Month: September 2015

One More Stop On The Road For Donna The Buffalo

Yeah, Another Blogger12 Comments

My wife Sandy and I recently saw in concert an electric and eclectic band from upstate New York amusingly named Donna The Buffalo, and afterward I wanted to write about the show. Before sitting down to compose my magnum opus though, I mulled over my approach to the subject matter. The main question I posed to yours truly was: What should the subject matter comprise? Naturally, Donna The Buffalo needed to be a big part of the focus. But you know what? I knew little about DTB pre-gig, and possess only a cursory knowledge about the band now. We went to see them on little more than a whim. I’d heard of them, knew that their history was lengthy, and decided that taking a chance on them would be fun. When my mulling concluded, I was of the opinion that the path that brought me to this show also should be part of the story.

I think of myself as a music lover. I listen to a wide variety of genres and have been to well over 1,000 concerts during my earthly tenure. Yet, these days I feel like a tyro when I listen to radio stations or read music-related websites, magazines and newspapers. I mean, more often than not, I am unfamiliar with the musicians. To me, it is just incredible how many solo performers and bands are out there playing the game. In the USA alone, there must be 50,000 professional musical acts, maybe more. In my younger days I thought that I had a handle on a fair percentage of music makers. No longer, not now in the Internet Age when anybody and everybody can make his or her presence felt.

And so, ten or more years ago I largely gave up on trying to keep up with the avalanches of musicians plying their trade. It was just too much work, too exhausting. Better, I think, to stay in tune to a lesser extent, and also to take gambles and hope for the best. As with Donna The Buffalo.

New Hope Winery, one half hour before showtime.
New Hope Winery, one half hour before showtime.

Donna The Buffalo appeared at New Hope Winery, a venue in the Philadelphia suburbs that Sandy and I discovered last year and have become very fond of. The joint was packed with 200 or more souls when DTB took the stage. A front-and-center area, where tables normally would be placed, had been cleared to create space for dancers. I looked over the crowd. At some previous visits to the Winery I’d seen demographics heavily tilted to the 50 and above bracket. Not this night. DTB had tipped the age scales downward substantially. Twentysomethings and thirtysomethings abounded. There even were a few very young children in the room.

Donna The Buffalo in action at New Hope Winery.
Donna The Buffalo in action at New Hope Winery.

What a band. Not having known what to expect, song number one told me that I had chosen wisely by attending this concert. A quintet, DTB was tremendously tight and intuitive all night long, and possessed a large catalog of songs to choose from. They held the stage for two hours and 10 minutes, filling their long set with 22 songs and little between-tune chatter. I was standing just behind the dance section, which was crowded with bobbers and weavers. After two or three songs, I too began to go with the flow. And kept going. But I was bouncing alone — Sandy stayed at the extremely stage right table to which we had been assigned. Her view of the musicians from there was lousy, but in the dance area she wouldn’t have had a chance seeing over anyone’s head. Mea culpa.

DTB has blended a bunch of musical styles into their sound: rock, country, zydeco, reggae. Rock being the dominant force. On some songs (What Money Cannot Buy; Love and Gasoline) the power was relentless, Stonesy, irresistible. On others (The Ones You Love; Conscious Evolution) the groove expanded, contracted, widened once again, giving no mercy to the audience. All you had to do on those expansive numbers, Grateful Dead-ish and Allmans-ish as they were, was close your eyes to be transported to a higher and mind-opening plane. Yes, Donna The Buffalo was that good.

DTB began its journey in the late 1980s, picking up steam in the mid 90s, and in the current century has become a decently successful and popular unit. They tour like crazy and have amassed a loyal national fan base known as The Herd, a mini version of the Deadheads. Two original band members (Tara Nevins and Jeb Puryear) remain. Tara and Jeb compose most of the group’s songs, usually individually. At the Winery, each took the lead vocal spotlight on his or her compositions. Jeb opted for the laidback Jerry Garcia approach to singing and handled electric guitar sizzlingly. He’s a guitar hero unknown to 99% of Americans. Tara’s sweet and gentle mountain drawl pleased me much. And she was the band’s multi-instrumentalist. Fiddle, acoustic guitar, accordion, tambourine and scrubboard (for the zydeco numbers) were her arsenal.

