Madcap Mondays Celebrates Its 2Nd Anniversary at Firehouse 13
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Madcap Mondays Celebrates Its 2nd Anniversary At Firehouse 13 PHOTO CREDIT: BIG Productions Since its beginnings at The Spot Underground during the summer of 2014, Madcap Mondays has become one of the best ways Providence live music lovers can start their week. It isn’t your average open mic, it’s more of a burgeoning artistic community where you can let your freak flag fly. Leaning more towards the variety show realm, host Nate Cozzolino and his fellow Madcappers express themselves musically while also welcoming people to create art. Through the use of hilarious memes and constant promotion, Madcap has also become a bit of a local internet sensation as well. On Monday June 13, Madcap will be ringing in 2 years of lovable madness at Firehouse 13 on 41 Central Street in The Creative Capital. Winner of Motif Magazine’s 2016 Best Singer/Songwriter Award, Cozzolino has always been somewhat of a troubadour. He’s spent time in Boston, Japan and even in the bayside town of East Greenwich, RI before staking his claim in Providence. Recently we had a chat about the origins of Madcap, the differences between playing in Japan versus playing Providence, doing both visual art and music, the Providence music scene and what the future holds for Madcap. Rob Duguay: Tell me about the origins of Madcap. You came up with the idea for it, what helped you get this community together behind it and what started the name? Nate Cozzolino: When I first came to The Spot in 2012, I’d just came to Providence from Japan after what happened in Fukushima and a friend of mine said “Hey man, you gotta check this bar out in Providence.” So we go to The Spot and immediately I was blown away by the energy. It was kind of what I thought San Francisco was going to be when I went there for the first time, this sort of hippie paradise where everyone was cool. When I finally went to San Francisco and went down to Haight- Ashbury I was super disappointed. It was a bunch of head shops and crack whores, I was really naïve of course but there was none of that mythical love & peace happiness, good times, music and rock and roll. I just kind of let that dream die until I came to The Spot. Hippie is a much maligned word, it can mean a lot of different things, but it was that general festival atmosphere where until you’re proven that someone is a dick you be nice to them. There’s also that openness, I remember the first night I came to The Spot and I was feeling overwhelmed by how cool everyone was and I was feeling out of place. Before I left there was a bunch of people smiling, laughing and having a good time. This big guy with wild hair all of a sudden goes to me saying “Hey you! Come over here!”, so I go over there and he was like “Smoke this.” and it was Kris Hansen. He was my welcoming committee and we always joke about it to this day that he was my first real impression of The Spot and that kind of community. The Spot then moved from Elbow Street to Richmond Street and I started hanging there more and more. I found the same kind of atmosphere, this open and gregarious place where when I felt I was people stupid or awkward people thought I was being funny and original. All my negative traits seemed like positive traits in that open atmosphere. I started hanging out and playing at Creation Tuesdays, going to Hansen’s Dropout Night on Mondays and I became a total devotee of the place. I started living there almost, I started helping out and taking out trash and doing anything to get there and be there. There became a time around May of 2014 when Hansen and Jon Tierney had been doing Dropout Night for a long time and they were looking to do other things. I was hanging out and they suggested to management that I take over Monday nights and everyone was really cool with the idea. Next thing you know it was June 2014 and I’d been doing a bunch of reading about Syd Barrett. I grew up on Pink Floyd, my father is from Pompeii in Italy and Pink Floyd is huge everywhere in the world. Especially huge in Europe and within Europe one of the biggest followings they have is in Pompeii because of the album Pink Floyd: Live In Pompeii. RD: One of the landmark live albums in rock history. NC: Exactly. So I grew up on that, it was huge for me. It was around that time in 2014 when I was kind of reading up and refreshing my Pink Floyd bibliography by reading about Syd Barrett. His first solo album was The Madcap Laughs and it was in my consciousness. So when The Spot came to me about doing a Monday open mic and it just came into my head as Madcap Monday. That’s how the name came about and it just started out with me, Amanda Salemi behind the bar, Mike Baker in the kitchen, Nic “Supe” Hallenbeck on sound, Caleb Ezra Poirier was a fresh new face, Tim Batty was the shy artist in the corner and the six of us bonded over the creative process. That’s how Madcap started. RD: It’s crazy with how much it’s grown and how many different types of people you get collaborating. Either with making art live on the scene, making music and people collaborating with each other. I’ve done it a few times, it’s fun. As you mentioned before, you were in Japan for a while. NC: I also was born in Kentucky and I grew up in Boston. I attended the Rhode Island School Of Design when I was in high school, I did two summer programs at RISD and that was my form of art education. Later I went to the Art Institute in Boston and that was less intensive by far compared to those two summer programs at RISD. RISD was kind of where I blossomed as an artist in Providence originally. Coming back to the city after 20 years was really interesting, having given up visual art mostly and the getting back into it. RD: What would you say about playing in Japan related to playing around Providence? It must be really different. Do regular people in Japan approach music differently? Are they the types of people that’ll just chill out at the bar and watch you or they don’t pay as much attention as people in Providence do? NC: When I first started out it was kind of a dream come true because I went to Japan when I was 18 for the first time. I was excited to drink, technically illegally because they don’t enforce that stuff, in a karaoke bar and people would say “Mr. American, sing a song!” and when you’re the cultural ambassador you gotta sing. I remember singing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” and I thought I couldn’t sing at all. I was right, I couldn’t sing at all but they were all really nice and applauding. They were very polite and they lie their asses off but they just reacted so well. Until then I’d been a reclusive visual artist who sat in the corner drawing and they made me think I could sing. In the beginning it was very much kind of like my version of what Hamburg was for The Beatles. An ideal situation to incubate what you have going on and get the support you needed. By the time Fukushima hit I’d been 10 years deep and when I’d go out and play people would pay attention because I was the foreigner playing guitar. Half the compliments I would get would be “Ahhh!! That was so great!! Your pronunciation is amazing!!”. They didn’t realize it but it’s the most deflating compliment you can get. Nothing about your voice or the song, just that you’re a cool American dude. I went from really needing that soil to really needing out of that soil creatively. I certainly didn’t want a nuclear disaster to be the impetus for that but life is fucking weird. I came to Rhode Island and my sister was living in East Greenwich. She called me and said “Get out of the Fukushima zone and come here pronto.” I quit all my jobs, left everything behind and I came to East Greenwich. The day after I came I went down to The Greenwich Hotel on Main Street there and they have an open mic. RD: It’s somewhat legendary. NC: It’s a very storied location. RD: Very much so when it comes to local music in Rhode Island. NC: They’ve won a couple open mic awards. RD: You always hear about all sorts of local musicians playing there. Both up and comers and scene veterans like Mark Cutler and a lot of others. NC: Definitely. I watched Mark Cutler all the time back at that place. When I first played there it was this day & night comparison. All of a sudden, people were responding to what I was doing in a way that I’ve never experienced before. People were complimenting the song, the structure and everything else, it wasn’t just that my English is good, they really liked what I was doing.