HubArts.com

Dan Auerbach rules the pop charts. Of 1973.

I've been meaning to write this post for weeks, since it's about my album of the summer, so please forgive my tardiness...

I am a child of the AM Gold generation. Dating myself, I know. But my junior high school years - formative ones for any music fan - coincided with the last heyday of AM Top 40 radio in the early 1970s. That was before the freeform FM rock format took much of the audience and disco took the rest, dividing radio listeners for decades. A quaint and ancient era to today's yutes, I know. But glory days too, when you might hear the brain-frying guitar of the new Creedence for the first time back-to-back with Gladys Knight singing the hell out of some broken-hearted love song back-to-back with execrable dreck like "The Night Chicago Died." And then you'd hear them all again the next hour!

Relatively often one would become a national ear worm, the song of the summer blasting from every transistor at the beach, every car radio. There are fifty or a hundred songs from that era planted so deeply in my brain they are part of me for better and worse. I am stuck in the middle with them, just like this guy ---->

Aside from the heaven/hell of shared experience and endless repetition, another characteristic of the time was the songwriting discipline, a holdover from era of the the Brill Building song factory where people like Carole King and Paul Simon cut their teeth a decade earlier. Songs were 2:30 or 3:00 and seldom much more. They had hooks and melody, verse-chorus structure, and were edited within an inch of their lives. (Naughty words were edited out, too. Like I said, quaint.) We devoutly wished to see these commercially driven restrictions shattered, as they were when we all switched from WRKO to WBCN. But something was lost, too.

Which is my long-winded introduction to my album of the summer, Waiting on a Song, the second solo album from Black Keys frontman and studio wizard Dan Auerbach, on which he dives so deep into the AM Gold sound that in addition to MP3, CD and the now obligatory limited-edition vinyl release, he put the thing out on fucking eight-track.

The album is promoted as his love letter to his adoptive musical hometown, Nashville, and he wrote or recorded with some of that town's best, including John Prine, who co-penned the terrific title number about the songwriting muse, and Duane Eddy, who contributes a guitar solo or two. Other heavyweight guests include Mark Knopfler and Jerry Douglas. But this isn't some all-star shitshow. It's an almost entirely cohesive, organic love letter to the country-inflected singer-songwriter vein of AM Gold, from "Stuck in the Middle With You" to "Take It Easy" to "It Never Rains in Southern California," a universe of strummed guitars and heart-on-sleeve sentiments, verse-chorus structure and sunny chords. Every one of the ten songs is less than four minutes long, several under three.

You've probably heard the first single, "Shine On Me," featuring an Up With People/Traveling Wilburys chorus and Knopfler's guitar solo, an irresistible hook and "Horse With No Name"-level gibberish in the verses. I can't get it out of my head. "Malibu Man" is equally, insanely catchy complete with a string section."Show Me" and "Never in My Wildest Dreams" are heartfelt, intimate love songs that would have been inescapable on the radio in the summer of '71 or '72 or '73...probably sung by B.J. Thomas or Albert Hammond Jr. or whoever sang "Chevy Van."

(The one real sonic outlier here is "Cherry Bomb," sounds more like mid-period Beck - albeit much more listenable - or possibly a Prince cover.)

WRKO isn't coming back, and neither is the national earworm experience. But if you like sunny, three-minute pop songs that you can't get out of your head and that would also sound great on earbuds coming out of your phone at the beach, Waiting on a Song is the album for you.

 

New book! New book! New book!

Plover Island Breakdown is out! One of these days I will remember how to get it into that sidebar. But in the meantime, you can get it at Jabberwocky, The Book Rack, or from Amazon. And yes, there is a Kindle edition.

Leonard Cohen

Roe cares about fewer residents of the Tower of Song than I do. I'm not sure how she formed her affection for the work of Leonard Cohen, but I'm glad she did, not least because she took me to see him four or five years ago, a mesmerizing Boston show near the end of his last major tour. It seems entirely appropriate that he died in the fall, the season that finds the beauty in death and decay. His brilliant lyrics tackled mortality and other essential facts of existence that artists with less zen about them address only superficially if at all. His gravelly voice and measured tempos match the gravity of the subject matter, which is one reason why I seldom listened to him before Roe fell for him. I still take him in small doses or at carefully chosen times; he's not the guy you put on to drive your dog to the beach or to get motivated for that morning commute. But he found the beauty in all of it, too. I was thinking about him when I looked up and saw this on the day after he died.