A bunch of musicians have played alongside Tara and Jeb since DTB’s inception. The three current guys have been around for several years. Mark Raudabaugh killed on the drums. Kyle Sparks was all over his electric bass’ strings, drawing out lines that percolated and sang. And organist David McCracken was immense. So many times in so many bands, especially the poppier or atmospheric ones, the keyboard player is on the lame side, somehow fooling the audience with pretty chords and simplistic runs. Not McCracken. He can play. He jabbed, moved fast, reached for the skies, whatever it took.

So, how many acts that I’ve never heard of or barely heard of, and that I’d find to be great, are on the circuit? The question is a puzzle, the answer unknowable. Which makes music and, similarly, much else of life, delightful.

(Photos by Sandra Cherrey Scheinin. If you click on a photo, a larger image will open)

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Screwball Begone! (A Review Of Mistress America)

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I wasn’t as fond as I thought I would be of the movie that my wife Sandy and I went to see recently. Sandy told me that various critics have heaped praises upon said flick, Mistress America, some calling it a screwball comedy in the grand old Hollywood tradition of Howard Hawkes and Preston Sturges. I saw the movie differently. I found it to be as much a drama as a comedy, as bittersweet as it is funny. And as for screwball, which can be great . . . well, Mistress America’s try at the madcap art form encompasses not the entire movie at all, settling instead for one long and uncomfortable segment in the second half. I didn’t have much fun with that interlude. A collection of intersections involving most of the movie’s cast, it felt flat and strained to me, out of place with the decidedly tilted but more realistic antics and people-play that populated the rest of the film. In other words, Mistress America overextended its ambitions. It would have been a better movie if its creators, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, had kept their eyes on the  wry and poignant, and left the supposedly wild and crazy alone. My rating? Two, maybe two and a half out of four stars.

We saw Mistress America at the Regal multiplex in Warrington, PA.
We saw Mistress America at the Regal multiplex in Warrington, PA.

Mistress America revolves around a small parade of characters led by Brooke Cardinas (Gerwig) and Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke). Brooke is a 30ish lady on the go, an at-times free spirit who cobbles together a living in New York City by leading exercise classes, doing interior decorating, whatever it takes. Her dream is to open a restaurant slash hair salon slash hangout in Lower Manhattan called Mom’s, a place where customers will settle in and feel really comfortable. A wifty notion possibly, but who knows? Brooke already has signed a lease for the empty space she plans to transform, and is in the process of assembling financial backing. She’s committed, and several steps ahead of herself.

Into Brooke’s life enters Tracy, a Barnard College freshman not connecting very well to the college scene in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. At Mistress America’s outset, Tracy and Brooke have never met. Tracy learns of Brooke’s existence from her mother, who has plans to tie the knot with Brooke’s father. Following her mom’s suggestion, Tracy gives her stepsister-to-be a call. They meet, they bond, and the slings and arrows and goofy twists of fortune begin to fly.

Excising the unwieldy aforementioned portion of Mistress America, what we’re left with is an observant study of two women looking for some answers. Tracy is young, an introvert, and beginning what appears will be a very long process of self-discovery. I’m not placing heavy bets on her ever finding peace and contentment. She can be nasty and guileful, sides of her personality she might not have known were alive till the forceful Brooke’s influence poked them to the surface.

Brooke on the other hand is a longtime gung-ho trooper. Disappointments have peppered her life, but on she goes, pushing aside her doubts and sadnesses as she seeks the next opportunity or person that might set her on the true path. Late in the movie Brooke offhandedly takes a deep look inside and throws out some comments that almost are on target. To Tracy she says something to the effect of  “I know everything about myself. That’s why I can’t do therapy.” Actually, she knows so much that, I think, she scares herself. And keeps on running.

