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Mixed grilles
Josh Lederman y Los Diablos, Charlie Farren, and Johnny Cunningham
BY TED DROZDOWSKI

Some of Josh Lederman y Los Diablos’s best songs sway like drunken sailors — or maybe the doors of an Irish pub. Others follow a brisk acoustic track that would seem to lead right to the kind of radio stations that play contemporary singer-songwriters. Then there’s a raft of numbers on their new album The Town’s Old Fair (Nine Mile Records/Coffeestain Music), whose parts seem to have crept onto the disc from a half-dozen different corners of the world — Eastern Europe, the Kentucky mountains, the Italian shore, the Midwestern prairies, LA’s dark underbelly, and Shane MacGowan’s backyard — to create their own comfortable fusion.

For Lederman, and for The Town’s Old Fair, it all starts in the pubs. "I began performing solo, as a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar," says Lederman. "Then I started playing out with a cello player, Pete Varga. What happened next is I started listening to a lot of the Irish traditional music that was happening around town, and I found that was moving me most. My melodies started to assume something of the Irish cadences I was hearing, so I wanted to find an accordion player."

That was John Buczkowski, who, along with bassist Travis Williams and drummer Rick Pierik, completes Los Diablos. Varga now plays mandolin and electric and slide guitars, and Buczkowski doubles on banjo, which extends the reach of this eclectic, inventive ensemble. They all hail from the Cambridge and Somerville area and will play on their home turf — at the Plough and Stars outside Harvard Square — on Friday, January 30. Somehow, whether they’re offering up a Celtic waltz like the disc’s opener "The Town’s Old Fair," the drinking lament "Forty Day," or the Turkish rumba "Palinka," their blend of influences always sound warm and natural together.

Part of that’s chemistry and the rest is the music’s one constant: Lederman’s singing. He warbles in the voice of a world-weary romantic, with the hint of a rasp and a tiny range that he stretches into constantly lilting melodies. It’s a voice of experience — the friendly but aching tones of the man on the next barstool, sharing lessons plucked from his life. And that gives his group’s three albums and live shows — which are raw, sprung-loose affairs — the same sweet, sympathetic appeal that Tom Waits had in his early years, when he wrote broken-hearted ballads with a reservoir of beauty just beneath their surface. Lederman also cites the influence of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues. "The Pogues would be playing merry melodies, but Shane would be singing very sorrowful, personal songs," he says. "I love that kind of paradox: music you could dance to, but one guy completely baring his heart."

Lederman isn’t exactly baring his heart. He’s sharing little slices of it, with a first-class songwriter’s eye for detail. The gentle character study "Fishs Eddy," for example, draws on a relationship Lederman shared with a woman who had a daughter; and gets its title from a kitchen worker he befriended while at camp who came from a town called Fishs Eddy, and — since it was written in baseball season — weaves in the simple pleasure of watching a game and then walking home in a comforting rain.

Putting the lie to an old truism, Lederman teaches English composition at Emmanuel College. "I do consider myself a writer, and my main form of expression is writing lyrics," he says. "I’ve written poetry and I went to grad school for screenwriting, but I wanted to write songs since I was a kid. The beautiful thing about writing lyrics is that 95 percent of the time they’re overlooked. But when you find an artist whose lyrics really invite you to notice what’s going on in the songs, I feel that you’ve made a special connection."

FARREN’S NEW HEIGHTS. Charlie Farren’s three solo albums — 1999’s Deja Blue . . . the Color of Love, last year’s World Gone Wild, and the new 4 Letter Word (all on his own FMan Media) — capture the sound of an artist shedding a second skin he donned for much of his career. Most Boston music fans know Farren as the boisterous frontman for the Joe Perry Project and his own Farrenheit, bands that spent the ’80s blasting big crunchy rock riffs off the stages of huge clubs, theaters, and arenas. But his recent solo work, and especially the new disc, showcase Farren’s big, clear voice in the service of playful images and carefully etched character studies. His guitars echo that in tastefully fingerpicked augmented chords and occasional shadings of slide. On 4 Letter Word, tunes like "Copy Love" reflect a complex emotional landscape, and his harmonizing and jazz-inflected arrangements on numbers like "Minds Made Up" are dispatches from an entirely different sphere of music, occupied by a spectrum of smart vocal arrangers, ranging from King Pleasure to Joe Jackson.

