A musician you may have heard of, who escaped from town and found a modicum of fame as a songwriter and producer in a warmer state, returned under cover of darkness last week. Quickly tiring of family reunions, he ventured downtown in search of a good band. How had the scene been since he graduated?

Our scene is diverse and majestic, but astonishes randomly, not reliably. Its pleasures are surprises more than guarantees. But our tourist happened to arrive on a magical night. Or perhaps you believe that the presence of someone whose interest in local music is genuine and deeply felt—not based on which bar stool he wants to sit in that night, or which musicians he happens to know from work or school—is the spiritual stimulant that makes a scene rise subconsciously to a new level. Or maybe the good fortune is that this interloper stumbled upon the best of all possible tour guides—yours truly.

Our tourist’s trek started badly, he related, but only I gave him vague directions and he stumbled into the wrong bar on Olympus. We take it for granted, but the Bullfinch has only been booking live bands for a few years now, and the only place on the block which our wandering friend remembered having any kind of stage was, of course, Sirens. He soon realized the error of his ways, and I found him happily at the Bullfinch while on my own rounds.

To be continued. He was realllly wandering. This may take a while.

Helluva club night coming this Thursday, never better. Could stray at any one venue and have a blast, but we’re gonna try to hit em all with friends plumbing in updates. Really, that good all over: Dying in the Post-War World and Stolen Away at the Bullfinch, Damned in Paradise and Carnal Hours (who do a killer cover of “Million Dollar Wound”) at Hamilton’s and a true legend, Majic Man, at Dollaire’s, with locals Neon Mirage opening. Our plan is to start at the Bull, then hit the middle of the Hamilton’s bill, then trace our steps back to the Bull. Majic Man is known to start late and play until after closing..,

Mar got the job! She has to get up at 4 a.m. And boil bagels.

[A brand new feature on this blog, since I find myself listening to some new or newish music nearly every day, and miss the days when the newspapers I wrote for would run record reviews by the dozens. A clarification: The Rock Gods serial is fiction, but this section rocks for real.)

Those Darlins, Screws Get Loose (on the Oh Wow Dang label, http://thosedarlins.com)

I downloaded this into my iPod without hearing it first—having, in fact, never heard of this three-fourths female band before, though I now learn they’ve been around four years or so and that this is their second full-length. When the songs started appearing on shuffle, it never occurred to me that this was a contemporary pop/rock band from Nashville. I thought these were loose tracks from one of the many New England indie comps I have from the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s high praise in my book to be mistaken for what I consider the golden age of indie music. The raw vocals, everything-mixed-up-front production and occasional tricky girl-group harmonies are just captivating. “Hives” has everything—a Buzzcocks pace, Merseybeat melodies, vocals that sound straight off old comps like Girls in the Garage, a guitar solo that has to fight through those vocals to break out (and does, for exactly the right amount of time). “Fatty Needs a Fix” is even better, so Britpunk you feel the safety pins and hear the sirens. There’s a goofiness and giddiness on this album that you can’t make up, and which a lot of dumb producers deliberately try to subdue. The twangy accents and heavy strumming proclaim the Nashville roots, but this is universal darlin rock, fitting right in with the coastal extremes of the Runaways and the Shangri-Las.

We went out to eat Saturday night at Bloodroot, the famed feminist vegetarian restaurant in Bridgeport. Everything there is fresh and homey, as if you’ve been invited over to someone’s house so they can cook dinner for you. There’s even a bookshop in one corner of the place, so I could do exactly what else I do when invited to dinner at someone’s home: browse through all their bookcases.

I struck up a conversation with Bloodroot’s co-founder Selma Miriam, who sits behind an antique desk and takes the dinner orders. She recommended the bread, which she bakes herself. I said I bake all our family’s bread. She said she particularly recommended the sourdough potato rye. I said I have a spelt sourdough I developed several years ago. She said she’s used the same sourdough for over 30 years.

Miriam later stopped by our table to pass on some bread baking tips. I bought a copy of The Best of Bloodroot Volume Two, one of two thick cookbooks the place has published. Volume One is subtitled “Vegetarian Recipes.” Volume Two is “Vegan Recipes,” which at Bloodroot includes the breads. It’s not hard to make breads without butter, milk or eggs, but a lot of restaurants lean on those things to add flavor (and fat) or body, so it’s a bold choice to avoid them.