Baumbach and Gerwig, a real life couple, have been feeling their collaborative artistic juices the last few years. They cowrote Mistress America, and Baumbach directed. Ditto for 2013’s Frances Ha, which resembles Mistress America in that it centers upon a young woman who stumbles a lot in life. Frances, though, is several notches below Brooke on the got-it-together scale. Gerwig starred in Frances Ha, and I wasn’t sure if she would have the acting chops to differentiate her leading roles. I am glad to report that she does. Her Brooke is a complicated soul, usually energized and with a gleam in her eyes, but down enough times that my good wishes went out to her. Mistress America, despite its big ol’ flaw, offers plenty to chew on.

(Photo by Sandra Cherrey Scheinin. If you click on it, a larger image will open)

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Puck’s The Place (A Venue And Concert Review)

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I’ve written several times on this blog about Doylestown, PA. In the extensive suburbs of Philadelphia, Doylestown is perhaps the prettiest, the most charming, the most interesting village. I’m referring not to Doylestown’s generic housing developments, but to its quite large historic district. This section is worth a visit, and for many people, such as my wife Sandy and me, multiple and regular hellos.

Puck's outstanding neon sign.
Puck’s outstanding neon sign.

You like art? Go to Doylestown’s high-quality Michener Museum. You like non-blockbuster movies? Try the County Theater. You like artifacts from America’s pre-Industrial Revolution past? The astonishing Mercer Museum was built for you. And if you are a popular music buff, the place to frequent in Doylestown is Puck, a spot with chic indoor and outdoor eating areas and, incongruously, a grungy cellar where singer-songwriters and rock and country and funk bands take the stage a few times each week.

I’ve been to Puck’s music room 15 or more times over the years. Puck’s management brings in a wide array of musicians, a few of whom are touring artists with decent-sized national followings. But generally the players at Puck are little-knowns from Greater Philadelphia. I once had a small career as a music presenter for a summer music series in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood (see my article The Music Biz And I). It was at Puck that I found several local acts (Cheers Elephant; Toy Soldiers; The John Byrne Band) who knocked my socks off and whom I ended up booking for the series.

What I like about Puck’s music room is its casual and boho vibes. Aside from the handsome bar, the space has been inspired by Frat House Finished Basement Magazine. The mottled floor could be mistaken for a Jackson Pollock painting. There are pillars that obstruct views of the stage. My kind of place.

As for the music, I tend to approach Puck with an open mind, with few expectations, and usually everything works out just fine. Many times I find the music to be good but nothing special. And sometimes, as with Cheers Elephant et al., I’m wowed. On a recent Saturday night, Sandy and I both were floored by Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders, the opening act of a double bill. I’d never heard of them, had little idea how they would be. What they were was tight and exciting, a country band in the classic mode, with some latter day tweakings. Anyone who favors Waylon Jennings, Gram Parsons and Dwight Yoakum would find good fun with Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders. For me, their 45-minute set was 45 minutes too short.

Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders, as I’ve learned from post-concert research, is a Philadelphia area band just starting out. They are working on a maybe-soon-to-be-released EP. Their Puck engagement, much to my amazement, was their public debut. Lance Davis, the leader, apparently had a fairly long career as an engineer and producer and rock musician, but for various reasons put all of that on an extended hiatus a number of years ago. In 2014 he emerged from his musical hibernation with country tunes on his mind. As the band came together, Lance decided that each member needed a colorful stage name reminiscent of the kinds of names (Ernest Tubb, Buck Owens) that once populated the country charts. Voilà, Lance adopted Grady Hoss as his moniker. The others in the group were dubbed Bucky Vennerson (in real life, Vince Federici), Dusty Reigns (Dan O’Neil) and Earl Smokesman (Charlie Heim).

Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders on stage at Puck.
Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders on stage at Puck.

