When Things Go Right

Took a few hours last night to go see Robin Lane at Whole Foods Glastonbury.

Now, I last got to see Robin Lane perform around 1981. I was a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) which had a pretty decent rotation of musicians and performers in my four years there. Robin Lane and the Chartbusters was a regionally hot, on the verge of breaking through kind of group, along the lines of Blondie or The Pretenders. I picked up their self titled debut album on vinyl, which followed me around for many years, until one final vinyl purge (everything went except for Springsteen and the Roches - strange bedfellows to be sure). But a few years back I picked this album up on CD.

Thinking back, I spent many hours with this album cued up on the turntable, figuring out the chords and the riffs. I must have worn that record out because to this day I still remember the lyrics and I bet if I spent a moment, the chords and riffs are still in my fingers. It was perhaps my first experience of connecting to a local musician / band that is perhaps not on the national scene, a habit that has lasted throughout my life.

Here's Robin Lane and the Chartbusters  at the Rathskeller (aka "The Rat") in Boston, a venue far cooler than the WPI gymnasium.



So, Robin Lane came to Whole Foods. She's been off the grid for many years, but has a new project called  Song Bird Sings, subtitled "Healing Trauma One Song at a Time". Their mission:

It is Songbird Sings mission to transform those silenced by domestic violence enabling them to give voice to their experiences and emotions through songwriting and creative collaboration in a safe, enjoyable, and structured environment. To help participants to learn inner strength and resilience as they come to trust themselves, and others, while building support systems between those with a shared history of trauma.

It was such a pleasure seeing and hearing Robin. She lives in Western MA and plays house concerts and small gigs, and I hope I'm able to attend (or perhaps even held to arrange) one in the future. She did a mixture of old rockers and newer, folkier numbers, as well as some songs from the A Woman's Voice album. (which I picked up at Whole Foods but the CD was not in there.....grumble). Abetted by bass player John Pfister, a couple of Whole Foods percussionists (Callem and......?) and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Chen from Them Damn Hamiltons (on keyboard), she was...in a word, delightful.

Here's Robin in the 21st century:


It was a wonderful look back into my past, fondly remembering my misspent youth. Robin and I - we are aging well. As a bonus, my fellow Guinea Pigs Sandy and Dan dropped in for a listen - it was sweet of them to come share the music and my passion for this particular artist.

Crockett

Among the life mementos that I have carried with me is a 45 RPM record by a Worcester MA group called "Crockett". The A side is a bit of bawdy innuendo called "Judy Grew a Wildflower" and the B side is the something called "Some Kids". Circa 1979.

Crockett (led by Walter Crockett, with his wife Valerie and I believe featuring a young whipper-snapper on guitar named Duke Levine) must have played the coffeehouse at WPI and I liked them well enough to buy the record (the sleeve of which bears a price - 49 cents - although no idea if the sleeve is original)

For some reason I thought about Crockett this evening, and hunted them down online. There is a self described primitive website and sadly, an obituary for Valerie Crockett who passed away in October 2009.

Walter Crockett is still out there, playing music. I dug up a few videos on Youtube. First, a 2008 reunion of the band Zonkaraz (which I vaguely remember playing WPI, probably some concert or another).


And more visible adding some leads to a folkie duo called "Chuck & Mud"


I ought to email Mr. Crockett and see if the 45 is of some interest to him as a bit of history that he may no longer have a copy of....