I tried baking the potato sourdough rye myself today. Technically it isn’t sourdough yet. The first time you do it, you need yeast to make it rise, but I’ve already saved back some of the dough to sour for future loaves, which I hope to make weekly like I do my spelt sourdough.

The dough is the very model of what cookbooks call “shaggy dough,” which you shellac with a cornstarch/water paste for a thick crust.

“Potato” really deserves its place in the bread’s name—fix of six mashed potatoes go in, not just potato water. Helps the rise, helps the softness, helps the taste. It’s definitely a powerful rye, but not overpowering. I’ve already had a slice of mine with cheese and another with cashew butter and marmalade

I’m quite pleased with the results, so much so that I took photos.

Blessings on Bloodroot.

Q is back! The mysterious Bullfinch bouncer, barback and band-booker has been spotted several nights in a row back at his old haunt. Ask him where he’s been, and he’ll only say “Carrying the sky.” The word is that he did travel, but that he also went underground for a while. Even while absent from the Bullfinch premises, Q was maintained a presence, booking dozens of shows at the Finch and calling in regularly to check on operations. Considering that he doesn’t own or manage the joint, his diligence is impressive.

Knowing that this guy of impeccable taste and practical get-the-job-done values has been nurturing some songs of his own makes us hopeful that his time away included some writing and recording.

But we’re just making shit up at this point. Welcome home Q!

Upcoming at the Bullfinch: Tense days, Some Optimists, Shadowy Road. Sounds like a biblical parable in the making, and in a sense it is—more of those reborn bands from the famous Shaking Quaker farmstead. The booking has inspired some foul scrawling on the club’s bathroom walls, urging the “cult” to stay home. Honestly, the Bullfinch has withstood harsher proclamations than this. Let’s be civil…

Speaking of graffiti, and of rank-smelling area, how about that glorious block-long tag under the tunnel by the train station? Does it refer to the well-known Deity or to the local band of the same name? We’re told it’s the latter, but will deny it if anyone comes calling with a bucket of whitewash and a brush…

Met another grownup through Jer: char, who owns a bakery. Mar needs a job bad, and asked char for one while they were getting introduced.

Conversations With Scorsese
By Richard Schickel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011; 423 pages)

Well, you can’t catch him out for false advertising—these are indeed conversations between the mainstreamy movie critic and documentarian Richard Schickel and the eminent filmmaker Martin Scorsese—or, as Schickel knows him, Marty.
There’s a casual air to the dozens of themed interviews here that brings a lightness to the often overwrought analysis that’s found in most Scorsese interviews and biographies.
At the same time, there’s such a thing as too loose. Only eight and a half pages on New York, New York, when what does get discussed hints at myriad other fascinating topics regarding what appears to be a major transitional period in Scorsese’s professional career? Only three pages on After Hours, that underrated black comedy with the amazing cast and an interesting back story (it began as a project in one of the film courses Scorsese taught) that is completely ignored here?

There’s a detailed filmography at the end of the book, but such careful scholarship is avoided in the main text. Here’s one of the many exchanges that’s just screaming to be footnoted, part of a rambling story about the financing of The Last Temptation of Christ:

Scorsese: Garth Drabinsky was a very unique character. Do you know him?
Schickel: I never met him, but I heard a lot about him. Didn’t he go to jail?
Scorsese: I think he might have. I don’t know.

Readers should’ve have to resort to Google to find out that Drabinsky was, in fact, convicted for fraud and forgery in Canada in 2009, though the case is on appeal and he has not yet served time. Schickel should have annotated or filled in the gaps in some of the most open-ended anecdotes. Or he should have taken a more professional and research-intensive approach to the interviews, as Mel Gussow did in his extraordinary series of sit-downs with influential playwrights: Conversations With and About Beckett, Conversations With Stoppard, Conversations with Pinter and Conversations With Miller.
Gussow raised the standard for the word “conversation.” Schickel lowers it again. As interesting as it can be to hear Scorsese reminiscing, Schickel’s constant “Oh, I know him too” and “I didn’t like that one so much” interruptions can be pretty irritating, and after a while the reader feels left out of the conversation altogether.

By Artie Capshaw

The Blats plays Hamilton’s last night and did that song again, the one we wrote about with all the “I”s in it. We were there to take scholarly notes. We thought singer Sonny Blitt might have tapped a new existential philosophy.

It came mid-set. We took pen and hidden mic in hand, ready to record any variations on this “I”-opening number.

