The sometimes sparkling and sometimes muddy waters of live music on the Island run deep, and like the wake that follows every departing ferry, it seems there are always a couple of questions churning up. At the end of last summer we wondered, would Outerland really close? Would there be any outdoor festivals in 2009, given the economy and the financial losses of 2008’s WVVY-radio fundraiser festival in Aquinnah and the larger, high-tech, high-ticket Martha’s Vineyard Music Festival at Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs?
Sadly, the answer to the first question is yes. Outerland did close. But not to despair, the music plays on there under the banner of Nectar’s, whose formula for live music has proven successful at its Burlington, Vermont, club – a music hot spot since it opened in 1975. As to the second question, neither festival broke even, and it’s still a bit of a touchy topic as some unpaid bills remain from the Oak Bluffs production put on by the New York–based Festival Network, which has since all but folded. So, the answer is no: There are no outdoor music festivals on the Island this summer, at least not on the same scale as last year’s. But on Martha’s Vineyard, there’s always live music to be found, both indoors and out, both in summer and off-season.
Music is part of the fabric of life here, woven into the eclectic ensemble of events this community continuously fosters. And as one question gets answered, another is raised. Like, what would fill the gap left last winter by the closing of Balance, the hip, upscale Oak Bluffs bar that over an eight-year run had hosted a range of acts such as Blues Traveler, the Island’s queen of soul Sabrina Luening, and even Bruce Willis sitting in on a jam session?
Well, the Oyster Bar Grill on Circuit Avenue, where Balance was first located, had its entertainment license revoked last year after fire codes changed and is restricted to single-event licenses until some costly renovations are made. And where Balance was for the past two years on Oak Bluffs Avenue, you’ll find Irish music at Danny Quinn’s Pub. It seems when one light blinks out, another comes on, as with Edgartown newcomer Atlantic, which has a packed calendar of live music.
Ultimately the Vineyard has something of a Field of Dreams, if-you-play-the-venue-will-come enchantment. When clubs grow old, change names, or are transformed into other businesses, new venues pop up and old ones are resurrected to keep the music stream flowing and the tunes in the public ear.
And when it comes to musicians, bands, venues, and gigs, there’s no shortage of Island names. Let’s start with some ABCs: Aboveground Records, Alchemy, Alex Karalekas, Alex Taylor, Allen Farm No Nukes Festival, Aquinnah Music Festival, Aretha Witham, Atlantic Connection, Atria’s Brick Cellar Bar, Balance, Ballyhoo, Barbara Hoy, Barleyfest, Becky Barca-Tinus, Bellevue Cadillac, Ben Taylor, Black Brook Singers, Blues Traveler, Bodes, Brad Tucker, Buck Shank...okay, let’s just stop there, as the first name on the C list is something of a flag of triumph flying over the Island’s folk and rock music scene: Carly Simon.
Long ago and far away: The Island roots of rock-and-roll and folk music
Carly is intrinsically tied to the Island’s largest venue, but let’s hearken back to the days pre–Hot Tin Roof/Outerland/Nectar’s MV. Yes, there was such a time, when the only sound coming from the location of the venerable airport club – now thirty years old, despite ownership and name changes – was that of the wind weaving through a backwoods tangle of trees and wild grasses. But elsewhere on the Island, roots for today’s rock and folk music community were being laid down.
Picture the brand new Chilmark Community Center, in the late fifties, as one of the It places to hear live music. Everything from Curly Carroll’s fiddle music and community sing-alongs to featured folk stars. Carly remembers, “I used to go as a little girl with my sister and my mom to hear Jessie Benton and Davie Gude sing. Jessie was my idol, the daughter of Thomas Hart Benton, and Davie was the boy everybody was in love with, including me and half of the Island.”
Carly’s adoration of the pair inspired a music career as well as a dream. Watching Jessie and David perform, she says, “That was when the light bulb went off, and I thought that’s what I’m gonna do.” And, just like Jessie, “I want to sing with the man I’m in love with.” Carly and her sister Lucy started singing together, songs such as “Goodnight, Irene” and the Jamaican folk tune, she croons, “Daylight come an’ I wanna go home.”
