Hamden’s New Open Mic

Performers and audience members arrived at Cantean on Whitney Avenue in Hamden en masse Tuesday evening before the posted start time of 6 p.m., quickly filling the space and the open mic’s sign-up sheet. Each performer had enough time for two songs. Host Steve Rodgers announced that he had ​“two and a half rules.” First, the songs all had to be originals. Second, audience members had to keep quiet for the performances. And third (Rodgers was joking about the ​“half”), everyone should remember to support Cantean by buying food and beverages.

“Any more rules?” someone in the audience said.

“Play good music!” someone else said, to laughter.

Tuesday marked the first installment of a monthly first-Tuesday open mic at the Hamden coffee shop, which will happen again March 5. ​“These guys called me up,” Steve Rodgers said of Sarah Gardner Borden, owner of Cantean, with the idea of starting an open mic. This was because of both a long friendship with Rodgers and Rodgers’s long history of running open mic nights in the New Haven area.

Rodgers has been friends with Borden and her partner Tim Parrish for years, since Rodgers ran the Outer Space. ​“When everything went south at the Outer Space, he saved the sign for me, so I still have it,” Shortly after opening, Cantean featured some of Rodgers’s fairy houses in its shop window. 

Meanwhile, Rodgers’s experience with open mics dates back to the 1990s. He and brother Jon Rodgers cut their teeth as musicians in their early teens playing open mics. From 1999 to 2003, Rodgers ran Under the Bridge, an open mic series that had the likes of Darian Cunning and Lys Guillorn playing at it. Then ​“the landlord caught wind of it and I got this love-letter eviction notice,” Rodgers said. He was living in the same spot where he was holding the open mic, and went across the street to the industrial park on Mather Street. ​“There was a for-rent sign on the Space,” he said. ​“It was on a Friday and I had the Space by Monday.” 

“There would be no Outer Space without the Space,” Rodgers said, and ​“no Space without the Under The Bridge open mic.” 

The last open mic Rodgers ran before Tuesday was at the State House, on State Street; it had its last installment in Feb. 2020 and was shut down by the pandemic. ​“I felt a little isolated in the last couple years,” he said. He started a recording studio, Tiny Bunker, and started lining up clients. People started telling him he should run an open mic again. 

When Borden called, Rodgers quickly saw the appeal. ​“For me, it’s community and bringing people together,” he said. ​“I think people have a lot to say.” Open mics give relatively inexperienced musicians a chance to hone their craft, and seasoned performers a chance to stay sharp and try new material. ​“That’s my whole jam,” Rodgers said. It hearkened back to his teenage years.

“When we were just getting started, we would play the open mic at the Moon,” Rodgers said of himself and his brother. ​“I met everybody I know now there.”

It seemed clear from Cantean’s first open mic that the desire for a stage like that, from new and seasoned performers alike, has not diminished. Tom, first up, warmed up the mic with a couple blues songs. Guitarist John Thomas followed with an instrumental he called ​“East Coast Warm-Up Blues,” which found him working right and left hands to produce a rolling rhythm and delicate melodies. He then played a ​“sad instrumental” that he wrote the night of the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown in 2012. With its frantic melody and bursts of sound, the piece captured the shock, anger, and despair that so many felt that night.

Mark Pollard announced that ​“most of my original songs, I play on the piano and sing, but I don’t have a piano, so here we go. Nice to have a full crowd.” Pollard proved a solid, energetic guitarist who wrote songs suffused with a wry earnestness. He told the audience that he was 72, and that one of the songs he’d played, he’d written at the age of 22, when he was visiting his mother, who was sick in bed.

“What are you doing,” he recalled his mother asking him as he played guitar in her room.

“I’m writing a song,” he replied.

“Well go in the other room,” he recounted his mother saying. The audience laughed.

Terri LaChance, who is herself an open mic host, offered songs brimming with hope. ​“Not sure why some people say one person can’t change the world,” she sang. ​“It’s happened time and time again.” She continued: ​“One person changed the buses. One person walked on the moon. One person made your house a home. One person dried your tears. One person calmed your fears. One person believed in what you do. Be that person for one person. The world will change for you.”

The relentlessly gigging Shelton-based singer-songwriter Shawn Taylor played two songs with guitarist Christ D’Amato that highlighted his warmth, grit, and playfulness on stage. His first song deftly changed meter and tempo to accentuate the lyrics, about the necessity and difficulty of personal connection, and keep the textures between the instruments changing. He then switched to ukulele for a song that drove on an easy lope that was hard to sit still to. Lisa Roberts followed with two songs she sang in a clear voice, delivering their direct lyrics. ​“I had my midlife crisis a decade ago, so what this is I don’t really know,” she said. ​“I’ve got to figure it out someday.”

New Haven-area stalwart Anne Marie Menta mentioned how nice it was to have an open mic within walking distance of her house again. She used the open mic to try out some new material, including a song that she said wasn’t recorded yet ​“but maybe will be someday.” She sang and played with the ease of a seasoned songwriter and performer, with curlicues of texture and ornament in her singing and playing that lent richness to her catchy melodies and chord structures. Rodgers himself took the stage for a song he said he wrote after visiting his mother and going to a church service where the pastor preached on the topic of raccoon hunting for 45 minutes. 

Brad remarked that ​“this place reminds me of the places I used to play in the ​’60s in the Midwest.” He began with a blues song, then said that he spent 20 years as a teacher and librarian at a school in Middletown ​“so exclusive that the only way to go was to be sent there by a judge.” His next song, about one of the people he met while working at the school, was a sudden plunge into a rich biography of a difficult life, starting with the suicide of a parent, proceeding through running away from home and afoul of the law. It made the members of the audience collectively catch their breath.

Stephen performed two songs, the first of which he said was ​“a little bit emotional” (“Emo!” someone in the audience said) and the second of which he said was ​“more uplifting.” Both were marked by intricate guitar work. Adam Christoferson of Musical Intervention sang two songs that immediately endeared him to the crowd — his second song in particular, about his grandmother, which had the increasingly funny and touching chorus ​“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition / oy vey, what are you, stoned? / Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition / Grandma had her way to get along.”

Leah explained that ​“you guys are my idols tonight,” referring to her fellow performers. She said she hadn’t written new songs or performed in years, but delivered her message with grace and aplomb.

Aidan, a neighborhood resident, talked about his love of walking around it and hearing drums and distorted guitars coming from the houses around him. He then launched into a hilarious song about an obsessive boyfriend who takes things way too far, ending with sneaking into his ex’s house, dressing in her prom dress and wearing her lipstick, only to be found and chased out of the house by an irate father.

“That was my Valentine’s Day song,” he said to peals of laughter. Doing a 180-degree turn in tone, he then sang about a lost friend, the touches of humor played for poignancy instead of laughs.

Sarah Dunn sang a sweet, sad song that she then followed up with a rager. ​“Let’s be angry for a minute,” she said, explaining that she’d been texting with a friend earlier that day. ​“I’m angry,” the friend had said. ​“Me too,” Dunn had responded. ​“Let’s do this.” The songs received rich rounds of applause. Buzz Gordo, a.k.a. Gary Mezzi, closed out the night with a song mocking older men who let the internet rot their brains, and then a triumphant song about boxer Joe Fraser that, Gordo explained, led to a phone conversation with Fraser years ago, after Fraser heard and liked the song.

Mezzi described himself as having little idea what to ask Fraser in response, and settled on the obvious.

“How’s the left hook?” he asked the by-then-retired boxer.

“You can’t kill it,” Fraser replied. The same, it seems, is true of the open mic scene, in the desire for people to perform, and the need for others to hear what the musicians in their community have to say.