Little Texas brings the rocking country to MusicFest

Little Texas

A rock ’n’ roll influence is pretty common in today’s popular country music _ even Kenny Chesney, in one of his latest hits, says he feels like a rock star.

 Little Texas was one of the bands that opened that barn door, so to speak. Formed in Nashville in the late ’80s, Little Texas generated heavy rotation on country radio with such hits as “You and Forever and Me,” “What Might Have Been,” “My Love” and_ of course_ “God Blessed Texas.”

“It was a natural thing for us,” bassist Duane Propes says of Little Texas’ patented “rocking country” sound. “Arena lions like Journey, Kansas, and Queen influenced us more than country did.”

But the band members were determined to make their way in Nashville and that meant charting a country course, which Propes now says he’s glad happened since Little Texas found itself at the start of something fresh rather than at the tail end of Southern rock’s heyday.

Little Texas is set to headline the 15^th annual Wachusett Mountain MusicFest happening Sept. 9. The main stage  also features Orleans and E Street Shuffle’s tribute to Bruce Springsteen, while the local-spotlight stage features James Keyes and Andy Cummings. Music starts at noon at the Princeton slopes.

Little Texas toured the country for a couple of years before signing a contract with Warner Bros. records and releasing its debut album in 1991. Over the ensuing six years, the band released four more records, including a greatest hits package, and became one of country’s hottest touring acts. The band broke apart in 1998, with members taking off into other projects and in some cases just settling back with family.

In 2006, Little Texas reunited and carries on minus the manic pressure to produce like it used to, Propes says.

             

Little Texas today consists of original members guitarist and singer Porter Howell, drummer Del Gray, guitarist Dwayne O’Brien, and Propes. (Even though original singer Tim Rushlow did not take part in the reunion, Howell has proven himself a compelling singer in his own right)

“We’re having as much fun as we ever did,” Propes says. “We’re not doing 200 shows a year. We keep it to weekends, and I think that keeps it dynamic. It doesn’t become a job. And we all have 11-year-old kids at home and want to be there with them.”

Little Texas also just released its first batch of new songs since reforming. “Deep in the Heart, Vol. 1” and can be sampled and purchased online at www.littletexasonline.com.

Even though what Little Texas started doing more than 20 years ago is pretty prevalent in today’s country scene, Propes sees some differences.

Fort starters, there are a lot of star singers, but not many star bands. Propes figures the record companies realized it’s easier to deal with one Chesney or one Shelton versus a gang like Little Texas, which the bassist admits could be difficult to round up or to get everyone agreeing on one thing.

Propes is also a little suspect of county songwriting.

“We wrote 98 percent of what we sang, and that lent it a legitimacy. We wrote about what we lived,” Propes says.

Propes like quoting a bit of Vince Gill, who said, “If I want a hit today, all I have to do is write a song about a truck.”

Checking out “Deep in the Heart, Vol 1,” we couldn’t find a truck song. Instead there’s that blend of rowdy  (“Hot in Texas”) and tender (“Take This Walk With Me”) that worked so well in the first place.

Boss tunes shuffle to MusicFest

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band have been barnstorming the region this summer, playing two nights at Fenway Park and one at Gillette Stadium this month. Maybe you were there and want more Boss. Maybe you missed out, and are itching for some live “Jungleland” and the like.

Either way, E Street Shuffle will have you covered at Wachusett Mountain’s  MusicFest happening Sept. 9. The festival starts at noon and also features Little Texas, Orleans, Andy Cummings, and James Keyes.

A popular Springsteen tribute since 2008, E Street Shuffle works so well because its members are dedicated Bruce scholars as well as talented musicians. Singer Sean Loughlin doesn’t just understand the fanaticism; he lives it. He collects the innumerable Springsteen concert bootlegs, stays atop the artist’s history, and sees his own life experiences through the filter of Springsteen’s lyrics.

And he learned that people seeing E Street Shuffle are just like the people seeing a real Springsteen concert, and want to have the band dig deeply. And Loughlin has yet to be stumped by a request.

