As locals gear up for the 2012 RPM Challenge and the screening of a new Portsmouth music documentary, musicians reflect on the history of our diverse and storied local scene.

The small towns of the Seacoast have long harbored a vibrant music community endowed with an immensity of instrumental talent and stylistic diversity usually found only in bigger cities.
It’s such a rich and storied scene that it’s even inspired a feature-length new documentary titled “In Danger of Being Discovered,” directed by Marc Dole of Hatchling Studios and co-produced by Dole, Michael Venn, Jon McCormack and Karlina Lyons.

The film chronicles the peaks of the 1990s, when several rock bands emerging out of the University of New Hampshire and nearby towns—like Groovechild, Thanks to Gravity, Fly Spinach Fly and Heavens to Murgatroid, among others—developed diehard followings and were on the cusp of signing record deals with major labels, just before the music industry itself collapsed. The film, to be screened at The Music Hall on Friday, Jan. 27, captures that distinct and vibrant period in Seacoast music history, with vintage concert footage and numerous interviews. The event will also include a Q&A with the filmmakers and a much-anticipated reunion performance by legendary local bands Groovechild and Thanks to Gravity.

In that spirit, The Wire reached out to local musicians to provide a colorful outline of local music history over the last 35 years, from the late 1970s to today. The scene has changed in myriad ways, with bands forming and disbanding, venues opening and closing, and advances in technology altering the way we discover and consume music. This is what it looks like through the eyes of those who create and cherish it.

Today, one of the best snapshots of musical talent is captured by the annual RPM Challenge. Since RPM debuted in 2005, hundreds of locals have recorded full-length albums for the event, which urges musicians to record a CD in the month of February and posts them for listening online at www.rpmchallenge.com.

RPM Challenge and “In Danger of Being Discovered” will join up when RPM Challenge hosts its annual kick-off party in conjunction with “In Danger of Being Discovered” at The Music Hall at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15, to help support the costs of producing and distributing the film. The RPM Challenge invites musicians to mix and mingle in the Music Hall lobby before the show, then head upstairs for some rock.

Harvey Reid
When I got to Portsmouth in 1977, the music scene was already quite vibrant, and the recently opened Press Room was at the center of its social life. The format there hasn’t changed much, partly because their cabaret license requires them to have music every day, and the management has always featured jazz, folk and, increasingly, rock. Most of the headline weekend acts in those days were us acoustic folk people, both local and out-of-towners like Jaime Brockett, Paul Rishell, Paul Geremia, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and other touring Celtic and folk acts. With the Sunday open mike at The Stone Church in Newmarket, Monday at The Rosa in Portsmouth, and Tuesday at The Press Room, usually with free beer for the musicians, there was a lot of socializing among the local artists. The town was not big enough to support a blues bar and a folk bar, so we all drank together. It’s the only place in the country I have ever seen where artists as diverse as Larry Garland (jazz), Joe Queer (punk), Tom Hall (Celtic), Frank Corso (blues) and I (folk) could be found leaning on the same bar hanging out.

Portsmouth was a restaurant town then, too, and people would come from at least an hour’s radius to eat good food and enjoy some nightlife. As a guy who has always traveled around the country performing, I was startled to find so many musicians per capita in such a small, friendly town. I noticed two things about the music scene back then that have remained pretty constant: There has never been a dominant genre of music here, and, to use a baseball metaphor, Portsmouth has always had a “deep bench.” Cormac McCarthy, Bill Staines, Bill Morrissey and I were around doing our acoustic guitar thing, and Patty Larkin had just moved away but was still around a lot. Taylor Whiteside, Jerry Tillett, Ed Gerhard, Wayne Reed, Curt Bessette, John Perrault, Tom Richter, Susie Burke and Linda Schrade all were playing high-quality original acoustic music for a living, just to name a few.

Working musicians from the area could also play in Boston, Portland, Worcester, Manchester, Concord, Newburyport and southern Maine. There were gigs available at the beaches, the Lakes Region and the ski mountains. The close proximity of the towns in New England allowed for heavy gigging with minimal travel, and the small size of the communities meant there were lots of solo and duo acoustic gigs available.

