Poughkeepsie Live:
The “Beat Club” of the Hudson Valley
By Peter Aaron

Photo by Margot Lynch. L to R: Doug Nash, Nile Clarke, Raj Sirohi.

“Four minutes, guys.”
Producer Kristine Conte checks the time once again as she darts around Time Warner Cable’s narrow control room. Surrounding her are enough glowing TV monitors to make the sales floor at Best Buy look anemic. Conte clearly knows her way around: Despite the haste, she threads her way quickly and decisively from one end of the tight closet to the other, narrowly missing the backs of a few camera people and producer-director Raj Sirohi, who sits at one of the room’s many blinking terminals. Nobody seems to notice, though. They’re all too focused on the task at hand.

“Two and a half,” Conte announces as she plants herself next to the tall plate-glass window that frames the facility’s performance studio.

Sirohi speaks low and evenly into his headset mic. “Kathy, give me a nice, wide shot of the saxophonist and the keyboardist,” he says. “That’s great, hold on that. Beautiful. Keep that. Perfect.”

Conte checks in again: “One minute, guys.”

In the performance studio, red, yellow, and blue lights illuminate the edges of the set. Host Michael Dell glides in and takes his spot on a tall, white-lit stool in front of one of the cameras. Smiling, he glances back through the glass and into the control room at Conte. “Thirty seconds,” she says.

“Band’s ready?,” Sirohi asks. The five silhouettes in the next room nod nervously. Dell straightens his back, meeting the gaze of the camera that points at him, barely five feet from his face.

“Ohhh…kayyyy…, “ Conte says. “Three, two, one, and… We’re in!”

Bouncy theme music issues from speakers in the adjacent green room.

“Poughkeepsie Live,” Hudson Valley television’s only live weekly music show, is on the air. Originating from Time Warner Cable Channel 6 studios, the half-hour program has been bringing national and local musical talent to the region’s 200,000 subscribers for nearly 20 years. And while Conte, Sirohi, and a few other members of the rest of the show’s 13-strong staff also hold down day gigs with the station’s news broadcast and other programs, no one here tonight is doing this for money. That’s right: “Poughkeepsie Live” is an all-volunteer show.

“We show up because we love the music,” says cameraperson Kathy Grahn. “It really is a privilege to be doing this, working with so many great musicians.” She’s not kidding when she says many. Thickly papering the walls around her are the signed 8x10 glossies of only a fraction of the hundreds of artists who have performed on the show over the years. Most of the faces are less known outside the viewing area, but embedded among them are shots of international stars like Pete Seeger, Burning Spear, John Pizzarelli, Shannon McNally, David “Fathead” Newman, and others.

Tonight’s guests? The Warhol Crowd, the wildly young outfit (oldest member: 19) that formed at the city’s Arlington High School in 2004, and went on to win the Garage Rumble in Woodstock the following year and a coveted slot opening for Phil Lesh, Gov’t Mule, Robert Randolph, and others at this year’s Mountain Jam festival in Hunter. After an introduction by Dell, the guitar-bass-sax-keys-drums quintet knocks out a couple of light, Dave Matthews-esque pop tunes as the control-room monitors offer varying shots of the individual musicians and of the group playing together. And then it’s time for a few words from the local sponsors. While the rest of the band goes for pizza in the green room, singer-guitaristDavid Htoo-Levine stays.

When the cameras come back on, he’s sitting next to Dell for a short interview. They talk about the group’srecent successes and its debut CD, recorded with the studio time that came with the Garage Rumble victory. Htoo-Levine is, not surprisingly, excited about the upcoming Mountain Jam appearance, and Dell picks up on this asking him about the festival headliners
that have influenced The Warhol Crowd.

“We’re really looking forward to it,” Htoo-Levine enthuses. “These are some of the bands that we listened to when we were starting out and now we’re going to be opening for them.”

More commercials follow, and then the band is back for another number. Next, the camera is back. Dell thanks the fivesome for playing and plugs the Mountain Jam gig as the screen fades to a shot of the group’s CD cover. Then it’s one more song, roll credits, and wrap. (A recording of the show will be rebroadcast that night and later in the week.) For all of the intense toil and fuss that its dedicated crew puts forth behind the scenes at “Poughkeepsie Live” every week, the program goes by blindingly fast.

Given the show’s empathy for its guests, it’s not so surprising to learn that several of the staffers are musicians themselves; audio engineer Todd Giudice is an acclaimed singer-songwriter with two CDs under his belt, while Dell fronts the popular cover band 4 Guys in Disguise and leads the Michael Dell Orchestra, a wedding group. But as a unit everyone at “Poughkeepsie Live” makes it all run like a Swiss watch, week after week.

“Raj and I definitely have this yin-and-yang thing in the way we work,” Conte says. “I’ll notice something I think needs correcting, like some camera angle that could be better or something. Then I’ll go to point it out to him and he’ll have already noticed it and be in the process of fixing it. We have that kind of synchronicity.”

Dell seems much at ease in front of the camera, perhaps attributable to his show-business background— besides playing in bands, he books local comedy nights and his father was a professional singer—but maybe also because he spent some time on the other side. “I was a cameraman on the show for four years,” he recalls. “I would fill in when the last host was sick or couldn’t make it, and then I just kind of got thrown into it. And here I am.” So who are his favorite acts to have been on the show? “Wow, that’s tough. There’ve been so many good ones,” he says. “Definitely John Pizarelli. I really loved having him on. I also really dug (ex-Saturday Night Live guitarist) G.E. Smith, (singer-songwriter) Tracy Bonham, and, especially, (adolescent blues phenomenon) Miles Mancuso—that kid is just amazing,” he says.

“Poughkeepsie Live” represents the tail end of a once thriving but now dying piece of American popular culture: that of the live local music television show. In the 1960s and early 1970s, a garage band could put out a 45 and odds were it would actually get played on the local radio station. At the same time, every decent-sized town from Trenton to Topeka to Tacoma had a regular TV show that aped “Shindig!,” “Hullabaloo,” or “American Bandstand” and featured teens dancing and live or lip-synched performances by local bands or touring artists. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, public access programming picked up the slack after the teen-dance shows had died out, but before long MTV and massmedia homogenization slammed the studio doors on most small-town talent.

“We have all kinds of acts on the show,” says Dell. “From singers using backing tracks to old blues players to jazz players, hip hop artists, teenage garage bands, you name it.”

So how is the experience for an artist appearing on “Poughkeepsie Live”? “Awesome,” says The Warhol Crowd’s Htoo-Levine. “We really had a lot of fun doing it.”

“This show is really important to local music,” says Joe Fusca, the band’s drummer. “Unless you’re in some really big-name band, how else are you going to get to play on TV?”

In an age where even well-known artists are being passed over in favor of rigged “reality” shows and ratings-baiting, velvet rope-climbing “American Idol” contestants, “Poughkeepsie Live” gives some muchneeded airtime to actual working musicians, the ones who are out there in the clubs and doing their best without the benefits of corporate sponsorship or an audience with Larry King. Let’s hope it sticks around.