Wed. May 9 – Sat. June 16

“I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck,” says Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockhart, the week before he kicks off his 18th season at Symphony Hall in Boston. “I realize that may be a little subjective.”
The question was: Are you feeling all right?
The ever-affable, 52-year-old maestro caught a nasty bug April 20th, the day he and the Pops played Fenway Park’s 100th anniversary. “I’m feeling better than I was then,” he says from his Brookline home, “but I wouldn’t go all the way to ‘all right.’ It’s been two weeks. Mostly it’s a bad hacking cough that keeps me up at night. I’ll be fine once we get into the run of it.”
Ah, the run. It’s a whirlwind 33-concert season that begins Friday with Broadway singer Bernadette Peters and ends June 16 with the final “Visions of America” presentation, the latter being the running theme of the season. Along the way: A visit (May 29 and 30) from Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers (Lockhart: “my most gee whiz moment”), the return of Pops Laureate conductor John Williams and his Film Nights (June 1 and 2)

JSInk: As you’re fighting your way off the sick bed now, let me ask, in general, how’s your stamina at the podium? And your passion?
Keith Lockhart: To be perfectly honest, it’s not as easy as it was almost two decades ago. There’s a lot of work in a very concentrated period of time. It’s like everything else when you reach middle age, I can also play two hours of tennis but I pay for it a lot more than I did twenty years ago. In terms of the passion, it’s a challenging world we live in from a live entertainment point of view right now. We have a great thing here and figuring out how to cast it and keep it viable and important is a continual challenge and at least an occasional, perhaps continual, frustration as well. But the great thing about it is, the sands shift so much around us over this period of time – everything around us in the entertainment world – it’s not boring. It’s not like I can do the same things I did ten years ago, because I’m constantly thinking about what else we can do.
When does the hard work come?
The hardest work is long before the audience sees it. The hardest work is programming, which is of course mostly done by this point and then making the pieces fit together. You have all these ideas about what you want to do and you have an artist who’s available and then falls through at the last minute and you’re scrambling and you get material from composers and arrangers and they’re not what you thought they were supposed to be or not what you thought you agreed to., so you’re debating with them and it all seems to happen with a giant ticking clock over your head. Once it starts, the season starts, there’s pretty much too much to do much about them.

In terms of scheduling and collaboration, what’s your percentage of landing the artists you want to play with?
We don’t get the door closed in our face very often, but it varies from year to year and it varies from discipline to discipline. Sometimes with our more contemporary offerings we’ve done over the years it’s very hard to tell a pop act that they have to be available on [a certain night], so we have a lack of flexibility problem on our side of things. We have great relationships with Broadway singers and fortunately we have a large stable.
And Bernadette returns for the first night this year.
Simply put, she’s kind of the best. She’s so good at doing what she does. The concept of “Broadway star” isn’t quite the same as it used to be. There was Mary Martincq and John Raitt cqand those people, but now there’s so many TV and film actors who’ve moved over to Broadway. The story is about the bells and whistles of the show itself, rather than the show. But Bernadette remains the grand diva of American musical theatre. We worked with her a number of times over the last several years, but she’s never opened for us. And we thought: Who better to start with?

Fri. May 18

It's not sexist, we hope, to suggest that the bulk of the people playing Delta blues guitar and singing are men. But Erin Harpe - the singer for the electro-funk band Lovewhip - is definitely female and she's definitely branching out with a CD called "Delta Blues Duets," and a gig at the Midway Cafe in JP Friday May 18. .

On her album, Erin accompanied on vocals and guitar by her father, bluesman Neil Harpe. The blues are not new to Harpe. Growing up in the Washington DC area, Erin began playing the guitar in her teens, under the teaching her father. She soon began performing at folk festivals, coffee houses, bars, and parties in the DC area, developing a strong blues guitar and vocal style of her own.

