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Pop Rock Nation

Category: People

all-about-musicians-and-the-people-who-help-them-make-music

  • Thank you, Stephen Bennett…

    Stephen Bennett helped me make it through many a dinner shift…

    Did you ever have a job that made you feel like throwing up every time you went to work? I did. Back in 1998, I took a job waiting tables at a well-established restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia. When I was hired, I didn’t know the first thing about waiting tables. I was also suffering from pretty significant depression and anxiety. For the first few months of my employment, I was constantly stressed out and on the verge of hyperventilation and/or projectile vomiting. Fortunately, I eventually learned how to wait tables and the job became easier. I was finally promoted to dinner, meaning that I could be scheduled to work at night. On many Friday and Saturday nights in the late 1990s, a then local musician named Steve Bennett would play music.

    Stephen Bennett plays guitar. Actually, he often plays a harp guitar, which he inherited from his great grandmother’s second husband, Edgar Pierce. Steve writes on his official Web site that his great grandmother was married to Pierce for over fifty years, so he thinks of him as his great grandfather, even though the man was not a blood relation. The harp guitar Steve Bennett inherited is a Dyer Brothers symphony harp guitar, which was manufactured in 1909.

    Although Steve was born in Oregon, which is where his great grandparents lived, he grew up in New York. Consequently, he didn’t really know the man whose magnificent harp guitar he inherited and now enchants audiences with. When I knew Steve, he was living in my hometown, Gloucester, Virginia. He has since moved north to Milford, Connecticut with his wife, Nancy. He has released many albums, several of which I own, and has traveled the world playing his guitar and teaching others. When I check to see what he’s up to these days, I feel very fortunate that I got to hear him play every weekend as we worked stressful night shifts at the restaurant. His soothing music got me through many tough evenings.


    A great video showing Stephen Bennett playing “The Water Is Wide” with many, many harp guitar players…

    As I get older, I find myself seeking music that is… shall we say… a little more soothing to the soul. When I listen to Stephen Bennett’s recordings play, I remember watching him live as I worked at the restaurant and how lovingly he held his instruments as he finger picked and flat picked beautiful music. I was always amazed by how he was able to coax such intricate melodies from his guitars. Sometimes he would play popular songs that everyone knew. Sometimes he’d play original compositions. Sometimes he’d sing. I remember a couple of times, he’d have guest musicians play with him. He was pretty well-known in Williamsburg and the surrounding areas. I’m sure his presence is missed by those who used to love to listen to him play as they enjoyed fine cuisine on date night as well as those who were privileged to work in his presence. Virginia’s loss is Connecticut’s gain!


    Here he plays “What Child Is This”/”Greensleeves”…

    While I can’t say I always appreciated living in Gloucester, Virginia when I was growing up, I do love to look at Steve’s CDs and see Gloucester referenced in the credits. Like I said, I’m getting older and starting to appreciate more soothing things. I can now understand why my parents decided to settle in Gloucester back in 1980, having moved us from the Washington, DC area. Back in 1980, Gloucester was a quiet, rural, peaceful place surrounded by rivers. Thirty plus years later, it’s become a lot more populated. But compared to the sprawling metropolis of Newport News, Gloucester is still pretty tranquil. And though Stephen Bennett doesn’t live there anymore, his music often takes me back to the place where I grew up. It calms me down… and frankly, kind of inspires me to want to learn how to play guitar. I’ve tried to before, but it’s not as easy as he makes it look!

    I didn’t enjoy a lot of the shifts I worked when I was waiting tables in Williamsburg, Virginia. But I can say that many good things came from that job. I made a lot of great friends, learned a lot about good food, lost a lot of weight, got driven into graduate school, and was introduced to Stephen Bennett, a stellar musician with a gift for producing wonderful music. If you like acoustic guitar music and have ever wondered about the harp guitar, I highly recommend checking out Stephen Bennett. And if he’s playing anywhere near where you are, you should definitely stop in for a show.


    Stephen Bennett and Tommy Emmanual play a scorching rendition of “Puttin’ On The Ritz”. You have to see this to believe it!

  • Sly Stone Turns 70, Contest and New Box Set News

    Sly Stone

    Sly Stone is Legacy Artist of the Month

    Sly Stone is 70.

    Now you feel old.

    Sylvester Stewart, the heart of Sly and The Family Stone, had a groove for everyone over a decade of crossover success when the band fused every music of the day from rock to funk to pop to soul to maybe drawing the line at Creole. Over a period of just several years, everything the Sly and the Family Stone released topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.

