Tag: maine bands

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Mumbles Make Late-Summer News

Mainly we pimp upcoming gigs here in the PFOM Blog, but several newsworthy tidbits have recently come to the band’s attention:

• DRUMMER JEFF GLIDDEN has been nominated for induction into the Maine Blues Hall of Fame! Jeff revealed this information on his Facebook page. See here the relevant bits, which we’ve duly highjacked:

“I was nominated for The Maine Blues Hall of Fame. Me. Totally out of the blue and unexpected. I don’t expect to be inducted, which is totally cool. I don’t see myself as necessarily a drummer of a certain style. When I was young, I admired the drummers who played with everyone: Gordon, Keltner, Porcaro, Gadd and later down the line John Molo (no one ever mentions John, who can play with anyone) and Jeff Sipe, of course. And Vinnie, naturally. But I’ve always wanted to be like them. Able to step into any situation. So, for me, the nomination is more than enough. I thank the Maine blues community for their faith in my abilities.

“Following that thought, I have had the good fortune to play with A LOT of different musical acts. Original and cover. Everything from my Allmans tribute, to original blues with Cryin’ Out Loud and Noah Watts & The Backwoods Blues Revue, to original Americana with Pocket Full of Mumbles and Matt Newberg … to the band that does it all, Time Pilots.”

Truth is, all the members of PFOM play with other bands, but we’re thankful to have Jeff holding things down/together. He also plays in two of Maine’s top Grateful Dead tribute bands — a particular comfort on Mumblecovers like Uncle John’s Band, with its crazy 7/4 time signature. We’ll be playing that one Sept. 5 at Allagash, for the record.

• TIM HOWIE, our pedal steel virtuoso, caught a skunk this week. Thinl about that for a moment: No small feat. Apparently, the varmint had been stealing eggs out from under Tim’s chickens.

This news may not strike the reader as particularly PFOM relevant. However, the band does practice mainly in the loft of Tim’s Barn in West Gray.  What’s more, he was able to turn this trapping trick without any … malodorous fallout.

“Nope. Never sprayed,” Tim reported the fateful morning. “I wrapped the trap in cardboard before I set it. When I realized the skunk was caught, I threw a tarp over the trap and talked to it — got it calm. Then I slowly picked it up, set it in the gorilla cart and wheeled it away from the chickens. Then I went to work. I guess I’ll take it for a ride tonight.”

• The cup of HAL PHILLIPS, the Mumbles’ primary Dumptruck enthusiast, has runneth over. The last week in August, he learned of a September reunion show down in Medford, Mass. Then, on YouTube, he stumbled upon a new mini-doc that pegs these seminal Boston-based post-punks as a band that really “should have been big!!”

“That’s part of the title, and the documentary is pretty good,” Phillips says. “But the comments are REALLY good. Diverse and full of interesting details and observations on all things Dumptruck. It’s a comfort to know that I’m not alone out there.”

The 1980s were replete with college-radio darlings that never became the next REM. But few put out an album quite so accomplished as “For the Country,” Dumptruck’s 1987 release from Bigtime Records. Some argue this was the very first “alt-country” album, influencing acts from The Jayhawks, to Ryan Adams, to Pocket Full of Mumbles…

Unfortunately, it all went wrong when  Bigtime ran out of money after “For the Country” was issued. The evil suits wouldn’t release the band from its contract. The legal tussle meant no more recordings from Dumptruck until 1994. By then, the moment — their moment — had passed.

“I was living in Boston when word of this standoff with Bigtime got around,” Phillips recalls. “My housemates and I got drunk one night and sent the band $50 for their legal defense fund. They sent us a thank you note and a cassette with 4 new ‘demo’ songs that would never be released. One of those tunes is ‘Ghost Town,’ which we will perform at Allagash on Sept. 5.  Dumptruck front man Seth Tiven later adapted the song into a track on ‘Days of Fear’ (1994) called ‘Turn Away.’ I’m glad we stuck to the original, and, like most things, it sounds way better with pedal steel.”

For the country

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Big 2026 Coming. Meantime, the Mumbles Ruminate on Tribute Origins

Heartiest New Year’s greetings from the band to everyone out there in Mumbles Nation. We wanted to share some content here and encourage you to monitor this space, as 2026 is shaping up as a busy year on the ol’ gig calendar. Expect an announcement soon regarding a new, prestige venue. Well, new to us. Also, our first Fryeburg Fair appearance is lined up (first week in October), and several more dates remain in the works.

Meantime, however, we ran across this  podcast and couldn’t help but share it. “Flightless Bird” ranges all over the map in terms of subject matter but this one, on tribute bands, hit home. Because, as some of you well know, Pocket Full of Mumbles started out as a Simon & Garfunkel tribute duo. Yes, we have evolved way from that enterprise, adding new sounds and personnel, while widening our content to include originals and covers of many different artists. Just this winter we’ve added originals and new covers from Little Feat, REM and The Pixies.

Yet facts are facts: The band was born in the tribute milieu and this podcast discussion really got us thinking about what that meant at the time, and what it means now.

Of course, our name is enduring. Pocket Full of Mumbles refers to a specific lyric from “The Boxer,” and we don’t see that changing or evolving.