Island light

You've got about a month to get down to Salem and see American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals at the Peabody Essex Museum. It's the first exhibition in more than 25 years to focus on his work from visits to the tiny archipelago visible a few miles off the New Hampshire coast. If you grew up in the southeast corner of the the Granite State, as I did, you've probably visited the Isles of Shoals and sailed around them. If you also grew up with a print of Hassam's At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight) hanging over the couch, as I did, you may have Hassam's perspective deeply implanted in your brain. Even if neither is true, this is a show very much worth seeing. Co-organized with the North Carolina Museum of Art in cooperation with the Shoals Marine Laboratory, the exhibit runs through Nov. 6.

Beginning in 1886, Dorchester native Hassam visited the isles often for three decades, mainly in summer, hanging on his friend poet Celia Thaxter's porch on Appledore and painting what he saw. There's not much of man here, aside from sailboats in the distance, as like a good impressionist he focused on foliage, landscape and the ever-present sea. The main subjects here are Thaxter's famous garden (Thaxter published An Island Garden in 1894 with illustrations by Hassam) and the rocky shore.

Many of the  images embody impressionism as it's most commonly thought of, as sun-dappled and dreamy as the Giverny of Monet. Some of these are just pretty, but others are beautiful in a deeper way. (Below: Childe Hassam. Poppies, Isles of Shoals, 1891. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Margaret and Raymond Horowitz. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art.)

A few paintings use more vigorous lines that inject craggy landscapes with mysterious life in a way that reminded me of Van Gogh. (Below: Childe Hassam. The Laurel in the Ledges, Appledore, 1905. Oil on canvas. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Promised gift of Ann and Jim Goodnight.)

At the end of the exhibit, there's a sample of the watercolors Hassam made late in his relationship with the islands, which are very different and surprisingly modern in their use of the simplest gestures and almost abstract components. There's a boldness in the best of these that's missing from the "prettiest" paintings in the show. (Below: Childe Hassam. The Cove, 1912. Watercolor on paper. Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas. John W. and Mildred L. Graves Collection.)

PEM has installed rocking chairs and a table of postcards near the end of the exhibit, a nod to the island experience. There's also a selection of 12 black-and-white photographs of Appledore today by Alexandra de Steiguer. Both are the sort of curatorial flourish that seems de rigeur in the modern museum experience, but they're superfluous. Hassam's best paintings carry us to Appledore in a more profound way that needs no such help.

'Miss Julie' at the Modern

I've written a few times about Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet, a handful of actors who decided to do things the old-fashioned way on the Cape: all by themselves. They've gotten a lot of good ink from the Globe and elsewhere for their shows, and now they've brought this year's early-summer production, "Miss Julie," to the Modern Theatre at Suffolk University so you can take a look without driving south. This is Strindberg, dark and explosive, with sexual politics and 1880s-style class divisions, and quite good. Check out my Globe review. FYI, it's only around through next weekend.

Memba my Brian Dennehy interview? Well...

You might remember my Globe interview with Brian Dennehy about Eugene O'Neill, Provincetown and Tennessee Williams. Dennehy was appearing in Ptown at a fundrasier for the 11th annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival which, as I noted in the story, is themed Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams: Beyond Success, "examining how each of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights found that their more challenging work had a hard time getting a fair shake from critics and audiences." Well, the Festival is upon us, Thursday through Sunday, and this Globe story by friend Don tells everything you need to know.

Huntington staying put

The week's big news in Boston arts was a pact between the Huntington Theatre Company and the developers who'll be taking over the block of Huntington Avenue where the BU Theatre sits, a pact that will allow the company to stay. Mayor Marty Walsh came to make the announcement to applause and cheers from a couple of hundred people including a number from other theater companies. The HTC will have to raise $60+ million for renovation of the theater and adjacent space to the west, while the developer builds a new mixed-up high rise to the east. Details here in my story for BU Today, although the second-most applause came when Huntington Managing Director Michael Maso said there will be more women's restrooms when the project is finished. At BU, meanwhile, we'll spend the $25M from the sale of the theater to build a new theater complex on Commonwealth Avenue, right across from the College of Fine Arts.

Talking O'Neill with Dennehy

Today the Boston Globe features my interview with Brian Dennehy, who will be the honored guest this weekend at the annual fundraising gala for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. Dennehy has acted in Williams plays but he's best known as an interpreter of Eugene O'Neill, and I talk to him about that work, which has taken up much of the last 10-15 years of his professional life. I had to leave out his candid and funny talk about something else he and O'Neill have in common, which is an overfondness for the bottle. Suffice to say he has a story about being brought home in a shopping cart. (Photo courtesy Goodman Theatre.)