Saturdays

First, there is the smell.Familiar. Intoxicating. Some say ED-preventing.Then, just when you can barely take anymore, a smiling head pops through the door - “Anybody want some chocolate?”
 
Welcome to two-and-a-half hours of educational heaven, aka the Taste of Chocolate Workshop.
 
Run by the folks who have been bringing the legendary Mystery Café to Boston and beyond for years and hosted in the Elephant and Castle Pub in Downtown Boston (the same site as one of the most popular Mystery Café dinners), the Workshop tells you perhaps more than you ever wanted to know about chocolate (pretty much right down to the molecular level) and then lets you get into it up to your wrists (at least) through a hands-on truffle-making party.

 ongoing 

   As Apple launched its iPad 2 in San Francisco, Blue Man Group unveiled its GiPad in Boston. Let’s hope Steve Jobs is not in litigation mode, or at least has developed a sense of humor.
    We were at press preview of the new show in early March. At the start, three GiPads – eight-by-five-foot electronic screens that resemble iPads – descended from the rafters at the Charles Playhouse, The three black-clad men in cobalt blue body-paint and skullcaps looked at them with curiosity.  
    Blue Man Group – which has been up at the Charles since 1995 - presented a 45-minute press performance, showcasing new or retooled material in their 105-minute show.
    The gigantic faux iPads made perfect sense. Blue Man Group has always done a lot with technology and communication. We live in an age of information overload and are awash in smart phones, tablets and apps. And so now are the Men.
   After the GiPads were lowered, the quizzical Blue Men touched the screens. A GiPad announced it would “do for reading what texting has done for driving.” It was time for “Synopsize Me!” (or “Twit Lit”) with Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Twain and Melville  rendered in Twitter-ese.
    “Moby-Dick” in `140 characters: “Where is that damn whale? Here whaley whaley! There he is! I think I've got him! Actually, no I don't That's off: He's coming towards the ship! I've got a bad feeling about”
     There was also on-screen give and take about texting and face-to-face communication. “Don’t you ever want to have a real conversation?” read one screen. “What do you mean by ‘real’?” read another. And, of course, there was yet another of modern life’s major online distractions, the cute cat video.

Sat. June 2

Two songs into the Parlotones Boston debut at Great Scott last year, a fan at the front shouted out, “I saw you on TV at the World Cup! What the hell are you doing here?”
   The answer: Beginning to work America. Just like they have done in Europe and especially in their native South Africa. There they can sell out a 17,000-capacity arena. And in June, they did indeed co-headline the FIFA World Cup Kick-off Celebration with Shakira, Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys and John Legend.
   But the Parlotones’ fourth CD, 2009’s “Stardust Galaxies,” is their first US release. They’ve toured the States only once, last fall as an opener for Blue October.
    The Johannesburg-based quartet - formed in 1998 and fronted by singer-rhythm guitarist Kahn Morbee – is returns to town, at Brighton Music Hall Saturday May 2.
    They’re cheerfully starting from scratch in this big new market by playing small clubs. There were perhaps 75 people in attendance for the hour-long set, the fourth gig of their 20-plus date tour.
    “We’re really happy there’s more than five people here tonight,” Morbee said from the stage. “More than five for us is good on this tour.”
    You never know how the gears of fame will mesh or gnash, but the Parlotones could become huge here - Killers huge, Muse huge, Coldplay huge.
     Morbee’s expansive and expressive voice is similar to Brandon Flowers’ cqand the band writes emotive, guitar-and-keyboard-stoked new wave marches, like the Killers. Their second song was “Only Human”; the Killers, of course, have “Human.” A cynic might think the Parlotones represent an attack of a Killers clone, but their 15-song set knocked that notion out of the park. They’re an accomplished group, with a deep catalog and an innate sense of melody and arrangement.

    The sartorially sharp band was dressed in black with red ties. All sported flourishes of facial make-up a la the droogs in “A Clockwork Orange.” Bassist-singer Glenn Hodgson frequently moved to piano and older brother, lead guitarist Paul Hodgson, often doubled on synthesizer. 
  

