Greg Klyma: Americana Mondays
PA’s Lounge, Somerville Avenue, Somerville, MA
March 14, 2016
Pay attention dancers, music lovers, dive bar connoisseurs.
The long running Americana Mondays hosted by the redoubtable Greg Klyma is about to end its quixotic 2 ½ year run at PA’s Lounge in Somerville.
The man is a high wire act with no need for a net. He’s funny, quick witted, delightfully goofy, and a deeply accomplished troubadour all in one.
Americana Mondays is vintage Greg Klyma. He wanted to develop a local audience, found PA’s Lounge in Somerville (a town filled with live music venues), booked Monday nights and set up shop. Talented musicians sign up to play with him for what patrons fork over into the tip basket. They know the audience is really listening and that Klyma shares the stage generously. Over time, Americana Mondays has developed a loyal following. During the evening’s three sets they’re tapping their feet or twirling around the dance floor. And Klyma, to quote one of his original songs, is “Livin’ The Life.”
Tonight’s band configuration:
Greg Klyma, telecaster guitar, harmonica, vocals
Andy Santospago, resonator guitar, banjo, laptop steel, vocals
Rob Megna, drums
Paul Chase, standup bass
LaDawn Sheffield, vocals
Set lists? Forget it. Part of what makes his shows so damn appealing is that he wings it. And it works. He’s good at reading a room, connecting with an audience, and somehow manages week after week to string together set after set of satisfying music from honky-tonk to country swing, ballads, waltzes, and rock that can groove hard or slink slow.
A partial list of Greg Klyma’s Americana songbook ranges from Hank Williams (whose portrait Klyma will occasionally hang on the stage), to Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Ernest Tubb, Merle Haggard, Steve Earle, Neil Young, George Jones, Buck Owens, Jerry Reed, The Band, Bob Dylan, Webb Pierce, Charley Walker. (see titles below) Kylma originals are often sandwiched in between.
Klyma’s singing is supple, sort of Neil Young with a sense of humor and wider vocal range. I’ve heard him do spellbinding one-man shows but his musicianship is amped up when jamming with a group of equally talented musicians, especially if they don’t mind not having a clue what the next song is going to be. Klyma’s shows are certified organic and unfold with a canny sense of sequence of covers and original material.
Klyma brings it whether there’s an audience of a dozen or standing room only. Exhibit A: last Monday, a rainy, cold March night.
“Welcome to Americana Mondays at Somerville’s premier dive bar, PA’s Lounge!” Klyma chirps to a sparse group of regulars.
“What shall we open with?” he asks the four men who make up his band tonight. Johnny Cash’s 1958 “Big River” gets chosen and off we go into another night in the weekly diamond-in-the-rough music travelogue.
There are a dozen people in the bar including the bartender/owner Stacy but you’d never know if from what’s being belted out on stage. No one in Boston is better than Klyma at stage patter connecting with his audience. “Good ol’ Johnny Cash… Johnny Cash Bar… Johnny Direct Deposit…and Johnny Paycheck…” he muses. “Johnny Dollar!” someone shouts from an audience always ready to join in the singer’s antics.
Next up is “On The Highway Tonight,” an obscure song from Citizen Slim, a favorite side project he founded with his pal Ryan Fitzsimmons. He’s all over it, a lilting swing beat, saucy swagger and the guys he’s playing with are loosening up. You have to when you play with this man.
Every night is an unscripted piece of performance art. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head as he picks one of the hundreds of songs in his repertoire to sing next.
Tall, long limbed, sporting a tiny fedora atop his mop of black hair, Klyma can kick the bejesus out of finger picking solos or launch into chord thrashers with body language flourishes that underscore the song’s energy. The beauty of every Greg Klyma show is its utter lack of self-consciousness, it’s bodacious off the wall showmanship, and original music stylings.
Part of the fun is listening to the song’s intro. You get the title, the name of the composer or artist who covered it memorably, and usually a humorous back story... an Americana Seminar, Klyma style.
“Bastard Son,” penned by Klyma, is a full out country two-step, more patrons begin showing up, and the dance floor gets some traffic.
“You Got The Money, I’ve Got The Time,” A Lefty Frizzell song, we’re told, is another quick-step tempo that by now has dancers establishing travel lanes on the PA’s fine hardwood dance floor.