Young composers at BU

Recently, on the day job, I was one of seven people in a drab room at BU's College of Fine Arts for an experience that only I found extraordinary. One of the others was a sound guy. Four of them were the alt-rock-band-looking, 50% beardo JACK Quartet, one of the nation's premiere contemporary-music ensembles. The violinists, violist and cellist sight-read their way through a twisty new composition full of jagged tempo changes, twists and turns. They kept stopping for mistakes and wry commentary, eventually playing the piece through twice.

The seventh person in the room was the composer of Experiment in String Quartet, a ponytailed BU freshman named Daniel Collins. That's right, I said BU freshman.

Collins is one of a couple of dozen undergraduate composition students in the music department, and I profiled him and others in this BU Today feature, accompanied by Jackie Ricciardi's pictures and a video by Jason Kimball.

Photo by Jackie Ricciardi shows Collins, in white shirt, with cellist Kevin McFarland and violist John Pickford Richards of the JACK Quartet.

Magic Mikes? Not the kind you think

James Waldron lives on Plum Island, designs web sites by day, and plays harp in a blues band on weekends. In his spare time, he tears apart old old microphones for parts and builds new, custom microphones for other harmonica players, like that guy in the Who. I profiled his business/obsession for the Boston Globe.

“You want to cup your hands to control the sound,” he says, demonstrating. “A bullet-shaped mike is easy to hold when you’re cupping your hands. And if you make a tight container around it. . . ”

He begins to blow. The sound blasting out of the speaker is part wail and part bellow, with a ragged edge of distortion. It’s James Cotton, Little Walter, or Junior Wells, mojo fully workin’.

After a few bars, Waldron puts down the harmonica and says mildly, “That’s the sound people want.”

Love means never having to give a bad review

I wasn't super excited to see "Love Story" stars Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal return to town in "Love Letters." Stunt casting, meh. But they turned out to be really good. And I had fun writing this Boston Globe review. Where else ya gonna read a piece that says both "OMG, srsly?" and "epistolary"? Pic by Jason Gillman

I eat oysters right from Duxbury Bay, you just read about it

The best assignment I've had in my now almost year-old job at Boston University was to spend a day on the water in Duxbury with John Brawley, an oyster farmer who sold his harvest to famed Island Creek Oysters, his neighbors on the bay, before starting his own Sweet Sound label. This story and the terrific pictures and accompanying video by my colleagues at Bostonia magazine should give you a real feel for how hard he works. I hope between the lines you also get a salty sense of how delicious the oysters were that sunny late autumn day.

Up on the roof...of the Boston area

OK, it's not exactly arts, but you'll enjoy my BU Today story on Brian Fitzgerald, chief weather observer at Blue Hill Observatory atop Great Blue Hill. He's got to drive up that lonely mountain road every day, rain snow sleet whatever, to keep records continuous at the nation's oldest weather station. Cydney Scott's photos are great too. I visited on a beautifully warm, sunny October day, and I did what most people do and hiked up there, rather than drive. For those who heard about the deer hunt that went on there this past week, I asked and he and his dog were both wearing blaze orange.

'Dunces' on tap at the Huntington

It arrives amid much change for BU and the Huntington, but here's my BU Today preview of the latter's A Confederacy of Dunces, starring Nick Offerman and based on John Kennedy Toole's novel that, if conversations of the last weeks are accurate, everyone read in college and remembers fondly without having picked up since.

Worst direct-mail marketing ever?

Database dumbassery made unintentional hilarity out of a mailing from an outfit called the Danbury Mint yesterday. Fortunately my spouse is a sane, non-jealous type. The rather elaborate mailer promised an item "as unique as the love you share," namely a heart-shaped diamond-and-birthstone pendant with all the subtlety of a Super Bowl ring, "only" $69 plus shipping and handling. I am supposed to give it to my love for Christmas, customized with our names and birthstones. In a classy touch, the mailer included a sheet of  birthstones sticker to help me denote ours correctly on the order form. And the elaborate, glossy, multi-part mailer even included several images of the item with our names engraved, to commemorate a love that will be "together forever...today, tomorrow and always."

And the names engraved were Joel and Frances.

"Who's Frances?" my wife - Rosemary - demanded to know.

With a smile, thank god.

Yes, the dipshits at the Danbury Mint wanted to commemorate forever a love that doesn't exist. Expressing their heartfelt desire to honor our loving bond in gems and gold - with a 90-day satisfaction guaranteed return policy - they got my wife's name wrong. And it's not just like they misspelled it. They gave me a whole new spouse.