Lance and pals played nine songs at Puck, eight of them originals. The songs were good. Lance’s vocals were heartfelt, his high notes reverberating with longing or regret, as they should in tales drawn from country music’s traditional wellspring. Lance strummed an acoustic guitar all evening, his face half-hidden beneath a big Stetson hat, and The Sidewinders created a rich palette of sounds around him. I knew I was in for an evening of treats right from the opening moments of the opening song, Rivertown. The chuga-chuga Johnny Cash-like beats from Heim’s drums and O’Neil’s electric bass built a strong template. Federici’s guitar licks ignited and pushed. And guest pedal steel guitarist Dave Van Allen’s poignant statements were as Nashville as you can get.

Two head-nodding honky tonk numbers followed Rivertown. I didn’t catch their titles, but their themes were classic country: lost souls and drinking. “Lord, I don’t know where I’m going/But I just want to get there” came from the first, and “I’m going back to the bottle/Back out in the rain/Back to the girls I need to see” from its successor.

So, how were these guys able to sound so good in their first-ever club performance? I imagine it’s because they’ve practiced a whole lot, and because they have heaps of talent. I can see this band going places. They without doubt have the chops, the look and the laidback attitude. What they will need to make it, if indeed making it is part of their game plan, is a bunch more original songs. As I discovered at home a few days later, two of the eight originals that I heard at Puck predate GHATS. They come from a rock album, The Hovercraft Diaries, that Lance released nine years ago. Maybe Lance possesses much new countrified material that he didn’t reveal at Puck. If not, I hope that composing sessions are on his agenda. Grady Hoss And The Sidewinders are a band about which I’d be happy to say one day, “I saw them when . . .”

(Photos by Sandra Cherrey Scheinin. If you click on a photo, a larger image will open)

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A Kite, The Moon, Sandy And I

Yeah, Another Blogger8 Comments

Few if any ideas are unique. But many ideas are good ones. Last year, for instance, I came upon a good idea while perusing a bunch of websites pertaining to Cape Cod, where my wife Sandy and I would be vacationing a few weeks later. We’ve been hitting the Cape for many years, and we always try to amass a long list of potential activities before our vacations begin. One website was crammed with suggestions about fun things to do on Cape Cod. One of the author’s notions connected with my sweet spot. Go fly a kite, the writer said.

Our kite soared above Cape Cod beaches many times last year.
Our kite soared above Cape Cod beaches many times last year.

Sandy and I did just that. A few days into the vacation we bought a cute and colorful kite in a toy store and headed straight for a section of Atlantic Ocean beach to test it out. I hadn’t flown a kite in at least 50 years. Sandy, surprisingly, never had. We took to the kite as if it were a long lost pal. Over the course of our sojourn the kite, when not aloft, lived on the back seat of our car, always on hand and ready for action. We flew it on beaches all over Cape Cod and in an inland park or two. During the trip, we spent at least ten hours holding the reel of the kite tightly, watching our yellow, purple and blue amigo ride the air currents far overhead. To fly a kite was a very good idea.

Another good idea visited me recently. And it morphed fairly quickly into a better one. Plopped as usual on my living room sofa one day, half listening to WRDV, a low wattage suburban Philadelphia radio station, I heard a song that I’ve always liked. Dancing In The Moonlight, by King Harvest. This happy tune from 1972 got me thinking, as I had been looking for a story idea for my blog. “Ah yes,” I said to myself. “Let’s write something about the Moon.” I hoped that I’d soon hear other Moon-related songs, and then be able to put them into a bit of context. A few days later, example number two arrived when WRDV played a most obscure tune, a sultry and quiet jazzy bonbon from 1939, Dancing On The Beach. It was written by Bulee “Slim” Gaillard and performed by Slim and his then-partner Slam Stewart. The dancing described in the song’s lyrics, admirably delivered nonchalantly by Slim, occurs at night, under moonlight.

I felt that I needed to hear at least one more moony song to increase the meatiness of whatever I might end up writing. But the next one that I caught, Yellow Moon, by The Neville Brothers, was a bad fit for my thesis-to-be. It concerns a guy who, uncertain about his girl’s degree of devotion to him, asks the Moon to tell him what it knows about the lady’s love life. I put Yellow Moon in the discard bin.

