Freak Scene #43: Farewell, Leah Kunkel
Plus, new music from Erin McKeown, the Greys and Gentle Hen.
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, we pay tribute to Leah Kunkel, catch up with Erin McKeown as she revives her anti-holiday show and hear new music from the Greys and Gentle Hen.
Though Leah Kunkel was never as famous as her older sister, Cass Elliot, she put in her time as a singer and songwriter in the 1970s and ’80s. Yet Kunkel’s primary impact came outside the spotlight, practicing entertainment and public defense law in Northampton, where she lived for more than 30 years until her death Nov. 26, about two weeks after she was diagnosed with cancer. She was 76.
In her music career, Kunkel’s first single, “Billy,” came out in 1969 under the name Cotton Candy. Later, she released a pair of albums under her own name and two more as part of the Coyote Sisters, with Marty Gwinn and (on one, at least) Renée Armand. She also contributed vocals to albums by James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jimmy Webb, Art Garfunkel and Arlo Guthrie, whom she had known since both were in high school. When Cass Elliot died of a heart attack in 1974, Kunkel and her then husband, the musician and producer Russ Kunkel, took custody of Elliot’s daughter, Owen, and raised her alongside their son, Nathaniel.
The Kunkels divorced in the ’80s, and Leah Kunkel was on the cusp of turning 40 when she graduated from Smith College in 1988, before earning a degree at Western New England School of Law and setting up an entertainment law practice in Northampton. Among others, Kunkel provided guidance to Signature Sounds, Guthrie, and June Millington and Ann Hackler when the Institute for the Musical Arts was purchasing property for the “Magical Queendom” in Goshen.
“She was so much to me: a possible bandmate at all times, the best raconteur when in the right mood, intellectual foil, my lawyer, sharer of certain secrets, fellow songwriter, and I believe we served as counterbalances to each other's moods,” Millington wrote on Facebook. “Listen, I don’t let a lot of people in. She was in.”
Signature Sounds co-founder Jim Olsen and his business partner Mark Thayer came to work with Kunkel through a musician who was recording an album for what was then a fledgling label.
“Leah questioned our motives and suggested that we were ‘too nice for the music business,’” Olsen said by email. “Neither of us had any experience running a record label, and Leah became an invaluable resource and sounding board.”
Along with her entertainment practice, Kunkel worked as a bar advocate — that is, a private attorney handling public defender cases. She had 50 clients as a public defender at the time of her death, Ruth Griggs, president of the Northampton Jazz Festival, said Monday on the WHMP radio program “Talk the Talk with Bill & Buz.”
“There are so many people she’s touched over the years,” Griggs said.
Co-host Bill Newman, a civil rights lawyer who has served as director of the Western Mass. office of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, recalled Kunkel’s devotion to those cases.
“I think it was really an integral part of who she was,” Newman said on “Talk the Talk.”
When Newman would assemble groups of lawyers to help defend protestors arrested at demonstrations or for acts of civil disobedience, he could count on Kunkel’s assistance.
“Leah always said yes,” Newman said. “Or she called early and said, ‘How are we doing this?’ And she was always there, she was always interested, she was always concerned and she was always involved and devoted to the task of winning those cases, or at least providing the best representation that we could.”
Leah Rachel Cohen was born June 15, 1948, in Washington D.C. She followed her sister first to Greenwich Village in New York, where she participated in the tail end of the folk scene there, and then to Los Angeles, where she married Russ Kunkel in 1968. Leah Kunkel was active in music throughout her life, but especially in the 1970s and ’80s, when she lent her voice to songs including James Taylor’s version of “Handy Man,” which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1977.
She released a self-titled album in 1979, and a second LP, I Run With Trouble, in 1980. Kunkel, Gwinn and Armand formed the Coyote Sisters in 1980, and released a self-titled album in 1984. The follow-up, Women and Other Visions, came out in 2001. Though she had been performing as recently as this past summer, her legal career occupied most of her time. Most, but not quite all.
“I’ll miss her fantastic annual holiday party, which was always full of great musicians and would inevitably have everyone gathered around Leah at the piano singing along,” Olsen said.
In that spirit, her family is planning a public celebration of Kunkel’s life, with details to come.
Erin McKeown Is Back With Anti-Holiday Cheer
The calendar at the Iron Horse lists a lot of Christmas-themed concerts over the next few weeks, and also one counterpoint: F*ck That! Erin McKeown's Anti-Holiday Spectacular. The Conway singer and songwriter is reviving the show in Northampton Saturday, Dec. 7, for the first time since 2013, and she’s got a new EP to go with it. (Tickets are here.)
FU Too! More Anti-Holiday Songs from Erin McKeown includes parodies of holiday standards, including “The 12 Crises of Christmas” and “What Child Is This” (“Really, what child am I holding?” she asks), along with the razor-sharp satire of “The Candle Song” and “Beautiful & Perfect (Home for the Holidays),” a moving rejoinder to the emotional sabotage of toxic relatives.
The EP is the companion volume to McKeown’s 2011 album F*ck That!, on which she let fly her antipathy for the holiday season. The album, and the EP (and the stage show), are snarky and irreverent, but ultimately good-natured — just like McKeown herself.