"You're keeping it?' Roe asked when I failed to toss the thing in the recycle pile, mildly annoyed until I explained that it would make a swell blog post. I could, I suppose, concoct an outraged think piece about the impersonality of computer-driver marketing, the whole garbage-in/garbage-out syndrome as it applies to romance-driven direct mail and so on. I figure this might have something to do with the other Joel Brown in the next town over, but I'm too lazy to look up his wife's name. I am planning on checking my credit card expenditures, though, too.

But all I really have to say is, Danbury Mint, THANKS A BUNCH for exposing my SECRET SECOND FAMILY. All those exhausting years of subterfuge and racing back and forth, blown for this exclusive offer that's not available in any store.

I'll take two please, and we'll talk about the engraving.

"Book of Mormon" opens in "South Park"

Got a last minute Globe assignment to step in and review the opening of "Book of Mormon" at the Colonial, a third-time-around touring production that somehow I hadn't seen before. Hilarious, heartfelt and so, so filthy. A truly terrific mix of the "South Park" creators' worldview with the Broadway polish of the "Avenue Q" guy. Fantastic attention to detail and a story that keeps moving forward, without a trace of the eat-your-peas feeling of so many touring warhorses.

"Waitress": Get it while you can

You may still hear faint grumbling in the Boston theater world about how Diane Paulus has turned the American Repertory Theater into a Broadway launch pad, but there were Tonys for "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" and "Pippin." There may be more for "Waitress" - one anyway, if Jessie Mueller stays in the title role, singing Sara Bareilles' songs. Read my Boston Globe review of "Waitress" here. The show is already set to move to Broadway in the spring, but you have until Sept. 27 to see it at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. 617-547-8300, www.americanrepertorytheater.org

Get thee to the Peabody Essex for Benton

There are some masterpieces in "American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood," now at the Peabody Essex Museum. But just about everything is worth seeing, and a lot of it is essential, at least if you care about Twentieth Century American art. Put together by PEM curator Austen Barron Bailly, it's the first major show in 25 years dedicated to Benton (1889-1975) and will be at the museum in Salem through Sept. 7.

There's a whole storyline about Hollywood running through Benton's career, best explicated by Seb Smee in the Globe. Connections to the movie business are literal as well as stylistic. The most dazzling is "Hollywood" (below) a 56"x84" tempera and oil painting that resulted from a Life magazine commission and a month Benton spent hanging around Hollywood studios. The final work is a deep focus mural with about eight things going on at once, a co-mingling of artifice and gritty reality that doesn't quite make literal sense in the same way that Hollywood doesn't make sense. The black smoke rising from a fire in the background echoes the smoke plume in Benton's 1927 "Boomtown," also in the exhibition, but there's something incrementally more ambitious and strange in "Hollywood."

Thomas Hart Benton, Hollywood, 1937-38. Tempera with oil on canvas, mounted on board, 56 x 84 in. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Bequest of the artist. Photo by Jamison Miller. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Benton's earlier American Historical Epic series (1920-28) is here, hung along the curving walls of a dazzling red room. Benton's critique of early American history, notably its brutality, rendered the series something less than popular in its day. The downside is that only nine of the 14 large paintings could be secured for the exhibit, so high-quality reproductions (unframed) are mounted alongside the real thing. That decision might be criticized by purists, but the overall impact is so potent it's hard to argue. This is work that needs to be seen together, and it's hard to imagine a better display.

Following the Hollywood trail, you'll want to see Benton's promotional art for John Ford's screen adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath, but it's illustration, not really competition for the stunning paintings. I see all sorts of echoes or influences in Benton's work, from the skewed Americana of his contemporary Grant Wood to the heroic figures of Soviet art to some strange clouds that seem to leak right out of a Dali.

In Benton's 1920 "People of Chilmark (Figure Composition)" (below), a group of men and women in bathing gear rassle a small sailboat in topsy-turvy surf. One of them holds a medicine ball. What exactly is going on here? Looking just at the facts, it might be a pleasant afternoon's frolic on a Cape Cod beach where Benton spent some summers, but the composition and the dark sky suggest something far more tumultuous. It's hard to identify exactly why it seems like such a terrific painting. But does anyone else see a faint echo of "Watson and the Shark" here?

Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920. Oil on canvas, 65 5/8 x 77 5/8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Scuplture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation. Photo by Cathy Carver. © Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

There are not many you could call "bad" paintings in this show, although the one painted as a promotion for the Burt Lancaster film The Kentuckian seems like kitsch compared to most of what's on display. But if you want to see something truly crazy ... there are two or three of WWII-era propaganda paintings that depict Axis soldiers as subhuman monsters that you will see in your nightmares for days. One has Jesus on the cross being run through with a metal pole by a handful of these creatures while he is also strafed by a Nazi fighter plane, blood dripping down, an angular tableau like some evil inversion of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. It may not be "good" art, but it's one of the images here that will stick with you.

