Beacon’s ‘Mr. Blues’ organizes a rotation
Denning’s Point Distillery in Beacon is an under-the-radar musical hotspot.
On any given weekend, bartender Alana McGovern might stream classic soul, classic country or a mix of songs by obscure bands from the 1980s, including the long-defunct L.A. punk-roots group The Gun Club.
On occasion, live tunes fill the space. After owner Susan Johnson anointed the Black Coffee Blues Band as the house rockers last month, Second Saturday gained a regular sonic component. The group will next perform at 7 p.m. on Saturday (June 8).
Dimitri Archip, known around Beacon as “Mr. Blues,” organizes ensembles from a rotating group of musicians with known entities on their resumes. Some are locals and others come up from New York City. The only constant is Archip.
Ian Hatton, who lives in Glenham and played guitar with the hair metal band Bonham, led by Jason Bonham, son of Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, often sits in. Hatton also accompanied Robert Plant in The Honeydrippers, which dipped into the blues canon.
Other pros might include keyboardist David Bennett Cohen, a founding member of Country Joe and the Fish, which performed at Woodstock; guitarist Arthur Neilson, who is touring with Shemekia Copeland; or Steve Holley, a drummer for Paul McCartney and Wings.
Archip, a Brooklyn native who left a white-collar job to pursue acting and singing, says he’s absorbed a variety of musical styles in his lifetime, including jazz, classical and Romanian folk music.
Playing with bar bands, he gravitated toward stripped-down Mississippi Delta and plugged-in Chicago blues standards as interpreted by 1960s and ’70s classic rock bands.
“I’m a late starter with the blues,” says Archip, who moved to Beacon in 2015. “But I was comfortable singing Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers, so that was my entrée.” He learned guitar to “communicate with my fellow musicians, but I have no goal of becoming a virtuoso.”
Hatton says he grew up with the blues before turning to rock. “Dimitri gets good players who love and know the music — that’s the key,” he says. “Some people think, ‘Oh, it’s the same three chords and 12 bars,’ but it’s about the feeling and what you do with them.”
Archip fell in with blues guitar star Popa Chubby, who turned relentless gigging at long-gone club Manny’s Car Wash on the Upper East Side into a touring career. The band’s name is the title of a 2002 Popa Chubby album on which Archip appeared.
When Chubby isn’t touring, he sometimes sits in with the Black Coffee collaborative, a name that fits the pick-up band’s caffeinated, late-night lifestyle and fervid approach to the music.
In 2012, a reporter for The New York Times followed Archip around Brooklyn with a video camera to display a typical day in the life, where he does laundry, eats a meal in a restaurant and drives around town at night, like Robert DeNiro in the film Taxi Driver.
The final cut is a beer being placed on the bar after his group played the old chestnut “Kansas City” (covered by the Beatles) at a dive without a stage.
Also no-frills, the Denning’s Point headquarters presents a challenge for electrified bands because the interior is all hard edges. Yet the sound warms up when the fermenting tanks are full, says Johnson, and Archip knows how to dial in the right mix.
Now a decade old, the distillery has hosted music from its early days, when The Costellos packed the room. After instituting a blues jam a few years ago that fizzled, Johnson let Mr. Blues do his thing.
Though the tunes bang during the bar’s open hours and Johnson plans to expand the entertainment offerings, there is a caveat: “I don’t see weekly live music any time soon,” she says. “We plan to host boozy bingo, literary events and a storytelling confessional but, really, we’re a manufacturing facility.”
Denning’s Point Distillery is located at 10 N. Chestnut St. in Beacon.