“Let’s do Whiskey River. Willie Nelson begins all his concerts with Whiskey River, I was in the audience during one of his shows,” Klyma says. In the midst of the bluesy cover, he reels off a riff of robust fingerpicking that would make Willie nod with appreciation.
“Speaking of whiskey, I’m not doing anything else before I have a taste of my Maker’s Mark,” he says for no reason in particular, citing the merits of bourbon as an elixir - then adds, “Be sure to tip Stacy at the bar.”
Classic Klyma. “St. Patrick’s Day is Thursday, you guys know ‘Dirty Old Town’ by the Pogues?” Unfazed at the uncertain response from his bandmates, he gets into a musical Esperanto conversation that any good musician understands, tells them the key and tempo, does a little sample and damn, they go and play he daylights out of it.
“Eastbound and Down,” the rambunctious 1977 Jerry Reed song that was featured in the film Smoky and The Bandit, gives Klyma a chance to showboat his considerable Telecaster chops, slams an exclamation mark on the first set and gives dancers a rousing tempo to animate the mustang in every one of them.
The next two sets keep patrons tapping their feet as dancers from beginners to the Fred and Gingers flood the floor. I am too busy dancing to take notes.
There’s probably a teenager lurking in most of us, long dormant but capable of reconstitution with the right stimulus. Riding shotgun on an errand with his mother in Buffalo, NY, 13 year-old Greg Klyma pressed a button on the car radio and heard “Guitar Town” by Steve Earle. It wouldn’t be overstatement to say it changed his life.
He may not have known it but his career began the moment he began memorizing the lyrics and licks of that song and every other that he loved and imagined performing them on stage. He’s the most comfortable in his own skin musician I’ve ever heard...funny, quick on his feet, thriving on spontaneity, feeding off audience reaction.
Giddyup! You’ve got two more weeks to take in this fabulous slice of Americana Mondays.
POST SCRIPT
I’d be remiss not to note the duets Klyma sings with LaDawn Sheffield in the second set:
“Killing The Blues” Lyrics sung sweetly by LaDawn Sheffield and Greg Klyma show Klyma’s ability to harmonize and feature Andy Santospago’s gorgeous slinky solos on laptop steel. Blues dancers improvise with panache.
LaDawn Sheffield joins Greg Klyma to sing "Killing The Blues"...actually they set it on fire.
PARTIAL CATALOG OF AMERICANA MONDAYS SONGS FROM GREG
Fred Eaglesmith (Freight Train); Johnny Cash (Big River, Folsom Prison Blues); Hank Williams (many songs); Merle Haggard (Mama Tried, The Bottle Let Me Down, Working Man's Blues, The Fugitive); Ernest Tubb (Thanks a Lot, Two Glasses Joe); Flatt and Scruggs (Rollin’ Inn My Sweet Baby’s Arms); Waylon and Willie (Good Hearted Woman, Mammas/Babies/Cowboys); Willie Nelson (Whiskey River, Angel Flying too Close to the Ground, On the Road Again); Waylon Jennings (Only Daddy That'll Walk the Line, Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way); Steve Earle (Now She's Gone and others); Neil Young (Out on a Weekend); The Band (Up on Cripple Creek, Ophelia, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down); Bob Dylan (It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry; You Ain't Goin' Nowhere; others); The Jayhawks (I'd Run Away).
We play Jerry Reed's "East Bound and Down." We sometimes play "Streets of Baltimore." We've played "There Stands the Glass" by Webb Pierce, "Close Up the Honky Tonks" by Buck Owens and "You're Still on My Mind" by George Jones. Charlie Walker's "Pick Me Up on Your Way Down" (written by Harlan Howard, as was "Streets of Baltimore" and others).
Lani Cromwell will join us sometime to sing "Walking After Midnight" by Patsy Cline, "Passionate Kisses" by Lucinda Williams, "Stand By Your Man" by Tammy Wynette and "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" by Stevie Nicks.
Ladawn Sheffield sings Lucinda's "Crescent City," "Price to Pay," and "The Night's Too Long." She does "Those Memories of You" by Trio, "Annabelle" by Gillian Welch, and a fabulous rendering of "Killing the Blues" written by Rowland Salley.
iPhone photo by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.
