SARATOGA LIVINGThe City. The Culture. The Life.

Last December, as I was traveling home from vacation in Hawaii, my wife and I got stranded for several hours in Los Angeles’ LAX en route to New York City’s JFK airport. As you well know at this point, I’m a huge fan of pop culture and the cult of celebrity, so I’m always on the lookout for star sightings—especially at major hub city airports. LAX came through big that day. On my way to men’s room, I walked right by Paul Scheer, the comedian best known for portraying Andre on FX’s The League. Then, near our gate, I caught sight of Curtis Armstrong, a.k.a. “Booger” from Revenge Of The Nerds, who also played the principal on New Girl (a few episodes of which were directed by Saratoga native Josh Greenbaum, whom I’d written about in saratoga living‘s 20th Anniversary Issue). Armstrong sat down just a few feet away from us. I turned around to take a look at him, and there was Brad William Henke, a few rows away, who my wife tells me has been starring on Orange Is The New Black, but who I know best as Bram from L O S T (we had literally just gone on a comprehensive tour of the show’s production sets in Oahu a week or so beforehand).

When our flight finally started boarding, yet more stars came out of the woodwork. Queuing up for first class was Courtney Love of Hole and The People vs. Larry Flynt fame, with a guy whom I believe was the lead singer of indie band …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Conrad Keely (I can neither confirm nor deny).

The final LAX cameo, though, was my favorite, likely because no one within an inch of him knew who he was except for me. That was Michael Lang, the legendary concert promoter, who co-created the original Woodstock Music & Art Festival in 1969. The guy’s walking music history! What a last-minute present from the celebrity-sighting gods!

Well, it’s entirely possible that Lang was shipping off to NYC to continue work on “Woodstock 50,” the upcoming music festival he’s producing that’s set to take place from August 16-18 in Watkins Glen, NY (just under four hours southwest of Saratoga Springs; the venue was confirmed to be Watkins Glen International Speedway). The festival, of course, will tip its cap to Lang’s original that took place in Bethel, NY, on Max Yasgur’s farm, just outside of Woodstock, NY. Lang recently told the New York Times that he wants Woodstock 50 “to be [about] more than just coming to a concert.” He’s looking to add a political, social activism angle to the concertgoing experience. “Hopefully a lot of the bands will become part of this effort to get people to stand up and make themselves heard, to get out and vote,” he said. “And if they don’t have a candidate that represents their feelings, to find one—or to run themselves.”

No announcements have been made about lineups at Woodstock 50 just yet, but if I were to make an educated guess, I’d say Carlos Santana—with the members of his original band that turned into Journey—would be a possibility, as would the surviving members of The Grateful Dead and The Who. Another more contemporary possibility could be Phish, who just announced today (January 10) that they’d be returning to the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) July 2-3 (they currently have the weekend of the Watkins Glen festival wide open on their tour schedule—but had to cancel a major show last August in the same location). The sky’s literally the limit.

As luck would have it, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, in Bethel, NY (about 2.5 hours from Saratoga)—the gatekeepers of the actual site of the original festival in 1969—will be co-producing its own Woodstock tribute festival, with the help of SPAC partner Live Nation and INVNT. However, concertgoers will have to make a tough decision; the powers-that-be behind said festival have scheduled it for the exact same weekend—August 16-18—as Lang’s big Watkins Glen showdown. (Lang recently took a swipe at Bethel Woods in Rolling Stone, saying, “They’re good stewards of the original site and they built a beautiful performing arts pavilion…But it’s a 15,000-seat shed. That’s not a Woodstock.”)

To add some of its own bells and whistles to entice potential ticket-buyers, the folks at Bethel Woods will be offering festival-goers with not only three days of music, but also TED-style talks “from leading futurists and retro-tech experts,” per a press release. (It’s unclear who exactly these “experts” and “futurists” are, and it remains to be seen what kind of attention span a festival audience might have for that SXSW-esque format.) Another plus? Bethel Woods festival has its own Museum at Bethel Woods, which tells the story of the original Woodstock festival, within the context of the ’60s, via immersive media, interactive installments and artifacts from the original festival. And potential concertgoers would have access to the museum, along with a brand-new 2019 exhibit, entitled We Are Golden: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival and Aspirations for an Aquarian Future.

If I were to make some futures bets on who might be appearing at this version of “Woodstock,” given that The Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian is performing there this October—and played the ’69 event solo—there’s a chance he could appear. Steve Miller Band, who didn’t perform at the original Woodstock, but did a gig at Bethel last year, might also be a possibility. Of course, Roger Daltrey of The Who and Carlos Santana both played sets at Bethel last summer, so there could be a bidding war between them and Lang. But if Bethel could coax Neil Young back, who played there last summer with his latest backing band, Promise of the Real (featuring Willie Nelson’s sons), well, then, I might’ve just made up my own mind.