Hey "Buffy" fans, tried "Orphan Black" yet?

For my friends who haven't started binge-watching Orphan Black‬ yet, I thought of this analogy: It's like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, except Xander is gay and competent, and Sarah Michelle also plays Willow, Cordelia, Bad Willow, Anya and Faith.

Yes, she occasionally fights with herself.

Tatiana Maslany stars as Sarah Manning, a rough-edged young single mom who learns that she has sisters. A lot of them. She is the result of a cloning experiment hatched by a dark conspiracy. And it's only through sister power that she can fight back. Maslany also plays Cosima (dreadlocked, organic, lesbian scientist), Helena (abused Eastern European capable of ultra violence) and Alison (Stepford wife with a comically twisted side and a dopey husband). The sisters ("SEEStras" in Helena's pronunciation, which the others sometimes adopt) interact all the time through the magic of television, and are so stunningly well differentiated you will forget it's the same actress. Their end-of-season-2 dance party is a wonder to behold. Maslany also plays Rachel, a leader in the conspiracy. Props also to Jordan Gavaris, who plays Felix, Sarah's Xanderesque sidekick, a sometime hustler and artist manque, sarcastic and frequently exasperated as he cares for more and more seestras.Worth a look, I'm tellin' ya. Oh, and it's Canadian.

Photo: Tatiana Maslany as, clockwise from top left: Sarah, Alison, Helena, Rachel and Cosima. From Wikipedia.

Thomas Hart Benton hits Salem in June

The Peabody Essex Museum is one of three museums that has organized a major exhibit of Thomas Hart Benton art seen through the prism of the movie industry. American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood is supposedly the first major traveling Benton exhibit in 25 years, and gathers more than 100 works, including paintings, murals, drawings, prints and illustrated books, pairing them with clips from Hollywood movies "to take visitors on a journey through America’s myths and into its national character." The exhibit runs June 6-Sept. 7 at PEM, before moving on to the The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, both of which co-organized it. The complete press release is after the jump. (Image: Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait with Rita, about 1924. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jack H. Mooney. Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution/Art Resource, NY. Art © T.H. Benton and R.P. Benton Testamentary Trusts/UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.)

Shockheaded and then some

Saw Company One's Shockheaded Peter at the Modern on Friday night and ... whoa.

For starters, the Steven Bogart-directed production is the most visually dazzling thing I've seen from C1. Taken together with their entirely different yet equally impressive production of The Flick in the same house not long ago, Shockheaded Peter suggests that it's really time to find the troupe a regular home outside the confines of the BCA basement where they usually perform. Bogart shares credit with set designer Michael Anania, costumer Miranda Giurleo, puppet-and-mask maker Eric Bornstein and others. But this show, with its fold-up set and crazy creatures, is literally something to see.

If you liked Bogart's Cabaret at Oberon a few years back, I'd draw this connection: the decadent-and-worse Europeans in that show were probably warped in childhood by having Heinrich Hoffman's The Struwwelpeter read to them at bedtime. Hoffman's collection of very-bad-things-happen-to-misbehaving-children tales forms the basis of this show, originally created for the stage by Julian Crouch and Phelim McDermott with songs by the Tiger Lillies. Bogart brought in Walter Sickert and his Army of Broken Toys to make the music, has choreographed the whole thing to a T and come up with something quite entertainingly over the top and dark, dark, dark.

I agree with most of what Don Aucoin wrote in the Globe. This is part Grand Guignol, part Kafka, part drunk-Disney-animator-revenge-fantasy. The tale of poor Shockheaded Peter, his terrible parents and his return from the crawlspace is woven through seven or eight other largely wordless vignettes, fairy tales with unhappy though fitting endings. Sickert sits with a keyboard and guitar at the side of the stage, a big, black-clad presence growling out songs like the love child of Dr. John and Rob Zombie. Most of the talking is done by Alexandria King (top picture, by Paul Fox via C1) as the MC, whose interesting, multilevel presence simultaneously suggests a slinky, devilish carnival barker luring us in and a past or possibly current victim warning of the cruel fates that await us. Standout among the others is Brooks Reeves (bottom picture, also by Paul Fox) as Peter's craven dad. A few moments could be a little more linear, perhaps, but this one will stick in your head.

Do not miss.