The gig poster tells the story behind the story of the song, at least in part. It muddies the waters a little bit at the same time. It shows an Old Spicey-looking salt on a bicycle pedaling past Barnacle Bill's marina. It is a clear night. There is an explosion of stars in the sky. The sailor has a song on his lips. The thought bubble has him singing "Oh dear ladies of the night."
OK? Now, a sailor on a late-night jaunt on the waterfront, singing a song about ladies of the night, brings up certain less than gentile, associations, doesn't it, Dan Blakeslee?
"Well, I guess it might" the Newburyport singer-songwriter says about the tune "Ladies of the Night," which is on "Lincoln Street Roughs," his first studio album in eight years.
But that's not what the song is about, or why Blakeslee, who is also a professional artist, used the well known Merrimac Street marina as the setting for his pen-and-ink drawing, which advertises a record release party for the new album.
Here's what happened: It was one of those wonderfully warm winter days in the age of climate change: A balmy 65 degrees in March. It was just about 2 a.m. and Blakeslee, who had been working late, as usual, was prowling the streets of Newburyport on his bike. He needed a break, some way to burn off the energy. He pedaled off. Then it hit him, out of the blue: The lyrical content for a melody that had been in his head for a long time. He pulled into the boatyard and started scribbling the words that would become "Dear Ladies of the night." And despite lyrics that speak of temptation, webs of pleasure and pleading vagabonds, the song, is not about an encounter with, well, hookers, streetwalkers, whatever you want to call them. Its real-life nexus was not on the waterfront, but in the mountains several months before.
Blakeslee had been a performance of Bread & Puppet, the politically charged Vermont-based theater company. It was a steamy summer evening. He and his girlfriend were walking to the pond on the company's home base in Glover, when all of a sudden they encountered a group of young female skinnydippers — skinnydipping being something of a competitive sport in Vermont. Nothing happened beyond an exchange of pleasantries, and nothing came up it — until the image broke free on that March evening while Blakeslee was biking around. He's at a loss to explain it — how, why the experience was processed and came emerged out of the blue, "but I'm not crazy enough to let it get away," he says.
It's like what happened with "He Cannot Take Me," another track from "Lincoln Street Roughs," the Peapod Recording release, which officially hit the stores Sept. 15. It was another late night, the witching hour of Devil's Day — between 11 p.m. and midnight on June 6, 2006 — or, rather, 06/06/06. Blakeslee was on the Newburyport Boardwalk when inspiration struck. He wrote the gritty blues number — words and lyrics — in just 30 minutes. "That's like finding a unicorn," says Blakeslee, who moved to the city two years ago and has been a fixture on the Seacoast music scene for a decade. "It never happens that way." He peddled home and laid it down in his home-recording studio, making sure the horn did not fall off that unicorn.
The land of Lincoln
Actually, the whole "Lincoln Street" project has a taste of the fantastic about it, beginning, as it did, with a slow-speed pursuit – a bike chased by a car, naturally— through the streets of Portsmouth, N.H., that started it all. Indeed, there have been unicorns in abundance.
Blakeslee grew up in South Berwick, Maine. He got his first guitar at 18. It wasn't his first instrument. That would be the drums, a fairly hideous but sturdy 70s-era sparkle set with a wood shell that his parents picked up at a yard sale somewhere. He used to play in an the family barn. But the drums stayed in Maine when Blakeslee left for Maryland Institute College of Art. The guitar went with him, but mostly collected dust in the corner of his apartment as he focused on visual arts. The guitar came down from time to time when Blakeslee needed to burn off steam after spending hours drawing and painting for class He became friends with Ron Harrity, another guitarist-artist on campus. They started playing together in an old art studio on Mount Royal Avenue in1993, but went their separate ways after graduating — Harrity to California, Blakeslee back home — with that peculiarly college-era feeling that, somehow, down the line they would get back together. In their case it did happen, but not until nearly a decade later and then utterly by chance.
He ended up in Boston, where he played in the subways eight hours a day — a gruelling musical and emotional experience. "It's the most humbling form of entertainment," he says. In the subways, people aren't especially interested in what you're doing and, for the most part, your audience would rather be somewhere else. And, it's not an especially healthful environment in which to do anything. He made enough money to buy record, food and pay rent. It also built his chops and hardened him as a performer. He made himself known on the Seacoast scene, becoming a fixture around the University of New Hampshire.
Last year, while riding his bike in Portsmouth, Blakeslee noticed a car following him, despite the evasive maneuvers he took. It was to be Harrity, who lived in Maine and owned a small recording studio in Portland. They talked about music. Blakeslee told him he had not recorded a proper, full-length album since 1999. (He does not court last year's "Live at Laconia State Prison" because it is "just old stuff in a new format." They decided to get together and lay something down. Blakeslee had "an arsenal" of "super stripped down songs" — enough for maybe four albums. He and Harrity sorted t through the tunes thematically. They had "endless ideas" about what to do with the current project. "It turned out to be bigger than I thought it would be," he says. " It was like a fully loaded train going down the tracks with no brakes."
Rough start
The name of the album, which features performances by local aces like ex-Tigersaw cellist and vocalist Juliet Nelson and Mill City Ramblers fiddler Dave Talmage, is something of a misnomer. Lincoln Street Roughs was, indeed, recorded in a studio on Lincoln Street in Portland, but the eight tracks are not "roughs," live takes from a recording session, but little gems that have been well polished and placed in evocative musical settings. They shine brightly and burn emotionally immediate. There's a lilting sadness to many of the tunes, which focus on well-remembered junctures of — and people in — the songwriter's life, from Hal Kenyon, who is "bringing me closer to everything i want to be," and who gave the aspiring artist an opportunity to meet Andrew Wyeth — which he passed up because, well, because he was too young to understand what an opportunity it was, to his eagerly anticipated reunion with his wife, who was studying in Spain, in "Your Spanish Scarf." Songs like the subtly raucous "He Cannot Take Me," with its netherworldly percussion and gritty, coarse guitar work, obviously the mold.
Blakeslee counts among his musical influences Leonard Cohen, The Smiths, Tom Waits and Radiohead, but the association that most quickly comes to mind, especially with his vocals, is Jeff Buckley. HE'S is well served by a team of local aces: Harrity, of course, who does a lot of the heavy lifting on guitar; Nelson on cello and backing vocals, Kris Day on upright bass, Dave Talmage on fiddle and Chris Elliott on flugelhorn. He doesn't like to to use the word "folk" to describe his work — the word having, for many, precious, eggshell walking associations. He prefers "melodic rock" as a tag. The disc, however you slice it, will be familiar territory for the songwriter and his Seacoast fans, which, of course, is a good thing.
—JC Lockwood
