Save the summer: Notes from the ‘live by two sessions’
Parker Dumont of the band Sunday Morning swayed as he played bass, backlit by an explosion of multicolored light, his silhouette visible through semi-opaque black curtains.
Those curtains wrapped around him and his bandmates, enclosing them with two photographers in the makeshift studio that has been the nexus of Five By Two Records’ operations in recent weeks and months.
They say it in many different ways, but, in essence, the artists behind these “live” session tapings are looking to rise from the depths of coronavirus quarantine, flying by the seats of their pants to jumpstart the local music scene back to life.
“This feels incredible to get back out there,” Sunday Morning guitarist Dom Barone said after his band visited the studio.
“This is amazing,” his bandmate Westly Benjunas echoed “It’s just a good way to relax and just do the thing you love.”
I got to sit as a fly on the wall through the past two months of this.
Having known the Five By Two records gang through previous reporting, I perked up when Five By Two head Robert McCarthy asked me in mid-May whether I wanted to help with this project.
He wanted me to swing by during sessions to interview bands as they set up and tore down before and after recording.
I said yes.
Highlights from those impromptu conversations now bookend the sessions themselves, serving as amalgamations of blooper reels and after credit scenes all with the expressed purpose of further personalizing these sessions.
Robert described this style as “guerrilla journalism.”
I like that phrase.
Photo by Samuel Bendix
“WE’RE POWERING THROUGH”
There was a clear philosophy behind these live sessions, which will soon be available on YouTube and through Five By Two’s new website.
Five By Two wanted to capture the very atmosphere of a live show. They wanted to revive the magic of favorite local destinations to momentarily transcend the often heartbreaking stagnation of life in quarantine.
As such, Robert had a common phrase he repeated to almost every band before they started recording, “We’re powering through,” he said. “No breaks.”
“If you fuck up, keep going. This is live.”
So, bands chugged along, thrashing as if the sweaty throng of Worcester, Lowell or Boston rock fans we all miss had, in fact, gathered again before them.
Dupont dropped a pic and kept playing.
Photo by Samuel Bendix, animation by Dakota Antelman
Circus Trees’ Finola McCarthy effectively lost her pedalboard halfway through a set after one of our photographers bumped her amp head and turned it off.
A few times, our overloaded computer, receiving dozens of microphone inputs, would glitch and drop a few measures of sound from certain channels.
Ryan Lynch of Louzy got drunk on whisky during his band’s taping. As we wrapped, he stumbled and knocked over our curtains and their stands.
Every time something like that happened, someone would quip “that’s the magic of ‘live’” seemingly validating that, like a super collider creating delicate and fleeting elements in a lab, Five By Two had captured the intangible feel of a live show.
Through a love for imperfection and an understanding of the multidimensionality that makes live music work, the atmosphere was authentic.
“EVERYTHING WENT TO HELL”
Coronavirus emerged in December in China.
Many stateside first heard about it buried in newscasts in those first weeks.
Those who missed early word of the eventual pandemic almost definitely heard at least something about it by mid-February when a cluster of infections and deaths rattled the Seattle area.
Then it got personal.
A biotech conference in Boston left almost 100 attendees sick in early March. After months of waiting for COVID-19 to arrive, local hospitals sprung into action, trying to identify and treat infected people, but struggling with a lack of testing.
This illness that seemed to have slowly crawled around the world pounced on those unaware of the earlier writing on the wall.
In the span of a week, local and state leaders changed their tone from one of gentle reassurance to alarming warning.
Massachusetts declared a state of emergency.
Colleges sent students home.
Aaron Garcia of Pillbook had an extremely personal connection to it all.
Though he’s lived in Marlborough, Mass. with the McCarthy family for years, he grew up in Chelsea. His family still lives there.
Unfortunately, as March turned to April, Chelsea emerged as a new epicenter of Massachusetts’ coronavirus epidemic, with the highest rate of infection in the state. In total, Garcia says, he had multiple family members come down with the virus.
“It suddenly hit me when it affected my family,” he said. “It was terrifying.”
In the music world, bands cancelled shows. Local acts on tour at the time saw their dates dry up overnight. Some stuck several states from home gingerly returned to Massachusetts and hunkered down.
Garcia was part of one of those groups as he had been playing bass on the road with Young Culture. On the first major tour of his life, Garcia said he felt isolated from the virus hopping from city to city.
Mere days after a show in Canada, though, Garcia and his bandmates learned the nation closed its borders. Having got back to the US just in time, Young Culture soon cancelled the rest of their tour and headed home.
“Little by little, as the tour went on, as cities closed down, it just got more real,” Garcia said of his experience. “By the end of the tour, when the first date got cancelled, it hit. Right when we got off tour, we were like, what did we just do? We were doing this whole social thing when the whole rest of the world was not.”
