Lewiston music – Pocket Full of Mumbles

AUBURN, Maine — Pocket Full of Mumbles, those expert purveyors of smart alt-country twang, are back at Side By Each on Saturday night, Dec. 30, just in time to prepare one’s groove for 2024. Show time at the popular Minot Avenue brewing company & eatery is 7 p.m.

Pocket Full of Mumbles debuted in 2017 as a Simon & Garfunkel tribute act, featuring close harmonies and largely acoustic instrumentation from fiddler/bassist Mike Conant and guitarist Hal Phillips. Early in the pandemic, they added Tim Howie on pedal steel, Telecaster and banjo, lending amplification and twang to their portfolio of S&G and original songs.

With a variety of guest drummers and soloists, the Mumbles today complement those originals with canny selections from Son Volt, CSN, Neil Young, Cracker, vintage Jackson Browne, fIREhOSE and Bob Mould, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Ryan Adams, James Taylor, Liz Phair and The Band. PFOM last appeared at Side By Each in June 2023.

The lovely and talented Nancy Durham will join PFOM on percussion Dec. 30. The Mumbles will also debut their newly dedicated “Telecaster Set”, featuring Mr. Howie on his vintage, case-less Fender which, while it appears to be held together with chewing gum and baling wire, really hums.

Beer tip: Side By Each remains one of Maine’s most innovative and skilled brewing operations. If you like a brown ale — good examples of which are notoriously hard to find in North America — check out SBE’s Fat Charlie the Archangel.

Pocket Full of Mumbles returns to the stage April 5, for an 8-10 p.m. set at everyone’s favorite oversized, burrito-serving, craft beer-pulling living room, the She Doesn’t Like Guthrie’s Restaurant & Café, in Lewiston.

The duo comprising Pocket Full of Mumbles (PFOM), Mike Conant and Hal Phillips, formed in 2017 as an acoustic homage to the harmonies and hyper-literate songwriting of Simon & Garfunkel. Twenty-eighteen saw PFOM expand the brief to include the similarly stellar talents of Jay Farrar, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, Neil Young and, at the risk of paled comparisons, Conant and Phillips themselves. Expect a sampling of all this on April 5.

If the primary inspirations for PFOM were Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, its secondary influence has been the seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, the fertile collaboration of Farrar and Jeff Tweedy. Indeed, PFOM nearly named themselves The Belleville Boys, after these two native sons Belleville, Illinois, where, incidentally, Conant was also born (his father had been based at nearby Scott Air Force Base).

The long-term goal of PFOM is to present a complete evening of live music: a two-man acoustic set followed by a second featuring full-band treatment of like material — to further demonstrate the remarkable versatility and power of top-drawer songwriting. Re-animating the Uncle Tupelo sound is PFOM’s hope for Set II.

Farrar and Tweedy would dissolve Uncle Tupelo amid not insignificant rancor in 1994, almost immediately following this club show in St. Louis. It’s an amazing performance at the peak of their powers when apparently — according to an oral history recently published in Rolling Stone — the two band principals were not speaking to each other.

Farrar would soon form his own band, Son Volt, further advancing the alt-country genre; the landmark album Trace (1996) at first gave the impression that perhaps he was the true genius behind Uncle Tupelo. Tweedy quickly complicated that assessment with the album Being There (1996), the second effort from what would become the prolific, indie super-group Wilco.

Tag: Lewiston music

Mumbles return to Side By Each Saturday night, Dec. 30

PFOM back at Guthries April 5, 8 p.m.