“My mother would trot my sister and I out to sing at every Vineyard cocktail party,” Carly recalls. Even then, in the late fifties and early sixties, the Island was a draw for big names in the music industry, especially at the Mooncusser Coffeehouse on Circuit Avenue in Oak Bluffs, where Basics department store now resides. The cafe’s roster included the Greenbriar Boys, Judy Collins, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, and Don McLean, and often those fresh-faced, teenaged girls from Chilmark who became known as The Simon Sisters. “We were opening acts to these more famous people,” Carly says. “That’s where we learned more of a repertoire.”
Another popular performance hot spot in the sixties, the Unicorn, was an offshoot of the iconic Boston coffeehouse of the same name. In 1963, teenaged James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar won a folk-singing contest at the Oak Bluffs location. But by the time the Unicorn closed in 1969, both James’s and Carly’s careers were soaring, as was Cupid’s arrow, and Carly’s dream to sing with the man she loved came true.
“I moved in with James Taylor in the fall of ’71. We sang at various high schools [here, when there was more than one]....Then we were coming home to a cabin that was basically a lean-to, and sleeping on hay practically, and we were both big stars at the top of the charts and got Grammys that year.” She says the intimacy of their Vineyard lifestyle suited them musically, and suited their growing family.
“When James and I were married [in November 1972] that was a very fertile time, because it was healthy competition. And later too when we were having babies, and we were in love, and we were listening very carefully to what each other played. In a way, walking on eggshells, but passing judgment in a positive way that we’d be altering ever so slightly what we played.” As an afterthought, she muses, “Well, James might disagree, but he certainly altered mine.”
But with a young family, it was also difficult to maintain her level of involvement in her other “baby,” the newly opened Hot Tin Roof.
Up on the roof laughing at the heat: Hot Tin Roof becomes Outerland becomes Nectar’s MV
“It was basically my baby: I’d introduce the bands, sing sometimes – like I sang with Peter Tosh, doing the ‘gonna walk and don’t look back’ Mick Jagger part,” Carly says fondly, looking back to the first days of the Hot Tin Roof, which she opened with partners George Brush and Herb Putnam in June of 1979. “It was great,” she says. “We invested time and love and money. The first couple of summers were fantastic.”
Carly says part of their success was that, in those days, the costs of running the place were relatively low, because they were getting performers who were pretty big up-and-coming acts but not yet huge stars, including Cyndi Lauper and Bonnie Raitt. She says, “We had a house where our acts would stay. And people just wanted to come here.” So the Roof’s rapidly growing reputation drew even bigger names of the times: Taj Mahal, Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King.
The market was different in the late seventies and early eighties too – the first days of disco and dance fever – which helped the club, because people just wanted to go out to dance. “We’d have DJs on the week nights and live music on the weekends. DJs were very lucrative, because we didn’t have to pay as much as for the acts.”
Yet right from the beginning, Carly says, they had some difficulties. “There were intrinsic problems with the sound, being a low roof,” she says, and to some extent, as managers, they were winging it and didn’t necessarily have the skills to correct those kinds of problems. “It’s got a better chance now,” Carly notes, “because of modern technology.”
Cory Cabral was the manager of the club during its last few years as the Roof and the talent buyer for Outerland for a year after it opened in 2006. And he believes Carly is right about the dynamics that made it work in the early years. But in the final years of the Roof, and since then, the club’s overhead has been so high, one unsuccessful show could tip the ledger to red. Cory says, “The overhead is crushing.” And because it’s primarily a resort-based business, there is little leeway for error. “The insurances alone are crippling. The property itself has a land lease.You own the business, you own the Roof, or whatever you call the club, but you don’t own the land underneath it,” he says. “To put on a single big show at that venue is a huge financial commitment. It costs twenty-five to thirty grand.
“It’s like making an investment in the market, but at the end of the day, there are so many things that can go wrong,” Cory says. “You may just not hit the demographic that likes that act, and you’re behind the eight ball.”
Though DJ nights worked in the early days, they just don’t have that kind of pull now, so clubs have to come up with other ways to make ends meet. Cory notes the smaller venue at Outerland, which was called The Dock, as an example of working with what you’ve got: A curtain blocked off most of the club to create a space for up to about fifty people where a portable wooden stage mimicked a dock. (Nectar’s MV will continue to use this small-venue setup.)