    You know the tracks, “Everyday People”, “Family Affair”, “Thank You” are just a handful. A pioneer at home on a stage with Jimmy Page or George Clinton, Sly had something to say about society and usually locked it within a groove that won over everyone.

    On Sly’s 70th birthday, we got two fun pieces of news. We already knew that Legacy Recordings had made Sly their third “Artist of the Month” following Janis and Nina Simone.  Today we learned that there will be a new multi CD box set released later this year to honor the Grammy and Rock Roll Hall of Fame winner.

    We also heard about a contest you can enter to design a funky Sly and the Family Stone poster and scoop up $500.   The poster contest details are online now, and you’ve got until April 11 at midnight Pacific Time to “create a fun design influenced by the…song titles that span the band’s legendary career.”

    I’m not an artist, but I’m guess the entries will be colorful.

    Happy 70th birthday, Sly.   Thank you for making so much music possible.

    Respect.

     

    Sly Stone photo courtesy Legacy Recordings

     

  • Davy Jones 1945-2012

    Davy Jones 1945-2012

    Davy's Pre-Monkees Solo Album
    Before he was a Monkee, a teenaged Davy Jones originated the role of the Artful Dodger in the musical Oliver!, and even landed himself a Tony nomination when he played the role on Broadway in 1963. But he’ll best be remembered for creating a different kind of role: a model for virtual life-long teen idol-dom. Like all boy bands, the made-for-TV Monkees were an easy target for the scorn of an increasingly rock-oriented, album-oriented record-buying public. They played songs – rather, they played hit singles – written by other people (never mind that those other people included some of the greatest pop songwriters of their era); and they weren’t allowed to play their own instruments on their records. Thus, they were artistically illegitimate.

    Davy Jones “Girl” (1971)

    45 years later, of course, we know (a little) better about The Monkees, although the arguments trotted out for their illegitimacy back then are still in play for today’s boy bands and girl groups. The story of The Monkees came to be less about their TV show characters and more about the struggles of the real life band, and by its real life individual members to be able to transcend their TV/pop star packaging and stand artistically with the rock star peers of the era. See a rapt Mickey Dolenz watching Ravi Shankar at the Monterrey Pop Festival. See Michael Nesmith going country-rock and reinventing himself as the godfather of the music video. See Peter Tork bitterly lobbying for the band to be nominated for induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

    The quartet eventually won the right to play their own instruments live and to record their own songs (which, it turned out, were often as good as the Neil Diamond and Boyce & Hart gems they made famous, and which sometimes took some genuinely weird turns); they made a (genuinely weird) movie (Head) with Jack Nicholson. But they were still the Monkees, and despite their best efforts (and those of the folks at Rhino Records, who have packaged and re-packaged the band’s catalog with the meticulousness of a stalker), they’re still regarded by many as a bubblegum boy band prototype. Would we look at the music of Backstreet Boys any differently if they’d soundtracked and starred in a Christopher Nolan movie in 2002? I’m sure some of us would, but they’d still have “I Want It That Way” to live down.

    The Monkees “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” (1967)

    But my sense of Davy Jones, more than any of his bandmates, is that he didn’t feel like he needed to live down The Monkees. Of the four of them, he’s the only one who actually seemed like a fan of the band. You could argue that it might have been easier for him to take as the group’s heart-throb focal point, but I don’t think that’s right. Those of us who either watched the Monkees on TV during their initial run, or (like me) watched them on reruns in the 80s (the group had a brief sans-Nesmith resurgence mid-decade) had their own favorites (I thought Mickey was the funniest and Michael the cutest). They were all focal points, which is why they made for good sitcom in the first place.

    I just think that Davy Jones had a gift for taking the mixed blessings of teen idol stardom with humility, gratitude, a winking sense of humor, and a strong appreciation of the absurd. He was still happily touring the oldies circuit when he died of a heart attack yesterday, playing to a fan base that wasn’t (isn’t) getting any younger, and apparently loving his life – like the lyrics of his 1971 single “Girl”, which might as well be a love song to his audience: “And what you are is all that I want for me, and it’s good to feel that way, girl.” In this sense, he truly invented the notion of the well-adjusted, non-pathetic, happily middle-aged-and-aging teen idol. Justin Bieber: take note, son.

    Davy Jones “Girl” (1995)