If you’ve spent any time in the Provincetown arts circuit, you probably know that Billy Hough’s punk-cabaret shows are the place to be. “There used to be a joke that if there was a celebrity in town, you’d find them at my shows,” he said this week. “But it’s really more about people hearing of it and saying, ‘That sounds weird, I think I’ll go.’ ”
Hough has performed in a few guises, doing punk rock with the Garage Dogs and some theater in New York. But his regular P’town gig is “Scream Along With Billy,” which he and musical partner Susan Goldberg do at the Grotta Bar on Commercial Street. Each night is dedicated to a particular album or theme, and the audience is expected to participate. They’ll bring a version of this to the EventThem space at 344 Salem St. in Medford, on Saturday night.
Rather than a particular album, this show will be devoted to the New York punk hotspot CBGB (which Hough himself played in the ‘90s). Along with Goldberg and the Garage Dogs, local guitar ace Anthony Kaczynski (of the Magnetic Fields and Fireking) will be in the band. Expect to hear a few handfuls of your favorite punk oldies.
“We’ll be doing Blondie, Patti Smith, and some Talking Heads from the later part of their career — We try to keep it chronologically legitimate, but of course nobody cares,” he says. “Look at what a time that was: New York was a mess, everybody was broke, and these bands were all stuck in crummy houses on the Bowery. And yet we still listen to those records. You pop on ‘Horses’ (by Patti Smith) and you don’t want to listen to anything else ever again.”
Hough admits that his show falls into a grey area. “We’re part of a cabaret scene because the show is dirty and kind of messy. I think of myself as a punk at heart, but one who’s open to Joni Mitchell from time to time. And of course I can’t keep my mouth shut, so everybody gets a crash course in whatever we’re doing that night. I don’t think I’m doing an interpretation, though, because the songs are already fine. When I do Joni, I think I sound just like Joni. Which I don’t.”
Among those who’ve caught Hough’s Provincetown shows are local icon John Waters — who became a friend and even officiated his wedding — along with Patti Smith and the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano (who joined the band for a time, on the stipulation that Hough would sing all the Femmes songs). “People think that you’d want to have Patti in the audience when you’re planning to sing Patti, but I’ll tell you it’s really pretty scary,” he says.
One memorable night was when he did a “Kurt & Courtney” show, and was informed at the start that Courtney Love was present. “We called the night ‘Kurt & Courtney’s Double Fantasy,’ alternating their songs like John & Yoko did. So I sat down at the piano and said ‘Here’s a Courtney Love song…’ and someone in the audience yells out, ‘…Which Kurt wrote!’ So I’m thinking, oh no, not that again (referring to a rumor that Cobain secretly wrote Love’s material). So I just said, ‘That riff is so good that if Kurt wrote it, he would have kept it for himself.’ After that she followed me on Instagram for a month and a week.”
