AUBURN, Maine — Pocket Full of Mumbles, those increasingly percussive purveyors of smart twang and Scarborough Fair-caliber harmonies, return to Side by Each Brewing Co. on Saturday night July 20.
Show time, inside the air-conditioned confines of Lewiston-Auburn’s finest craft brew purveyor, is 7-10 p.m. So mop your brow, put away your sweaty cares, and join the band for an evening of climate-controlled fun.
The Mumbles are also delighted to announce they will again play the Topsham Fair, on Wednesday, Aug. 7 — the noon slot, as the gates open. PFOM will also return to Side by Each on Oct. 19, so do circle that date on your calendars.
NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine — Pocket Full of Mumbles, those increasingly percussive purveyors of smart twang and Scarborough Fair-caliber harmonies, will return to Pineland Farms June 20, 21 and 22 to play the annual Strawberry Moon Celebration here at the former Gillespie Farms.
Show times and picking hours are identical: 4-7 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Parking is free here at the expansive and idyllic Pineland Farms, located at 752 Mayall Road in New Gloucester.
Come June, all sensible Mainers make time for at least one pick-your-own strawberry outing. Strawberry Moon takes the experience up a notch, or two, by providing a grassy commons area where visitors can sit back and soak up the sun, avail themselves of food-truck and craft beer/beverage vendors, and listen to the dulcet, alt-country tones of Pocket Full of Mumbles.
“Don’t forget the goats,” says Mumbles bassist and fiddler Mike Conant. “There are always animals to pet and tractors to climb. It’s a pretty great family event. The ultimate yard party, though I don’t know that I’ve ever attended a yard party with a strawberry shortcake station.”
Entry to Strawberry Moon, inclusive of parking, is just $6 per person. Folks have the option of putting their ticket price toward their respective pick-your-own strawberry purchases, at checkout. Or just spread out on a blanket, or at a picnic table, and enjoy a beverage, inventive comestibles and live music. Children under 2 are free.
Pocket Full of Mumbles have headlined the Strawberry Moon festival each year since 2021. The band considers this event the unofficial kickoff to its busy summer season. The Mumbles will play Side by Each Brewing Co. in Auburn on Saturday night, July 20. It will return to the Topsham Fair on Aug. 7. For more gig and band information, visit www.PocketFullOfMumbles.com
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, Maine’s favorite purveyors of eclectic, crowd-pleasing twang, will return to Side By Each Brewing Co. in Auburn this Friday night, June 9. Showtime is 7-10 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 tunes.
With a variety of guest soloists (the lovely and talented Nancy Durham will sit in on the drums this Friday), the Mumbles do indeed stock each set with eclectic crowd pleasers. On June 9, expect newly worked up selections from Warren Zevon, the Grateful Dead and Son Volt, to go along with heapin’ helpings of originals, CSNY, Chris Stapleton, vintage Jackson Browne, Bob Mould, The Dillards, Ryan Adams, James Taylor, Liz Phair and Tom Petty.
Later this month, the Mumbles will play in residence at the annual Strawberry Festival, a three-day, pick-your-own extravaganza scheduled for June 22-23-24 at Pineland Farms on the Mayall Road in Gray. As it has done the last three Junes, PFOM will preside from its flatbed stage Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 4-7 p.m. The band will also play the Sebago Days festival on July 15 (2 p.m.), and the Topsham Fair Aug. 9 (11 a.m.), so mark your calendars.
Pocket Full of Mumbles, Maine’s favorite purveyors of smart twang, has emerged from winter hibernation straight into show season. The three-piece will make its 2023 debut at Side By Each Brewing Co. in Auburn this Saturday night, May 6, with a return engagement scheduled for Friday June 9. Each show will run 6-9 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 (Bald Hill mando player Ben DeTroy will sit in June 9), the Mumbles stock each set with 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.
Later in June, the Mumbles will again play in residence at the annual Strawberry Festival, a three-day, pick-your-own extravaganza held June 24-25-26 at Pineland Farms on the Mayall Road in Gray. The event has grown a great deal through the years: What had been a quiet, 1-day, pick-your-own affair has matured into a three-day family-friendly blowout complete with food trucks, craft brew vendors, farm equipment (for climbing) and, of course
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.”
We often tell audiences that a particular tune we perform (and recently recorded, see below), “Wednesday Morning, 3 a.m.”, contains perhaps the most unlikely Paul Simon lyric ever written down. Give a listen and pay special attention to the third verse… The notion that effete, petit Paul Simon would ever knock over a liquor store, or commit a violent felony of any kind, is patently absurd. The same could be said of Art Garfunkel, who is taller but no less the sensitive, urbane sophisticate.
No one claims this or any S&G song is explicitly autobiographical, but this unlikely outlaw theme is one that Simon & Garfunkel must have fancied because they resurrect and amplify it on their very next album with the song, “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me”.
In an earlier blog (from July 2018, see below), we remark on the fact that S&G’s debut album, Wednesday Morning 3 a.m., was something of a dud. Indeed, Simon’s next batch of spare folk tunes didn’t thrill the executives at Columbia Records, and so he fucked off to England, with Kathy (she of the song), to concentrate on becoming the next Bob Dylan. It wasn’t until producer Tom Wilson rocked up the single, “Sounds of Silence” (in post production), that S&G would reform. Indeed, this new Byrds-inspired version would go straight to #1, which led Simon, Garfunkel and Wilson to affix more orchestration to many of the remaining songs on this second album, the now iconic Sounds of Silence.
One of those cuts, “Somewhere They Can’t Find Me”, doesn’t merely harken back to the criminal storyline detailed in the previous album’s title cut; it reprises nearly the entire lyric and updates the story.
In the wistful original, our antihero narrator has committed a crime, broken the law… In the middle of the night, his girlfriend asleep at his side, he wonders aloud (amid rich harmonies) what fate the dawn will bring.
Artists will sometimes refer back to previous lyrics, dropping little references or inside jokes to the listener. But with “Somewhere” we find something quite different: Simon deploys the original “Wednesday Morning” lyric to create a brand new song. A newly inserted chorus spells out next steps: I’ve got to creep down the alleyway, fly down the highway…
These urgent new lyrics and tone reveal that our unlikely felon has resolved to go on the lam — Before they come and get me I’ll be gone! Somewhere, where they can’t find me…
It’s not clear, but it seems his girlfriend may have woken up in time to hear all this. One can imagine her surprise: That this poetic, nebbish (a nice Jewish boy?) has A) robbed a liquor store; and B) now intends to elude the long arm of justice like some turtle-necked, scarf-wearing Clyde Barrow. It’s all a bit grandiose but it does lead us to wonder (and further consult the S&G songbook) as to whatever happened to that guy…
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.