We musicians would wake up late in the morning, meet for coffee or lunch in town, hang around record stores like Rockbottom and Sessions Music, play our gigs or open mikes, listen to each other play and drink beer. There were five or six all-night restaurants to go to after hours, and they were often packed until 2 or 3 a.m. There were some disco clubs in town, too. It was quite a scene on summer nights when the folk audience, musicians, disco queens, bikers, sailors, college kids, waitresses, and regular working folks all spilled out of the clubs and into the streets around 1 in the morning. Now that I’m a family man who seldom goes out, it all seems like a distant dream.

Songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Harvey Reid has been performing across the nation for more than 35 years and has released more than 20 recordings.

T.J. Wheeler

I grew up as a teenager on Bainbridge Island, about a 25-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. I had lots of musical friends of various genres, mostly falling under blues, jazz and folk. To see big-name headliners, I’d catch a boat to the city.

This musical routine spoiled me for life. From that point on, I was drawn to small towns that had similarly thriving music scenes and were close enough to a major city to see bigger touring artists.

In the fall of 1975, I received a call from harmonica player Pat “Hatrack” Gallagher, who said, “go East, young man.” I did, arriving first in Franconia and then in Dixfield, Maine. I started a country, blues and swing duo called the Ragtime Millionaires, and we traveled up to 1,000 miles a week playing the small club circuit in northern New England.

The Stone Church in Newmarket and The Rosa in Portsmouth were the first Seacoast venues I ever played. By then, I was in a group called The Downeast Jazz Babies. I also started checking out shows at The Press Room. But my real breakthrough came when a new club opened on Congress Street called the Kearsarge House around 1978.

I didn’t know a Kearsarge from a corsage, but they had an R&B band just starting to play called Ben Baldwin & the Big Note, so I decided to check them out. When I heard them break into Louie Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” sung by a guitar player who looked like a young Red Buttons, I knew I was in the right place.

Pretty soon I had landed myself a regular gig at the Kearsarge. My extended weekends in Portsmouth gave me plenty of time to beat feet all over town. From the gardens of Prescott Park to the brick walkways of Market Square, it was love at first gig. Catching all the various jazz brunches (with full bands led by Lovey Ann, Tommy Gallant, Barbara London, Charlie Jennison, Paul Broadnax, Sharon Jones and others), not to mention the folk music at The Press Room, I had found my home niche.

Over the next couple of years, before it closed around ’81, the Kearsarge brought in more blues headliners than any club in Portsmouth. Just a partial list of artists who played there before it closed includes Son Seals, John Hammond, Albert Collins, Mose Allison, Jimmy Rogers, Koko Taylor and Johnny Copeland, plus a slew of regional blues, R&B and jazz artists. It was a wild ride, but, like a roller coaster, it’s never quite long enough.

Singer and guitarist T.J. Wheeler is a blues and jazz musician, educator and activist, and leader of the workshop/concert tour, “Hope, Heroes and the Blues.”

Alan Chase
Portsmouth has long had a reputation as a “restaurant town” with numerous culinary establishments. The music scene is largely driven by the relationship between those establishments and local bands. It’s been this way for the last 30 to 35 years.
Jazz has been an integral component of the scene throughout that period. Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, you could roam around town and find jazz musicians performing at the Oar House, Riversmere, the Warehouse Restaurant, The Metro, The Dolphin Striker and, most of all, The Press Room, among other places.

As has always been the case with jazz, the music was as diverse as the surroundings in which it was performed. On any given night, you might find Charlie Jennison, Tommy Gallant, Jim Howe, John Hunter, Ken Ormes, Matt Langley, David Seiler, T.J. Wheeler, Richard Gardzina, Tom Barron, Larry Garland, Sharon Jones, Charlie Kolhase and a host of others performing around town. There were also at least a couple of full-fledged big bands, including the still active Seacoast Big Band and the Branch Sanders Big Band. On Sundays, you could start off with a jazz session at Josef’s Rye on the Rocks with singer-pianist Annie Bosteel, then make your way to The Press Room for the weekly Sunday Jazz session with Tommy Gallant’s trio and a variety of special guests. Or you could go The Metro on a Friday evening and find musicians sitting in with Gallant or Paul Verrette. Between 1983 and 1995, you could attend the Portsmouth Jazz Festival, a day-long event that was held on Ceres Street each summer featuring local and regional musicians. It was a heady time.