“I’ll know the song, but the band may not necessarily be ready to play some obscure tune that pops up once or twice on a demo recoding. But we learned pretty quickly that Bruce fans want to hear more than the hits. When we started, people, shouted out for ‘Thundercrack’ all the time” says Loughlin, referring to one of Springsteen’s long story songs that just circulated among bootleg traders before finally appearing on the “Tracks” box set.

E Street Shuffle balances the what with the how, meaning it doesn’t just play Bruce songs, it plays them the way the real E Street Band does in concert, going beyond the recorded versions from studio albums. Loughlin points out how some songs, like “Promised Land” have 15 different arrangements as Springsteen performed it over the years.

“What we’ll do is borrow a little something from all of the versions,” Loughlin said. “We want to give people a taste of why Springsteen has such a fanatical following and why his shows are so legendary.”  

Loughlin entered the fandom early. It started when he was 9 years old and his dad routinely played Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” album. As he got older, Loughlin developed his own appetite for the music.

After spending 10 years playing his own music in an original band, Loughlin formed E Street Shuffle with his brother Ryan and the lineup now includes two keyboards, sax and rhythm section.

Since starting this project, Loughlin says he has even more admiration for Springsteen

“I have even greater appreciation of him as a vocalist. When you put on a full show of this music, it’s a lot of work,” he says. “I don’t have the natural rasp that he has. When we started, I blew my voice out the third night of our first run. And there’s the sheer amount of lyrics he puts into a song. If  this were a Pink Floyd tribute, the band could play ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond' for 25 minutes and give the singer a break.”

E Street Shuffle comes from the Boss’ own home state of New Jersey, and is anchored along the Jersey shore, just like Springsteen himself.

“It’s always a little different when we play outside of New Jersey,” Loughlin says. “They are fascinated that we are from New Jersey and playing this music. When we play in Monmouth County where Bruce lives, it’s a little different. There’s a little more pressure at home to do it right.”

Orleans celebrating legacy, honoring founder

Orleans quartet featuring Fly Amero, Lane Hoppen, John Hall, and Lance Hoppen (John Bruno photo)

What should have been a year of celebration for Orleans_ which turned 40 in 2012_ took an awful turn when Larry Hoppen, one of the band’s founders, died last month.

“My brother Lane called me at 5 o’clock on July 24th to tell me Larry had passed. My whole world just went up in the air,” says Lance Hoppen, who joined Orleans on bass when he was just 17 years old, a few months after Larry launched the band in 1972 with John Hall and drummer Wells Kelly.

Despite the recent tragedy, Orleans is fulfilling its previously booked engagements, with Hall coming back into the fold for these shows, including the band’s performance at Wachusett Mountain’s Sept. 9 MusicFest with Little Texas, E Street Shuffle, James Keyes, and Andy Cummings.

Orleans pulled together a variety of sophisticated pop influences to build its following then crashed the mainstream in the mid ’70s with the indelible hits “Sill the One” and “Dance With Me.”

“I hate to reduce anyone’s career to two or three songs,” Lance Hoppen says. “But Orleans made its mark on Americana with ‘Still the One’ and ‘Dance With Me,’ and that’s not something most people can say. We actually got to work for 40 years because of those two songs. We always worked on new things and continued to develop songs, but we knew people were interested in the warm and fuzzies of those songs.”

At the peak of Orleans’s popularity, Hall left the band, setting up the entry of Dennis “Fly” Amero. Amero, who lives in Gloucester, regularly played around Worcester with his namesake band and the Mitch Chakour Band when not busy with Orleans.

Amero recalls making a casual remark among musician friends, wondering how Orleans would pull off the signature dual guitar parts in “Still the One” without Hall.  The comment reverberated through the league of seasoned session players familiar with Amero and Orleans, and, as the guitarist and singer put it, “in the fall of  ’79 I was on a Greyhound to Woodstock,” and entering the Orleans base camp.

“I considered myself a singer until I joined this band,” Amero cracks about the intricate vocals woven into Orleans’s signature sound.

Hall rejoined Orleans after performing at a memorial concert for Kelly, who died in 1984. Then Hall ran for Congress in 2006 and represented his district in New York until last year, during which time he left the group and Amero was back in.