Growing up wanting to be a professional musician, my parents always encouraged my guitar playing, but they made sure I was realistic about what kind of career I could have. Really, in my 16-year-old head, I had no idea what mom and dad were talking about. And though I understand better now how my parents were only trying to prepare me, I still wouldn’t mind having a career like that of Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame drummer (and one of my music heroes) Max Weinberg.

The New Jersey-born Weinberg has held two separate musical dream jobs throughout his long career. Since 1974, Weinberg has served as the drummer for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, becoming a mainstay of the group and giving Springsteen’s rhythm section its iconic power and punch. In addition to his meteoric rock career, Weinberg is also known to millions of fans around the globe as the bandleader and founder of the Max Weinberg 7, a.k.a. Conan O’Brien’s band on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show from 1993 to 2010.

As if Weinberg weren’t busy enough—he completed the massive The River Tour with Springsteen and the E Street Band back in 2017—he’s now touring with a truly interactive concert experience: Max Weinberg’s Jukebox, which is coming to Proctors this Friday, January 11. Capital Region fans won’t just get to see him and his “Jukebox band” play live—they’ll also get to create the playlist from a menu of more than 200 songs. We’re talking all the songs that were formative in Weinberg’s life and career: everything from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to his work with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Weinberg will also give audiences a peek behind the curtain of his career (both in rock and late night) by telling stories and reminiscing about certain songs. Luckily, saratoga living got to talk with Weinberg and get its own sneak peek into his concert at Proctors.

Tell me a little about your concert, Max Weinberg’s Jukebox at Proctors this Friday.
I put the Jukebox band together in April of 2017. We’ve done a little over a hundred shows since then. We call it the “No Overhead Tour,” because all the equipment is provided by the venues, such as Proctors. It’s not a concert; it’s a party. It’s all audience requests, essentially the songs that I grew up with, the songs that created the soundtrack to the ’60s and ’70s.

You’ve played at Proctors before, but you’ve also played at SPAC, right?
Yeah, we played SPAC one time on the Born in the U.S.A. Tour in the summer of 1984. And my son’s a well-known drummer [Jay Weinberg] who took my place when I did The Tonight Show with Conan, and he made his US debut there when he played with the E Street Band in 2009.

Did you get some down time to enjoy Saratoga?
Oh yeah. I actually brought my 15-piece jazz band to Saratoga to the Universal Preservation Hall in 2010. It’s a great music city.

You started with the E Street Band at just 23 years old. What’s it like looking back now after such a successful and diverse career?
Well, I was kind of an unusual kid. I started playing professionally when I was seven years old with a local weddings and bar mitzvahs guy. I was a novelty act as a child. So by the time I met Bruce and the E Street Band, I’d been playing professionally for 16 years. So, yes, while I was 23 years old, I’d been playing every kind of job you could imagine and had a lot of experience. And at the time when I met Bruce and the band, I was actually playing in the Broadway show Godspell, which was quite popular in the 1970s.

Tell me how that first audition went.
Playing with Bruce the first time was obviously, even just on a musical level, a life-changing experience. My first audition was with Bruce, Clarence Clemons [saxophone], Garry Tallent [bass] and Danny Federici [organ/piano]. It wasn’t just what Bruce was doing, which was formidable, but it was how the three of them were relating to him [musically] that really stood out. Even though I’d been playing a lot, it was really quite unique to my experience. I think I was about the 56th or 57th drummer that auditioned during the summer of 1974, and the rest is what it is. [Laughs] I took a huge pay cut at the time [going from Broadway to rock], but it was the best investment I ever made.

I heard that you got the audition for Late Night with Conan O’Brien from a chance encounter with Conan. Is that true?
I’d read that David Letterman was leaving NBC to go to CBS. Paul Shaffer is a friend of mine—[we] played in Godspell together back in the ’70s—and he gave me a couple of leads. This was four years after Bruce broke up the E Street Band, and I wanted to do late-night as a way to get back into music. So my wife and I had been at a party in New York City in May of 1993. We left early and went into the Carnegie Deli for dinner. Afterwards, we’re walking down 7th Avenue and standing on the corner of 7th Avenue and 54th Street was Conan O’Brien.

And you just approached him?
It was my wife, Becky, who encouraged me to go over and say hello because, hey, you never know. What are the chances of running into the guy in New York City, waiting for a light to turn, and he’s just given a network TV show? So [we] walked over and introduced ourselves. Conan wasn’t a particular fan of the E Street Band, but it put us in contact. I congratulated him [on the show] and asked what he was doing for music. He said, “We’ve got some ideas.” And then he said, “Do you have any ideas?” So I went into my pitch for the band. And the great thing about Conan O’Brien, that was consistent his entire career, is that he doesn’t care where a good idea comes from. If it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea. And he’s always eliciting the best from the people that work for him.

