Hurray for the Riff Raff w/ Squirrel Flower
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only One of the reasons you started listening to music in the first place might have been in the hope of finding the kind of conviction and fierce rawness evident in Hurray for the Riff Raff’s, aka Alynda Segarra’s, “nature punk” manifesto about survival, LIFE ON EARTH. A visionary musician, Segarra (they/she) is an outsider in whose voice you might find echoes of your own. On her eighth full-length album, Segarra is creating music of honesty and portent. If there hadn’t been a pandemic, Segarra might have made a very different sort of album from Life on Earth, which became the record she’s waited a lifetime to make. Like the rest of us, Segarra had the disconcerting experience of putting the brakes on life as they knew it in March 2020. “I need to keep moving all the time,” says Segarra on a Zoom call from their light-filled studio in the shotgun house they call home in New Orleans’ Seventh Ward. Segarra had been a human embodiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion even before they ran away from their home in the Bronx at age seventeen, illegally hopping freight trains or hitchhiking across the country in the company of a band of street urchins, sleeping rough under dense underbrush at night and hiding in trees for shelter. Coming from a fractured family, they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for, but they had the feeling they would know it when they found it. And they did when they pulled into New Orleans in 2007. There Segarra formed two bands: Dead Man’s Street Orchestra and Hurray for the Riff Raff, releasing an EP and seven albums with the latter. In 2015, Segarra temporarily decamped, first to Nashville, then home to New York. Her 2016 Hurray for the Riff Raff album, The Navigator, was a quest to reclaim her Puerto Rican identity. Each song segued into the next in a tight narrative arc, uncovering important hints through the lens of her ancestors. “I feel like I’m always leaving clues in my song, hoping my listeners will follow the breadcrumbs,” says Segarra with a short laugh. On Life on Earth, they just might. This time, she’s chosen a topic that affects us all: our relationship to the natural world. “You could call Life on Earth survival music for the end times,” says Segarra. “But not just surviving—learning how to thrive. The importance of adapting and learning from nature—those were the themes that kept coming to me.”
Stephen Marley Presents Babylon By Bus Tour wsg Subatomic Sound System
2023 Bell’s Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only “Anything that sounds good is good,” says Stephen Marley, paraphrasing Duke Ellington. Don’t be surprised to hear the King of Reggae’s son referencing Harlem’s master of the jazz orchestra. Never one to limit his musical horizons, Stephen has always listened without prejudice, letting his inspiration set him free as a singer, songwriter, musician, and producer—whether collaborating with his illustrious musical family, or with Lauryn Hill, Nas, or Erykah Badu. Beginning his lifelong musical journey at the age of six, Stephen shared historic stages with his legendary father and toured the world with his brother Ziggy and sisters Cedella and Sharon, The Melody Makers. The Tuff Gong instilled in all of his children a strict work ethic and an awareness that “music is way more than just music.” Over the past 45 years, Stephen has won no fewer than eight Grammy Awards—three with The Melody Makers, twice as a producer of his younger brother Damian Marley, and three times as a solo artist. Every one of his solo projects to date has topped the Billboard Reggae charts. Stephen Marley’s place in music history is already secure. He does not really need to push the envelope, to defy expectations, to let the whole world into his world. And yet that is just what he’s decided to do. Stephen Marley’s highly anticipated new single Old Soul just dropped on his birthday April 20, 2023; the first work off his new studio project in 5 years which is set to release later this year –and comes as a complete revelation and many new surprises. Stephen is excited to bring another ‘Babylon By Bus’ Summer Tour on the road this summer!! Stay tuned for more updates and music coming soon, visit stephenmarleymusic.com for more information.
