Happy accidents can lead to lasting magic.
That’s what happened in the summer of 2012, when a local venue called The Arts Block in Greenfield, Massachusetts staged an Americana music festival called The Whiskey Treaty.
Four local bands headlined: Greg Smith and The Broken English, Bright Lines, Tory Hanna and the Pondsiders, and Billy Keane and the Misdemeanor Outlaws. But the magic happened when Smith, Hanna, and Keane joined forces on stage, along with fellow local artists Chris Merenda and David Tanklefsky.
Five solo musicians, each with their own bands or careers. They never intended to form a new band together, but they were so caught up by their collaborative chemistry that they knew they couldn’t leave it a one-night stand.
So they didn’t.
Instead, they took the Whiskey Treaty Festival on the road across Massachusetts on a four-night mini-tour they called The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow. And that might have been it for the quintet, had a filmmaker friend of Hanna named Tim Bradley not captured the experience in a documentary film called The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow that went on to captivate audiences and win national film festival awards in 2015.
Lots of documentaries have captured the final days of a band. Not many capture the very first.
Over the last nine years, The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow (now a band named after a film named after a festival) has delighted audiences across the country with their original material and inventive covers.
In January 2020, weeks before the pandemic shut down the world, The Treaty released their debut studio album, Band Together, featuring The Black Crowes’s Steve Dorman on drums and Wilco’s Pat Sansone on bass. The album’s debut single, “Don’t Cross My Land,” made Rolling Stone’s “Ten Best Country and Americana Songs to Hear Right Now” that month.
And then the world stopped.
But the Treaty kept going. As 2020 gave way to 2021, the band live-streamed a benefit concert for the Berkshire Community Action Council that replaced income lost by local service industry professionals during the pandemic. The event’s theme was Recovered, and the set featured a collection of well-known rock classics from “The Sound of Silence” to “Keep the Car Running,” recast in the band’s own style, streamed live with wonderful production values.
One of the songs on the set list that night was a beautiful banjo-inflected cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising.” In an affecting performance, each of the five singers gets a turn in the spotlight, and each makes the most of it while the others harmonize as the song builds towards its climax.
Unlike Bruce’s original, The Treaty’s version of “The Rising” is more reflective than defiant, with veins of loss and resilience running through it to powerful effect. This is a cover you feel.
The entire show was recorded and released as an album this past Friday. Check out Recovered on your favorite streaming service (or if you have Spotify, take a listen to it below.)
The concert film was also posted to the band’s YouTube channel on Thanksgiving. It features their cover of “The Rising” plus so much more.
The entire show is well worth watching, and if you enjoy it, you can check out more of The Treaty’s music here. Let’s hope these guys get back out on the road soon (or else I might have to make a trip out to Massachusetts).
