Blue Ribbons/David Champagne Live at the Lizard Lounge

$15/$20

Doors 7

"The Blue Ribbons’ latest album, 2024’s “Forever, But Not For Long,” has plenty of pop hooks. Or rather, it had plenty of them before the band took sledgehammers and scalpels to most of the pretty bits.

“It took a while to get the bones of some of the tunes down just so we could break them,” bandleader James Rohr told Herald with a laugh.

Local champs the Blue Ribbons are a pop band in the same way that the Beatles or Steely Dan or Television are pop bands in that they like pop but “aren’t too precious about the songs,” Rohr said.

Jed Gottleib - Boston Herald

The Blue Ribbons

A short history of David Champagne. Pre-internet in the band Treat Her Right. 2000s backing up wife in the band The Heygoods. Next decade Agnostic Gospel. Current project Sunset Engine with Elizabeth Steen and Jude Heichelbech. Go to agnostic gospel at band camp to hear music from any of these combos.

After spending time in New York and California, he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where he became a longtime fixture on the local music scene. Around the turn of the 1980s, he was in Shane Champagne, which Trouser Press described as being like Graham Parker's band, the Rumour. This group issued several singles. Alcott was also in Pink Cadillac, "a sharp rockabilly-cum-rock'n'roll trio" that released one EP in 1983.

In Treat Her Right, Champagne's "tremulous slide guitar" provided part of the band's distinctive quality, as Nashville music journalist Robert K. Oermann put it People magazine wrote that Champagne mimicked the moaning vocal-slide guitar interplay that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page did so well in the early days of Led Zeppelin. That article also noted how Champagne and Mark Sandman wrote "bona-fide bad luck songs with a wink."

Dave Champagne

Agnostic Gospel

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