Chloe Kimes wsg The Rebel Eves
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only Nashville based singer-songwriter Chloe Kimes is actively defining the next generation of folk-singing troubadours with an old-soul sensibility for storytelling in a spirited country outfit. Born and raised on the lakeshores of northern Michigan, Kimes is unbound by genre as she consistently navigates a delicate balance between poignance and charm with vocals wrung out and steadfast as any before her. Named one of NPR’s 2022 Slingshot Artist’s to Watch, Kimes’ debut album is ambitious and strikingly live. As a self-titled ought be, Chloe Kimes is a sincere reflection of the artist, and with music as homegrown as its penman, Kimes and her band are not to be missed. https://www.chloekimesmusic.com ——–The Rebel Eves is a powerhouse Americana Trio with Michigan roots formed from the joy of connection, love of creativity, and the knowledge that music is a gift that can’t be taken for granted. Composed of three award winning songwriters, Grace, Jilian, and Katie started The Rebel Eves in 2022 as a way to inspire one another by sharing their experiences as women with the intention of empowering both themselves and their audiences through songwriting. Their honest story telling, hair raising harmonies, and compelling lyricism makes for true listening room moments attendees won’t soon forget.
MAGIC CITY HIPPIES w/ Pink Skies
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room OnlyShades on and shirts unbuttoned, Magic City Hippies generate the kind of heat that could’ve powered a high seas yacht party in the seventies or shake a Coachella stage next summer. If the trio — Robby Hunter, Pat Howard, and John Coughlin — stepped off the screen from some long-lost Quentin Tarantino flick in slow-motion (instruments in hand), nobody would question it. Embracing everything from AM radio rock and poolside pop to nimble raps and salsa, they lock into an era-less vibe with no shortage of psychedelic funk or hooks. The three-piece deliver the kind of bangers you can play on the way to the party, during the party, and to smooth over the comedown as the sun comes up.As the guys so eloquently describe it, they “give people a choice to enjoy this on the surface level, feel funky in their bodies, and dance…or go deeper into the music.”As legend has it, the origin of Magic City Hippies can be traced back to Robby’s days of permit-less busking in Miami. Eventually, Pat and John proved to be better accompaniment than his loop pedal, so the trio played regular bar gigs and built an audience locally. They formed as Robby Hunter Band, released the Magic City Hippies album, and adopted the title as their name. That LP gained traction in 2013 with syncs on The CW’s iZombie and Showtime’s Ray Donovan. On its heels, 2015’s Hippie Castle EP catalyzed their breakout as “Limestone” piled up over 21 million Spotify streams followed by “Fanfare” with another 20 million Spotify streams. They toured endlessly and moved crowds at Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Hulaween, Okeechobee Fest, Electric Forest, and Austin City Limits, to name a few. Along the way, the band also picked up acclaim from Relix and OnesToWatch as they dropped the fan favorite Modern Animal in 2019. When the world shutdown, the boys settled in different parts of the country (Rob “doing his Johny Mayer thing” in Bozeman, MT, Pat in Los Angeles, CA, and John still in Miami). Remotely, they wrote what would become their third full-length album, Water Your Garden, out January 2022. As things opened back up, the musicians put it all together in person.Armed with singles such as “Queen,” the falsetto-spiked “High Beams” [feat. Nafets], “Diamond,” and “Ghost On The Mend” Magic City Hippies are ready to heat up their next chapter now.
