Freak Scene #17: Buffalo Tom Bring New LP Back to Amherst
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, Buffalo Tom bassist Chris Colbourn tells us what the Valley music scene was like in the mid-’80s, while Wishbone Zoë leaves us wanting more with her new EP.
Buffalo Tom came out swinging. Formed at UMass in Amherst in 1986, the college-rockers released six albums in 10 years between 1988-98. They sent a couple of tunes up the charts, had songs appear on TV and movie soundtracks and even wrote the theme for a short-lived TV show. Then things slowed down: Buffalo Tom’s new album Jump Rope is just the trio’s fourth LP since Smitten in 1998. What changed?
“Good question,” bassist Chris Colbourn says by email, before Buffalo Tom open a tour at the Drake in Amherst tonight (Friday, May 31; tickets are available here). “Answer: Six kids.”
He’s kidding, but also not. “Kids really did take up a lot of our time post-’90,” Colbourn says. “And also I think we had done our best at touring, recording and were ready to stay at home and get old.”
Yet Colbourn, guitarist Bill Janovitz and drummer Tom Maginnis have never called it quits. Even as the interval between albums grew longer, the band has retained a distinctive sensibility over the years. Jump Rope dials in that Buffalo Tom sound: catchy songs with a roots-rock feel built around jangly guitars, limber bass and steady, straight-ahead drums. It’s not far different from the 1993 single “Sodajerk,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Alternative Songs chart, or “Taillights Fade” from 1992, which appeared in the 1999 film by the same name, starring Elizabeth Berkley and Breckin Meyer.
For all the continuity in the band’s sound, the way the musicians work together has evolved since the early days, when they practiced in rented houses in Northampton with mattresses lining the walls to dampen the sound. After finishing at UMass, they moved to Boston, though the trio was rarely home in those days.
“When we graduated college around 1987, we immediately started touring around the world, which became our practice and writing sessions,” Colbourn says. “Our first tour was in Europe, and we did a week with Black Flag’s Henry Rollins’ band.”
Buffalo Tom in 1988 released their self-titled first album, co-produced with their Amherst pal J Mascis, of Dinosaur Jr. The band made the most of those years on tour by writing new songs together on the road, though now they tend to work on material separately at home and exchange demos that they work up in rehearsals before recording.
Though Janovitz once told an interviewer that the Western Mass. music scene “was kind of dead back then,” Colbourn has a different recollection of Buffalo Tom’s formative days in the Valley.
“I feel like there was actually a lot of music going on in Western Mass. in the ’80s compared to the sleepy suburban towns we grew up in,” Colbourn says. “I think of that era as the Pixies or Dinosaur but I also remember seeing the Pajama Slave Dancers at Sheehan’s Cafe in Northampton, and NRBQ at Smith College. Also, these amazing national tours coming through UMass Amherst at that time like R.E.M. at the Fine Arts Center, the English Beat, Hüsker Dü and the Replacements at the Student Union Ballroom. It was a great time to be starting a band.”
Wishbone Zoë Contains Multitudes on Micro-Mirage EP
As someone who often gets requests to write about three- and four-song EPs, which don’t offer much to go on in terms of what a band is about, I wish more musicians would take Wishbone Zoë’s approach. The Amherst musician (and animator, videographer and poet) uses her EP Micro-Mirage almost as a lure, on three songs that are distinctive, and distinctly different.
Opener “Mirage” has a stripped-down, ’90s-style folk-funk feel that finds the singer (a.k.a. Zosia Kochanski) accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. On “Microwomb,” she talk-sings her lyrics over a boom-bap beat and the whirring, clanking industrial sound of an MRI machine. (She made a video, complete with an auto-interview, for “Microwomb” that you can find here; for some reason it wouldn’t embed.) Final song “Find Out Why” is a cover of a song by the Western Mass. band Landowner, from their 2018 album Blatant. Zoë replaces the loping, bass-heavy instrumentation of the original with prismatic layers of her voice in what must have been a labor-intensive production.
Micro-Mirage is Wishbone Zoë’s first solo release since her 2020 album French of the Bird.(She also plays bass in the Hadley punk group EIEIEIO.) The EP is varied enough to make you (or me, at any rate) eager to hear whatever is coming next.
Free Live Music in Northampton
Free live music outside is one of the joys of summer, and there’s plenty happening in Northampton over the next few months. There’s Summer on Strong, which has live music Wednesday-Sunday on Strong Avenue. Check out the schedule for May and June.
Also, the city of Northampton has teamed up with Northampton Brewery to present bands every Thursday (except for July 4) through August as part of Bands on Brewster. Ian St. George and the Chris Jennings Band performed this week (sorry to have caught on to this too late to have announced it), and the shows continue until Aug. 29 on Brewster Court outside the brewery.
Here’s what’s coming up: The Fawns and Gentle Hen June 6, Avery Joi June 13, the Invincible Casuals June 20, Magick Lantern June 27, Thrasher Wheat July 11, King Radio July 18, the Ray Mason Band July 25, Jake Manzi Aug. 1, Matt Hebert & Haunt Aug. 8, Kimaya Diggs Aug. 15, “surprise guests” Aug. 22 (Dinosaur Jr.? Sunburned Hand of the Man? Black Pyramid? A band called Surprise Guests?), and Soul Magnets Aug. 29. All the shows are free, and also weather-dependent. Updates will be posted on Instagram by @nohoarts.
Next week: We talk to guitarist Bill MacKay ahead of his show June 8 in Turners Falls, plus a new album from the Connecticut/Massachusetts group Perennial.
Do you know a musician you’d like to read about in Freak Scene? Let me know! To submit your (or their) music for coverage consideration, send a note to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first. You can find previous issues of Freak Scene in the archive.