“The idea is, we don’t have to open the entire venue on the full scale, where operating costs are three times, four times, the smaller space.” Because even when the doors are closed, the meter is always running for operational costs such as electricity. Cory says, “The overhead, the seasonality of it, killed [Outerland].”
But he believes there’s a future for the club. “You have to start on an upswing,” he says. And that means getting the first shows of the season right. “I think over the years, part of the success of the club, when it had success, was knowing who’s here and who your audience was. And when it was empty, it was clearly evident that we didn’t know. And you can only have so many of those empty nights.”
Can new kid on the block Nectar’s, which is testing the waters with a summer lease, make it work? Cory thinks they have a good chance: “Nectar’s, they’ve got smaller venues [in Vermont] but a good brand. Basically they’re taking that brand, which has worked really well for them, and they’re applying it to the Vineyard.”
Mona Rosenthal, one of the three co-owners of Outerland, also believes it can work. “It’s a legendary nightclub,” she says. “People come to the Island to be entertained, and even make their plans around what’s playing there. You know there’s always going to be a need for it.”
Never too late: Other Island clubs
Meanwhile, the Roof/Outerland/Nectar’s MV is not the only act in town, although the rest of the club scene here is just as capricious. To wit, the Atlantic Connection on Circuit Avenue, which had been the second-largest live-music venue for more than a decade, was replaced in 2006 by an arcade. But it might be argued the landmark closing of the last decade was the Wintertide, which began as a roving folk-music parlor in the seventies and eventually established itself at Five Corners in Vineyard Haven in 1991. For two decades, it had been as thriving a folk coffeehouse as any urban counterpart, and indeed, one that gained national acclaim under manager Tony Lombardi, whose singer-songwriter retreats helped establish such budding talents as Martin Sexton, Susan Tedeschi, and Mindy Jostyn. After Tony left and the retreats stopped, the Wintertide fizzled out, closing in 1999.
The music-and-food mix seems to be one successful formula for venues. This spring Doug and Leslie Hewson moved their Vineyard Haven restaurant Mediterranean to where Lola’s was on Beach Road in Oak Bluffs. With the larger space, they’ve added music to the menu and hope to keep as full a roster of live acts (year-round and primarily Island bands) as Lola’s had for fifteen years.
Food might be what will save the Ritz Café on Circuit Avenue, which quite rightly has the gritty, saloon feel of a bar that’s been on the block for decades, and whose fate was up in the air after a much-publicized sale last spring fell through before the deal closed. Hoping to infuse new energy into the club, which has year-round live entertainment (primarily Island talent such as the Mike Benjamin Band), the long-inactive kitchen has reopened – with a spicy difference: Rather than the diner fare offered years ago, the Ritz has gone ethnic, offering Thai food for lunch and dinner.
Aside from nightclubs, Martha’s Vineyard has a year-round calendar of live music events that have that warm, community- coming-together feel of yesteryear, including the autumn Harvest Fest at the Agricultural Hall in West Tisbury, customarily featuring bands such as Johnny Hoy and the Bluefish, and the Flying Elbows – the fiddle band, it should be noted, has been around with various changes in membership since the sixties.
There is something about that community element, almost a which-came-first question of whether it’s the community that fosters the music or the music that fosters our sense of community. Nevertheless, the Vineyard has a strong history of benefit concerts. Two of note – both for the heartfelt, emotional vibe generated, and the dollars raised – are the Hot Tin Roof benefit in 2000 for reggae-legend Winston Grennan (famed for creating the one-drop beat) and last year’s benefit at Outerland for beloved blues man Maynard Silva. Both concerts brought all of the who’s who of Vineyard talent to the stage, and sell-out audiences to the dance floor to help out these popular artists, both of whom were battling cancer.
Island musicians never fail to surprise us: Head to Oak Bluffs for lunch on a June day and find Ballyhoo playing at the annual Harborfest, or tuck into Offshore Ale on a winter night to find Rick Padilla of Mercy Beat going back to his Cuban roots and singing Spanish love songs. And perhaps it’s testimony to how much music is a part of our lives that Island radio station WMVY’s annual event does not even have to be a music festival per se, but rather the winter Big Chili Contest where, certainly, music is an element but not the focus.
