Routes rock

Road Trip '97's Fall Madness

by Jonathan Perry

Lisa Makaitis, a 30-year-old pharmacist from Weymouth, was dancing with her friends downstairs at the Middle East and talking about how she came to hear the band on stage, an outfit out of Durango, Colorado, called the String Cheese Incident. Straining to be heard over a mutating mix of fiddle-driven bluegrass, percussive jazz fusion, and slide guitar drenched in a tide of Hammond organ, Makaitis pointed to her friend Phil Silverman, a 34-year-old lawyer from Weymouth standing nearby.

"Phil's friend is a dentist in Arizona who listens to these guys and sends him tapes," said Makaitis, still in motion. "And now, we're all listening to them."

The group's appearance at the Middle East was part of the "Fall Madness" phase of "Road Trip '97," a series of multi-artist bills being sponsored by a pair of local promoters, the up-and-coming Allston-based Gamelan Productions and veteran Northampton-based promoter Jordi Herold. There was a lot of music to be heard, and a lot of people there to hear it.

"I feel like this audience is made up of every different type of person who's into every different type of thing," Silverman explained, regarding the packed-to-the-gills house. "And the concept of the `road trip' is the American dream, right? To travel around the country? Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?"

Although few in the crowd had actually driven cross-country to see the three bands performing that evening, travel is nevertheless a recurring theme in the Road Trip series. The groundswell of support for artists like String Cheese Incident and the Atlanta-based Aquarium Rescue Unit (ARU), who performed a week later at the Somerville Theatre, doesn't depend on album sales or radio play or MTV videos -- rather it works through a simple, efficient word-of-mouth network. The friend who telephones you from Arizona, raving about what she heard last night; the stranger you bump into at the Phish concert who tells you what he's going to hear tomorrow. Mike Abramo, a 21-year-old student at the University of Massachusetts, made the two-hour trek from Amherst to catch String Cheese Incident after hearing about them from a friend in New Orleans. Jim Morrison ("That's my name, for real"), a 35-year-old independent insurance broker, drove down from New Hampshire to attend the show after downloading the band's tour itinerary off the Internet. Morrison was typical of the crowd in that did not seem too concerned about getting his hands on the latest Pavement album or collecting Guided by Voices singles.

Like Leftover Salmon or Phish (the current standard bearer of choice for an audience that's been forced to embrace new icons in the wake of the Grateful Dead's demise), Road Trip artists tend to be live performers with a penchant for organic, improvisational jamming that often takes their material in dramatic, genre-hopping directions. Some, like ARU, don't even have a record contract. Although the annual H.O.R.D.E. festival, launched by Blues Traveler in the early '90s, brought this kind of live aesthetic to a new audience, its stylistic roots go back much farther -- to the smoke-filled daze of patchouli, Haight Ashbury, and yes, the Grateful Dead (and the Allman Brothers and Cream and the Jefferson Airplane).

In keeping with this grassroots approach to momentum building, the psychedelic handbills and posters announcing Road Trip look like something you might have seen plastered on windows at the old Fillmore East in the '60s. Mention legendary Fillmore promoter Bill Graham to the 28-year-old entrepreneur behind Road Trip, Gamelan chief Andrew Stahl, and a wide smile spreads across his face. When he moved to Boston, roughly six years ago, after studying economics in college, Stahl got his first taste of the business world by helping his father sell carpets. All the while, the memory of those college years tugged at him -- especially all those Grateful Dead shows he attended. "What struck me more than the music was the scene. My goal -- my dream, really -- was to make billions of dollars, just stupid amounts of money, but at the same time be able to do something to raise consciousness about a dying planet. I was also surrounded by friends who were jam-oriented musicians who wondered how to get gigs."

Before long, Stahl started renting 60-person capacity rooms and booking his friends' bands to fill them. "I was just winging it, and through trial and error I learned a lot from my mistakes. I almost quit a few times, but it just basically grew one step at a time. And in the last two and a half years, I think I've learned what it is to be a promoter."

Last spring, Stahl teamed with Herold -- a veteran promoter who's booked hundreds of bands during the last two decades -- to organize the first series of Road Trip dates. "It was the biggest risk I ever took. I had to borrow $5000 from my dad to do it, but it was successful. And I think it really helped to solidify the music scene that we're tapping into now."