Yet, like many aspects of life, things changed. Today, the places in town where jazz musicians can ply their trade are far fewer. There’s Rudi’s and, in Dover, the Barley Pub.  The Music Hall and, more recently, The Dance Hall in Kittery offer periodic jazz events. But many of the characters are still the same, along with newer ones like Chris Burbank, Nick Mainella and the Klaxton brothers. And, of course, jazz still thrives on Sunday nights at The Press Room, as well as several other times each week, thanks to the ongoing efforts of folks like Ryan Parker and Larry Garland. Larry Simon’s monthly Beat Night and annual Jazzmouth festival also add to the scene. And so the Seacoast still provides a solid home for jazz after all these years.

Alan Chase is a jazz musician, freelance writer and staff member at the University of New Hampshire. He is author of The Wire column “Jazz Universe.”

Bob Halperin
In 1984, when I first moved to the Seacoast, I had already been playing in the area for five years. Part of what brought me here was the size, quality, and warmth of the local scene. There were dozens of venues within a 20-mile radius of Portsmouth and no shortage of fans of live music. There were more working musicians living in this area per capita than anywhere else I’ve ever been—and the talent bar was set very high, as it still is. There was also a local ethos of generosity in the music community. Gigs were shared and passed around. It wasn’t unusual to get a call from a club manager who had gotten my name from one of my buddies, inviting me to play a gig.

The chief social event among the acoustic crowd at that time was the Tuesday night Hoot at The Press Room. It was run by Rocky Rockwood, and it was the biggest night on the schedule. The room was generally packed and all the local pros who weren’t working would be there. There were bands formed impromptu that lasted the length of a 20-minute slot and friendships established that lasted a lifetime. Cormac McCarthy, Sammie Haynes, Jon Ross, Rick Watson, Harvey Reid, Frank Corso, Stanley Longstaff, Leif Gerjuoy, Cosy Sheridan, Stan Moeller and TS Baker, Tom Richter and many, many others were regular habitués. 

The crowd was into the music. There would be conversation and laughter, of course, but folks were listening and responding, and good performances were rewarded with salvos of applause. I’m a fan of open mikes and I’ve run some very successful ones in Cambridge, Mass. and Rochester, N.Y., but I’ve never seen anything that approached the levels of musicianship and community of those Press Room Hoots. 

There was also a huge rock scene. I was most acquainted with what was happening at the recently closed Rosa. The Postcards, Big Night Out, Neil and the Nightlifes, The Cooltones, The Electric Caves and The Boys were among the regular acts you would see.  Every weekend night, no matter who was playing, the line to get in would stretch down State Street.

The mid to late ’80s were an incredibly fertile time around here. Music enjoyed the support of the community, and the community was rewarded with the best damn music scene I’ve ever witnessed.

Guitarist and singer Bob Halperin is an active member of Wooden Eye and a solo performer who has been in numerous local bands.

Dave Gerard
(Savoy) Truffle started officially in 1986, although David Bailey and I started playing at least a year or so before out of the mini dorms at UNH. Truffle consisted of myself, David Bailey, Ned Chase and Brian Dionne, with Pete Kowalski playing whenever he could join us. Mike Gendron joined the band on drums in 1996. The lineup is still the same now in 2012. We just celebrated 25 years as a band.

The scene back in the ’80s was much smaller but no less talented. Our local influences included Neil & the Nightlifes, T.J. Wheeler and many others who were a bit older and more experienced than us. I, of course, always think of Gandhi’s Lunchbox, Heavens to Murgatriod and Father Nature in the earliest years. Later came Thanks to Gravity, Fly Spinach Fly and Groovechild, to name a few.

