David Bromberg
GNP proudly presents a double bill evening with The David Bromberg Quartet and Loudon Wainwright III at the Somerville Theatre for one show only Thursday, June 14 at 8PM. Larry Campbell, string player extraordinaire and veteran lead guitarist for both Bob Dylan and Levon Helm’s bands (among countless others) will be joining David Bromberg’s band for the performance. Campbell, who excels on guitar, mandolin, fiddle and pedal steel is a three time Grammy Award winner and recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the American Music Association. Reserved seat tickets are $37.50, $34.50 (plus $1 facility fee) and are on sale now on the web at feitheatres.com/somerville-theatre/events and without service fees at the Somerville Theatre box office (55 Davis Sq. on the Red Line) open daily 4pm-8pm (except holidays). For assistance with handicapped accessible seating please call the Somerville Theatre at 617-625-4088 between 4pm – 8pm.
“The reason man created stringed instruments. David touched them with a lover’s fingers and they moaned that true love right back at him. Wood and wire and flesh spoke.” – Jerry Jeff Walker on David Bromberg
Born in Philadelphia in 1945 and raised in Tarrytown, NY, “as a kid I listened to rock ’n’ roll and whatever else was on the radio,” says Bromberg. “I discovered Pete Seeger and The Weavers and, through them, Reverend Gary Davis. I then discovered Big Bill Broonzy, who led me to Muddy Waters and the Chicago blues. This was more or less the same time I discovered Flatt and Scruggs, which led to Bill Monroe and Doc Watson.”
Bromberg began studying guitar-playing when he was 13 and eventually enrolled in Columbia University as a musicology major. The call of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the mid-’60s drew David to the downtown clubs and coffeehouses, where he could watch and learn from the best performers, including primary sources such as his inspiration and teacher, the Reverend Gary Davis.
Bromberg’s range of material, based in the folk and blues idioms, continually expanded with each new album to encompass bluegrass, ragtime, country and ethnic music, and his touring band grew apace. Despite jubilant, loose-limbed concerts and a string of acclaimed albums on the Fantasy label, Bromberg found himself exhausted by the logistics of the music business. “I decided to change the direction of my life,” he explains. So David dissolved his band in 1980, and he and his artist/musician wife, Nancy Josephson, moved from Northern California to Chicago, where David attended the Kenneth Warren School of Violin Making. Though he still toured periodically, the recordings slowed to a trickle and then stopped. As 2010 drew to a close, David is completing an ambitious new album entittled Use Me, which features David collaborating with friends like John Hiatt, Levon Helm, Los Lobos, Tim O’Brien, Vince Gill, Widespread Panic, Dr. John, Keb’ Mo’ and others.
Loudon Wainwright III
Loudon Wainwright III started playing the guitar around 1960 and after seeing Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1962 acquired a brand new musical role model. He worked a variety of jobs – movie house janitor, boatyard barnacle scraper, and cashier-cook-dishwasher at New York’s first macrobiotic restaurant, the Paradox on East 7th Street. This was also the time I started to write my own songs. Male singer-songwriters were a happening commodity in the 1960’s and was signed to Atlantic Records in 1969. The first album came out in 1970 and the career’s been up and down ever since.
Career accomplishments include1972’s “Dead Skunk” (#1 in Little Rock Arkansas for six weeks) and my 3 appearances on the M*A*S*H TV show in 1975 as Capt. Calvin Spaulding, the singing surgeon. Hopefully you’d mention my two Grammy nominations for the albums I’m Alright (1985) and More Love Songs (1986). The late great Johnny Cash recorded Mr Wainwright’s song “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry” for his highly acclaimed 1994 album American Recordings. BBC II TV hosted the show, Loudon And Co. and the topical songs he has been writing for N.P.R. and Ted Koppel’s Nightline on ABC and recorded and released 15 albums.
At 65, Loudon Wainwright III is older than his father ever was, and it’s got him thinking, and writing, and singing. His new album ‘Older Than My Old Man Now’ (April 17/2nd Story Sound Records) is a collection of fifteen original songs in which Loudon sizes up his own tangled life and family history and mortality in general with unflinching candor and humor.
His latest release, ‘Older Than My Old Man Now’ features contributions from all four of Loudon’s children – Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Lucy Wainwright Roche and Lexie Kelly Wainwright – as well as two of their three mothers, Suzzy Roche and Ritamarie Kelly. Also included are recitations of passages written by Loudon Wainwright Jr., Loudon’s father and famous LIFE Magazine columnist, and a recording of “Over The Hill,” the only song Loudon co-wrote with his first wife, the late great Kate McGarrigle.
“Contemporaries of mine have recently taken to writing memoirs and autobiographies. I decided I would try to tell the story of my swinging life in a 3 and a ½ minute song,” says Loudon of “The Here & the Now,” the album’s first track.
Loudon was awarded a GRAMMY for his 2009 release, ‘High Wide & Handsome – The Charlie Poole Project.’ He is also an accomplished actor and has appeared in films directed by Martin Scorsese, Judd Apatow, Tim Burton, and Cameron Crowe.
Links: David Bromberg – Loudon Wainwright – Tickets – Somerville Theatre – Theater Directions