What was it like when you found out that you were going to be the show’s bandleader?
They let me sit for about a week, and then a producer from the show called me and said, “Can you go to LA?” I said yeah. A car picked me up in two hours and took me to the airport. I flew out to meet Lorne Michaels, who was producing Wayne’s World 2, and, basically, he just wanted to meet me. I was in LA for just an hour, got back on the plane, and the next day went to the studio and started putting the show together. I had an incredible group of musicians with me—the best, in my view. The last decade of my tenure there, I led the band on that show and played with the E Street Band. So for me, it was an embarrassment of riches, and certainly the top of my own personal bell curve.

There are certain bands that can just transport you right back to a specific time in your life. For me, those include Huey Lewis and The News, The Misfits, The Figgs, Son Volt, The Byrds and The Shins. To that point, during my late teen and early college years, I could often be found in a non-medicated trance—alone in my room or with my headphones plugged in—listening to one such band: The Samples.

I know I say this about a lot of bands (see: The Weepies), but The Samples were one of the first groups I was truly obsessed with. I gravitated to lead singer/songwriter Sean Kelly’s hyper-personal, introspective lyrics and at times haunting, at others jubilant melodies. I also loved how not-the-same-as-everything-else-on-the-radio the band sounded (and well, they didn’t get much airplay up here in Saratoga-land). This was the era when grunge, alternative rock and jam bands were elbowing for space on the airwaves, and The Samples were lumped in with circuit-mates such as the Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, Phish and Blues Traveler, despite being quite a bit more all-over-the-place, musically, and a decidedly less jammy. They were sort of this happy amalgam of folk and stoner rock, country, jazz, reggae and zydeco, with little snippets of ’80s synth rock, The Police, Neil Young and Toto’s “Africa” encrusting it. (Can you tell that I’ve thought long and hard about that mixture?) Selfishly, I also enjoyed being able to play and sing most of their songs on my guitar, which I was still learning how to play at the time. There was nothing too technical about the compositions, save for a few difficult guitar solos here or impossibly fast finger-picked passages there. It was right in the ballpark for me.

At some point, it became my mission in life to listen to everything The Samples had ever recorded—and at one point in time, it was “mission accomplished.” I soaked in so much of the band’s catalog that I pretty much knew every single song of theirs by heart. My gateway drug was 1992’s No Room, which my older brother had either borrowed from a friend for a time or owned on cassette or CD (my memory escapes me). I don’t think I gave the album a fair shake that first time around, beyond the song “Did You Ever Look So Nice,” which got random airplay on 102.7 WEQX in the ’90s. But when I was gifted the band’s eponymous debut album a few years later—it’s blue and features the five members in mid-dance around a fire—something clicked. (I particularly enjoyed “Birth of Words” and “Close to the Fires.”) I soon went out and bought my own copy of No Room (1992), following that up with The Last Drag (1993) and Autopilot (1994). That was later followed by the semi-live double-album, Transmissions from the Sea of Tranquility (1997). And that pretty much took me to 1998, when I graduated from Saratoga Springs High School and through the four years I spent studying at Connecticut College. The Samples were nothing short of my religion.

And then, one day, I just stopped listening to them. I have no simple explanation. My newfound interest in alt-country music and Son Volt was partially to blame. As was my incessant listening to The Byrds. So was the real world. I was no longer free to just lounge around all day, between classes, listening to music. I had to find a job and make a living, and then, of course, I got married and moved to Brooklyn—and then turned around and moved back upstate to Troy. All of this happened in 15 years time. The Samples sort of got lost in life’s tectonic shuffle.

Just recently, I started listening to the band again. Their albums had been transferred over to my iPod at some point, and I’ve been known to crank them on the weekends, when I’m home alone or have been tasked with tidying up. Then, one day at saratoga living, I rediscovered literally everything The Samples had ever produced (the goal of that early mission of mine) on Spotify. It was like meeting an old friend for coffee and catching up about old times. I was keenly aware that the band had—to paraphrase a lyric from one of my favorite songs from their album The Last Drag—carried on, but it was those original five or so records that felt the most real to me.