There were plenty of rooms to play up and down the coast on any given night. In Portsmouth, Truffle used to play every Tuesday, alternating between acoustic at the Codfish and electric at The Rosa. Of course, we also played at The Stone Church and great rooms like Raoul’s in Portland. In the very beginning, we also played the True Blue Cafe, the Loaf and Ladle, and Jonathan’s, among others.

We felt a connection with the crowd through our rootsy, groove music. The Neville Brothers and Radiators were big then, and that suited us fine. We loved N’awlins music and R&B. I can’t say that was what all the locals liked, but the audience sure felt strong. The previously mentioned rock and roll bands always did well, too.

I really don’t remember many out-of-town bands touring the Seacoast. Back then, without The Music Hall as it is now, and the area being less populated, national bands tended to hit Boston and Portland without stopping in between.

I have far too many good memories to list on this page. It’s easy to remember “the good old days,” but the scene is still good, in a different way. There’s still loads of talent in this rich area we share.

Guitarist and singer Dave Gerard is the front man of Truffle and a solo performer.

Guy Capecelatro III
My introduction to the Seacoast music scene came way back in the late ’80s, when a friend told me about the Button Factory Hoot Night. He said it was an old factory building set up as artist spaces, and once a month they had a gathering where people played music and did performance art. Growing up outside New York City, I’d had some experience with performance art, mostly tripping my brains out on mushrooms in galleries on the lower East Side, so I thought it might be fun.

The day of the hoot, while attending classes at UNH, someone handed me a religious tract, which seemed remarkably sadomasochistic and erotic. I concocted a performance of with some friends and headed over to the Button Factory, feeling pretty psyched to be part of the scene.
Prior to our slot, an old bearded man did some sea shanties, a woman read a poem about birds and a mother-son tap dancing act performed. It wasn’t quite what I’d imagined, but it was too late to quit, so we turned out the lights and began.

Alex started playing a low, ominous drum beat as I read from the tract in an overly dramatic voice. Then Bex, done up in working lady garb, lit a bunch of candles illuminating Paul, who was dressed as a priest. Bex ripped open Paul’s shirt, poured candle wax on his chest and then started whipping him as she pulled her own top off. It definitely went further than we’d talked about. My memory is that no one clapped as the lights turned on and we slumped back into the audience.

At the next hoot night (where I read a story about sea monkeys while my friend Bob buzzed my hair off and then taped it back on), I saw the band Ed’s Redeeming Qualities and found some kindred souls. They played violin, ukulele and coffee can with beans in it, and their songs about lawn darts, laundromats and broken cars really resonated with me. After the hoot, we connected excitedly about music and writing and art.

At the time, I was playing in an acoustic duo called Bob & Guy, and we ended up sharing stages with Ed’s Redeeming Qualities at places like True Blue Café, The Warm Penguin, Café Petronella and, later, the Elvis Room. My live show experiences up to that point had primarily been at places like Madison Square Garden seeing AC/DC and Blue Oyster Cult. This was a whole different and amazingly intimate experience, and it really changed the way I made music. It felt exhilarating and inspiring to be part of such a rich musical community.

I went on to play in the bands Two-Ton Santa, Size of Guam, Toast, Unbunny, Milk of Magnesia, The Buckets and a slew of others. To this day, I am staggered by the diverse and generous musicians in this area. Walking into the Button Factory more than 20 years ago proved instrumental in finding my own voice as a performer and connecting with such an amazing group of people.

Guy Capecelatro III is a singer-songwriter, author and co-owner of Burst & Bloom Records. He’s been in several local bands.

Andy Herrick
The mid ’90s Seacoast music scene not only had a lasting impression on my life, it helped define who I have become. My introduction to the scene took place in 1994 when I joined the band “Harpoon,” based out of Plymouth State College. I was a UNH student and I quickly convinced them to move to the artistically rich Seacoast so that we could network with other likeminded musicians and capitalize on our dream of rock stardom. At the time, the most popular local bands were Groovechild, Percy Hill, Thanks to Gravity, Fly Spinach Fly and (Savoy) Truffle. Truffle was touring on a national level, and they inspired the rest of us to attain their level of national recognition.

The great thing about the scene was that you could play within a small geographic location many times and people would still come out. Most of the bands could play shows at Nick’s (Durham), The Brewery (Portsmouth), The Stone Church (Newmarket) and a UNH house party all in one week.

