How’s my Dry January going?
Great, thanks for asking. I broke my streak last Saturday at a show in Medford. It’s an easy streak to break when you have no overwhelming reason to start, no end goal in mind and a deep appreciation for getting a little buzz on while you listen to music.
For 10 and a half days I was a card-carrying member of Dry January Nation. Was I part of a burgeoning movement or just a fool being taken for a ride by the Sober Industrial Complex? Nobody can say for sure in this post-fact-checking world, but I inquired at a few local establishments to find out whether Dry January was, indeed, a “thing.”
First off, is there really a noticeable decline in alcohol sales in January? All the bar and venue operators who responded to this question agreed that sales suffered during this period. Gerald Amaral (Union Tavern) suggested that the drop was as much as 50 percent. Holly Heslop (Cambridge Common, Lizard Lounge) didn’t quote a dramatic figure, but she did observe that the dip was part of a larger two-year trend that hurt alcohol sales across the calendar year.
Before we hastily connect the dots between a dip in alcohol sales and sobriety movements, though, let’s explore some alternative explanations. Gil Aharon (Lilypad) acknowledged a January dip in alcohol sales at his venue during this time, but characterized the decline as part of a general slowdown in business between Thanksgiving and the end of January. It’s a time many people leave town to go on vacation, or visit friends and family. And when they return, they might be looking to spend a little less after the holiday splurge.
In other words, the slowdown in business might be more efficiently explained by shifts in cultural and economic behaviors triggered by end-of-year calendar events and independent of any burning desire to get off the sauce.
While noting that alcohol sales can provide a nontrivial amount of the revenue that keeps local venues afloat, we should hold off on our alarmist “Dry January is killing the local music scene” takes for now. Business is cyclical, and alcohol sales have historically rebounded after declines in January.
Sam Epstein (The Jungle), for one, isn’t worried about any impending epochal shift in our taste for alcohol, noting that Jesus and Dionysus have been doling out the stuff for around 3,000 years and counting, and people seem to like it.
The good news is that there are more palatable nonalcoholic options than ever. You don’t have to avoid bars and venues to keep your sobriety streak going. All the bars and venues we polled offered nonalcoholic beverage options. Heslop noted that their January drink of the month was a mocktail called “Cherry Pie” and that their nonalcoholic IPA from Athletic Brewing was a big seller.
I drank a couple ABC IPAs at a Lizard Lounge show last week and they tasted like … actual beer. If the last time you tried boozeless booze was an O’Doul’s in your cousin’s basement during the mid ’90s, it’s time to give the beverage category another try.
That being said, there was a fantastic mocktail selection at Deep Cuts, the music venue in Medford where I broke my own streak. I didn’t think twice about it. I spotted an attractive German-style pilsner on the beer menu, asked myself “What would Jesus do?” and ordered accordingly. Just follow your moral intuition, I say.
Hit this
Thursday through Sunday: Boston Celtic Music Fest (various, Cambridge and Somerville)
I really am going to work up the courage to dance at the Boston Urban Ceilidh this year.
Jan. 19: Megan From Work, Tiffy, Barefoot Young (State Park, Cambridge)
An evening of tender punk in Kendall Square. New Hampshire’s Megan From Work is still riding high on the heels of their full-length release “Girl Suit.” Tiffy always brings the hawt licks with an exacting slackrawk precision. And Barefoot Young cooked at last year’s Nice, A Fest. You’d pay good money to see all these bands share a bill during the summer fest months. But it’s the offseason, so you can catch all three for the low, low, low price of free. Don’t be a cheapskate, tip the bands. Venmo usually accepted.
Tuesday: This Is Lorelei, Youbet, Intac (The Rockwell, Somerville)
A pair of bands from the Empire State, This Is Lorelei and Youbet. Both craft electropop in varying degrees of -fi: hi- and lo-. This Is Lorelei’s song “I’m All Fucked Up” makes you feel like sprinting barefoot through the rain. There’s a fancy-free, wyrd folkiness to Youbet’s 2020 LP “Compare and Despair.” But the latest single “Deny” from the musician behind the moniker, Nick Llobet, rocks with a harder edge. So who knows what sound they’ll bring to the deep dark dive below Davis Square. Local opener Intac brings a growth mindset.
Jan. 23: Mahya Hamedi Group (The Mad Monkfish, Cambridge)
Mahya Hamedi blends jazz, pop and contemporary Iranian folk music into a soup that’s at least as tasty as The Mad Monkfish’s duck soup. Yum. Her artist bio boasts that she’s played “over 20 shows,” which, frankly, is not a lot. But I guess these Berklee College of Music grads, who develop their chops all day long in a classroom atmosphere, think about performances in a different way than your average workaday gigging musician. Backed by a brigade of current Berklee students, the night promises to be “highly syncretic.” And nights never break their promises.
Live: Ron Savage Trio at DX Dunster
There’s a new jazz brunch in town, and it’s at the bottom of the stairwell at 33 Dunster, where the old John Harvard’s Brewery used to be until it went belly up during the pandemic.
DX Dunster rolled out its inaugural jazz brunch Sunday, the brunchiest day of the week, in the form of a soft opening that catered to friends and family of the club, along with sundry journos who, habitually and with the utmost grace, accept warm invitations to free food, drink and music.
The Ron Savage Trio performed a businesslike set to a crowd slightly distracted by their Southern bread baskets, chicken and waffles, shrimp and grits, fried fish and banana pudding pound cake by Everybody Gotta Eat, the Jamaica Plain caterer that is all over Cambridge.
Savage (drums), Ron Mahdi (bass) and Consuelo Candelaria (keys) are all Berklee faculty who can knock out performances like this in their sleep. They’d play a concert to a room full of crash test dummies, if they felt like it, just to stay limber.
“Soft openings” are funny sorts of things. Nobody knows where, when, or how they’re supposed to be. It’s a calculated moment of chaos when you let things go wrong so you can identify what’s going wrong and fix it.
Food and drink aside, DX Dunster is already humming along in the music department. An adequate PA pushed clean jazz sounds out into the main hall at just the right volume, loud enough to appreciate while still being able to make small talk at your table.
The venue has ambitions to become a “destination for culture in Cambridge,” which will require a fuller calendar of events than is offered. But many fine establishments were built on the back of a reliable brunch service. To paraphrase scripture, “Out of jazz and mimosas proceedeth great things.” Amen.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
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