Hall wasn’t actively touring with Orleans during the 40^th anniversary run but jumped in to fulfill the dates already booked before Larry Hoppen died, turning shows such as the one at MusicFest into celebrations of Hoppen and his musical legacy.

Lance Hoppen points out that Orleans wrote many songs the band is proud of  (and please audiences) in the years after the big hits. One of the newer compositions_ “God Never Gives You More Than You Can Handle”_ has become especially poignant, he notes.

For MusicFest, Orleans will perform as a quartet, with Lane Hoppen on keys, Lance Hoppen on bass, and Hall and Amero on guitars.

“When we finish this calendar of events, I can’t see beyond that,” Lance Hoppen says. “There are no decisions about continuing. The one thing that I have learned over the years is that every time this band goes down it manages to get backup."

Are you ready for MusicFest?

For its 15^th year, Wachusett Mountain’s MusicFest delivers a rich earthiness to it. Headliners  Little Texas blends country and rock; Orleans conjures indelible, generation-spanning pop anthems; and E Street Shuffle pays tribute to blue-collar rock hero Bruce Springsteen.

Similar musical values spill over to the festival’s side stage which features James Keyes and Andy Cummings, two guys who have built their followings with music full of grit and heart.

MusicFest takes place Sept. 9, and starts at noon. Tix are on sale now here on the Wachusett Web site. Check back here for news and weekly profiles on the bands playing the festival this year.

Catching up with Keyes recently, he was singing the praises of Alabama Shakes, the blues-rooted, indie rockers that bubbled up this year.

“They’re the only new band I feel is not trying to sell me something,” Keyes says. “It’s refreshing to hear a musical band, by that I mean a band that puts the music first and made it on its music, not an image.”

You could say the same about Keyes’s music, a smoky blend of country, folk, and rock.  Keyes writes and sings like he’s riding shotgun with you on a long road trip. But his hard strumming, foot-stomping playing style keeps this from turning into idle conversation. There’s urgency and immediacy in Keyes’s work; he projects energy akin to that when he plays guitar in the punk rock band The Numbskulls.

“I’ve been in rock bands forever, and I had that kind of performance under control. I wanted to take just an acoustic guitar and still generate that kind of energy,” Keyes says. “I’ve got to make the song work. I’ve got to get somewhere. You can get somewhere in a Ferrari or with a skateboard. You just gotta make it work.”

And Keyes has been making it work pretty good. He’s toured around the region and out to the Midwest as a solo artist and is working on his new album “Yankee Peddler.”

While it took him a while to transition from band member to solo performer, the spirit of the music is much the same in both settings (volume, he says, being the biggest difference).

“As a kid, I listened to Oldies 103 _ Buddy Holly, the Platters, stuff like that while my friends were listening to Guns N’ Roses,” Keyes says. “Then I got into Nirvana and worked back to Black Flag to the Stooges to John Lee Hooker and the blues. Through Social Distortion, I worked back to Johnny Cash and country. And I kept going back to bands like from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s like the Carter Family and they were as heavy and bad as anything today.”

Greening the mountain

Any musician with even a hint of Irish heritage is pretty busy this time of year; who doesn't want to hear reels, jigs and those incredibly vivid Celtic folk songs around St. Patrick's Day?

But tracking down Boston's Katie McD was difficult not because she was gigging non-stop, but rather the singer/songwriter was busy recording the soundtrack for the Irish film "No Eye to Pity Her."

Fortunately, the mountain will be getting McD out of the studio and onto a sun splashed deck  for a St. Patrick's day concert from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday.

"We played at the mountain last year too and it was so much fun. People came skiing down into us playing all of these Irish tunes. And there were so many kids we could play a few children's songs too," McD recalls.

Since her last visit to the mountain, McD has been writing pieces for the above-mentioned film as well as setting classic Irish poems to music for a theatrical production. Though she has made her home in Boston for many years, McD returns to her native Galway often enough to plug into her native culture, and that's a big deal for her.