Then Sonny started singing. “We! We We! We We We! We We We We”

Which, if you parse it, becomes a single-syllable shout of joy, followed by duo-syllabic babytalk for the act of pissing, followed by a phrase commonly attributed to a little pig. Four times is an excitable Frenchman. And so on.

We were appalled, then amused, then appalled again. We suspect Sonny did this to chide us for what we wrote about the song before. We actually did try to talk to him about it this time, but got the brush-off. The whole band split together right after the set, so we remain intrigued and perplexed. We think Sonny’s on to something, but we don’t think he knows what it is.

Nothing at the Bullfinch tonight. Waaaah!… At Hamilton’s Pep Talks, Fan Art and Next Issue (more like reprinted issue—it’s a cover band)… At D’ollaire’s, mercenary “supergroup” On Sale Everywhere with opening thrash duo Would-Be Overlord…

We were wrong about Jer. He’s not a juror. He’s a lawyer. A lawyer who’s down with the kids of today.

[Christopher Arnott continues to espouse the glories of the many 45s he’s kept in the basement all these years.]

The Botswanas, Little Witch b/w Primitive High. Hardwired Archie comics fanatic  that I am, I once accidently mistyped the Botswanas song title “Little Witch” as “Teenage Witch” (as in “Sabrina the…”). Whereupon another New Haven rock band, The Gravel Pit, wrote a song called “Teenage Witch.” My little contribution to local band culture. “Little Witch”—there, I got it right, is a real barnburner of a garage anthem, wrought by the guitarist Price Harrison and featuring vocalist Eileen Ziontz at the height of her miraculous melding with the spirits of Nancy Sinatra and Wendy O. Williams. White vinyl for all the white magic.

The Trashmen, Lucille b/w Green Onions. One of several packagings of previously unreleased tracks by the distillers of “Surfin’ Bird.” Both are dance-at-the-gym standards from The Trashmen’s mid-‘60s heydays, sped up a bit and graced by the band’s patented sandpaper vocals, but otherwise respectful.

Shiv, Lust b/w EMK and Stratego. Three-song EP put out by John Nutcher’s Caffeine Disk label, which really believed in this band. It’s one of those slowburn, thumpy, bass-heavy sounds which eventually morphed into emo but was still considered punk back in 1993, when this came out. Singer/ guitarist Keith Cotlier has recently resurfaced in the somewhat spritelier Forge Records band The Clearer.

Malachi Krunch/Maggot split EP. Each side has its own collective EP-style title. Malachi Krunch’s is called “This Will Be on Your Permanent Record” and contains two tracks, “What Can I Do for You Now?” and “Flinch.” The Maggot NYC side is dubbed “From the Cradle to the Grave” and has three short songs: “Your God,” Death Trip” and “Casualties of War”—which I don’t believe I’ve ever heard. That’s because it’s impossible to get past the fun-loving hardcore-badass MK anthem “What Can I Do for You Now?” Malachi Krunch reunited last year, nearly 20 years after breaking up, to honor the late Wally Gates (who briefly played in one of the last editions of the band) at a memorial show at Café Nine last summer.

The Furors, Electric Guitar and Drums. One of the most brilliant (literally, like colorful) packaging concepts in the history of the Connecticut music scene: Eleven songs spread across two singles. Each side of each single is a bright color—red, blue, green, yellow—unsullied by any text. The music is, in classic Furors fashion, basic and brilliant. For the past 30 years, Derek Holcomb and Tom Dans haven’t wavered from the model set down in the title of this album (unless you count the Huntingtons, but even that isn’t too far afield). It’s astonishing how clearly they’d figured their sound out from the very beginning, and how superbly it still works.

Until I looked at the liner notes just now, I didn’t realize how far back the connection between Rob DeRosa and this mighty duo went. Rob apparently took the cover photo for this “juke box album.”Decades later, DeRosea would release a two-CD Furors tribute album on his Thin Man Music label.

The Furors, Furors for the Live EP. A four-song 45 from 1979 that predates the more elaborate Electric Guitar and Drums (which was an album’s worth of music splayed across two 45s). “Letters” remains one of my fave Furors tracks—it’s simultaneously Buddy Hollyesque, Beatlesque, New Wavesque and completely furious. The other tunes—“I Couldn’t Pretend,” “Her Other Man,” “A Look for the Honey”—are not shabby, but “Letters” is immortal.

The Furors play this Saturday, along with dozens of other Connecticut bands, at the Daffodil Festival in Meriden’s Hubbard Park.