Micah Stone is a rock band from a little town in western Massachusetts. Micah has played all over the country with different bands. Mike Lenfest and Christian Kemper are the muscle in the band bringing Micah’s music to fruition. The two as a rhythm section combine jazz, bluegrass, country and rock to fill Micah’s songs with interesting highs lows and moving beats. An emotional group sound as a whole with influences such as Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam these three have been gaining fans locally and globally two years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ARTICLE IN THE BERKSHIRE EAGLE WROTE.
Figuring I’d peaked irredeemably early, like Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan, and that nothing good could come of trying to outdo my midweek zenith, I left work Friday evening with every intention of hunkering down for the night and watching cable news until my eyeballs bled, like any good political junkie on the eve of a seminal caucus. But when Larry King decided to devote his entire hour to weird Texans talking out of the sides of their mouths about UFO sightings, I shook it off and headed down the hill to the Lion’s Den, beneath the Red Lion Inn, where the unexpected blues-rock of the Micah Stone Trio jarred this columnist out of his two-week spiral of hyperbole and narcissism.
Ducking underground, I pushed past the spring door and into the kerosenic glow of the cavernous pub, warmly lit and well attended, like a walk-in fireplace tailor-made for striking up a conversation with the nearest patron over a heavy beer and the drone of background chatter. I took my seat at the bar, ordered a Barrington I.P.A. and checked out the crowd: mixed by age, comprised mainly of rollicksome 20- and 30-somethings but not short on older faces. My beer arrived, and a few moments later the band — Micah Stone on guitar and lead vocals, Christian Kemper on bass and Mike Lenfest on drums — took the stage to begin its second set.
Like the rest of the audience, I was instantly taken in by the band’s deep sound — rich but appropriately light on distortion, given the cozy subterranean venue — which stood in impressive contrast to its lean economy of personnel and musicianship.
The trio’s major influences include Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens and Pearl Jam, according to Stone, though you hardly need an interview to know that. Their first song was "Radio Nowhere," a Springsteen cover — not their last of the night — and Stone swallowed his lyrics with a throaty, rasping vibrato reminiscent of Eddie Vedder on two packs a day, a characterization to which he half-heartedly objected.
"We’ve been in the studio all day cutting our next album," he demurred. "I’m not usually this raspy."
When Stone followed up "Radio Nowhere" by deadpanning, "That’s a song off our next album," and no one in the audience was attentive enough to call foul, he shot his bandmates a Belushi-esque look of incredulity, eyebrows wagging, and shrugged into the next song, an original called "July 5th."
A full set of originals ensued, most from the band’s last album, "Jane Doe," the blues and bluegrass influences evident in both the instrumentation, at once complex and classical, and the song structures, which relied more on progressive drive than traditional pop reprises.
It soon became clear that I was witnessing a rare phenomenon in a region replete with talented but often derivative musicians: a truly compelling songwriter with a supporting cast that understands and complements his style.
But The Micah Stone Trio’s appeal is certainly not limited to its catalog of original material. After a short break, the band began its final set with a cover of Pink Floyd’s "Another Brick in the Wall," complete with live sound-effects rendered in the requisite sneering English accent.
"We probably play a ratio of about 50/50, covers to originals," Stone told me between sets. "There were a lot of originals in that set. When we play (Club) Helsinki, we do 80 percent originals. It depends on where we’re playing. We come here, and we want to get people into it, we want to get people singing.
"Why not have everyone enjoy the show just as much as we enjoy playing?" he added.
Michael Scott Leonard is a Berkshire Eagle staffer. He can be reached at mleonard@berkshireeagle.com.