But unlike many of the tribute bands operating today — and there are hundreds working today and making good money from coast to coast — we Mumbles never much indulged in cosplay. Early on we had some fun re-creating famous S&G covers. See here some examples. But we never took that whimsy to the stage., whereas many tribute bands purposely perform, dress and promote themselves on- and off-stage in ways that pay homage to the original bands. As one pod guest put it (he performs in an AC/DC tribute ensemble), it’s often the goal to create a sort of Broadway-show version of the original lineup from night to night.

There was quite a bit of discussion regarding what distinguishes cover bands from tribute bands. This doesn’t seem a very fine line to us. Cover bands do not indulge in much cosplay; how could they? You can’t dress up and act like a dozen different bands during a single performance. I mean, think of how many wigs that might require!

Cover or “bar’ bands also seem to place more emphasis on interpreting recognizable songs in a different but effective way altogether. We often say, “You may know the Simon & Garfunkel version of America but you can’t truly appreciate the song until you’ve heard it with pedal steel.”

The Mumbles have moved well past the tribute thing but we still perform half a dozen S&G songs and we don’t judge. Tribute bands go that route today because they ‘re popular and can be lucrative, which is just another way of saying, “Many folks who patronize live music venues want to hear what they know.”

There can be great creativity in the exercise, not just dressing up but crafting the brand: Apparently, there is a tribute ensemble out there that opens with a set of Foreigner, followed by another in the “role” of Journey.  The are, naturally, called Foreign Journey. Some original acts actually mine established, skilled tribute bands to replace aging, deceased, disaffected members. Journey famously plucked a tribute lead singer (based in the Philippines!) back in 2007, when the original Steve Perry stopped believing.

In the end, a good set, ably performed, is its own reward regardless of genre. I saw an outfit called The Outsiders deliver a truly excellent Tom Petty show at Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo two years ago. First rate, and they didn’t do any “characters” or costumes. [If you think drunk middle-aged women go crazy when they hear a spot-on version of “Last Chance for Mary Jane,” you should experience that phenomenon in the Midwest.]

By the same token, if you play in a Grateful Dead tribute band — as Mumbles drummer Jeff Glidden has (along with an Allman Brothers outfit called Wake Up Momma) and you don’t get stoned with fans between sets, you’re not really trying.

For us, this pod reminded us of these bands, how all types of bands, are conceived. Mike Conant and Hal Phillips had played together in a couple different bands starting circa 2008. At some practice five years later, Mike started noodling the melody of “Leaves That Are Green,” off Sounds of Silence. I joined him and sang the whole thing, start to finish. We looked at each other and said, without speaking, “Well then. Here’s someone who likes S&G as much as I do.” And the rest is history…

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Jamulus, pedal steel & Pockets writ larger

That’s our new hero, second from left, on lead guitar, circa 1979.

While the prevailing pandemic has wrought considerable havoc with pretty much every nook and cranny of the music scene, nationwide, Pocket Full of Mumbles has managed to emerge all the stronger — and 50 percent bigger.

Founding members Mike Conant and Hal Phillips are pleased to have welcomed Tim Howie on pedal steel and Telecaster. He joined the band in April, when all musicians could do was practice. PFOM debuted the new three-piece lineup and its ever-evolving sound at a private party in Poland early in July.

That gig felt several worlds away from the dark, secluded months of March and April, when Conant and Phillips could do nothing but practice remotely via the online application Jamulus, a quite marvelous technology that allows musicians from the around the world to convene and play together via a specific, remote, third-party server. Conant and Phillips actually stretched the technology one step further, using Jamulus to access each other’s Internet servers directly.

“For the host, the delay was negligible because the server is right there next to him,” Conant explained. “For the visitor, there was a latency of 40-60 milliseconds, which can feel like quite a lot. Try playing in a field with someone standing 25 feet away. But like anything else, you can account for that delay with practice. And if the connection is good, it starts to feel quite natural.

“One thing’s for certain: It was great practice for us — especially all our close-harmony singing. After doing that remotely, singing together in the same room is a great luxury. It also sounds great because to us, it feels almost effortless.”

Conant has continued to play via Jamulus with dozens of strangers spanning the globe. He and Howie were no strangers, however. For several years they have played together as contributors to the free-form, practice-averse jammers known especially to Grateful Dead mavens across southern Maine as the Kennebunk River Band.

“Acquiring the twang of pedal steel has always been part of the plan for Pocket Full of Mumbles,” Phillips says, “mainly on account of all the Son Volt and Jackson Browne tunes we do. And those tunes really sound great with Tim on board.

“What we hadn’t expected was just how great the pedal sounds — along with his occasionally ripping electric guitar — on the Simon & Garfunkel songs we play, and our originals. A classic folky tune like Wednesday Morning 3 a.m. is completely transformed. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say Tim has totally changed the sound of PFOM, for the better.”

Howie is a multi-instrumentalist from way back, having played trumpet, drums and guitar with a succession of “rock ‘n roll bands” while still in his teens.

“I picked up the banjo when I was in Texas, playing with a country band,” says Howie, who, in addition to playing with Kennebunk River Band, did a recent stint playing with Maine’s own Rock Bottom Band. “But when I was relocated to northern Maine, in 1984, that’s when I picked up pedal steel guitar and played with different bands in Aroostook County. I’ve stuck with guitar and pedal ever since, when my family relocated to the central Missouri area, and after we returned here to southern Maine.”