Ready, set, doh!
Sign-ups for musicians at the inaugural Cambridge Porchfest (July 19-20) opened and closed before you finished your holiday hot dogs. Better luck next year …
True enough, the one day of Cambridge Porchfest that might involve actual porches, the July 19 celebration around Cambridgeport, has been independently accepting performer applications at its website for weeks.
But the neighborhood group managing this portion of the fest, the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association, doesn’t have nearly the reach of the organizing entity that is driving the event as a whole, Cambridge Arts. You’d think it would make sense for the arts council to promote the call for musicians for its own event.
To be fair, the council did promote the call. Sort of. A press release was sent out on July 2, advertising an application with a deadline of Sunday. Additionally, a page at the council’s website was constructed hastily to link the relevant Google Forms.
You know how I know the page was constructed hastily? Because the URLs to the Google Forms were dropped in whole, with all their gory alphanumeric details, instead of hyperlinking something civilized such as “Musicians apply here.”
The website manager was in such a rush to get on their holiday weekend that the rough edges of the webpage were left rough. Who can blame them? Americans work too many hours. We need more holidays, not less.
The thing is, though, that all the local musicians (plus hosts and sundry volunteers) who’d be interested in responding to the call were eager to get on their holiday weekends too. The timing of Porchfest’s call for musicians shares some similarities with the timing of the Big Ugly Bill for the federal budget. Jam it through at the last second without enough time for a meaningful response.
I no longer take the inaugural Cambridge Porchfest to be an AI hallucination. Whatever it is, it is happening July 19-20. But the way the festival is being organized and administered is starting to feel like a low-wattage grift. The event is funded by public money, but the public is barely involved and almost completely in the dark with showtime just a week away.
At the time of this writing, the organizers have yet to reveal a single artist who is performing at this two-day event. That’s crazy! Punk rockers organizing fests in their basements give more lead time on lineups and schedules than Cambridge Arts.
Porchfests are a popular type of community event. They’re everywhere. And their bottom-up, grassroots-type organization is part of what makes them popular. Right now it looks like the arts council is leveraging that popularity to bait-and-switch the people of Cambridge into paying for a Porchfest that is mostly not a Porchfest.
Instead, whatever is happening July 19-20 looks like a small group of governmental bodies, nonprofits and PR auxiliaries pingponging public funds and services between them while local taxpayers Joe and Jane Musician wait for invitations that come and go in a blink of an eye. That approach is good enough to slap something generic onto the local arts and culture calendar, but the event will have much less of the participatory and public joy that people traditionally associate with Porchfests.
That’s too bad, and it seems like an unforced error when there are so many good examples of Porchfests done right elsewhere. It’s the “pilot” year of the fest – okay, fine – but where’s this pilot flying?
Hit this
Saturday: Walter Sickert & The Army of Broken Toys (The Sinclair, Cambridge)
If I understand correctly the blurb at the headliner’s website, Walter Sickert & The Army of Broken Toys have been doing their thing for 20 years. That’s a lot of water under the bridge. And a lot of time to develop into one of the most distinctive music acts on the local scene. You get what they’re going for the first time you see it and hear it: Tim Burton out on the town with the Marquis de Sade for a night of rock ’n’ roll. A fine platform on which to build upbeat music that translates into live shows with E Street Band energy. Eight Foot Manchild and Lovina Falls, the current stomping grounds of Valerie Forgione, open.
Tuesday: Carrellee (Middle East, Cambridge)
A night of dark electronica and goth rock. Carrellee is touring through the building that’s been earmarked since forever for demolition to make room for a boutique hotel. Any day now, Sater family. Not that I’m rooting for such a thing – just the opposite! We’d lose a complex that houses as many as five stages, depending on your standards for staging music. Sure, the facility is a little creaky. But that won’t sully your experience of Carrallee’s synth-driven noir pop. In fact, the déclassé atmosphere will only enhance your enjoyment of the brooding and haunted undertones of her self-titled second LP. Local openers Ex-Hyena, Misuser and Identical Palms will set the darkwave table.
July 17: Leopardo (The Lilypad, Cambridge)
Another curious gem from Illegally Blind’s Jason Trefts, the booker behind Fuzzstival and assorted one-off revelations throughout the calendar year. The bill is organized around Leopardo, a postpunk-psych outfit from Switzerland. Maximum Rocknroll described Leopardo as a “one-man band” in its review of 2020’s “Di Caprio” LP. But I see a lot of musicians credited in the liner notes for the latest LP “Side A / Side B.” It’s exciting to catch acts from abroad, but you should always brace yourself for the possibility that one guy from the band shows up with a guitar and 20,000 backing tracks. Visas and traveling expenses make everything difficult. Worth a roll of the dice, for sure, because sometimes the stripped-down performances can be eye-openers. Austin’s Spirit Ghost and local tripped-out cowboys Tyler & The Names open.
Live: Los Fletcheros at Toad
Los Fletcheros played to a jam-packed Toad audience Saturday, proving it’s still possible to draw a crowd during this particularly sleepy time in the show calendar.
Like Memorial Day and Labor Day, Fourth of July weekend is a time a lot of people either get out of town or hang around the backyard grill. They don’t typically flock to clubs. But Los Fletcheros, the “house band” of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, came with their built-in fan base: all their fellow classmates at the graduate department.
While the band performed perfectly serviceable covers of classics such as the Beatles’ “Something” and the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden,” the real reason classmates turned up was just to witness the legacy of Los Fletcheros ride again. Legend has it that the band has been active at the Fletcher School, with rotating membership, for three decades, and that it started out as a mariachi band. Hence, the name Los Fletcheros, I guess.
Thirty years is a long time to maintain a tradition as absurd as a departmental cover band. Los Fletcheros is an institution unto itself. It’s a beautiful thing.
Does that band name feel a little racist in 2025, though? I don’t know. Hard to read the room these days. Off the top of my head, I can think of Yo La Tengo and Los Campesinos! as examples of bands with no Hispanics or Latinos that nevertheless chose a Spanish band name. Because they thought it was … funny.
If they got a do-over tomorrow, would they pick the same name?
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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