"The core of that style is something I’ve always pursued as an artist, not as a rock star," says Farren, who today works for a computer company and maintains his own self-sustaining music career out of his home and studio in Chelmsford. (Learn more at www.charliefarren.com.) "When I was lucky enough to be offered a chance to be a rock star by Joe Perry, I took it. I mean, what musician wouldn’t at that time and at that age? But when that period of my career was over and I started functioning as a singer-songwriter, I feel the quality of my work shot way up."

These three discs are proof. But some of their material actually dates back to his earliest days in the craft. "I never stopped writing songs like these," he explains. "In fact, this is where I started. When I was in groups before I was part of the Joe Perry Project, I would write, like, 30 songs with beautiful chords that really served the lyrics, but only three of them would work with my rock band, who would take out all the ninths and diminished chords and replace them with power chords when I brought them in. I would save those 27 songs for the future."

For Farren, the future is now. So when he dusts off a tune like 4 Letter Word’s "Poor Old Romeo," it may have a chord structure similar to what Elton John was playing in the mid-’70s, when the number was written and Farren was a budding songwriter influenced by John. But with a fresh arrangement built around acoustic and slide guitars and a richly emotional vocal performance, it comes off as timeless.

Farren’s audience is still avid and split roughly between newcomers and loyalists from his hard-rockin’ days. "I’m lucky," he says. "A lot of my audience has matured with me. There are people who buy all my new records and have them in their personal top five — and that’s an awesome feeling. That’s a gift."

GOODBYE JOHNNY. The fiddle virtuoso Johnny Cunningham was a fixture on the Boston music scene during the early-to-mid-’90s, after he arrived as part of the Raindogs, a band whose fusion of rock, American roots, and mild Celtic influences put them ahead of their time. He was colorful, with a Scottish burr, a ready catalog of hilarious stories, and an ability to consume vast amounts of alcohol. And his virtuosity made him a favorite co-conspirator of some of the city’s finest musicians, including Bill Morrissey and Angelo Petraglia.

Cunningham was already something of a legend when he came to these shores. He was a harmonica whiz at age five and left home when he was 14, squatting in Edinburgh and eking out an existence with his fiddle until he met the other players with whom he formed the seminal Celtic rock band Silly Wizard in 1972. He went on to play in a number of other influential groups before coming to America. After the Raindogs broke up, Cunningham’s efforts gravitated toward New York, where he found work as a session player, producer, and touring performer with artists as disparate as Hall & Oates, Solas, and Irish songstress Susan McKeown. He also worked in theater and on soundtracks, and in 1997 recorded Peter & Wendy (Alula), his compositions for Mabou Mines Theatre Company’s adult version of Peter and the Wolf. Cunningham had just completed a tour with McKeown when he died on Monday, December 15, in New York City at age 46.

Although my early-’90s band Vision Thing shared bills with groups featuring Cunningham on occasion, my fondest experience with Johnny — and his musical genius — was in 1994, when I had the pleasure of recruiting him to play on a song Vision Thing was recording. It was a romantic minor-key ballad that called for a sympathetic fiddle line weaving through the tune. Johnny and I met one afternoon for lunch, which consisted solely of Guinness, to hand off a rough demo. I returned to my desk at the Phoenix after several hours, praying that nobody would sense how plastered I was.

The next week Johnny showed up at Squid Hell, the Jamaica Plain studio where we were recording, with his fiddle case under his arm. We put him in the live room, but he felt the acoustics weren’t right. After playing in several other places, he chose to record in the bathroom, where the tiles reflected his notes beautifully. Johnny sat on the toilet — the only chair available — and we hung a microphone over his head.

Insisting that listening once to the new version of the number we’d put on tape would be a waste of time, Johnny told producer Drew Townson to roll. Johnny unfurled a gorgeous melody, full of emotional nuances that complemented every turn of the vocals and the guitar solo. We were blown away by his performance, but we insisted he do another take. If Johnny did that well without having heard the tune, we figured the next pass would be even better.

"And what the hell was wrong with that?" he barked.

We debated for a moment, then he shrugged and returned to his perch on the toilet. The second pass was equally spellbinding. And when Johnny finished, he flushed and laughed as the sound of the gurgling water went down on tape.

"Wow! That was brilliant," Townson said as Johnny emerged. "It’s gonna be really hard to choose between the two."

"Well, if you fly ’em together," Johnny replied, "you’ll find the second take’s a third above, perfectly harmonized all the way through."

We went with that.


Issue Date: January 2 - 8, 2004
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