—as much as the magnificent music—was the fact that unlike many writers I know the musicians were extremely supportive, non-competitive and friendly with one another, which added to an air of conviviality to the event.
Meanwhile, I was able to catch up with some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while and had a nice chat with Rob’s lovely wife Julie.
In a moment of strange serendipity, Exeter’s Todd Hearon also performed two of my personal favorite Waits’ tunes: “Martha[12]” and “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You.”
Above: Paul Driscoll performs at The Shaskeen.
The evening began to draw to a close with Sgt. Kurt killing their version of “Hang Down Your Head” from “Rain Dogs[13]” before giving the stage over to Paul Driscoll who closed the night with a tear-jerking cover of “Hold On.”
I wasn’t crying. You were crying.
After the show, came the part that makes my wife roll her eyes: I went out on the town with Rob, as well as some new and old friends. I could go to explain what we did, but I would likely lose all aforementioned friends for writing about it in a public forum.
I believe the Irish poet[14] WB Yeats captured our escapades perfectly in his poem “The Second Coming.”
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
In short, my wife was right to roll her eyes.
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[1] If you’ve never read one of my columns, my mail is delivered there.
[2] It takes a certain amount of foolishness to not realize that $30 in Uber fees are economically—as well as legally and mentally—preferable to a DWI.
[3] None of which can be confirmed, nor denied.
[4] Somehow this bloke landed a free Guinness, which he gladly consumed. When asked about Dublin, he described as “a shit-hole.” When asked if he were from Northern Ireland, he said that he was born in England. I stopped there.
[5] Note, dear reader, I will return again the next day.
[6] On the cover of their menus, it reads: “Open every day (closed on Christmas).” Need I say more?
[7] Let me be clear here, my wife most certainly didn’t imbibe far too much, fall down then have a mini-meltdown at the bar. Please hear me out: That absolutely did not happen.
[8] My wife insisted we stop at Trader Joe’s for “a few things,” which amounted to an hour of me pacing the aisles in that hipster Hell.
[9] They’re not closed, or closing.
[10] At a Bruce Springsteen Tribute show last June, I had a small issue when I spilled a beer on my notes and tried to dry them with the hand-dryer in The Shaskeen’s men’s room, which has roughly the same amount of power as the engine in 747 jet, thus shredding some of them.
[11] Which we were all doing in our own ways. I could imagine my wife rolling her eyes.
[12] Before the show, Todd and I exchanged maudlin stories about “Martha” and old relationships.
[13] I have spent many dejected, drunken nights playing this album and calling exes while crying.
[14] You see what I did there?