“I really like doing the show, even if people online grumbled” — a contributing factor in why she put it to rest 11 years ago, McKeown says over coffee (and at the laundromat) in downtown Northampton.
The cultural climate this year prompted McKeown to revive the stage spectacular. Though she says the show would have worked better if Kamala Harris had won the presidential election (indeed, the first song on the EP is “Kamala Ye Faithful”), the fact that she didn’t means that people are looking for ways to vent. What better way than finding community at what McKeown bills as “the world’s first anti-capitalist, pro-queer, suspicious of Christmas-as-patriotism, sex-positive, not safe for work, multi-ethnic, radical leftist Anti-Holiday show?”
“People want to do something, but nobody has the energy to take to the streets,” McKeown says.
Her anti-holiday spectacular initially took shape when she wrote a handful of subversive carols to play during intermission at a 2011 production of Santacide, a comic Christmas murder mystery by cartoonist Hilary B. Price and dramatist Kelsey A. Flynn. Never a big fan of the holiday season, McKeown soon found herself with a growing collection of tunes spoofing it.
The ideas didn’t stop after her first anti-holiday collection. As inspiration continued to flow over the years, she jotted down reminders in the Notes app on her phone. While recovering from an injury this past summer, McKeown found she had plenty of time to flesh them out. The finishing touches will come onstage, when she and an ad-hoc chorus of volunteers from the audience will perform them — without first rehearsing together.
“It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole thing,” McKeown says.
The Greys Contain Multitudes on First Album
Northampton band the Greys started as a duo comprising vocals and upright bass, but it wasn’t long before Caity Simpson and Chris Merritt needed a broader musical palette and the lineup expanded. Featuring guitarist Tim Zucco and drummer Kevin Mason since 2021, the foursome has been honing its first album, Sixteen Eyes, which comes out Dec. 12 — the same day the Greys play an album-release show at the Iron Horse (tickets).
Sixteen Eyes is a varied collection of songs that reflect a band open to different sounds and approaches, from sprawling funk-rock to sleek indie tunes to smokey introspection. The Greys often take their time here: five of the tracks are more than six minutes, with “Portal” stretching well past nine. The song opens with a whirlwind of funk-laced wah-wah guitar and strong bass, shifts into rugged riff-rock, makes room for a jazzy, restrained section in the middle and brings back the wah funk at the end. It’s like a jammy operetta.
Elsewhere, the Greys dial in a wistful indie-rock sound on “A Vision,” where bright, trebly guitar cascades down over a descending bassline while Simpson sings in a voice balanced between sultry and sweet. “Rabbit Hole” is more somber, with liquid bass and resonant tapping on a ride cymbal leading into drifting guitar textures that coalesce into a blazing alt-rock chorus where Simpsons demonstrates the power of her voice.
Though the songs on Sixteen Eyes span a seven-year period, between 2016-2023, there’s no evidence of a learning curve in the songwriting. That suggests the musicians have worked hard to straighten any wobbles that might have been apparent in the early days. The result is an album that shows a group that is still exploring the full scope of its abilities, as individual players and as a unit, but with the confidence that comes from knowing they’re right where they want to be.
Gentle Hen Put the Right Songs on ‘The Wrong Record’
There’s a good chance that any band with more than a couple of LPs to its name has some loose songs kicking around. Gentle Hen had just about enough for another album. The Wrong Record compiles seven tunes the Northampton group had recorded for, and left off of, previous projects, plus one new track that singer and guitarist Henning Ohlenbusch wrote to complete the collection.
Gentle Hen recorded four of the songs while making last year’s LP The Whole Point of the Trip (featured in Freak Scene #2); three others were part of 2011 sessions for what became the 2016 album Bells on the Boats on the Bay. Most listeners will be hard-pressed to distinguish between the two batches. All the songs have the essential characteristics of Gentle Hen’s music: jangly guitars, sunny pop harmonies and a certain offhanded, day-in-the-life vibe.
Guitars are more prominent on the title track, while Ken Maiuri’s contributions on piano and melodica carry “Bad Day Done.” Later, “The Rumour Mill” has a rollicking rock ’n’ roll feel thanks to a blend of muscular guitar and twinkling piano, and “Sofa So Good” unwinds with an arrangement that triangulates indie-pop and bossa nova, with strummed acoustic guitar, a steady beat from drummer Brian Marchese and flourishes on electric guitar. Bassist Max Germer rounds out the group.
Though the band calls this new collection The Wrong Record, it’s the right grouping of songs that simply hadn’t found their place before now.
Upcoming Concerts
Oof, we’re going long this week. OK, quickly, some highlights: Phish’s Trey Anastasio performs March 8 at Symphony Hall in Springfield (tickets).
Heather Maloney plays a pair of album-release shows Feb. 7-8 at the Iron Horse in Northampton (night one; night two). Amethyst Kiah is there March 1 (tickets). Valerie June stops at the District Music Hall in Norwalk May 7 (tickets) and at the Iron Horse May 10 (tickets).
Ani DiFranco plays College Street Music Hall in New Haven April 26 (tickets). Alan Sparhawk, formerly of Low, performs April 4 at the Space Ballroom in Hamden (tickets).
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