Freak Scene #39: Brunch Returns to the Iron Horse
Plus, Joshua David Thayer releases his first solo album and the next installment of the Back Porch Festival Songwriter Series is a winner.
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, we tuck into the history of brunch at the Iron Horse, and Valley music veteran Joshua David Thayer has released his first solo album.
Northampton band Recent History will make some of the same when they take the stage Sunday morning at the Iron Horse. Their performance is part of the return of brunch to the Center Street club after a decades-long absence — though Sunday mornings back in the day rarely, if ever, included live music.
Playing as a duo, Recent History will perform acoustic versions of tunes from the soundtrack to Singles, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 movie about the romantic entanglements of a group of twenty-somethings in Seattle as grunge was breaking into the mainstream. (Tickets are here.) The soundtrack includes songs by Seattle stalwarts including Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, as well as Smashing Pumpkins and Paul Westerberg’s first post-Replacements music.
“One of the things that separates the grunge era from other types of hard rock is that many of the songs can be enjoyed with acoustic arrangements,” says Recent History’s Glen Fant, who also books concerts in the Valley as Fantastic Shows. “Nirvana Unplugged was huge and I listened to all of the records from that series.”
Recent History played similar shows in February at the Press Room in Portsmouth, N.H., but a local venue that could handle brunch and live entertainment proved elusive until the Iron Horse decided to restart a brunch service — this time with live music. Chris Freeman, executive director of the Iron Horse, sees brunch as an opportunity to increase community engagement with the club.
“We're really excited to try this out,” Freeman says. “As a non-profit we always want to be fulfilling our mission of enhancing the health and vitality of our community through the power of music.”
Recent History’s performance Sunday will be the second brunch revival event, following last month’s “Klezmer and Kugel” show with Northampton’s Myrtle Street Klezmer. They return Dec. 22 for the Winter Klezmer Carnival brunch.
Though food and live music intersected from the start at the Iron Horse, performers weren’t part of the program on Sunday mornings when brunch arrived in the early ’80s.
“In my memory brunch was never (or almost never) a musical affair,” says Jordi Herold, who opened the Iron Horse in 1979 as a coffehouse with live music. “It’s possible that it was experimented with a few times (a jazz trio? a classical guitarist?) but that is certainly not my memory of the ‘daily.’”
Mary Gravel, who worked at the Iron Horse as a server and manager, has a similar recollection.
“No live music at Sunday brunch, unless once in a blue moon someone local asked if they could come play,” Gravel says. “Lots of our favorite cassettes played on the sound system: McGarrigles, Karla Bonoff, George Benson, Pierre Bensusan.”
When the venue first opened, it wasn’t equipped for full-on food service. It took a few years before the Iron Horse acquired a restaurant-grade range that the staff dubbed “grandma,” and the menu expanded to include omelets, fried eggs and hash browns.
“From the beginning we had the coffees, blender drinks and pastries,” Gravel says. “There was also a gas burner which could boil eggs for breakfast with toast, 7 days a week! There was a toaster oven to heat up quiche and our other hot food choices.”
The menu options for this Sunday, included in the ticket price, are crunchy cabbage salad with sesame dressing, cheddar and scallion quiche and crispy potatoes with remoulade. The bar will also be open, with regular mimosas, apple cider mimosas and coffee available for an additional cost.
Brunch at the Iron Horse had a loyal following until Eric Suher dropped it when he bought the club in 1994. It “was consistently popular in the community,” Herold says. “It had a real neighborhood vibe with people coming as regulars and knowing others in the room.”
Joshua David Thayer Wrestles with Loss on ‘Feeling Rough’
Making his first solo album was about processing a year of upheaval for Joshua David Thayer. The former Valley resident and bassist for bands including Love Minus Zero, Hadley Transfer Station and Fancy Trash wrote and recorded It Will Still Keep Feeling Rough after the unexpected death of his father in 2023 and a job change. Thayer set up in his basement in Medford, where he played pretty much everything: guitars, bass, synthesizers, percussion, vocals. (Jason Smith later added drums.)
The result is a dozen robust songs that reflect the title of the album: they are searching, sorrowful and sometimes bewildered as Thayer threads his way through a landscape of loss. Opener “Tempest” sets the tone for the album, pairing outsized overdriven guitars with a vocal melody that seems to rise above the tumult. Later, “The Only Way to Do No Harm” reads like a reminder to himself as Thayer sings through a cascading cycle of electric guitar arpeggios, his voice refracting into a prism of harmony on the refrain.
Many of the songs here give the impression that Thayer is working to regain his bearings — understandable, considering the shock of suddenly losing a loved one. He’s wrestling with feeling helpless over a rugged guitar riff on “Punch, Crumble and Crawl,” while gritty slide guitar on “No Sort of Dream” accompanies Thayer’s sense of stagnation. Yet for all rugged emotional terrain that Thayer traverses, It Will Still Keep Feeling Rough is at its core a triumphant album. When he was feeling his roughest, Thayer sought solace in music — and after 35 years in a supporting role, found that he’s more than capable of stepping out front.
Upcoming Concerts
The next entry in the Back Porch Festival Songwriter Series happens Nov. 19 at the Iron Horse, where Sandy Bailey, Zara Bode, Kimaya Diggs, Tracy Grammar and Erin McKeown will perform the songs of Carole King (tickets).
The one after that is a winner, too: Rani Arbo, Lisa Bastoni, Tracy Grammer, Ward Hayden, Peter Mulvey, Winterpills and Deep River Ramblers will perform the songs of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris Dec. 11 at the Drake in Amherst (tickets).
The salsa band Lulada Club performs Saturday, Nov. 9, at Mass MoCA in North Adams (tickets). Malawi group Kasambwe Brothers are there Nov. 16 (tickets). And while we’re at it, the FreshGrass festival already has dates for next year: Sept. 19-21 (tickets).
The Marigold Theater in Easthampton hosts the Gaslight Tinkers Saturday (tickets). Saliba, Two Wrong Turns, Clancy Conlin and Wallball share the bill Nov. 13 (tickets). Holyoke’s Behold! True Believers perform Nov. 16 with Fool & the World and the Berkshires (the band from South Windsor, Conn., not the mountains; tickets).
Games We Play perform Nov. 19 at the Webster Underground in Hartford (tickets). Brenda K. Starr is there Nov. 30 (tickets). Connecticut metal band Vomit Forth play Dec. 15; according to the Encyclopaedia Metallum, their themes include “gore” and “human sacrifice,” which ought to make for a cozy evening out (tickets). Afroman plays the main room at the Webster Jan. 17 in a show rescheduled from this past week (tickets).
Hartford-area guitarist Joel Weik, formerly of the band String Theorie, has come back to performing after a 13-year break. He’ll be at Talcott Mountain Collective in Simsbury Nov. 23 opening for Mauve Lloyd, at New Park Brewing in West Hartford as part of their Expressions Songwriter Series, and at the Wadsworth Atheneum Feb. 6.
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