Chadwick Stokes sets a rock opera in the days before Roe, with ‘1972’
MILTON — It’s been more than 15 years since Chadwick Stokes last hopped a train. With his brother, Willy Urmston, and two friends, the musician set out across the country in the summer of 2008, stealing aboard freight trains, hobostyle.
After a half-dozen hectic years with Dispatch, the wildly popular rock band he cofounded in the mid-’90s, Stokes was looking for a new adventure. He got what he was looking for.
“I was so inspired by the community out there, and that experience as a whole, that I kind of endlessly wanted to write about it,” Stokes said recently. He wrote plenty of personal songs about it, for solo projects and for his band State Radio. But the enduring legacy of that trip may turn out to be a fictional young woman named Hannah.
For years Stokes has been toying with an idea to write a concept album about a woman who rides the rails across the country. Over time, he came up with various reasons for Hannah’s odyssey. After the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion rights case, in 2022, Stokes found a purpose for his narrative.
It’s 1972. Hannah wants to leave her abusive boyfriend. She’s pregnant. Abortion has not yet been legalized. And Hannah has a difficult decision to make — one that will change the rest of her life.
On Friday, Stokes and his current band, the Pintos, will debut a work-in-progress of his rock opera, “1972,” in a sold-out performance at the Somerville Theatre. It’s this year’s benefit for Calling All Crows, the activist organization he cofounded with his wife, Sybil Gallagher, 16 years ago.
“I’ve been watching Chad sculpt this for years,” said Gallagher, sitting with her husband in the cozy house they share with their three children, ages 12, 10, and 7. At lunchtime, there was soup on the stove and a fire crackling in the den.
“All of a sudden it just clicked for Chad that the protagonist was this woman fighting for her future in a way that is really relevant in this moment.”
Sharing its name with a 2009 song by Stokes’s socially conscious roots-rock-reggae band State Radio, Calling All Crows organizes feminist awareness campaigns, with particular emphasis on the music business.
That’s partly a product of the years when Gallagher served as State Radio’s tour manager, Stokes said. After a gig, while the band members loaded out their equipment, she’d have to deal with contemptuous venue managers.
“We’d be packing up, and she’s got to go to some seedy office to get the cash,” he recalled.
“A big part of what we saw from the artist side was this really dangerous behavior with regard to power dynamics,” Gallagher added. “There’s this extraordinary objectification of women. It’s everything you could imagine.”
Both partners were raised in socially aware households in MetroWest towns. Gallagher grew up in a large family with a “wildly liberal” Jewish mother and a devout Catholic father who had his own principles. When their priest denounced homosexuality from the altar, Joe Gallagher stood up and led his family out of the church for good.
“Looking back, I feel really proud of that moment,” Sybil Gallagher said. “It left such an imprint.”
Stokes — known as Chad Urmston during the Dispatch days — grew up on a small farm in Sherborn. He spent several summers working as a counselor at Camp Jabberwocky, the overnight program on Martha’s Vineyard for people with disabilities. That’s where he met his wife.
Though his parents were a little older than the hippie generation, they loved the musical “Hair.” From a young age, he was hooked, too.
“It just blew me away,” he said, “that idea of loving a song for the melody alone and then having its lyrics sink into you — ‘Oh, this is about something much greater.’ The power of that!”
For years, the storytelling of rock operas from “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the Who’s “Tommy” to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” has been on his mind. “1972” relates Hannah’s tale through songs designed for musical embellishment. On the day of this visit, Willy Urmston and family friend Sam Dudley were on hand, rehearsing the new songs on banjo and trombone, respectively.
Stokes is hoping the project eventually grows to include piano, strings, the works. In their current demo versions, it’s easy to hear the songs as anthemic sing-alongs.
“Everyone has been trying to push him away from calling it a ‘rock opera,’ but he’s sticking with it,” Gallagher said.
“Right now there’s no dialogue,” Stokes explained. Instead, the lyrics have to convey all the action.
“We could go and record it two months from now, but I’m sure it’s gonna change so much.”
Given Gallagher’s commitment to the feminist work of Calling All Crows (she’s the organization’s chairwoman), much of the conversation at home has revolved lately around Hannah’s decision — “this very sacred, devastating experience that so many women we know have gone through,” Gallagher said. And how her husband tells it “as a male writer.”
Rather than pushing back, she’s urging him to share it.
“My opinion is that the most important voice to be heard from is the male voice,” Gallagher said. “The movement really begins when the oppressed demographic is not standing alone anymore.”
‘All of a sudden it just clicked for Chad that the protagonist was this woman fighting for her future in a way that is really relevant in this moment.’
SYBIL GALLAGHER, on how her husband, Chadwick Stokes (above, and at right with Gallagher), was inspired to write “1972”