Years ago, when my daughters were still in high school, we discovered a Boston-based band called Hypnotic Clambake. I don’t remember where we first heard them — we used to go to a lot of random concerts, fairs and events back then. But we heard them somewhere, bought a couple of cassettes, and some of their songs became part of the background music of our family life back then. Their music was a witty and lively mix of styles — folk, Zydeco and Klezmer among other things.
The cassettes are long since lost, along with the cassette players, and I haven’t thought of the band in years. But today while browsing around on Flickr, I saw a photograph of a car with a license plate that read ANT. And I thought “Maybe he’s an ANT MAN“, thinking of one of my favorite Hypnotic Clambake songs :
I’m an ant man
I’ll take a stand for the ants
I’m an ant man
I want to see them on the plants
With the song playing in my head, I did a quick online search and was happy to discover a collection of live (and legal!) recordings from Hypnotic Clambake concerts, many from the 1990s and one from a couple of months ago.
Great stuff!
- Hypnotic Clambake — Official website
- Hypnotic Clambake at the Live Music Archive — Recordings in many formats from the Internet Archive