At the moment, the Allston-based Gamelan Productions has a roster of five artists it books regularly in venues around the country, and one jam-rock band -- Jiggle the Handle -- whom Stahl manages full-time. As for the consciousness-raising part, everyone who donates one dollar to the National Arbor Day Foundation at a Gamelan show gets, in return, a tree to plant. But Gamelan just might run out of trees to give away if its shows continue to draw this well. According to Stahl, by evening's end the String Cheese Incident show at the Middle East was filled to "about 95 percent capacity" and Gamelan's Halloween concert at the Somerville Theatre, featuring the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Moon Boot Lover, and Michael Ray & the Cosmic Krewe, also proved a rousing success. Just ask Michael Ray, who, having played with avant-jazz giant Sun Ra's Arkestra, knows a thing or three about shows that take on a life of their own. Decked out in gold lamé and sequins and exhorting the swelling crowd from behind his wild haunted-funhouse of a Korg keyboard, Ray and his seven-piece band delivered a hard-stomping Halloween-night performance that climaxed in a shrieking, improvisational fury with Ray screeching "Halloween!" over a joyous cacophony of horns and shivering keyboard runs.

"This is one of my favorite holidays, because it's one of the easiest times of the year to communicate with the other side," the soft-spoken Ray said afterward backstage. "And these kids are listening. I've learned how to read an audience from when I was with Sun Ra, and there are different energy portals you can ride on. But it's easy to play to this audience because they're interested, and this kind of presentation is great. It's got style -- and I can appreciate style."

Indeed, there was no shortage of that commodity during the "Cosmic Moon Unit Halloween Bash" (with a title like that, how could there be?). Moon Boot Lover's funkified hard-rock camp -- kind of like Stevie Wonder meets Kiss -- served as a midway point between the Cosmic Krewe's spellbinding freakout jazz and the Aquarium Rescue Unit's brand of ravishing art rock and Southern-fried funk. "The multi-act shows are a good idea," ARU manager Paul Easton explained, "because each band is going to be exposed to every other band's audience and vice versa -- and that's a good thing."

It certainly didn't hurt ARU any. Guitarist Jimmy Herring, in particular, played as if he had memorized the complete works of Jeff Beck, Duane Allman, and Robert Fripp -- and was able to recite them all back at will. Which he did with spiraling corkscrew clusters of notes, soaring blues cries, and stabbing riffs that never overwhelmed the equally audacious music sizzling around him.

As disparate as the bands booked on the Road Trip series may be, there's a common denominator to Gamelan's growing roster of artists: superior musicianship put in the service of an adventurous spirit. There's joy in this music, and a sense of purpose -- whether the spacious jam rock of Brookline's Rockett Band or the straight-no-chaser blues of Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters or the cross-pollinated bluegrass-jazz-folk of David Grisman. And it seems that everybody from artist to audience knows it. There's a hint of the old-fashioned to all of this -- the explicit references to the bygone Fillmore and its Aquarian Age communal spirit -- and yet something new and exciting, too, in the audience's shared sense of discovery.

Still, when it comes to booking shows in this intensely competitive market, one that features prominent national acts performing on any given day of the week, Stahl admits to feeling the occasional pang of uncertainty -- okay, fear. "Sometimes it's hard to take a step back and just enjoy a show. And sometimes panic sets in because if the shows don't sell well, I could lose everything." But the moment passes and Stahl's thoughts turn to his next showcase, and Gamelan's future.

"I think things are happening," he concludes, reflecting on the events of this past, very crucial year. "There is a community whose members are starting to know one another, and I'm starting to see the same faces at the shows. The dream is starting to come together."

The "Fall Madness" phase of Road Trip '97 concludes tonight (November 13) with Merl Saunders & the Rainforest Band performing at the Somerville Theatre with One Step Beyond and Conehead Buddah. Other upcoming Gamelan-related shows include Moon Boot Lover at the Paradise on November 29 and the Merry Danksters downstairs at the Middle East on December 20. Call 499-8658 for more information.