The folk scene seems to be more aligned with off-the-beaten-path venues, such as the many church-turned-theater-turned-music-clubs and places like Aboveground Records, where co-owner Chris Liberato has showcased various Island bands since he opened the Edgartown record store in 1996. There are some intimate Island bars too that present more like a neighbor’s den: The Newes from America pub in Edgartown, where Chappy singer-songwriter Kevin Keady performed weekly with his band The Cattle Drivers all this past winter; and Alchemy’s upstairs lounge and Atria’s downstairs Brick Cellar Bar (both in Edgartown), where Kate Taylor had weekly gigs the summer of 2004. So, the loss of places like the Atlantic Connection and potentially the Roof/Outerland might not impact folk musicians as much as it would bar and cover bands.
And there are, Kevin notes, “tons and tons of opportunities to play here.” Though he says the level of collaboration between musicians may not be so much an element of folk, nor of live music at large, as it is intrinsic to the nature of the Island: “Because there’s a finite number of musicians here, there’s going to be a lot of swapping and matching to accommodate all the situations that arise.”
Perhaps as a counteraction to portable technologies like iPods and the Internet, both of which give increasingly easy and wide access to all sorts of music, live acoustic folk music in particular seems to have had a resurgence in recent years. Kevin points to a pivotal performance in 2004 at the Katharine Cornell Theater in Vineyard Haven, featuring Old Crow Medicine Show, Grammy-winner Gillian Welch, and David Rawlins: “I’d have to say it seemed to coincide with this revival of acoustic music that’s reached here,” Kevin says. “Certainly that Buck [Shank] and Don [Groover], both electric guitar gods, picked up acoustic instruments around that time shows a return to that.”
And the momentum has continued with more back-in-the-day kind of barn-dance events that bring the community together – including the musical potluck series at the Chilmark Community Center and West Tisbury’s Grange Hall put on by Willy Mason and Ballyhoo’s Alex Karalekas and Brad Tucker, who now plays with the Mooncussers, a new band that debuted at Nectar’s MV’s opening the last weekend in June.
Take me to the field: Outdoor festivals
Live music here has never been confined by walls. Pretty much every area of the Island has a history of outdoor concerts. Some say the hallmark is the 1978 No Nukes protest concert that drew thousands of people to Allen Farm in Chilmark. The gods were smiling down, with one of those quintessential fall days – a blue sky dotted with a few milky clouds and a warm breeze rippling the sparkling waters of the Atlantic and the expanse of green fields housing a veritable sea of onlookers. And the Island muses were in full force too, with Carly and James, along with John Hall of Hall and Oates, performing on a makeshift stage. Cast against that farm background, it was decidedly reminiscent of the iconic Woodstock festival.
A decade and a half later, Livestock ’95, the benefit concert for the new Ag Hall in West Tisbury, included renowned names such as surprise guest Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, and it brought James and Carly together on the same stage for the first time since they’d split up in 1981. The crowd numbered some ten thousand and the event carried with it the peace-love-and- understanding feel of the folk heyday. Yet only a few years later, the Nantucket Nectars Music Festival (no relation to the Nectar’s running the former Outerland), which was held on the high school grounds, was sparsely attended though it featured big names, including Arlo Guthrie, Bruce Cockburn, and the Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir, as well as Island favorites such as Entrain.
There are always outside factors like weather that can impact numbers, but the fact that none of the large-scale outdoor concerts on the Island have been well attended since Livestock ’95 has to raise the question of whether that show marked the end of an era. While last summer’s WVVY fundraiser festival in Aquinnah had a warm, hippiesque glow with girls in long skirts dancing barefoot by the stage, children hula-hooping, and the occasional canine sniffing around the stage, it did not generate enough ticket sales to break even, let alone raise money for the community radio station. WVVY Station Manager Paul Munafo says, “It was a great idea. But it was a financial risk to start with, and maybe there’s room in the future for it to happen again, but not right now.”
