A hippie with a brain
DAVE POTTIE’S SOUND WAVES AN ONGOING LABOR OF LOVE
In a region rich in live music venues, one doesn’t have to look far to see the familiar face of Dave Pottie. There he was last month, standing outside New London’s Garde Arts Center on a cool fall evening, waiting for the season’s debut performance by the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra. A few weeks before that, in the twilit Hygienic Art Park at a multi-band bill of roots musicians, Pottie watched, smiled and chatted with folks as a succession of acts trod the stage.
Or last July, at the Groton Elks Lodge & Marina, Pottie was on hand for the spectacularly attended memorial service for his friend and fellow music enthusiast Daddy Jack Chaplin. On a portable stage, as an all-star group of players paid sonic homage to their departed pal, Pottie stood by and nodded in time to the celebratory tunes and shared anecdotes with fellow mourners.
“I like all kinds of music. Fortunately, I have a job that lets me see and hear a lot of it and has allowed me to make a lifetime’s worth of friends,” Pottie says.
Indeed, he’s the editor, publisher, ad salesman, distributor and doer-of-whatever-needs-to-done at Sound Waves, the free monthly music, entertainment and dining guide that has served southeastern Connecticut and western Rhode Island for 31 years. The magazine is a familiar sight, neatly stacked near the entrances of dozens of clubs, restaurants and business establishments. Inside, in addition to music features and reviews that tend to focus on blues, rock and jam bands but extend across the whole domain of popular music, there are regular columns by longtime Sound Waves
writers waxing with wit and insider knowledge about the bar scene, cooking, life as a musician and so on.
At its peak, Sound Waves had subscribers in all 50 states and across the globe including, Pottie says, “one guy at the South Pole. Seriously.” The coverage and delivery-distribution area for the magazine ranges from South County in Rhode Island to Old Saybrook and north to Windham, with about 80 percent of the copies going to New London County.
And the artists who've appeared on the cover over the course of 300-plus issues constitute a remarkable array of local, regional and national talent — many of whom were being featured on the front of a publication for the first time.
And speaking of “first time,” when Sound Waves started, Pottie had zero idea what he was doing. “I knew nothing about it. Nothing. But I guess I was in the right place at the right time.”
Pottie, with his neat goatee and always present hat, is speaking earlier this week over a burger and iced tea at the Engine Room in Mystic. Now 68 and a graduate of Newington High School, he moved to southeastern Connecticut in 1973 and was running a news agency called Shoreline News.
Pics of the stars
He used a press pass to gain access to a triple-headliner show with the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, and took along a camera.
“I took a ton of pictures and a lot of people liked them and a few even wanted to publish them,” he says, sounding mildly astonished all these years later. Before long, he was a professional rock photographer, regularly shooting images for publications like Rolling Stone.
He also brought his camera on his frequent evening forays to local music clubs. One night, shooting a jam session at the old Island House on Misquamicut Beach, a group of regulars were talking, and it came up that Rockfax, a popular free music mag, had recently ceased publication.
Pottie recalls, “Someone said, ‘Hey, Dave, start a magazine.' I thought it was interesting idea, but I said, ‘I couldn't afford to try it.' And the owner of the bar came over and handed me a check for four grand to get started. Amazing. I only knew him as Rick. I never knew his last name till I saw it on the check. Rick Marone. Without him ... He got a BIG discount from that point on.”
It took Pottie, who lives and works in his mobile home on the Mystic River, a few months to get the first issue out. Modeling the format after Rolling Stone and other magazines he leafed through for ideas, he then had to learn layout — and then figure out the whole financial aspect, distribution and ad sales.
Loyal and talented
One lucky thing was that, at the time, Pottie's roommate was renowned pedal steel guitarist Buddy Cage, a longtime member of influential country rock band New Riders of the Purple Sage whose session gigs ultimately included work with artists from Anne Murray to Bob Dylan to Slipknot.
“Buddy knew a lot of musicians with great stories, so he did a cover story on the Grateful Dead and became my first writer,” Pottie says.
Another pal, Ed Roach, was the first ad salesman, and “he definitely helped me get the thing off the ground,” Pottie says. “He told me his strategy was to drink a beer at every place he went. It worked. He got to know the customers but of course he had to go to sleep at 7 o'clock at night.”
In addition to plenty of useful information for residents as well as visitors in a high-traffic tourist area, readers have gotten to know and look forward to regular voices in the magazine. Two of Pottie's longest tenured writers are Marc T. Gould and Bill Harriman — both of whom have been with Sound Waves for over 25 years. Harriman is also a familiar face at dozens of shows across the region, and Pottie relies on him to pitch and provide knowledgeable advance stories months in advance. And Gould, who was a lawyer when he started writing his long-running Music Notes column, is now a judge for the New Haven Superior Court.