Many other touring bands would come to the Seacoast and develop relationships and popularity. The two most important for me were Moon Boot Lover (Woodstock, N.Y.) and Strangefolk (Burlington, Vt.). In 1997, I joined Moon Boot Lover when two members left to form the band Soulive. What I learned from incessantly touring the country with MBL made me hyper aware of how special the Seacoast scene was.

When I left Moon Boot Lover in 2001, the relationships I had developed from the Seacoast showed their true value. Former Strangefolk singer-songwriter Reid Genauer was forming his own band and had reached out to John Leccese and Nate Wilson (Percy Hill), Adam Terrell (Groovechild) and me. We ended up forming the group Assembly of Dust and, over the next 10 years, that band would bring us to places far beyond our innocent Seacoast dreams. We were able to play festivals like Bonnaroo and famous rooms like Carnegie Hall, share the stage with many of our musical heroes and travel from coast to coast doing what we loved.

One common theme to our band’s culture, humor and onstage “musical language” was that it all developed in that mid ’90s Seacoast music scene. It was something we would reference with great appreciation every time we achieved a new musical milestone.

Drummer Andy Herrick is a member of Assembly of Dust and director of marketing at the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom.

Martin England
The Seacoast music scene in the late ’90s and early 2000s was in many ways a lunar landscape. Gone was the underground music and party scene of the early to mid ’90s, when you’d find many amazing bands performing for free beer every Friday and Saturday night, including Pink Belly Wipeouts, Dollhouse and the Vibe Merchants, to name a few. Also absent were once-thriving venues such as Norton’s, the Elvis Room, and downstairs at the Portsmouth Brewery (still there but without live music), all of which housed capacity crowds for local and national acts, alike. The thunder from the early ’90s echoed into the wilderness, and the dream of Portsmouth becoming the next Seattle or Athens was quickly and quietly shuttered.

But the rise of the Internet started to take hold in the late ’90s, setting into motion a golden age for DIY bands who were sick of paying others to do work they knew they could do themselves. The elitism that once haunted the music business collapsed into a near-level playing field, with bands self-producing and self-promoting their own records while using websites such as CD Baby to sell these recordings locally, regionally and globally—something that was once impossible without some semblance of a record deal.

My band, Pondering Judd, thrived in this new environment. We were suddenly able to book and promote our own shows, but more importantly, grew our fan base in a way that had never been imaginable. We were a working man’s band, all holding down day jobs so we could ply our craft on weekends, using money made at gigs to self-finance our CDs.

The music scene in the late ’90s lacked the cohesiveness that it had earlier in the decade, and it featured fewer venues, but there were still plenty of bands. Eventually, places like the Redhook Brewery in Portsmouth and the Barley Pub in Dover began hosting music.

From 1999 to 2003, Biddy Mulligan’s in Dover was Pondering Judd’s home base. We’d pack the place regularly on Friday and Saturday nights, with crowds lining the sidewalk on Washington Street for hours just for a chance to revel in the experience. We’d suddenly become a local entity, much like Truffle at The Stone Church or Heavens to Murgatroid at Norton’s back in the day. Many nights we played so drunk we could barely escape with our dignity, mostly due to the Irish Car Bomb races we’d have at the bar between sets. People would often dance on the bar as we played, and owner Mike Murphy had to shoo them off with a bar rag.

Those shows were magical. They became not only an integral part of P-Judd’s second wind, but a part of our lives. Biddy’s became our living room, and the folks filling it our family.

Singer-songwriter Martin England is the front man of Americana bands Pondering Judd and Martin England & The Reconstructed.

Geoff Palmer
I first became involved with the Portsmouth music scene around 1995 with my band The Useless Fucks. We couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but that didn’t stop us!

The scene was a giant party until around 2000. You couldn’t turn a corner on Congress Street without stumbling over some passed-out punk kid leftover from the previous night’s show, wearing a 13 Tons of Napalm shirt. The Seacoast was packed with bands like The Tunnel Rats, Satan’s Teardrops, Pinkerton Thugs, 13 Tons of Napalm, The Trailer Sluts, Mid Step Crisis and Shuttlecock, just to name a few.