(This is an expanded review of a review that ran last year in the Boston Herald.)

158 Brighton Ave., Allston, 617-779-0140 www.brightonmusichall.com

My niece, Deborah Yarchun, me, Amos Lee, my wife Roza. At Lowell Summer Music Series, Boarding House Park, July 9

My wife Roza, me, Chef/host Daniel Bruce at the Boston Harbor Hotel's Wine Festival 2010

 Sun. July 1 

Roger Waters re-staged the grandest production he’s ever created, “The Wall,” a massive tour last year that stopped at TD Banknorth Garden in October, 2010. He's doing it again this time at - yes, on even a grander scale - Fenway Park, Sunday July 1, in front of, yes, our very own famous Wall. Tickets on sale Feb. 20. The conceptual double album came out in 1979 and it was one of the darkest extravaganzas, of then or now. All about alienation, smothering mothers, a bankrupt educational system, jingoism, war’s destructive power on all, rock star delusions, drug abuse, egotism and isolation. Fun stuff? You bet!  Pink Floyd tried to stage this monster in 1980-81 and it sputtered. Very expensive to mount and people didn’t exactly like the idea that as the show went on this gigantic wall that separated the crowd from the band. Hey, it was symbolic, but, well, you know, all that distancing meant you were detached from the band, which was part of the point. That wall served multiple purposes. At any rate, Waters has decided that “The Wall” really is his major statement and he’s mounted it again, spending tons of money, yes, but with modern technology and much more flexibility.

      Waters, 67, has spent a good part of his post-Pink Floyd career suggesting (sometimes rather pointedly) that he was Pink Floyd’s main man and the band that sometimes records and ventures out on the road – guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason plus whoever – was Floyd lite.

I did a piect in March on WBUR's "Radio Boston" about Viggo Mortensen and his receiving the Coolidge Award and on the theatre itself. Link here http://radioboston.wbur.org/2012/03/06/the-coolidge-a-hub-for-independent-film

Wed. July 11 

     No, I did not think the B-52s would be around in 2012, doing what they do, playing "Rock Lobster," "Planet Claire" and "Dance This Mess Around." But I am very glad they and also pleased to note their July 11 concert at Bank of America Pavilion. Here’s something I adapted from a piece I wrote this nearly 20 years ago, when the B-52’s (then they had that inappropriate apostrophe in their name, not anymore) were staging a comeback.

Think of the B-52s as, perhaps, the Beach Boys of their day or genre. You have two veteran, successful pop bands, each of which has struggled, each having survived the death of a founding member. Many fans associate their music with escapist summertime fun. One band came to fame in the mid-to-late '60s, the other did it during the late-'70s-early '80s.

So: Could the B-52s the new wave generation's answer to the Beach Boys?

"Ugh," says B-52s guitarist Keith Strickland on the phone, after the notion is floated. "Oh God, I hope not!" exclaims B's singer Kate Pierson, during a separate interview. "I went to a Beach Boys show once without Brian Wilson and it was horrendous. I hope we never become like that. I just hope we don't become an institution. That we keep evolving and changing."

Contrary to the Beach Boys, the B-52s don't seem to be in any danger of turning into a traveling a human jukebox. In a sense, the B-52s -- hip new wave band of the '80s -- are the rock 'n' roll comeback kids of the '90s. Their current album, "Good Stuff," is not the 4 million seller like 1989's "Cosmic Thing," but it's done well enough to go gold, representing sales of 500,000 copies. The future looks bright.

"We did have a down time, a time of less success," says Pierson, referring to the period following guitarist Ricky Wilson's AIDS-related death in 1985. The group recorded a mediocre album, "Bouncing Off the Satellites," and then went on an extended sabbatical. The band -- once based in Athens, Ga., but relocated to New York -- never formally disbanded, but few had high hopes.