No more staying out late for me
No more narrow escapes for me
I've reached the, I've reached the turning point in my life
— from Turning Point, by Tyrone Davis
About 20 minutes shy of showtime, Dr. Burma bass player Casey Dennis helped keyboardist Doug Southworth hang a bulky speaker from one of the rafters at Skunk Hollow Tavern, already swarming with customers on a frigid Friday night in mid-November.
"How long have we been doing this?" Dennis asked Southworth.
More than 20 years with Dr. Burma, in the cases of Dennis and Southworth.
More than 24, in the case of drummer Marcus Copening.
More than 25, with one brief hiatus, in the case of lead singer Linda Boudreault.
Nigh onto 27, in the case of guitarist, singer and bandleader Ted Mortimer, who joined/adopted/adapted/re-formed the blues band Nestor Burma — named by one of its Dartmouth-student founders for a detective in the Tintin series of French graphic novels — not long after moving to the Upper Valley from Los Angeles.
Now Mortimer was saying hello to the crowd at the Hartland Four Corners nightspot.
And goodbye.
"We're Dr. Burma — delighted to be here, at the center of the known universe," Mortimer told the crowd. "This is our last official gig at the Skunk, so we're going to celebrate."
Their farewell tour next pulled into Salt hill Pub in Lebanon on Dec. 13, and on New Year's Eve they'll celebrate once more as a quintet, with a horn section joining them for a grand finale, at Freight House Hall, the White River Junction venue formerly known as Tupelo Music Hall.
And fans and club owners around the Upper Valley will wish them well, while lamenting the end of an era in live music in these parts.
"I'm going to miss them in my rotation," Skunk Hollow co-owner Carlos Ocasio, front man for the band Frydaddy, said a couple of weeks after Dr. Burma's final fling at the venue. "They're a huge part of the music community. … They've never had a problem putting bodies in the room."
Among the many bodies dancing in close quarters through much of Dr. Burma's last waltz at the Skunk — to songs ranging from One Last Chance, off Dr. Burma's 2008 CD, One Bite Won't Kill You, through Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and Marvin Gaye's What's Goin' On? — Woodstock resident Bill Blaiklock tried to move in the moment, rather than reflect on the coming reality.
"They have played at such a high standard for such a long time, it is strange to think about them breaking up," Blaiklock, manager of Mascoma Saving Bank's Lebanon branch, said a couple of weeks later. "You could feel the emotion in the building between the fans and the members of the band, after playing there for so many years.
"What I noticed over the years was how much fun they always seemed to have playing together. They are all great musicians, and they interact with and seem to enjoy the crowd as much as any band I have seen."
Just ask Boudreault, after she gives those high-mileage RB vocal chords a rest.
"You give out to the audience, and then they give back," she said in early December. "You get that circle going, there's nothing like it."
That feedback, along with the chemistry among the band members, makes it "hard to give it up," Mortimer admitted recently.
"We're super comfortable with each other," the leader of the band continued. "It's so successful for us. We don't get stage fright.
"We're lucky, and grateful for it."
So why stop now?
"We do it because we love it," said Mortimer, who will continue to perform solo, and with Dennis in the Americana ensemble Stone Cold Roosters. "The music really means a lot to us. At the same time, Dr. Burma is a lot of work. It's a popular band, and we like to give it our all.
"Every time we play, it's like going 10 rounds with Sonny Liston."
Which was fine when everyone was in his or her 20s and 30s …
"The equipment keeps getting heavier and heavier," Southworth said in early December. "And there has been a lot of sacrifice of family time in order to be available for gigs."
Never mind their day jobs: Dennis is a financial adviser who also writes mystery novels for e-books. Mortimer is chief financial officer of the River Valley Club. Southworth is a psychiatrist with Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Boudreault teaches yoga. Copening is a nurse.
"It's not like your typical, drug-and-alcohol scene, where everybody's trashed and hating each other after too long together," Copening said earlier this month. "We always had fun. If it wasn't fun, it wouldn't have lasted this long.
"Our approach is that you always have to play like the cops are going to come to get you, no matter what the gig. Whatever makes people happy, we were able to do it for them."
Hence the demand for Dr. Burma to play family parties and benefit concerts as well as the club gigs.
"We used to do a lot of weddings," said Dennis, who like Mortimer eked out a living playing music in the 1970s, "and it was fun because we had the budget to hire a horn section, plus we would usually open with a jazz set, which was totally different from the kind of music that we'd play in a club.
"The money was good, but weddings were an all-day commitment. You would leave the house at 1 in the afternoon, drive several hours, set up, eat, play for four hours or longer, take down, and get home in the wee hours. It could easily be a 12-hour deal, and as we got older, it got older."
With a 7-year-old daughter, as well as his mystery novel sideline, Dennis started talking with Mortimer last spring about triaging Dr. Burma from his rotation of obligations.
Meanwhile, Boudreault, to whom Mortimer was married in 2001, was talking with more urgency about dialing back on music to devote her energies to her yoga clients.
"We love it, because it's fun," Boudreault said. "It's ridiculous how much fun it is. But it's also a lot of work. It's not like we're high rollers, pampered, getting into our limos for the next gig. We don't have roadies. You've got to take care of yourself and your equipment.
"And the bounce-back time is just not there like it used to be. I need a whole day to recover some times."