So when I saw in my Facebook newsfeed, recently, that The Samples’ Sean Kelly would be performing at Saratoga Springs’ famed, historic folk club, Caffè Lena (on January 10, to be exact), I was intrigued. It was as if the ghost of my former favorite band were haunting me, friendly ghost-style—and just steps away from my office at saratoga living. On the off chance that Kelly was available for an interview, I reached out to his press contact, and what do you know? I found his kind voice on the other end of the line, apologizing for not picking up his phone quicker. The conversation was a little, shall we say, all over the place, but that’s sort of how it goes with “old friends.” (Note: Before the interview, I’d never actually met or talked to Kelly before, and I’m embarrassed to say, even at the height of my Samples fandom, had never seen the band live. When I tell Kelly this, he says, “Well, I haven’t either,” tongue firmly in cheek. “It’s true, you know,” he continues. “I’ve played in the band but I’ve never seen us.”)

So basically, I asked Kelly to fill me in on the last 15 years. What had he and The Samples been up to? “We’re almost finished with a new album right now called Indian Summer, and I put out one [before that] called America,” he says. (The new one marks eight album’s worth of Samples material I’m going to have to go back and listen to for the first time.) Kelly tells me that, round about the mid-’90s, the band’s original lineup started dissolving. Members moved on, and lineups shifted. “It’s a rough business,” he says. Though he’s really been the lone constant in the band as the lineup’s changed around him, all the upheaval hasn’t really affected him that much. “I always make sure that I capture the snapshot of time with an album,” says Kelly. For example, he says, the first album featured multi-instrumentalist Charles Hambleton, whom he drove out to Boulder, CO, with in 1989, long before the band was a “thing” (Hambleton went on to have his own successful career as an Academy Award-winning film producer). So when you listen to that first album, what you’re hearing is one version of the band. The next album, the one after that, and so forth, all have a different color. Kelly tells me he recently played a gig with the group’s original keyboardist, Al Laughlin, who left the band decades ago, and the guys he’s been playing with lately have been putting on some spectacular shows. (The band’s OG five-piece lineup has reunited only twice since that first album, once in 2010 and more recently, in 2014, both at music festivals.)

Speaking of touring, Kelly tells me that, despite playing Saratoga’s own OG music venue—the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in the early ’90s—he’s never actually played Caffè Lena before. Kelly, who hails from Manchester, VT, by way of Burlington and Milton, where he eventually dropped out of high school to go pro as a musician, remembers seeing his first-ever show at SPAC—The Allman Brothers Band—and years later, once The Samples got a bit more famous, playing on the same bill as the Allmans, at the 1993 H.O.R.D.E. festival. Talk about a full-circle moment. For those Samples diehards worried that they’ll be hearing a lot of new material at said folk venue, Kelly says not to worry: “I probably will only play one from the new album, and then one from each album since and all the stuff off the first album,” he says. “There’s so much to pick and choose from.”

It’s not lost on me that the band’s celebrating a bit of a milestone this year, given that their first album came out 30 years ago this year. I ask Kelly if he has anything planned for the 30th anniversary of the album, and he’s momentarily stumped, telling me he wasn’t sure about the exact release date (all the usual, reputable suspects online point to The Samples coming out in ’89, but I’d air on the side of caution before calling this an official 30th birthday bash). And I want to know, as much for him as I do for me: Has he found that The Samples have been building a wider audience in recent years, now that their full catalog is on streaming services like Spotify? “To be honest, I don’t know what Spotify is,” admits Kelly. I fill him in on the details, and how his bands’ full catalog is there, as clear as day. “How do you find out if anybody’s listening to it?” he asks me. And I tell him it’s pretty easy: Those data are right there on the page for all to see. And they’re quite astounding: Not only does his band have 50,000-plus monthly listeners, but also one of their songs, “Could It Be Another Change,” from that first album, has eclipsed 4.1 million streams—not bad for a song that never made it on mainstream radio, MTV or VH1. Kelly’s just as gobsmacked as I am, asking me to take a screenshot of the evidence for him. (I obliged.) “That’s a little song I wrote when I was 18 years old in Londonderry, VT” says Kelly. “Who would’ve thought that [song] would end up like that?”

Kelly further admits that he hasn’t watched TV in two years and doesn’t even own a CD player, let alone know what a streaming service is; he uses an old 70s radio that he bought at a thrift shop for his musical consumption. “I’m not the person people probably think I am when it comes to [music],” he says. “It’s so good to have music go through your head, so it inspires you, but I can’t remember the last thing I was inspired by.” Maybe, I suggest, that’s because there’s no music on the radio these days (or anywhere else, for that matter) that’s really all that inspirational. He responds: “[The Samples] have never really fit in in any way, when it comes to all that stuff [on the radio].” And that’s when it hits me: What an incredible way to live your life! Maybe being a tech Luddite—or having a band that’s so all-over-the-place—hasn’t helped Kelly receive the type of following or press or fortune as a Dave Matthews Band or Phish, but it’s made The Samples the greatest “new” discovery for all who stumble upon them and quickly, dig their music. I’m looking forward to rewinding things back to 1998 and plowing forward. Won’t you join me?