Here’s your fair warning that the Campfire Festival returns to Club Passim, beginning a four-day run, May 24. The singer-songwriter extravaganza is at least 25 years old, which puts the affair in Silver Jubilee territory.
The organizers will celebrate the same way they always do: platforming a deep roster of acoustic artists all across the spectrum, on and off the radar. The bill is sprinkled with names you might have heard from the Folk Collective, including Stephanie McKay, Gabriella Simpkins, Chris Walton, Almira Ara and more.
But the special ingredient in the secret sauce is always the names you don’t recognize. Artists that pull up with a six-string, a songbook of tunes that you’ve never heard and just blow you out of the water. Be there for a magical night, or two, or three, or all four. Your parents taught you about buying in bulk for volume discounts, right?
Hit this
Saturday: Still Around 2024 (Arts at the Armory, Somerville)
Who’s still around? Are you still around? Where else would we be? Sure, there’s a dip in population density once colleges and universities let out for summer, sending students on a three-month sojourn back to where the tuition checks come from. But the lease on that “garden” apartment runs through Sept. 1, so get your money’s worth and stay a while. Don’t miss Still Around, a fundraiser for brain tumor survivors organized by the mind who brought you Fuzzstival. With a festival-worthy lineup, including Squirrel Flower (solo), BabyBaby_Explores, Rick Maguire (of Pile), Nova One, Haasan Barclay, Bong Wish, Pet Fox and Mercet, there’s something for all ages and every billing address.
Sunday: The Owls Are Not What They Seem: The Music of “Twin Peaks” in Two Lodges (Lilypad, Cambridge)
If you’re a sucker for David Lynch, then you’re a sucker for the music of Angelo Badalamenti (RIP) who composed the hauntingly beautiful sounds that accompany the director’s most iconic films. Local musician and teacher Joel Roston proposes to put the spotlight on the “Twin Peaks” score to find out what makes it tick. Fair warning: We’re going to wade through some “basics of Western music theory” with a capital “W.” But presumably we’ll be hearing plenty of Badalamenti, which is more than enough sugar to help the medicine go down for a true fan. Wow, Bob, wow!
May 24: Talib Kweli (The Sinclair, Cambridge)
Talib Kweli’s gone full mogul-mode. The Brooklyn, New York, rapper spent decades making a name for himself as a skilled and sociopolitically conscious MC, working his way up the minor to major label food chain. It’s a natural next step to establish your own “media powerhouse” (Javotti Media, named after his grandmother) and start releasing your own music on your own terms. Not just music – join the #KweliClub for exclusive access to a lineup of books, films, art prints and apparel. Of course, unless you’re “Jay-Z” big, you still need to go out on tour to remind the people who you are. The balcony should be open at the Harvard Square hot spot.
Live: Somerville Porchfest
It was the Porchfest to end all Porchfests!
Only in a manner of speaking, of course, because we want and need this annual event to pull the curtain back on how much music lives in this city. Block to block, it was one giant “We here!” from resident musicians who give so much to the cultural life of Somerville, and Greater Somerville.
Sure, there was some grousing about Guster, the international touring indie rock band with local roots who decided to plant their flag at 12 Aberdeen Road in the 2 to 4 p.m. slot. Cue the alarmists. Quoth one: “I was there and it was scary … I suddenly understood how, if even one person had panicked, people could easily be trampled.”
Heaven help us. The crowd density was comparable to what you might expect in the general admission area of any average festival, or shopping downtown during the holidays, or waiting in line for a limited-time McRib combo meal. People afraid of people always have the option to stay home with their Netflix, DoorDash and toxic comment threads.
Bands such as Battlemode and The Love Shamans profited off the Guster glut, reeling in their post-set stragglers for an afterparty of chiptune and psych rock at 51 Laurel St. Dream poppers Otis Shanty pulled the college crowd at 163 Summer St. Ruby Grove and Cosmic Rush set up shop at prime locations along Highland Avenue. And, confidentially, playing proximate to a “wine and spirit” retailer hurt attendance not a whit.
Everywhere you looked, locals of all ages.
The youngest ones set up lemonade stands with digital payment options. The teenagers gathered in gaggles, thrilled to be out of sight and mind of their parents. The college set was deep in its hard seltzer game. The childless 30-something couples were dressed in the kind of upscale leisure wear that says to the world: “I’m older, wiser and still drink out of red cups.” The 40-something parents were dressed in whatever looked clean in the morning light while they wheeled their young messiahs around the neighborhood in tank-sized e-bikes. And the folks in their 50s, 60s and 70s, who actually own all the real estate that everyone else rents at cutthroat rates, were content to sit back and watch their property values rise in real time.
All those landlords should pay a rich dividend to the artists that made Somerville Porchfest happen. It takes a lot of time and resources to put a show together. The math rockers Voided Shape, for example, put on a three-band bill on Beacon Street. It was their first Porchfest and they spent months preparing, starting all the way back in icy February.
In addition to booking the other bands, they created and distributed the flyers, rallied a network of fans, family and friends, hammered out logistics for trash removal and recycling, and – probably the biggest single expense – pulled together a legit PA system so the music would actually sound, you know, good.
You know what? It sounded good!
Arts and cultural labor isn’t free, but it sure feels that way when strangers and neighbors alike can walk house to house under vaulted arches of cloudless azure, red cup in hand, enjoying music floating on the breeze with no cover charge. The “please tip the bands” advisory issued by the Somerville Arts Council is a cute and utterly fruitless gesture. Let’s think big! How’s that “rent stabilization” legislation coming along, Mayor Ballantyne?
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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