An Evening With Yo La Tengo
2023 Bell’s Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event. Time keeps moving and things keep changing, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back.Yo La Tengo have raced time for nearly four decades and, to my ears, they just keep winning. The trio’s latest victory is called This Stupid World, a spellbinding set of reflective songs that resist the ever-ticking clock. This is music that’s not so much timeless as time-defiant. “I want to fall out of time,” Ira Kaplan sings in “Fallout.” “Reach back, unwind.” Part of how Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew escape time is by watching it pass, even accepting it when they must. “I see clearly how it ends / I see the moon rise as the sun descends,” they sing during opener “Sinatra Drive Breakdown.” In the séance-like “Until it Happens,” Kaplan plainly intones, “Prepare to die / Prepare yourself while there’s still time.” But This Stupid World is also filled with calls to reject time – bide it, ignore it, waste it. “Stay alive,” he adds later in the same song. “Look away from the hands of time.” Of course, times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. Yo La Tengo made This Stupid World all by themselves, though. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. Another new thing about This Stupid World: it’s the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in a while. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has been made a touch more direct.This Stupid World gives your brain a lot to digest, too. All the battles with time drive toward some heavy conclusions. In the gripping “Aselestine,” Hubley sings about what sounds like a friend on death’s door: “The clock won’t tick / I can’t predict / I can’t sell your books, though you asked me to.” In “Apology Letter,” time turns simple communication into something fraught and confusing: “The words / Derail on the way from me to you.” Not everything is so serious, though. The absurdist “Tonight’s Episode” helps McNew learn to milk cows, steal faces, and treat guacamole as a verb. And somehow Alice Cooper, Ray Davies, and Rick Moranis show up in “Brain Capers,” all telling us time isn’t finished yet.So I guess everyone on This Stupid World grapples with how time keeps steamrolling and how we keep trying to do something about it. It’s there in the title, a weary but clear-eyed pejorative that suggests determined resignation, a will to fight despite the grim odds. It’s there in the title track too: “This stupid world – it’s killing me / This stupid world – is all we have.” Such realism leads to the resolute optimism of This Stupid World’s parting shot, “Miles Away,” which sees time’s passage and life’s impermanence as things to deal with rather than reasons to despair. “You feel alone / Friends are all gone,” Hubley prays softly. “Keep wiping the dust from your eyes.”
The Baseball Project featuring members of R.E.M., The Dream Syndicate, and The Minus 5
This is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only In 2008 they busted out of the box and easily reached first with their Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails. The Baseball Project was on base and immediately posed a threat to go further. In 2011, they moved on to second with some wildness aptly called High and Inside. They were halfway home. Three years later in 2014, the quintet of Big Stars moved on down the line to the aptly titled 3rd, an epic double dip delight of craftsmanship and savvy. And there they stayed. For 9 long years at the hot corner, but we’re happy to say that The Baseball Project is finally coming home, scoring big and touching ‘em all with their fourth album Grand Salami Time. The scoreboard is lighting up and the fireworks are illuminating the sky Speaking of reaching home, this album is a homecoming of sorts, as the band recorded and produced the album with none other than the legendary Mitch Easter. BBP members Peter Buck and Mike Mills’ made their first albums with Mitch back in the early 80s with a swingin’ little combo called R.E.M. Scott McCaughey and Steve Wynn kept busy themselves, busting out new tunes with the Minus 5/Young Fresh Fellows (Scott) and The Dream Syndicate (Steve), while stockpiling a passel of penned poetics about the national pastime, many co-written with Peter. Mike adds a new classic of his own about doctored baseballs called “Stuff.” Linda Pitmon, who along with Peter and Scott has been part of a steady rhythmic nucleus, bashing out epic rock platters with Filthy Friends, Alejandro Escovedo, Luke Haines & Peter Buck, is back driving the ship from behind her mighty drum machine. All in all, a fancy pedigree but, as Wynn points out, “this is our only band that plays stadiums” — true story as The Baseball Project has performed full sets along with the National Anthem and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at major league parks in Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and more minor league and spring training fields, as well as having thrown out some exceptional first pitches (nothing but strikes!) as well. It’s all part of an unusual arc and fun story of a band whose first gig was an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman followed by a festival in a medieval Spanish city. For a quintet that has seemingly done everything over the years with their other bands, The Baseball Project always offers new and uncharted experiences. The album was recorded at Mitch Easter’s fabled Fidelitorium Studios in Kernersville, North Carolina, with the entire band performing live together in the same room, a joyous experience that seemed impossible to imagine only one year before. Mitch adds guitar on a few tracks and the record also features appearances by Stephen McCarthy (Long Ryders) and Steve Berlin (Los Lobos). In the meantime, the band will be out on the road throughout—when else? —the upcoming baseball season. And we all know they’ll find their way home. Get out the rye bread and mustard, Grandma, it’s Grand Salami Time!