Townies, who recorded a recent live session with Five By Two, meanwhile, had been in the process of planning a tour with pop-punk rockers Neutral Snap. They were going to start a trip in Louisiana and eventually trek back to Boston.
“But then everything went to hell,” guitarist and vocalist Tom Lynch said.
On March 17, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh put the proverbial nail in the coffin for the Boston music scene. Outraged having seen large crowds gathering on St. Patrick's Day, he closed all bars and restaurants in the city.
Photo by Samuel Bendix, Animation by Dakota Antelman
Three months later, venues have not reopened. In fact, the only news we have heard from many local favorites has been grim.
The beloved Great Scott in Allston announced, May 1, that it would close permanently.
Three days before that happened, word trickled out of Worcester that The Raven, a favorite destination of Five By Two Records’ acts, had partially burned in a fire. Its future remains uncertain.
Bands have tried to make do through it all.
Five By Two’s Eoghan McCarthy doubled down on his music production work, dropping the debut, self-titled EP for his new project The Light Inside Me Is Dead.
Circus Trees continued ironing out their upcoming album and pieced together a handful livestream gigs.
Garcia revisited his back catalogue, transforming his early rock songs into psychedelic, dream pop jams he labeled “quarantine sessions.”
Recently he’s started mixing his first full length Pillbook album.
Five By Two even signed a new artist in quarantine, bringing indie punk musician Jesse Golliher under the umbrella to begin work on his release as Geskle.
But without live shows, and with the restrictions of quarantine in place, the hurt has been real.
“It’s been sad to cancel shows,” Finola McCarthy of Circus Trees said. “It really, really sucks to feel like you haven’t played out in a really long time.”
“It’s definitely difficult,” Jerry Picard of Planet Mercury agreed.
“I WANT TO GET THE IDEA OUT THERE”
The coronavirus threat had not lapsed completely.
But with key infection data trending in a promising direction, and state officials announcing a gradual reopening of public life, Five By Two saw its chance to bring bands back to the stage in a safe way.
The day before he contacted me, Robert posted to Facebook asking if local bands were interested in taping live sessions.
“This will only happen in accordance with the state's rules on social gathering limits, business re-openings, etc.,” he wrote, “but I want to get the idea out there now.”
Almost immediately, 30 acts from across New England responded wanting in.
Photo by Samuel Bendix, Animation by Dakota Antelman
That’s how we got here.
“ATYPICAL SONIC LIFE”
I’m standing in the kitchen of the house where Robert McCarthy lives with his five kids, Finola, Edmee, Giuliana, Eoghan and Declan. Aaron Garcia lives here too.
I’m on my phone and the family great dane is nuzzling my leg asking for my attention. I’m skimming a band’s Facebook page brushing up on their backstory and aesthetic before interviewing them.
Robert is on the road, riding back from Natick after picking up photographer Sam Bendix there.
Aaron said earlier that he had just woken up after staying up late the night before.
Right now he’s in a room of keyboards, consoles and desktops off the kitchen. The door is closed but I can hear the Neighborhood playing. Last week it was Anderson Paak. Sometimes Tame Impala gets sprinkled into the Saturday morning mix.
Aaron emerges at one point to make coffee. Sam just texted us all in our communal group chat asking that much.
When Sam finally arrives, he makes a bee line for the coffee pot. He was up late too, reflective of a conversation we all had a few weeks back about our general aversion to relaxation. It’s hard, we agreed, to sit still. We’re all creatures of creation. For me, that’s writing. For Aaron, that’s music. Sam, meanwhile, spends nights editing photos or painting his face for drag photoshoots.
Sam has just started a TikTok now full of such looks and he’s showing off to Aaron.
Robert files past after a few moments of that and nods to me saying that the band has arrived.
“You can go get started interviewing, if you want.”
So, I head downstairs, ducking under the ceiling that’s a bit too short for my 6’3” frame as I walk into the basement that’s always looked like a playground of music and audio production to me.
The guys from Sunday Morning are setting up in the aforementioned ramshackle fabric lined studio.
The curtains are all black yet no two are the same texture. Robert explained the reason for that a few weeks earlier, lamenting how hard it is to find blackout curtains.
Though piecemealed, the curtains still do their job, catching pink, green and blue lights that Giuliana set up earlier.
As Tito, the stuffed koala mascot of Sunday Morning, perches on an amp, Eoghan sits on the mixing laptop out of view of the band. He talks to them over hardwired mics that sometimes fail.
Someone needs to go to the bathroom.
That’s upstairs, directly above this studio space.
You can’t actually use it while a band is recording as the pipes snake through the ceiling and the walls -- the flush would interrupt the mix.
I pull an old dining room chair to the side of the room, sliding out of the way of coming and going band members.
Robert makes eye contact again.
“You got all the interviews you need?”
“Yeah.”
I sit back, and soon, this jet black basement sees a summer in the shadow of a pandemic come to atypical sonic life.
Photo by Samuel Bendix