Call me Geoff Obvious, but man did we get lucky back then. The Useless Fucks, along with any the other band with two brain cells, caught the punk wave that rolled through town. The punk scene was launched largely by Joe Queer’s association with the Lookout Records crowd, Al Barr and The Bruisers, and Jon Clark from Sinkhole (who also owned Ringing Ear Records) booking shows at the Elvis Room.

It was a pretty amazing time for a small town. The Useless Fucks released two seven-inch EPs and started getting opening slots at the Elvis Room. The amount of high quality, professional bands I was able to see at such a budding young age provided some of the most exciting moments of my music career. It largely shaped who I am and how I manage (I use that word very lightly) a band today.

Around 1998, I moved to Colorado for a short stint and played with a band called The Nobodys, who I had met here in Portsmouth when they recorded a record at Fishtracks with Jim Tierney and Joe Queer for Hopeless Records.

Eventually I moved back East and started The Guts with some other local cretins in 2000. The “local scene” was still active with great bands, but you could definitely feel the well running dry. You really had to work hard to get a gig and then try and convince a bigger band with a decent draw to come up from Boston to get a crowd in the room. The heyday of the Portsmouth Punx was over.

Now I have a band called The Connection and I play guitar for Kurt Baker. I’ve toured Europe three times, as well as Japan, Canada and the U.S. I owe all this largely to the contacts and friendships that started right here in Portsmouth years ago. I am still grateful for that time and those people.

Guitarist, bassist, drummer and singer Geoff “Useless” Palmer is a member of The Guts, The Connection and Kurt Baker Music.

Nate Groth
Broken Sparrow Records got its start in late 2004 as a vehicle to self-release the first Hotel Alexis album, “The Shining Example Is Lying on the Floor.” Formed by Sidney Lindner in 2004, Hotel Alexis was part of a tightly knit group of bands that centered in large part around the Hush Hush Sweet Harlot music series still held upstairs in the tiny Red Door in Portsmouth. The bands were diverse, sharing not only overlapping aesthetics, but in many cases, overlapping members, which contributed to a sense of cohesiveness within the scene.

Generally favoring quiet songs augmented by vocal harmonies, unusual instrumentation like vibraphone, cello and lap steel, a healthy dose of spacey reverb and delay and the occasional bursts of noise, bands like Hotel Alexis, the Water Section, Jerry Brookman, Northern and Guy Capecelatro III shared stages around town on many occasions. Unconventional venues like RiverRun Bookstore began hosting small shows, and later on, the innovative audio/visual Sotto Voce series held at the Nahcotta gallery became another showcase for locals like Farewell Dutch as well as out-of-towners with strong local ties like Portland’s Brown Bird.

After Hotel Alexis debut was released, we noticed it was getting positive press and blog coverage not just locally but from all over the country. Lindner and I started Broken Sparrow to release material by other artists we liked, some local, some from farther away. The varied and unpredictable results were indicative of the shifting landscape of the music industry of that time.

Hotel Alexis toured infrequently, played small rooms, and had no PR budget, but still managed to get featured on NPR, covered by blogs like Pitchfork and, in one surreal case, even had a track used in an NBC crime drama. Nat Baldwin, who released three albums on Broken Sparrow, toured the country constantly and had a track used in a large advertising campaign in the UK. On the other hand, it wasn’t all successful. Our release by former New Hampshire resident Dave Snider’s band Testface (which was criminally overlooked, in my biased opinion) sold roughly six copies.

Broken Sparrow continued releasing music for the next several years, experimenting with different formats, including hand silk-screened versions of ubiquitous local drummer Gregg Porter’s debut solo album. As it became more difficult to recoup even the basic costs of releasing albums, the label’s output eventually ground to a halt. I left the label in 2010 due to creative differences, but Lindner, who now lives outside San Diego, recently revived it to release his new solo album.

While Broken Sparrow and the scene it grew out of have undergone significant changes, its effect on the local music landscape is felt in the continuing sense of community it forged among its members. Many still perform together in various acts like the Estate Collective, or on one of Guy Capecelatro’s many RPM albums.