Photos and videos https://www.facebook.com/AmericanaMondays/
Bud Collins: Ace of Ambassadors to the World of Tennis: RIP
Bud Collins 1929-2016
Bud Collins was one of the most colorful sports writers of all time. I looked forward to reading his columns in the Boston Globe, not because I’m a big tennis fan but because I love to read a Prose Prima Donna. No one could consistently write more engaging hooks then sustain them through the whole story.
Cases in point: first paragraphs of four of my favorites.
NEW YORK – "Through one of his characters, Marcellus, a scribbler named Shakespeare said there was “something rotten in the state of Denmark.” But if the Bard had been among 20,000-or-so ticket-holders at an open-air theatre called Arthur Ashe Stadium yesterday, he might have reconsidered that line from his ancient soap, “Hamlet.”"
and a few paragraphs later...
"To be or not to be a tennis player didn’t seem to come into play. Caroline, from a family of jocks, gravitated to a racket right away. If Shakespeare could have imagined a sweet young thing making more than $ 4 million in prize money for playing a simple game, he might have given Hamlet this line to Ophelia: “Get thee to a tennis court!” rather than a nunnery."
http://budcollinstennis.com/nothing-rotten-in-the-state-of-denmark/
EN ROUTE TO PARIS -" the year’s second major, looms, along with a guy who may be more monumental than the Eiffel Tower. That would be Rafa Nadal of course, and here’s my advice to Messrs Federer, Murray, Djokovic, Roddick and anyone else who would hope to flatten him: Show up in a tank equipped with flame throwers."
"Rafa has become such a striking landmark in Paris, where he has won the last four French Opens, that he rivals one of Rodin’s statues – and is as tough to dislodge. They ought to give him a gold key to the city, and a rent-free apartment at the top of Notre Dame alongside Quasimodo. If Quasi is the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Roundhouse Rafa is the Punchback with those big, powerful swings."
http://budcollinstennis.com/beware-the-spaniard-who-owns-the-town-its-roundhouse-rafa/
NEW YORK – "Ever wonder how Billy the Kid would have done with a tennis racket instead of a shotgun? The Kid, known as a withdrawal artist to the bankers of Lincoln County, New Mexico, showed his quick, greedy hands to advantage in practicing his craft in the neighborhood of the Tombstone’s infamous OK Corral."
"Who knows? Maybe the Kid might have preferred serving aces through the rich folks on their plush grass courts at Newport, Rhode Island. Those well-coiffed lawns were easier on the feet than prairies, the food was better and the Kid could have been an earlier-day Bobby Riggs, hustling the robber barons for millions…"
http://budcollinstennis.com/flushing-meadows-a-latter-day-ok-corral/
LONDON – "Why does Sister Serena remind me of the Statue of Liberty? Well, both of them are famous Americans, recognizable heroines just about everywhere.
They stand out in their occupations, symbols of the fact that anything is possible in the USA. Lady Liberty is a one-woman welcoming committee in New York. Sister Serena travels the world as the best female tennis player in creation."
"Of course they have different ideas about fashion, the Lady in a somber robe, while Serena is somewhat more daring in her raiment, on and off the job.
Did I say somewhat? Do you think Liberty would be comfortable in the fire-engine-red drawers that accompany Serena’s pristine white ensemble? Or the silver fingernails speckled with tiny sparklers and seeming like claws?"
"Probably not. Still the thought of their similarities came to me yesterday during a soft summer afternoon at Wimbledon, glorious for everyone in the forest green ball park but the hustling though helpless Russian, Vera Zvonareva."
"Serena had just about completed her demolition derby, but one point remained. A lob rose above Serena, and she raised her racket to deal with it. It was just like Lady Liberty’s pose with her celebrated torch lifted to the sky."
"Serena’s racket was as fiery as the torch, scorching the tennis ball with a bang…."
read the rest at
http://budcollinstennis.com/sister-serena-slams-shut-the-door-taking-her-fourth-wimbledon-title/
I love this stuff, old-fashioned sports writing with flair, style and humor. You got the results of the match and a wonderful topspin lob of a story.
RIP, Mr. Collins.
Photo courtesy of AP
March 05, 2016 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (1)