A couple of days later though, out on a drive, I turned on Sirius radio and was taken aback by the first tune that emanated. It was Van Morrison’s iconic Moondance. There, the pieces had emerged. Three songs about letting go, about moving freely with someone you love, in partnership with the mysterious energies and powers of Earth’s nearest neighbor. It was time to analyze the songs, compare their calibrations and then start typing.

I studied the songs’ lyrics. In their essences they didn’t diverge very much. In each, under the moon’s spell, folks are grooving and open to the possibilities. “Dancing in the moonlight/Everybody’s feeling warm and bright.” “Dancing on the beach ‘neath the moon above/ Dancing on the beach with the one you love.” “Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance/With the stars up above in your eyes/A fantabulous night to make romance/’Neath the cover of October skies.”

But I saw at least one difference among the tunes. Each, it seemed to me, inhabited a distinguishing milieu. Where else but in a meadow, one undoubtedly full of blissful and merrymaking hippies, could Dancing In The Moonlight be taking place? As for Dancing On The Beach, well, duh. And Moondance, to my reading, finds its home in none other than Van The Man’s grassy backyard.

The Moon illuminating the Scheinin backyard.
The Moon illuminating the Scheinin backyard.

With those and other thoughts in mind, I began to write. But my intent soon took a sharp change in direction when it dawned on me that the end game was not to turn out an essay about the intriguing aura that monnlit dancing casts upon the human psyche. Instead, I came to believe that the musical gods had held a meeting and decided to send a message my way. Sure, they had experienced brain freeze when they allowed me to hear Yellow Moon, but they quickly had regrouped and set things straight by showering me with Moondance. Their message was a simple one: Dance in the moonlight, fella! It’ll be fun. It’ll be good for you.

In my adulthood I’ve been a reluctant dancer. I give it a try at weddings and bar mitzvahs and other celebrations, but other than that, no. But this moonlight idea is intriguing. It might take awhile before my first dance occurs, but I’m going to coax myself. I can see it now  —  Sandy and I in our compact backyard, soft moonbeams filtering through the trees, the two of us flowing as one to the tune playing on the iPhone. Which of course is Moondance. And after that, before year’s end, we dazzle a lunar-lit stretch of sand and sea somewhere as Dancing On The Beach accompanies us. And then a meadow, where Dancing In The Moonlight shapes our movements.

(Photos by Sandra Cherrey Scheinin. If you click on a photo, a larger image will open)

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Infinitely The End (Thoughts About Two Movies)

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Existence can be perplexing. If you’re like me, there are countless aspects of the organic and inorganic and intangible realms that are hard or impossible to figure out. Now, some of these subjects are of high importance, such as global warming or one’s relationships with one’s fellow species members. Others aren’t worth devoting too much brain power to. Naturally, those are the ones I gravitate towards. A few days ago, for example, I decided to look into the degrees of success that a couple of movies that I’ve recently seen in theaters have had at the domestic box office. Our planet’s fate did not hang in the balance as I did my research. I’m talking about Infinitely Polar Bear and The End Of The Tour, smart and perceptive movies aimed at the art house market. Infinitely seemed to me to be far more of a potential crowd pleaser than The End. Yet it has been attracting far fewer dollars in the USA than The End. Here’s why this surprised me:

My wife Sandy and I saw Infinitely Polar Bear at the Hiway Theater in Jenkintown, PA.
My wife Sandy and I saw Infinitely Polar Bear at the Hiway Theater in Jenkintown, PA.

Infinitely Polar Bear is a boisterous movie, a full-of-life, family-oriented comedic drama and to a large extent a feel-gooder. What’s more, it centers around a wild and bigger-than-life character, beautifully played by Mark Ruffalo. The End Of The Tour is and has none of that. It is slow-moving and understated and wry. And cerebral too. Its main character is charismatic, but in a geeky and repressed sort of way. Infinitely has flash. The End doesn’t.