“Dave is like family to me,” Harriman says. “We've been close friends for over 30 years. We just hit it off and he gave me the freedom to pursue whatever stories I thought were best for the magazine and the region. I still get excited when I secure a good interview because I get to tell Dave about it.”
Gould, who's been a massive music fan his whole life, picked up a copy of Sound Waves in the early ‘90s and, as a young attorney, reached out to Pottie with the idea of writing a legal advice column for musicians. Pottie loved it. Gould ended up writing music features and reviews and still enjoys “keeping my toes in” with his Music Notes pieces.
“Dave's involvement with Sound Waves has been unbelievable,” Gould says. “Somehow, he stays one step ahead of the curve, whether its business trends or musical styles. He knows everyone and respects everyone and I've never heard a bad word about it. And that he'd give me an opportunity to write about a passion of mine is something I'll never forget.”
When Pottie talks about the folks he's worked with, he speaks with a paternal sort of pride because so many of them have been with him for years. When he refers to them by name, he instantly adds the length of time they've worked for Sound Waves:
“Rex Rutkoski, about 20 years. Stephanie Shawn has written the Bar Fly column 14 years Andrew Kerns, 15 years and Ali Kaufman, Tom Mathews and Jon Persson have been with me about 10 years. It's says a lot, I think,” Pottie says. “Kathy Pollard, who helps me with distribution.”
And while many younger writers are entering the field of entertainment journalism through blogs or podcasts, Pottie says newer and regular reporters Dot Ames, Adrian Webb, Nic Hall and Joby Rogers all contacted him within the last five years. And while most of the writers reside in southeastern Connecticut, Hall, for example, originally pitched Pottie stories when he was 17 and living in Denmark. He now lives in Austin, and McCowski lives in Pennsylvania.
Two popular Sound Waves voices have been Chaplin, whose “Cooking with the Blues” column was hugely popular, and singer-songwriter Sue Menhart's monthly reflections on life as a working musician. Chaplin, of course, passed away earlier this year and Menhart has taken a hiatus from the stage and writing.
“You won't find a bigger supporter of live music than Dave,” Menhart says. “A new venue opening up? He's there. A new local band has an album out? He'll give it a listen. For local musicians, it's a big deal to get a write-up in Sound Waves. It's our mini-Rolling Stone.”
She also credits Pottie with the opportunity to develop her own writing in the pages of Sound Waves, starting with album reviews to artist interviews and ultimately her own column. “This gave me the confidence I needed to publish my own book about music. For musicians and writers alike, Dave always has our backs and wants everyone to succeed.”
Tough times
The idea of ongoing success, of course, applies to Sound Waves itself. Like virtually every entity in print media, Sound Wave is struggling through the lighting/thunder changes in the industry.
“Business is down a lot, but we're hanging in.” Pottie says. “Like a lot of publications, I attribute it to a mixture of social media and COVID.”
He describes the demographic reality as a “can't win for losing” situation. Though Sound Waves is available online and has respectable metrics, Pottie says he's like every other print publication that has to appeal to the social media generation, where everything's free, but still rely on dwindling ad revenue from the print edition.
“This has been a rough few years,” Pottie says. “A lot of our print readers are over 40 and don't go out as much, and the bars and restaurants who do advertise have less money to spend on advertising because they're hurting to and can't find help.” He pauses, thinking. “I sound old, but it's true that it used to be more of a family approach. The clubs and musicians and Sound Waves all worked together because we needed each other. And there's still a lot of that attitude, but not as much. And I get it. It's a new and changing world out there.”
Carolyn O'Brien, who with her husband Stan own popular Pawcatuck bar CC O'Brien's, is one of Sound Wave's oldest supporters — and the magazine and the club have each helped the other out over the years when times were hard.
“I've known Dave for years, since before I was here, and he works hard and does so much himself,” Carolyn O'Brien says. “He cares about independent businesses and artists and sometimes I think a lot of us forget that in the day-to-day. Even when it was really bad for us in COVID, and we couldn't have live entertainment, he'd say, ‘Don't worry about it' and throw my ad in the magazine anyway. He's a champion of the music and hospitality scene whether it's a bar or a band, a festival or a winery or whatever.”
Gould says he has the perfect description of Pottie — and wishes he'd thought of it. “I'd written for Dave for about 10 years before I saw him face to face. My wife and I met him at a blues bar in Niantic and we spent a few hours with him, and he was just as great as I'd anticipated — his personality and his attitude and the way he thinks about people and music. On the way home, my wife said, ‘You know what Dave is? He's a hippie with a brain.'”