Many museums across the country have started incorporating live music events into their programming as a way to bring in more visitors and expand their reach. But it’s rare to see line-ups like that of the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation’s Second Shift Series. Curated by Mark Erelli, this spring features incredible acts, and a diverse array of talent. We got to chat separately with Erelli and with the Museum’s executive director, Robert Perry. These evenings are sure to inspire, so get out there to Waltham for an evening you won’t forget.
RLR: The mission of the museum is largely about inspiring innovation. What does that mean to you?
Robert Perry: I started working at the Museum in June of 2015, so it’s been a bit over two and a half years. When I arrived this was a place that was very quiet, it hardly had any operating hours, almost no staff, there weren’t any volunteers anymore, and there was no programming whatsoever. The Museum had taken a major hit a little over a year prior when a longtime sustaining donor retired ended his support at age 90. He had been single-handedly keeping the organization at break-even; when he stopped, the organization went into a tailspin.
My predecessor’s instinct was to contract, to try cut costs to break even, a strategy that didn’t work. My instinct was to run in the other direction, to innovate! We had to innovate, we had to reinvent ourselves and wake the place up, raise our profile in the community, and become useful in the community; the path forward seemed to be was to deliver a broad array of programming for our community that is fresh, and interesting, and exciting.
But at the beginning I really was groping for toeholds. A lot of our artifacts are huge–they weigh 2,000 lbs, and we don’t have a lot of square footage. So the place wasn’t going to crackle back to life on the strength of a new artifact or from rearranging the furniture. Partly because I had seen other museums do this, [we began to] experiment and are over time developing a broad base of cultural programming that relates to our mission, that’s establishing the museum as a go-to place for lots of different reasons, and not just our core mission as a Museum of the American Industrial Revolution. — The 2nd Shift Music Series was the first regular programming we instituted, beginning in the spring of 2016.
I come from a restaurant background, believe it or not. The board of this institution took a real chance on me. The relationship that I saw was that a museum is in the hospitality industry too. Danny Meyer, a legendary New York restaurateur, coined a simple definition of hospitality that I love: “Make people enjoy being in your place.” Fundamentally, that’s my job: to make people enjoy being at this museum.
RLR: How did 2nd Shift come about?
RP: Michael Tarbox, who was the first curator of the series, happened to Facebook message us in late 2015 and said, “Have you ever thought of doing live music?” We had already had done a modern dance performance, that was actually very on-mission; it was about the Mill Girls of the 19th Century. The Mill Girl was invented on our site, by Francis Cabot Lowell, so that was a perfect beginning—but we needed more. I answered Michael and said I would love to do it and talked to him about coming into the museum and puzzling out a program, and that’s what begat the Second Shift music series.
He has a really wide-ranging musical taste, and I think he had a lot of fun sharing that with the world. He booked acts I’d never heard of and who were really pushing boundaries; just super creative musicians who did the job of altering the profile of the Museum. And they are musical innovators: jazz, blues, and rock-and-roll are the ultimate American art forms, and music that’s highly improvisational is on-mission for the museum. We are an educational venue that is no longer [just] STEM, but STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics). Because music is a live performance medium, it lends itself to innovation through improvisation.
Back to the Mission piece for a second…. I will admit to a little discomfort at first making such a strong commitment to the arts, but in the restaurant business I was in the food service industry and by the same vein, musicians are absolutely working in the music industry. So I quickly came around to making a full-throttle, sustained commitment to an program of live concerts at the Museum.
RLR: How does the space work for shows–what kind of atmosphere should people expect, and how is it different/similar to seeing a show at a music venue?
RP: A couple of things come to mind immediately: start with a 40-foot ceiling. It’s a big brick box that is 42 feet at its peak. The second thing is the audience is sitting surrounded by industrial machinery. In a typical music venue, you might have fixed seating or not, you might have curtains or some other sound-absorbing material surrounding you, you’re often in a low-ceiled environment; the room might be demised into sections, with seating, and a bar, and there’s a whole group behind that bar, and you get increasingly distant from the stage. We set it up theatre-style on a flat floor and we set up the stage in front of a giant oil-fired boiler that used to heat the mill back in the 1940s. And then you’ve got steam engines on one side, and a couple of cars behind you, massive steam pipes rising on a the high wall on your right, and an antique machine shop on your left that has all belt-driven tools: planers, milling machines, lathes, drill press. This place is different in so many ways. When people come for a show, if they’re early or there’s an intermission or a break between an opening act and headliner, we encourage people to wander around.
Lonnie Holley is a performance artist who played here last spring. He was here early enough that he’d gotten through sound check and was just starting to ask questions about the place. So we gave him a mini tour, and we turned on line shaft system, which is the leather belt and pulley system that drives the huge cast iron 19th century machines tools, and he was like, “Wow, can you turn that on during the show?” Lonnie’s shows are entirely improvised, and we got to the point in the show and he kind of nodded to me, and so I flipped on the motor and the belt system cranked up. With a leather belt line shaft system there is a rhythmic slap, slap, slapping it makes that Lonnie then improvised a 6 or seven minute piece around. It was pure magic. [Note: Check out the performance below]
RLR: A lot of museums are trying something like this; what do you think you have learned and what do you see as the benefits to the musicians too?