Multi-instrumentalist Nate Groth, co-founder of Broken Sparrow Records, has performed with Ardent Ways, intelevision, Hotel Alexis, Towers Of Silence and many other bands.

Nick Phaneuf
Do you want to join five bands in one week? Do you want them all to play different genres? Do you want them all to have gigs that people go to? Then you should move to the Seacoast.

Since I moved to the area, I’ve heard a lot about how great the music scene was before I got here. I’ll admit that in the ’90s the legend of the Elvis Room traveled to Manchester, where I grew up. My friends and I were slack-jawed with the idea that somewhere in our state cool music was being made and many people were in the room to hear it.

That said, in the last nine years, I’ve never found the Seacoast to be lacking in music. Quite the opposite. I firmly believe that if there were more hours in the day, the fine people in this area would just form more bands and have more shows. I also believe that in this world of 30-hour days and nine-day weeks, there would still be eager audiences coming out to listen.

I’ve had the good fortune to play indie pop with Texas Governor and Tan Vampires, rockabilly with Elsa Cross, folk with Dan Blakeslee, jazz with Jose Duque, and then wear a wig and play in the spoof rock band Spinal Tarp. Sometimes all these things happen in the same week (well, nearly). I experienced, early on, some kind of “can do” attitude that makes people say yes to try things they never thought they could.

What makes all this work, though, is the willingness of the community to come out and listen. That is what really makes the Seacoast special. I see many of the same faces at Tan Vampires shows today that I saw at Museum of Science shows five years ago. I see those people at Bluegrass Night and Jazz Night at the Barley Pub in Dover. They go to Buoy in Kittery to hear Nat Baldwin and then show up at a MMOSS show the next week. People here love music. As long as that remains the case, great music will keep happening. An army of lawyers with decibel meters couldn’t stop us.

Guitarist and bassist Nick Phaneuf is an active member of Tan Vampires, Dan Blakeslee and the Calabash Club, and fiveighthirteen. He’s a music instructor at the Portsmouth Music & Arts Center.

Stu Dias
It’s hard being a musician on the Seacoast if you have an ego. No matter how well you think you play, there are guys who do it better and have been doing it better for a very long time. Eventually, though, if you lose some of that ego, not only will those guys teach you, they will play music with you.

When Gnarlemagne started playing on the Seacoast, we would walk into the Barley Pub in Dover on a Wednesday night and see bands like Tan Vampires, Mmoss, Jack Bandit and Moon Minion. We would see musicians like drummer Jim Rudolf, trumpet player Chris Klaxton, bassist Steve Roy, guitarist Nick Phaneuf and keyboardist Mike Effenberger, who were in numerous bands at the time (and still are), and just watch these guys in amazement. They were incredible at their instruments, but also had very distinctive musical voices. These were some of the heaviest musicians around, and they were playing at the pub on a Wednesday!

When Gnarlemagne finally started playing at the pub, it was incredibly validating to see people I admired in the audience. Eventually, Mike Effenberger started playing with us, adding a new layer to our sound with his Hammond B3 organ. It forced us to think about what we were playing and how we were writing music in different ways.

There are many bands around the Seacoast that make you think differently about the way you are doing things. Bands like Tan Vampires offer examples of what a perfectly crafted song should sound like; Jazzputin reminds you how important it is to have fun while playing; Comma teaches you that there is always more music theory to learn, and I can proudly say that Gnarlemagne has learned a lot from these guys and worked hard to make sure our shows are a worthy experience to witness live.

Along the way, Nick Phaneuf, Mike Walsh, Chris Klaxton, Russ Graham, Dave Gerard and others have sat in with our band. It’s a strange and magical day when people you consider superiors view you as a peer and friend. Gnarlemagne started as a way for me to hang out and play music with some of my best friends. I feel lucky and blessed to say that’s as true now as when we started.

Guitarist, singer and songwriter Stu Dias is the front man of Gnarlemagne and a member of Cornelius Crane. He’s also a solo performer.

< Prev		Next >