BLAST FROM THE PAST
Channel’s lunchtime concerts return – streaming, of course
Local rockers of a certain age are bound to have rosy memories of the lunchtime shows that WBCN produced at the waterfront club the Channel (and later at other clubs) during the ’80s. After all, what could be better at noon than free music, free beer and even a free hot dog?
You’ll have to bring your own hot dogs, but the Channel (located at 25 Necco St., and torn down in the ’90s) lives again as an online venue. And they’re now reviving the lunchtime concerts on Fridays at noon, with livestreamed shows by artists who were local favorites in the Channel’s heyday.
Former Private Lightning and Souls member Adam Sherman does the honors this week, with Fools mainstays Mike Girard and Rich Bartlett following next week. They stream on the Channel’s Facebook page and like the original shows they’re free, but viewers are referred to a few music-related charities.
The shows were put together by Sean McNally and Harry Booras, who booked and managed the Channel, and they even got WBCN personality Chachi Loprete to do MC honors.
Adam Sherman’s first band, Private Lightning, put in their share of
Channel time; he reckons they played there every eight weeks during 1980-81. Signed briefly to a major label, they had a raw yet progressive sound; later Sherman fronted the more straight-ahead band the Souls. And today he’ll revive a couple of songs from both bands, for the first time in decades.
“I’ve really resisted it because I hate dwelling in the past, and I didn’t think you could really do Private Lightning without a violin or a keyboard — We had an orchestral kind of sound, but with some real guts to it. But I’ve got to say it’s been really fun to play these songs again; there’s something liberating about doing it with just an acoustic guitar.
“Difficult a person as I may be, I still really like to please an audience as a performer, and I absolutely want to give the people who’d tune in for this what they’d want to hear.”
Now leading his own band, Sherman
is itching to get back to the non-virtual clubs. Meanwhile he’s releasing a new digital single, “Love Forgives,” in time for the show. “If I’ve gained anything as a writer, it’s the ability to speak truthfully about things I really know. After all these years I feel I’m able to write something that’s very personal, but might have a universal appeal, because there’s some truth there.”
The Fools don’t take a whole lot of things seriously, but they will be serious about safety when they play next Friday: Singer Mike Girard and guitarist Rich Bartlett will be under one roof, but with a partition between them. Otherwise, they’ll do their best to summon the Channel, where they were a fixture and even made a live album.
“It was a real Wild West kind of place, in a part of town where there was no other reason to be there — unless you were a gangster dumping a body in the river,” Girard said.
“The place officially held 1,200 people, but I can guarantee that we had two thousand there, and they were all on each other’s shoulders.”
The band always had two sides — nifty power pop songs on one hand and raucous sendups (most famously the Talking Heads parody “Psycho Chicken”) on the other — and on Friday you can expect some of both. “I realized there’s no FCC on the internet, so that’s advantageous.”
In recent years, Girard has turned his attention to writing. His first book was a memoir of band life, for the second, “A Fool in Time” (available through Amazon and other online sources), his onstage character gets to ride a time machine. “He sees Elvis on Ed Sullivan, then gets to investigate the Sasquatch story and do some exploring with Lewis & Clark.” So he’s got a future as a fiction writer? “Not at all. Every word in there is true.”