Here Come The Mummies w/ Desmond Jones
2023 Bell’s Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only Here Come the Mummies is a nine-piece funk-rock band of 5000 year-old Egyptian Mummies with a one-track mind. Their “Terrifying Funk from Beyond the Grave” is sure to get you into them (and possibly vice versa). Since their discovery HCTM has been direct support for P-Funk, Al Green, Mavis Staples, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Cheap Trick; rocked Super Bowl Village; become a regular on The Bob and Tom Show; played massive festivals like Summer Fest, Summer Camp, Common Ground, Musikfest, and Suwannee Hulaween; and sold tickets by the thousands across large swaths of North America.Maybe that’s why the ladies (and some dudes) can’t stop losing their minds over these mayhem-inducing mavens of mirth. Some say they were cursed after deflowering a great Pharaoh’s daughter. Others claim they are reincarnated Grammy-Winning studio musicians. Regardless, HCTM’s mysterious personas, cunning song-craft, and unrelenting live show will bend your brain, and melt your face. Get ready, for Here Come The Mummies.
Murder By Death w/ Laura Jane Grace
2023 Bell’s Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only As trailblazers of the early 2000s indie-Americana style, the Louisville, KY-based quintet finds a way of taking tried & true rock-and-roll and knocking it slightly off axis, into tottering revolutions of something eerie, emotional, immediate, lush, and uniquely theirs. On the surface, Murder By Death is a Louisville, KY sextet with a wry, ominous name. But behind the geography and moniker is a band of meticulous and literary songwriters matched by a specific brand of brooding, anthem-riding balladry and orchestral indie rock. Murder By Death’s path began in the early 2000s as most Midwestern college-town groups do, by playing to small crowds at ratty venues and frenzied house parties. While many of their formative-year scene-mates failed to make it much further than campustown’s borders, Murder By Death translated their anonymous beginnings into a 20+ year career founded on a bedrock of eight full-length albums, tireless D.I.Y. touring and performing ethics, and, most importantly, a dedicated, cult-like fanbase
The Beths w/ Disq
2023 Beer Garden Summer Concert SeriesThis is a 21 and over event.Standing Room Only On The Beths’ new album Expert In A Dying Field, Elizabeth Stokes’ songwriting positions her somewhere between being a novelist and a documentarian. The songs collected here are autobiographical, but they’re also character sketches of relationships and more importantly, their aftermaths. The question that hangs in the air: what do you do with how intimately versed you’ve become in a person, once they’re gone from your life? The third LP from the New Zealand quartet houses 12 jewels of tight, guitar-heavy songs that worm their way into your head, an incandescent collision of power-pop and skuzz. The album’s title track “Expert In A Dying Field” introduces the thesis for the record: “How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field? How do you know it’s over when you can’t let go?” Stokes asks. “Love is learned over time ‘til you’re an expert in a dying field.” ‘Expert In A Dying Field’ is out now via Carpark Records and Ivy League Records.
Aaron James Wright w/ Kyle Rasche (of Chain of Lakes) and Dave Johnson
21 and over This is a seated performance Aaron James Wright is an independent singer-songwriter, special education teacher, environmental activist, husband, father and noted smart ass. During a 30 year career in music, Aaron has dabbled in alternative rock, classic rock, punk rock, butt rock, country, jazz, blues, and children’s music. Performing in bands such as “Slow Drag”, David Bowie tribute act “The Long Players”, and most recently “Aaron James Wright & The Ultralights”, as well as a solo act, Aaron has played venues from Detroit to Chicago, and from Alaska to Kentucky. His most recent solo album, “A Little Stronger”, was produced in Kalamazoo at Broadside Productions by studio wizard and guitar slinger Mike Roche. Aaron’s tunes have been heard on WYCE’s “Local Spins”out of Grand Rapids and on WMUK on “Grassroots” and “Let’s Hear It”. “Grassroots” host Darcy Wilkin calls him “the best songwriter you’ve never heard of”. Aaron is not sure if that is a compliment.