Ditto that for the Martha’s Vineyard Music Festival at Ocean Park. One resounding complaint from Island youth and many year-rounders is that the $75 price tag for general admission was too exclusive. Island musician Colin Ruel says the show really excluded his peer group, and not just the price, but also the acts consigned. “They’re not playing to the crowd that would really want to be there. It seems to me, as far as promoting something, if you get that young crowd, that eighteen to twenty-something crowd, pumped for something, it just blows through the Island like wildfire. It’s so much more effective than gearing something just towards the older people.”
Cory Cabral, who left his position as talent buyer at Outerland in the spring of 2007 to work for Festival Network, says the problem was branding: “Festival Network, we were essentially positioned as a music-lifestyle company, where we would attract sponsors, upper-tier sponsors, to the affluent demographic of highly desirable locations throughout the world.”
Cory says, “It’s nothing different than any other music company does, but that we were picking these really remote, beautiful locations,” such as the desert in Mali and the mountains of Whistler, British Columbia. Cory, who grew up on the Island, says unfortunately the company had a glamorized idea about wealthy Islanders and did not really understand the demographics of the Vineyard. “The pricing was off, the market was off, as far as who they were targeting. And then with the economy, it was kind of a perfect storm of miscalculations.”
Plus, he says, if they’d had the budget to build the festival – absorbing the costs – over the next several years, they might have achieved a profit margin that would have made it viable. “The idea was to build it to a point where it became one of the crown jewels of Vineyard summer, kind of like the Newport event,” he says.
So, where last summer we had two sizable festivals, this year we have none. But there are many smaller events and fundraisers on the Island that incorporate live music. And there is no shortage of the less publicized, homebred, grass-roots kinds of gatherings that have highlighted the early careers of Carly, James, Kate Taylor, and so many others.
Since the mid-nineties, Kevin Keady has been hosting the Harvest Hoe Down, an annual, fall, Lollapalooza-like outdoor fest on the Chappy hay farm where he works and resides. With bales of hay serving as seating and a big bonfire for upwards of a hundred guests to gather around for a potluck sharing of food, his word-of-mouth bash brings together Island musicians, including Joe Keenan, Tristan Israel, Nancy Jephcote and Paul Thurlow, and Nina Violet, to perform on a bandstand comprised of hay wagons. Kevin says he’ll usually get some off-Island acts too – “who date back to the Wintertide days: Rob Skelton usually shows up, and the Herschler Brothers, who penned songs for Johnny Cruz, and Entrain.”
Kevin’s only lament about the Island’s music scene is rather poignant, “There are no real folk venues anymore, where it’s an understood situation that you’re laying down these new songs that are the new crop.” Meanwhile, his regular, summer, outdoor gig at the Farmer’s Market in West Tisbury, where The Cattle Drivers are now a mainstay from 10 a.m. until noon every Saturday, suits him just fine “to be growing out of the farming situation rather than the bar scene,” he says.
Home from the city: Making music and money in today’s world
With all the recent upheavals, you would think there’d be a dampening of the Island’s musical spirit. There isn’t, not really. Some complaining, certainly, but nobody’s pulling out their guitar strings because of a decrease in venues – and maybe even a decrease in the demand for live music itself. There is always something brewing – a new venue, a new band, or a new movement – to fuel the music engine.
Twenty-four-year-old Colin Ruel says he couldn’t believe the vibrant music community when he moved to the Island from Old Lyme, Connecticut, as a freshman in high school: “No one played music where I was from....When I came to the Vineyard, everyone was playing music. And at the high school, it was great, I got asked to join two bands the first day.” Soon, he was touring with Willy Mason, and Nina Violet. Now, he’s focused on playing his own music, as well as promoting emerging talent on the Island; he’s created youth-friendly shows at places like Che’s Lounge and Katharine Cornell Theater, both in Vineyard Haven. Colin prefers these smaller venues: “That’s the thing about live music, people want that connection with the artists....Those small venues are the best kinds of gigs, because it’s like you’re in someone’s living room and you’ve got that connection.”
And there is a lot of talent to be fostered here, Colin believes, including an even younger set of musicians who are already staking claims on the musical landscape, such as the teenaged foursome of Sal McNamara, Malcolm Smith, Noah Stuber, and Cooper Handy, who make up Pierre, a band that consistently draws a full house. But Colin realizes the low cover charges that these young, new acts bring in aren’t enough to pay band members. So he asks the bands to put proceeds from shows into a fund that will allow his newly formed (soon to be non-profit) production company, Noepe Records, to record and produce albums. “We’re going to be able to preserve so much of the music that’s happening right now. And the deal is we pay to record and print an album. We print maybe three hundred copies and we keep half of them to sell, and that money goes directly back into the fund.”