And so by summer, Mortimer was alerting club owners and inquiring brides-to-be not to count on booking Dr. Burma in 2015.
"I just felt like, 'It's time,' " Mortimer said. "I didn't want to do a pale imitation. These five people are Dr. Burma.
"I can't replace any of them."
The most notable social event … was without a doubt the fantastic party with Bones Gate during Green Key Weekend. Featuring a great local blues band, Nestor Burma, the party was held on the back lawns of the two houses and was certainly the biggest social draw of the weekend.
— from January 1988 newsletter of Dartmouth's Zeta Psi Fraternity
Mortimer replaced just about everyone during the first several years after he joined then-Dartmouth student and bass player Chip Blough with Nestor Burma in 1987. First, they recruited Eugene Uman to play keyboards.
"One of the places we played in the early days was Joseph's Waterworks (on Route 5 between Norwich and Thetford)," said Uman, now director of the Vermont Jazz Center in Brattleboro. "It was my favorite place to play. We would get mobs there who would dance all night."
Especially once Boudreault came aboard in 1988, with a voice that could cover the bases from Bonnie Raitt to Patti LaBelle, while she wielded a tambourine and dervish-ed around the microphone.
"Linda is an enormously appealing front woman," Mortimer said. "She has a lot of energy onstage. If they're not with you right away, once she takes the mic, everybody in the crowd looks up to see who's singing."
The trick was knowing how and when to deploy each member of the band, to give each her or his time in the spotlight and to make the transitions look and sound seamless.
"There was a show where Eugene was wrapping a solo and Ted turned to Linda to give her her cue, and she nailed it," said Blough, now a carpenter and house renovator in Richmond, Va., where he plays with four bands. "I remember thinking, 'Oh. OK. This is musicianship.' "
Copening ramped up the vibe when Mortimer recruited him to play drums for a performance with blues master B.B. King in Burlington in 1990.
"We did that show with one rehearsal," said Copening, who had followed his Upper Valley-raised wife to the Bradford, Vt., area in 1988 from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "I think we've done maybe six rehearsals in 25 years.
"We're not kids. We could do our homework and show up prepared. Ted could email us and say, 'Listen to this James Brown song,' or 'Listen to this Michael Buble song.' "
Onstage, Southworth realized early on that his bandmates could bring it, too — as a group as well as individually. "Things started happening for me when I got over myself," he said, "and started listening to everybody else."
In those early years, Dr. Burma was emerging and evolving in the midst of a renaissance of live music in the Upper Valley, alongside Sensible Shoes, Spare Parts and the Al Alessi Band, playing such venues as Joseph's, the Four-Legged Duck in South Royalton, and the American Legion Hall and the Vermont Room of the Hotel Coolidge in White River Junction.
"Sunday was our concert night with the likes of Doc Watson, Nanci Griffith, Mose Allison, Livingston Taylor, et al., playing for a full house," Joseph's proprietor Joseph Stallsmith recalled recently. "Friday and Saturday was when the local bands took the stage and the place was alive with local color, good energy, and lots of dancing."
And lots of sweating by members of the band, on hot summer nights.
"After some of the gigs," Uman remembered, "we would go across the road and jump in the (Connecticut) River, go swimming together."
In the water as on stage, Ted Mortimer called the tune. "Some nights the rest of us would be just paddling around, then somebody would look around and say, 'Where's Ted? Where's Ted?' " Boudreault recalled. "It's 1 o'clock in the morning, and you could hear him out there in the river, going PLASH! PLASH! PLASH!"
While on clear nights he could swim forever, Mortimer, a Dartmouth dropout, never imagined Dr. Burma streaming 14 years into the 21st century, even after Dennis and Southworth rounded out the ensemble.
"Most bands last a few months or less, or don't get off the ground," he said. "We were just trying to have a good time, to follow our instincts. We all turned out to be good friends, got along well. … Even now, I don't think the band has ever had a quarrel. We all have the same attitude toward music. We like to be a high-energy band."
High-energy enough, after a quarter of a century, for one young woman to approach Mortimer during a gig at Salt hill Pub and say, "It's great to see guys your age still rockin' out" before adding, "and you're my mom's favorite band, too."
Over the last decade and change, Josh Tuohy of the Salt hill chain of pubs watched the next generation of fans come to the revelation their elder siblings and their parents divined over the last decade.
"I've always been knocked out by just how much talent there is in a relatively small area like the Upper Valley," Tuohy said. "Still, Burma occupies some rare air around here. Dr. B has always been a solid pub draw, and fun to listen to — good mixed crowd, great for people who take their dancing seriously, but also for the guys and gals hanging out at the back of the room. We shared a couple of fantastic New Year's Eves together, to boot."
David Briggs, innkeeper at the Hotel Coolidge, is crossing his fingers to find time to sneak over to the Freight House on the last night of 2014 and catch one last glimpse of the band that played so many New Year's Eves at his establishment.
"And I really hope they might come back once in a while," Briggs added.
While he won't rule out "some reunion gigs in a year or two," Mortimer insists he's saving his energies for the last one.
"I want to go out with a big bang," Mortimer said, "not a whimper."
Editor's note: At press time, a few tickets remained for Dr. Burma's farewell performance at Freight House Hall on New Year's Eve. For more information, visit freighthousehall.com. David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.
http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/dr-burma-one-last-chance-2/
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