Tuesday Oct. 28 at 8 p.m in the HUB Fireplace Lounge hosted The Freeze Dried Hippies and Howard Jennings. The event was put on by P.A.C.E and sat over 50 students, at least for the first hour. Though the fireplace was not lit, which would have supplied the ideal environment for the two different styles, the A/V Crew was on point with a luminous mix of red, pink and yellow lights.
The crowd grew larger as The Freeze Dried Hippies, a jam band from the Plymouth area, broke into their first of five tracks. Each song performed in the set was a cover of The Grateful Dead and certainly paid honorable homage to good ol’ Jerry. As soon as “Bertha” hit the airwaves and students realized whom the track originally belonged to, several shouts escaped from the crowd and a solo dancer busted his way onto the floor. While there weren’t any keyboards involved in TFDH’s set, percussionist Bill Joyner, Mountain View Café employee, matched up with rhythm guitarist Jon White to help resonate the jam throughout the crowd, which extended up and around the staircase. Halfway through the set a squad of Stroom Troopers grooved on the floor for a brief interval and added to the bands performance as audience members laughed, clapped and continued to jam.
Heavily rocking in the free world, TFDH’s third song was “Scarlet Bagonias.” Grasping firmly to the original chords, lead guitarist Chris Palmaro looked as if the music played itself while he stood back, closed his eyes and let the quiet and eclectic track unwind. ” The guy does kind of sound like Jerry, ” Sophomore Sean Varney said of Palmaro’s playing.
The stoke became even higher on the fourth song when TFDH’s broke into their rendition of a “Fire on the Mountain.” The mellow track got the positive vibes flowing throughout the audience as students heads bobbed up, down and around to the textbook cover. The calypso sounding anthem provided students with an easy feeling when the track broke down into its long, high pitched an pedal induced jam.
Breaking into the bands fifth song was the pavement peeling, easy like Sunday morning jam, “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad.” Still vibing out in the audience was the lone dancer who moved and grooved throughout the songs entirety. Joyner’s drums offered a perfect rhythm to accompany his bandmates while last minute students gathered around the railing above the FPL to catch the final moments of TFDH’s excellent set. After the set, the five person band wanted to let their fans know they felt, “a great response from the audience, the band really appreciates everyone coming out,” as stated by Joyner.
TFDH’s packed up their gear to make way for the evenings second performer, Howard Jennings. Hailing from the New York area, Jennings recently released his first album and is currently touring college campuses to promote the new release. Unfortunately for the sake of Jennings, there were only a handful of members left in the audience after TFDH’s outstanding performance, but those who stayed received an intimate introduction to Jennings.
With a mixed sound of artists from John Rzeznik to Jason Mraz, Jennings performance set the surroundings for a rather dull performance. The wornout vocals of artists like Chad Kroeger mixed with instrumentals of John Mayer made Jennings a hard listen but appeared to please several audience members. The first three tracks were hard to swallow except for Jennings interesting cover of The Human Leagues “Don’t You Want Me.” The acoustic cover was certainly interesting and got a foot shaking or two but it was his only hit of the fourteen-song set.
Taking a breather for a moment, Jennings told a funny story about a friend of his whom he thought had much more courage than him. The audience produced a few laughs before Jennings broke into “Take My Chances,” a quiet song with deep tones and vocals that sounded like a distant Bon Jovi, “Wanted Dead or Alive.” The anticlimactic track became rather repetitive after the first two minutes.
Jennings tenth song of the evening was a catchy jam that is to be featured in an upcoming T.V. show, of which Jennings seemed quite pleased about. The tracks insightful lyrics paired with Jennings slightly raspy voice created a tasteful make out melody that paints the picture of a girl running down an ally with smeared mascara while the boyfriend sits on a stoop singing to the sky, how many times has that been done done? Too many, but fair enough if a T.V. program purchased it, it must be OK.
Johnny Cash may or may not have turned over in his grave when Jennings broke out into a cover of “At Folsom Prison.” Initially the track was off to a great start but Jennings just couldn’t do it justice when it came to the high pitch plucks of the famous breakdown, instead Jennings opted to hum those parts. Finishing out his set with two more tracks, one of which sampled Pink Floyd’s, “Another Brick in the Wall” and the other, a new track titled, “You and Me.” Whether or not Jennings played out the rest of his set well is purely a matter of opinion but the fact that there were only five people remaining, two of which were A/V guys, might say something. Though Jennings musical pallet was rather dry, his performance was certainly entertaining.
Even though the majority of the audience left before Jennings came on to finish out the night, P.A.C.E provided an excellent event with the performance of TFDH’s Grateful Dead jam session. To hear more of Howard Jennings and The Freeze Dried Hippies check out each at Myspace.com/Howardjennings, Howardjenningsmusic.com and Myspace.com/freezedriedhippies. The Freeze Dried Hippies will be playing a show in Milford, Mass. on Nov. 15 at Tennessee’s BBQ and Grill, get down there, check it out and chill.