"I love these kinds of challenges," McD says, mentioning how both the film and play required her to put a contemporary touch to some very traditional stories, music and writing. "It dredges up all that I  grew up with. It helps me know what I need to know about my culture."

While her previous CD focused on contemporary tunes with a Celtic accent, her next project is shaping up to be a collection of the more traditional music she has been cooking up.

"I've never done a purely Celtic CD,"  she says. "But I'm ready to do one now, and I can bring a lot to it. I couldn't have done something like this 10 years ago."

McD's Irish Cross Country Band includes bodhran player Martin Butler and fiddle player Matt Leavenworth. They will be working in their new songs alongside the repertoire of traditional tunes, and the blend has already proven popular in concert.


"The new age Celtic meets old school went over really well. We played (last) Friday and I did 'No Eye to Pity Her,' a song nobody has really heard, and the whole place jumped out of their seats," McD recalls. "It just touched everybody, and that is very gratifying."

Macey country

Country singer Joe Macey is set to take the Coppertop stage at 4 p.m. Sunday, making up a show originally scheduled for January. As noted back then, Macey has been singing and writing songs for more than 30 years. He’s concentrated his work around his Massachusetts home, but did spend time in Nashville where he honed his craft. Most recently, Macey formed a duo with singer Liz Hartman that is just starting to make the rounds, so keep an eye out for that too.

A few weeks back, some of the Coppertop’s returning performers weighed in on their favorite music. Macey did the same when asked to make a list of what he considers to be “Essential Country Music.” Here’s what he had to say:

“Toes” and “Cold Weather” by the Zack Brown Band. “‘Toes’ is extremely popular with fans of all ages and ‘Cold Weather’ is a great modern country ballad.”

“It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” by Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett. “This has become the essential party tune over the last five years or so. Who doesn’t dream of being at a tropical paradise everyday at 5?”

“Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash. “This is essential due to the legend of Johnny Cash. He made timeless music spanning all generations. This is one of the most requested songs that I play.”  

“People are Crazy” by Billy Currington. “This song has a great storyline and is very popular among the younger country fans.”

“Lookin’ for Love” by Johnny Lee. “A huge hit on the ‘Urban Cowboy’ soundtrack, which popularized country back in the ’80s.”

Familiar, but a little different

Can a folkie and a funkster peacefully coexist in a band? Apparently so, according to Now & Then guitarist Mike Holley.

Little more than a year ago, Holley, acoustic guitarist and singer Pete LeBlanc, and bassist Tom Coleman put together Now & Then.  All three are longtime friends but been involved in other, separate musical projects.

"We got together to just jam and see how it would go," Holley says. "I'm an R&B, funk and blues guy. Pete is a folkie. The jamming went well, then the goal became to find songs we could bring in and  make our own."

To that end, Now & Then can take a familiar tune such as Steve Miller's "Fly Like an Eagle" and give it new accents.

"On that song Pete will play a djembe and we'll look for ways to weave the guitar and bass that make the song structure a little different," Holley says.

Now & Then makes its Coppertop debut Friday, starting at 8 p.m.

Now & Then also has pretty broad tastes, bringing in some left-field song choices such as "Spooky" and "So Into You" by Atlanta Rhythm Section.

But, Holley says, the band won't tackle material that doesn't connect with an audience, no matter how much fun it may be to play from a musical point of view.

"It's not about how many notes or how intricate the guitar solo is," Holley says."We want a song to bring someone back to a to a time in their life."

And sometimes the audience members themselves come up with the ideas for Now & Then.

"Someone asked us to play 'Dock of the Bay.' We ripped out a version that went over well," he says. "Now we worked on the song some and play it early in the set a lot because it gets people warmed up."

The guitarist notes that Now & Then is playing for the fun of it _ both the fun of musicians that enjoy working together, and the fun of an audience willing to go out and support live music.

But as fun as it is, Now & Then takes its job seriously.

"We work hard on the songs and arrangements.They are like our babies, and we see what happens when we put them out into the world," Holley says.

And when he sees someone grooving in a seat, tapping a foot, or singing along, Holley knows the kid is all right.