Some nights, you take the good with the bad.
We’ve just returned from our trip to New England, bodies sore, heads aching, but loving life. Providence RI was exactly as amazing as I remember it being from my 7 years there. I even chugged Rhode Island Red hot sauce—the world’s greatest hot sauce—on stage. And our new clarinet player Scrubz had his first crowd-surfing experience. And the Stone Church in New Hampshire was epic—mainly due to the massive shuffleboard table upstairs—and we also discovered that an old washboard lying around sounded amazing when played along to our polkas.
But here’s a pro tip: when the singer of our awesome, epic partner-in-crime band, Mickey Rickshaw, tells you that Boston’s music scene is collapsing because the good venues are all gone, you believe him.
The Bad: The Boston-Area Venue
I’m going to name and shame this venue for one reason: they just randomly take 20% from all door proceeds before anything even touches the musicians, no matter how colossal their bar sales will be or how sold out their night is. This is just pure extortion and so while I normally wouldn’t name a venue like this, The Burren, Somerville Massachusetts, this next few paragraphs is for you.
This was a punk show with three punk/celtic/folk bands. The word “punk” is, I think, fairly well understood, people know what it means: leather jackets, weird hair, loud guitars, and, you know, boisterous audience participation. Which is why it is suprising, halfway throgh a punk show, to have the manager smugly call you over to the side of the stage and inform you that “if there’s any more moshing, we are going to cut the power to the stage and this show will be done.”
The irony, of course, is that we are barely even a punk band anymore; I had just whipped the crowd into a polka frenzy, where they had all linked arms and danced around in a circle. They were a very tough crowd, immaculately dressed and cool for school, but I had just broken through their wall and got them to really move around, basically in the style of a Croatian children’s dance chorus. But I guess the owner/manager—this fuckin’ jabroni who has the audacity to put a Pogues poster up on his wall whilst banning pogo-style dancing at his venue—got a bee in his panties about the polka circle and had one of his employees threaten us with a cancelled show, mid-set.
I care so much about the audience and their participation, everything is supposed to be communal, wild, not unsafe or violent but obviously crazy. And to have it all shut down like that, by a venue that is basically robbing you at the same time, was just fucking brutal.
And then, as we do every show, we sent our mandolinier Jungle Jim crowdsurfing to get a beer. We’ve done this literally 250 times at venues all over the world with no real issues. We announce this loudly and the bar staff is usually surprised, sees it coming, and figures it out. You know: get coors light bottle, take cap off, the end. Jim had been buying beer from the bar all night, tipping this one particular bartender well, even though he was the musician in the headlining band at a sold out show and should have been given his beers for free. So he crowdsurfs over there—once again risking spinal injury for the sake of the show—and the bartender just refuses to pour a beer. After much cajoling from the crowd he poured half a pint and begrudgingly handed it over. Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break. Man.
But despite all of this, the night was one of the most wonderful and memorable of my musical career. This is all because of..
The Good: David Coffin
David Coffin has rightly risen to prominence as the finest shanty/nautical-singalong leader in the USA. He can take an entire crowd of hundreds of people and bring them to an absolute standstill with his voice. And he can have them singing along to a song they don’t know in no time. To me, he is a legend. For 33 years he’s led the Boston-area Christmas Revels celebration, an extraordinary and well-loved celebration of folk tradition and wine and song from all over the world. My family listens to the Revels recordings all the time, particularly around the holiday season.
So you can imagine that it has been utterly mindbending to see him covering our songs on Tiktok and in the studio. Here’s Dear Old Stan. Here’s Suvla. Like: WHAT. WHAT IS HAPPENING???
And then to hear that he was coming down to our show in Somerville MA; that was a little nerve-racking. I asked if he’d sing a couple on stage with us and he agreed. I’ve got like seventeen songs by this guy saved on my Audio Streaming Service. One of these songs is The Seaman’s Hymn, which sends chills down my spine every time I hear it and which is absolutely custom-tailored for his booming, powerful voice. I worked out some harmonies, sent them to King Louie and Pauly Shoreman to learn, and we got together one night in Manhattan to learn them. Paid subscribers: you get to see a video of this in just a minute!
The night came, I met Coffin at the bar and we talked over a drink, and it was just awesome to speak to someone of his stature but also to someone who really genuinely cares about passing on folk traditions to anyone and everyone without bastardizing or disrespecting those traditions in any way.
And when he jumped up on stage and started to sing, it was just incredible to watch him take this chatty, semi-difficult crowd and shut them all up with just a single note. We burst into the Seaman’s Hymn, and I remember just looking over and feeling totally awed and deeply inadequate as a singer. This isn’t a bad thing, mind you, I believe each of us should understand that there is always someone better than you and accept that you may occasionally get to stand next to greatness. But it was just awesome to be in the presence of such a commanding talent. And when we finished with his epic version of Roll the Old Chariot Along, the crowd absolutely exploded. Amazing.
So what’s in store for the future? Hopefully Coffin and the Dreadnoughts can collaborate on a few things and sing together again, maybe this time (gasp!) practising the songs together before doing it. But regardless, no shitty management or bar staff could possibly spoil that night for me, it was just a phenomenal, once-in-a-lifetime thing. Hallelujah.
Oh, did you want to SEE us practising the song beforehand? Oh, and did you want to see the video clip someone sent of us singing Seaman’s Hymn with David Coffin himself? Guess what, if you’re a paid subscriber, you get to see it all!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Roll And Go: Dreadnoughts Blog to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.