RP: There was a fear, or self-consciousness: would people judge an industrial museum having rock concerts as being off-mission, or being inappropriate in some way? There’s been none of that, and a lot of community leaders have been very complimentary and encouraging; so have our Trustees. What they’re so happy about is the place is alive again and people are talking about it. The musicians really enjoy it. They say, “This place is so much more interesting than the places I play every night.”
In the Second Shift, the artists are identified and booked by a musician, not by a booking agent. Michael hadn’t done that before and Mark hasn’t done that before. So, there’s kind of a first time aspect that is really exciting. They’re putting themselves out there and they understand the music business from the opposite direction, from the artist’s perspective, so they’re experiencing something for the very first time as they reach out to performers and agents seeking to set up a gig. It’s also great fun to see a musician’s own musical taste expressed through putting together a roster of performers; musicians they know and like, and others they’re just discovering, or know from a distance.
Michael did it for two years for us, and it was exhausting. It can be really challenging to reach the agreements–there is all this back and forth about dates, and how much, and negotiating contracts and riders and lodging, if it’s needed. So, one thing I think we’re learned is that having musicians do this is exciting for all parties, but that they shouldn’t do it for too long. They could understandably burn out. So our agreement with Mark is for just one year: 2018 — an idea he enthusiastically embraced.
Mark has brought a tremendous amount of energy to the whole process and has put together a fantastic lineup for the spring. He was one of the musicians that Michael booked last fall and he was able to hang out after the show and chat for a bit with us. Mark asked a few questions about the 2nd Shift Music Series and how it worked. We knew at the time that Michael wasn’t going to continue as Curator, so I jokingly said, “Do you want to do it?” And a few weeks later, I followed up and said, “Seriously, would you like do it?” — Mark sat on that for a few weeks and then got in touch, saying: “Yes. Yes, I believe I would!”
Speaking of Mark, we’ll now turn to our conversation with him. And, just in case you haven’t yet checked out his new album Mixtape, ya should. Here’s a song premiere of “Ophelia” we did last fall and an interview we did with Mark about the album in January.
| RLR: When you consider preparing for a performance in a unique space like this, does it impact how you think about the show?
Mark Erelli: The context of a performance—everything from history of the space to current events to the sonic features of the venue—is definitely a factor in how I think about my own shows. The same concerns go into the artists I wanted to book for the series. If an artist had a cool sonic or thematic synchronicity with the physical museum or its mission, that made it more of a high priority booking for me. RLR: There has been a growing trend of finding unique spaces to perform music (Sofar Sounds, The Wild Honey Pie, for example). What do you think that is about? And what, from a performer’s perspective, are you looking for to know if a space will work? ME: I want to set this series apart from your examples, some of which I’ve done and do not, in my experience, share the level of respect for the artists that myself and the museum are trying feature with the 2nd Shift Series. But I acknowledge your point: audiences and artists are getting excited about finding non-traditional alternatives to seeing and performing live music. I think it’s partly an economic trend, in that it might be a lot cheaper to re-purpose a space for music than to open a new venue in one of Cambridge or Somerville’s squares. It also has to do with the explosion in entertainment choices—if people can see any movie or listen to any music from the comfort of their home (or their phone!), then perhaps we can use novel settings for art as a way to get folks off their couches and out into their communities. As a performer, I’m first and foremost concerned about whether the space will sound great, which is not an issue with the room at the museum. But I also want to see if there’s some overlap between the things I explore in my art and history and vibe of the space, so that there’s a potential for the impact of my songs to be amplified by the performance context. RLR: What are the benefits to a musician playing in a place like the Charles River Museum, as opposed to the dozens of music venues around Boston? ME: On a nuts and bolts level, some venues are too busy to play more than a couple times a year (e.g. Club Passim) and others have the opposite problem, in that if you play them too regularly you risk your shows becoming less of a special destination event. So as a musician, it’s great to be able to spread your annual share of local performances throughout the areas surrounding Boston. There is also a large portion of the greater Boston audience that, for reasons I acknowledge but don’t fully agree with, regard going into the city for a show to be more logistical hassle than it’s worth. It’s really nice for that segment of the arts audience to have options like the series in Waltham. RLR: What do you think you’ve learned from this opportunity to curate the series? ME: Well, booking is hard! There’s a lot of juggling of schedules, which wasn’t something I really fully appreciated when I signed on for this and is my least favorite aspect of the job. But I don’t even like juggling my own schedule! I also came on board with only a couple of months before our first spring date in March, so I think it was harder at first because of the short lead time. As I get deeper into this and can look at artists’ availabilities a bit farther in the future, I think it’ll get more manageable. The Second Shift kicks off on March 15 and goes through May. You can find tickets here. It’ll be unique, it’ll be good, and you’ll be happy. |