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Bob Hallett stepped back from the mic. It was early September and the founding member of the eclectic band Great Big Sea was finishing up an open-air concert in Buffalo, New York, with his bandmates.
They were in the middle of playing an up-tempo drinking song Mr. Hallett had come up with more than 15 years ago, “The Old Black Rum,” but something made him stop singing after the first verse.
He didn’t need to bother with the second.
The lyrics floated up to the stage from the audience like fog rising on the Erie Canal. Five thousand people were belting out his words. “…’Cause the old black rum’s got a hold on me like a dog wrapped ’round my leg…”
It was a pinch-me moment for Mr. Hallett.
On stage were three guys from Newfoundland who mixed traditional folk songs and sea shanties from that isolated corner of Canada with their own original pop songs; who played instruments like the fiddle, the diatonic accordion and the goatskin drums; who had never recorded on a major U.S. label; who never got radio play in the States; who had not released a new album in more than a year; who were still going strong 16 years after starting out in dive bars in St. John’s; who were now performing in front of the largest crowd they’d ever attracted—an overwhelmingly American crowd, no less.
And the audience knew every word.
“You just have to step back and think back and philosophize about how you got here,” Mr. Hallett, 41, recalled during a recent telephone interview.
Great Big Sea will be flooding the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on October 11 at 8 p.m.
The success of Great Big Sea was not completely unexpected—at least from the band’s perspective—but it certainly was improbable. “We knew in our heads that there was a place for a band like this out on the world stage,” Mr. Hallett said. “The music was really good. But no one had successfully taken it out of Newfoundland, let alone Canada.”
Mr. Hallett, Alan Doyle and Sean McCann might not have been the most talented of musicians, but they were determined to spread their cultural heritage, and they were hungry for success. “We knew if we had the right recipe, people would like the dish,” Mr. Hallett said.
It was just a matter of convincing people to take a taste. So Great Big Sea tried to make it as palatable as possible.
The first step was to arrange traditional songs as pop songs. Then Great Big Sea brought the tunes to life with an infectious jollity, a full-tilt zest that inspires even the most skeptical listeners to hoist a frothy pint and search for the nearest mahogany bartop and a jig partner.
Mr. Hallett calls it the “Great Big Sea presentation.”
“You have to be good friends with your songs because you’re going to play them every night for the rest of your life,” he said, explaining the band’s enthusiasm for its music. “We’re not actors.”
(That’s not entirely true. Mr. Doyle will make his big-screen debut in the forthcoming “Robin Hood,” directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett.)
But Mr. Hallett simply means: the band isn’t faking it. They really are having a raucous good time.
For the record, Mr. Hallett says the band has never embraced the oft-applied label of “Celtic” to its music, although he understands that it helps the uninitiated grasp the general universe within which the band plays—one also populated by the likes of the Pogues, Gaelic Storm and Carbon Leaf. Irish, Scottish and bluegrass music all comes “from a similar place,” Mr. Hallett explained.
Over the years, the band has gained confidence and maturity and expanded its musical horizons.
On “The Hard and The Easy,” released in October 2005, the band delved deeper into the more esoteric and obscure traditional music of Newfoundland that it had shied away from in its early years when it was focused on attracting general audiences. And on its last release, “Fortune’s Favor,” which debuted in April 2008, the band deliberately embarked on a “sonic experiment” to move away from the sound upon which they built their name.
“We wanted to see what we could play and still be in the same band,” Mr. Hallett said.
The album has as many different sounds as the northern Atlantic has shades of blue and green—even if the accordions and tin whistles are consistently in the background. Listen straight through and you’ll hear echoes of Huey Lewis, Ben Folds, ’80s metal bands, Christian rock and the Muppets. You’ll hear the gruffness of Nickelback, the whispy folksiness of Neil Young and the tightly blended vocals of Phish at their most melodic and playful.
“The question for us is: is this as good or better than what we’ve done before?” Mr. Hallett explained. “The biggest pressure is, can we top ourselves?”
The one thing Mr. Hallett will not tamper with is the place he calls home. “The further we get from there, the less authentic we’ll be,” he said. “The music is so tied to the geography and the culture of Newfoundland, if we were to move away, an essential piece of what we are would be gone.”
Sure, maintaining that stance requires a lot more travel on his part to get to gigs. But he knew what he was getting into. “This is the life I’ve wanted since I was 8 years old.”
Great Big Sea will play at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, October 11, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $30, $40 or $50, available by calling the Arts Center box office at 288-1500, stopping in at the PAC at 76 Main Street in Westhampton Beach, or visiting www.whbpac.org.
on Oct 6, 2009