THE BEAT

Meg Hutchinson, Michael Eck, Arlo Guthrie, "Mansion on the Hill"

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 3, 1997) --

Meg Hutchinson: The innocent voice of experience

The voice that jumps out at you from Meg Hutchinson's eponymous debut CD would be shocking under any circumstances. But when you learn that Hutchinson is only 19, and has only been writing and performing for a little over a year, it's all the more shocking, for her achingly mature delivery belies her youth and relative inexperience.

Hutchinson's songs combine the personal and the literary -- sprinkled with allusions to Shakespeare, the Bible and Greek mythology, they retain a sense of intimacy that shuns sentimentality. In "Building the Ark," a fully-developed mission statement, she knowingly refers to "sing/ing/ from way down deep where it counts," which she does. And with her elastic melodicism and her crackling vibrato, she sometimes sounds like a cross between Dar Williams and Tracy Chapman.

Hutchinson has already garnered an inordinate amount of acclaim in the Capital District, having been profiled and reviewed in Metroland and The Source, which recently named her Best New Artist. The South Egremont native and Simon's Rock alumnus warms up the crowd for Michael Eck at Milltown Studios in North Adams on Saturday, July 5, at 8:30.

Arlo Guthrie: Furthur on Up the Road

The long and winding road of Arlo Guthrie's career has taken him to strange, wonderful places, many of which we know about via his comic narratives in song. One of the strangest, no doubt, is his current role as emcee and performer in the "Furthur Festival," the post-Grateful Dead travelling circus named after Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Reprising the role he played at the original Woodstock festival, Guthrie said he was chosen for the honor because "they were looking for someone who could talk and say something at the same time."

Joining Guthrie , who lives in the town of Washington, will be Dead guitarist Bob Weir and his group, Ratdog, Dead drummer Mickey Hart leading his band, Planet Drum, Bruce Hornsby, the Black Crowes and Moe. The Furthur Festival comes to Riverside Park in Agawam tomorrow and the Saratoga (N.Y.) Performing Arts Center on Sunday, July 6.

In other Arlo news, Guthrie's own Rising Son Records inked a deal earlier this year with Koch Records, an international record label, which will begin to manufacture, distribute and market new editions of the more than 20 separate titles in Guthrie's back catalog. These include the landmark albums he recorded for Warner Bros. in the '60s and '70s, including "Running Down the Road," "Washington County" and "Arlo Guthrie," as well as the half-dozen records he made for Rising Son over the past decade.

Michael Eck strikes a resonant chord with "Resonator'

Perhaps best known as an entertainment critic for Albany-area newspapers, Michael Eck has always led a dual life as a creative artist, writing poetry and playing in bands including the Stomplistics, Chefs of the Future, Wag and Glaze. In the past few years, Eck has been focusing his energies into his work as a solo singer-songwriter. While his first album, "Cowboy Black," suggested he boasted a highly idiosyncratic vision and approach, his newest, "Resonator" (Mandala Hand), strikes a chord that should resonate with a much wider audience. While Eck's voice still takes some getting used to, he has gotten rid of some of the rawer, rougher edges. A few songs into the album, his gruff, wayward pitch actually becomes endearingly suggestive, a tool signifying as much about the indeterminacies and contingencies of human relationships as do his well-crafted lyrics and rootsy, "anti-folk" or "No Depression"-style melodies. Eck performs at Milltown Studios in North Adams on Saturday, July 5, at 8:30. South Egremont singer-songwriter Meg Hutchinson warms up the crowd for Eck (see accompanying item). Call 413-662-2725 for more information.

Readings

THE MANSION ON THE HILL: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head- on Collision of Rock and Commerce, by Fred Goodman (Times Books, 431 pages). For the most part, when people think of the evolution of rock music, they think in terms of the key artists -- people like Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson -- who as trend-setters, for better or worse, influenced the music of their particular era.

There is, however, a whole other story, mostly unwritten but no less influential, to be told. The music industry can be thought of as an iceberg, with the artist being the part that floats above the surface of the water, but with a much larger portion submerged, out of public view, actually guiding the movement of the music.

In "The Mansion on the Hill," Fred Goodman tells the story below the surface, focusing on the increasingly influential role that managers, agents, promoters and record executives have played in pop music since the 1960s. In particular, readers are treated to intimate portraits of such figures as Albert Grossman, the bearlike figure who steered the major acts of the '60s folk revival -- including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary -- and critic-turned-manager Jon Landau, the Svengali behind Bruce Springsteen. Goodman offers especially astute profiles of the give-and-take between artists like Neil Young and Peter Frampton and businessmen like David Geffen and Dee Anthony.

Of particular interest to Berkshire readers is a fairly extensive history of the Boston music scene -- much of it undoubtedly gleaned from the files of local archivist Chuck White -- including the role of the alternative press and of master promoter Don Law, who to this day exerts near monopolistic control over most of the major concert venues in New England, including Tanglewood.

Goodman's highly readable, entertaining volume occasionally suffers from an overly moralistic approach -- a naive viewpoint that posits a Manichean struggle between commerce and art as if such concerns are unique to post-'60s rock. The text also jumps around too much, making for jarring juxtapositions, leaving a reader hanging unnecessarily in the midst of one story only to pick up another thread. In the end, the main thing wrong with this otherwise fascinating book is its impressionistic approach. Maybe someday a publisher will let Goodman loose to tell the whole story.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 3, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]

Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.

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