Colin says, “It’s a viable business, even now – people will go to see live music, no matter how poor they are. They want that connection with the artists.”
While many Island performers are career musicians in the sense that they are consistently playing (both public and private events such as weddings), producing, and even teaching, few of them earn a living solely as musicians. Some exceptions are Rick Bausman, Willy Mason, and Phil DaRosa, who are finding ways to do what they love full-time.
Rick Bausman, one of the original members of the seventies world-beat band the Ululators and then of Entrain, has turned his musical talents and passion into a profession. Rick says at some point he realized the touring-band lifestyle was not going to work for him – at least not once he started to raise a family. The success of his long-running ensemble Die Kunst der Drum, which has drawn Vineyarders (and visitors) to various beaches for informal, tribal-like drumming circles, inspired him to begin offering classes in a more formal way, and he founded The Drum Workshop.
Now he uses the ancient act of drumming as a cutting-edge therapy to treat certain kinds of conditions, including Parkinson’s disease. And the therapeutic benefits of his approach are gaining national recognition. U.S. News & World Report last year specifically recommended Rick’s Drum Workshop as an ongoing therapy for patients with Parkinson’s, after noting that research “has found motor control to be better in those who participated in group music sessions – improvisation with pianos, drums, cymbals, and xylophones – than in people who underwent traditional physical therapy.”
Willy Mason made his name off-Island when his song “Oxygen” became a hit in the United States and Europe. Between the two continents, Willy spent five years touring for six months of the year. Now, he is part of that network of young Island musicians creating their own events: “It’s about beginning to sort of assess your place on the Island as an adult, as a semi-adult. It’s been good to sort of tie myself to a place like this.”
Vineyard-born-and-raised Phil DaRosa also took to the road to try to earn a living as a musician – which he’s done with varying degrees of success for the better part of a decade: for five years, by touring New England with his first band, Bathtub Mary, and playing 150 shows a year; and for another two years by running his own publicity company to promote “other bands from all over the country who were on tour or releasing albums – including my own solo happenings.”
His next band formation, the Phil DaRosa Band, won the 2007 Emergenza music competition’s regional round in Hartford and went on to be a finalist in Providence. Now, he performs as a solo artist, from the House of Blues in Boston to Nectar’s in Vermont to the Rockwood Music Hall in New York City. Though he had to leave the Island to earn a living as a musician, Phil is quick to note, “It’s a great place to nurture your talent...and prepare for the bigger stages off-Island.”
The main restriction on the Island is size, Phil says. There are simply not enough clubs to be able to perform as frequently as you need to, nor the number of people to consistently get the size audience you need to pull. Now Phil is trying to find a balance between working off-Island and at home by setting up a recording studio here, with a hope, he says, “to start bringing in some local talent to get back on the path of making a living at this, while touring and playing shows as well.” Among other venues on the Vineyard, you might find him at Sharky’s Cantina in Oak Bluffs and at Nectar’s MV, which so far has had a good mix of genres and acts from on-Island (such as the Mooncussers) and off-Island – bigger names include rapper Ghostface Killah as well as Grace Potter and the Nocturnals (August 5).
So, the music plays on, and the consensus is that it will continue to do so – on the Island at least, rock-and-roll (and folk) will never die. As Cory Cabral sees it, “There’s always going to be a demand, to some extent, for live music. Maybe back in the earlier days there was more of a demand because of the climate and the demographics and socioeconomic factors....Sure, the economy has something to do with it, with less disposable income. But I still think there’s going to be a demand.”
Perhaps it’s the pioneer fortitude in the musical landscape here, with a camaraderie among musicians, that lends itself to that endurance. Or maybe it’s because, like nor’easters, Vineyarders expect the occasional musical storm to blow in and change the face of live music. Nevertheless, Carly Simon says, “Live music, you go out, it’s a social situation....I don’t think there’s anything out there that compares.”
