Tuned In

Thanks to an email that alerted me to the broadcast, I had a chance to watch a replay of Gordy Quist '02 and The Band of Heathens on Austin City Limits last night and noticed something I missed the first time around. Turns out the former linebacker wasn't the only alum of the Dartmouth football program on stage performing in the second half of a show that opened with Elvis Costello. The credits revealed that that onetime corner Trevor Nealon '02 was sitting in on keyboards with TBoH.

Quist and the Heathens, by the way, will be in New England this week with shows at Higher Ground in South Burlington, Vt., Thursday and The Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass., on Friday. I'm hoping to head down for the Friday show with Mrs. BGA.

Here's a pretty impressive blurb about Quist's band from the Iron Horse site:

Austin's Band of Heathens is constantly being compared to The Band because of the musical finesse that overlays their timeless, rootsy core. And the three founding members are all skilled multi-instrumentalists who can play almost any position in the field. But TBoH has reached so many fans so fast because of the echoes of and subtle homage to so many different artists at the core of the Americana canon, including Tom Petty, Tony Joe White, the Grateful Dead, Leon Russell, George Harrison, and other rarified stylists. You can hear a little of all that at a Heathens show or on disc, and Top Hat Crown & the Clapmaster’s Son, thier latest, feels like the most coherent and mature encapsulation of those elements so far.

Find The Band of Heathens' website here and Trevor Nealon's site here.

Here are the musicians' bios from their senior-year press guide:


By the way, Quist and Nealon were joined on the Dartmouth football team and in the Lucky Southern band by receiver Damien Roomets. Here's a picture of Gordy and Damien performing together during a radio show down in Texas.

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He's a track athlete not a football player but incoming freshman Grant Sparling is pretty accomplished at a young age. In fact, he's a winner of a Top 20 Under 20 award "to celebrate and honour Canadians who have demonstrated a significant level innovation, leadership and achievement but have not yet reached the age of 20." And what did he do to earn that award? From the release:

Grant and his team, Medicine for a Better Tomorrow, created Formulation V720, a revolutionary accomplishment: the world’s very first, and only, flu vaccine in pill form.

Read more here. (And thanks for the link ;-)

William Kamkwamba '14 got a mention in this electronic neighborhood last year after the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind came out documenting how he built a windmill that brought electricity to his village of Masitala, Malawi. Now there's a copy of the book on an end table in our family room because it's the summer reading book for all students at Hanover High School.

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It's back out to Hanover Country Club today to wind up my coverage of the Tommy Keane Invitational golf tournament. I'll be following the championship match on a glorious summer afternoon in the Upper Valley.