As we see, I’m no Kreskin when it comes to predicting people’s tastes in movies. What else is new? Still, though I enjoyed both, in a way I’m glad that The End Of The Tour is outdoing Infinitely Polar Bear financially, because I think that The End is better. I’d give it at least three and a half out of four stars. To Infinitely I’d grant maybe three. There were aspects of Infinitely that rang a bit false to me. I had no such problems with The End Of The Tour.

We saw The End Of The Tour in Montgomeryville, PA.
We saw The End Of The Tour in Montgomeryville, PA.
Guess what time the movie started.
Guess what time the movie started.

One big thing that Infinitely and The End have in common is their aim to portray real life people and events. Another similarity is that the main figure in each is weighted with psychological problems. The End Of The Tour’s core takes place in 1996, when a Rolling Stone magazine writer, David Lipsky (a medium octane turn by laser-eyed Jesse Eisenberg) tagged along with David Foster Wallace during the tail end of the promotional tour for Wallace’s recently-published and massive (1,000+ pages) novel, Infinite Jest. Lipsky’s assignment was to profile Wallace for Rolling Stone, and he filled many cassette tapes with Wallace interviews. The End is drawn from the interviews and from Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which was Lipsky’s 2010 book about his Wallace adventures.

No supernova explosions took place during Wallace’s and Lipsky’s five days together, but in a subdued and riveting way their conversations soared. I’m pretty certain that The End mirrors reality in this and most respects. The wary Wallace opened up more to Lipsky than he might have wanted, partly due to some slings and probes that got under his skin. Wallace talked about the love-hate feelings he was developing about the fame that Infinite Jest was thrusting upon him. He talked about the dehumanizing effects of technology on modern man, about the place of the creative person in the world. He touched upon many other topics, including his struggles with mental depression (sadly, he lost this battle in 2008, when he committed suicide). I found The End’s depiction of all of this very moving and kind of exhilarating. I was totally smitten by Jason Segel’s portrait of Wallace as a shaggy dog, a pretty brilliant and mostly nice guy. If Segel isn’t nominated for an Oscar he’ll deserve to say “I wuz robbed.”

Infinitely Polar Bear is Maya Forbes’ baby. Forbes has been a writer for the big and small screens (Monsters Vs. Aliens and episodes of The Larry Sanders Show). For Infinitely, she wrote the screenplay and took her first stance ever behind the camera. The movie tells the story of part of her life, zeroing in on the late 1970s when preteen Maya and her younger sister were raised in semi-poverty in Cambridge, Massachusetts by their bipolar father. The two girls had been living with Maya’s underemployed mother Peggy. Peggy, though, came to decide that the only way to lift the family from its lowly monetary straits was to obtain a marketable postgraduate degree, a Master of Business Administration. This pursuit resulted in her relocation to New York City, Columbia University being the only school that approved her application. Peggy hesitantly deposited the girls with her husband, the girls’ father, Donald Cameron (“Cam”) Forbes, and visited them on as many weekends as she could.

Infinitely Polar Bear is bursting with energy. Ruffalo’s Cam captures the screen, especially during his manic phases, which seem to be far more frequent than his self-absorbed and down moods. Maya Forbes’ screenplay paints Cam as an admirable father, flawed and unpredictable and psychologically challenged, for certain, but there for his girls. Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana (Peggy) make a believable, though separated, couple. Imogene Wolodarsky (Maya’s real life daughter) and Ashley Aufderheide are so feisty and delightful as the young sisters, I was convinced that they gave Ruffalo his wings.

So what about the movie slightly rubbed me the wrong way? For one, it felt a few tads too glossy, too Hollywoodized. And I’d have liked to know what the family arrangements were as the years went on. For instance, did Maya’s parents ever again join as one? Forbes didn’t say, not even in a few written sentences on the screen before the credits rolled. And what’s with changing the family’s names? In Infinitely Polar Bear they all are surname Stuart, not Forbes. Some first names were altered too. In interviews surrounding her movie, Maya Forbes has said that she wanted to present a true portrait of her family. I wish she had started by assigning the screen characters their correct appellations.

(Photos by Sandra Cherrey Scheinin. If you click on a photo, a larger image will open)

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