I’ve known Chris Ohlman for more than 40 years, but unfortunately have only seen her perform a handful of times. And some of those were when we were on the same bill in different groups at charity events.
I caught The Beehive Queen and her remarkable band Rebel Montez Saturday night at Cafe Nine, a tiny club that might hold 200, in New Haven, Connecticut. Chris showed why she is one of the state’s legendary R&B/soul singers as I watched her play the first of two 90-minute sets that included original tunes from each of her five albums and a number of meticulously chosen covers that not only put her vast talents on full display but also carried a sense of blues and soul history.
One of the first groups Chris sang with in the late ’60s was called Fancy, which included her brother Vic Steffens and was based out of Wallingford, CT at Syncron Studios, later Trod Nossel, managed by Doc Cavalier. In the ’70s, she fronted the ultra popular and ultra hot regional act The Scratch Band, which also featured G.E. Smith, later a leader of the Saturday Night Live Band, and bassist Paul Ossola, also with SNL. Chris as well has been a singer with the SNL Band since the early ’90s. Continue reading The Beehive Queen
The place was called The Stone Balloon and was fashioned directly after the Cafe Au Go Go in New York. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Tables and chairs took up most of the audience area in front of a small stage on the right-hand side wall toward the front half of the room. Unlike the Au Go Go it was brightly lit between sets. The Au Go Go was always like a cave.
My main interest was not in the Director’s Cut, which I had bought back in the early ’90s, but in the Extras disc, Woodstock: Untold Stories. It includes about three hours of material with nearly 150 minutes of previously unreleased performances, the rest consisting of documentary video segments.
For the uninitiated, Rockpalast is a long-running German TV show that started in the early 1970s and broadcasts live concerts. Many performances from those shows by scores of artists have been officially released or generally available over the years.
The only question left is whether Michael Lang, who produced the original festival, will stage anniversary events in August. There were reports earlier this year about free 
Not electrifying in a showy, glitzy, glamorous sense, but in a musical sense. The two giants whose careers started in the 1960s and have paralleled each other, intersecting once for an extended period in 1969, show they are still fully capable of producing inspring and creative performances on their own material and covers of some of their contemporaries.
It’s a pleasure to note that the film makers of Jeff Beck Performing This Week … Live At Ronnie Scott’s got it right. So right it’s one of the best concert films in recent memory. The last with this type of professionalism and dedication to the music and musicians was another Cream gig, the reunion concert from 2005, also at RAH. But the Beck show is better.