Dec. 20: Rigometrics look to pack out The Press Room with some high-energy rock

With some bands, it can take a while to have a substantial presence in both your local scene and in other cities and towns. The best way to speed up this process is not being afraid to go out on the road while playing a hometown gig on a regular basis, but not too much where your fan base is watered down.

Rock trio Rigometrics of Portland, Maine, have been working on this in a variety of ways since pianist and vocalist Keenan Hendricks, guitarist Joey Berger and drummer Derek Haney came together back in 2021.

On December 20, folks around Portsmouth can go see these guys kick off the weekend before Christmas at The Press Room. The show starts at 8 p.m. and the bill will be split with local indie rockers The Rock Dwellers rounding it out.

Hendricks and I recently had a talk about the unique way Rigometrics began, a new EP they have out, his approach to singing and having a good feeling about the upcoming performance.

The Press Room, 77 Daniel Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801 ·

Tickets

Rob Duguay: How did you guys start out in Portland? Did you all go to school there or did you all meet up there after being in different bands?

Keenan Hendricks: I’m from Rockland, Maine, which is about an hour and a half away from Portland. Joey, who plays guitar, is also from Rockland, so he and I grew up together, and Derek, who plays drums, we met in Portland. We went to college together for five years, we played basketball together for a few of those years and Joey was playing football at the University of New England. Our last three semesters were during COVID, and it was an interesting time to be in school. We were all moving on from being so devoted to athletics, so it was kind of like a thing where we were asking ourselves,”Well, what do we do now?”.

I had been playing piano for a while on my own and I had a little bit of musical history in my family while growing up, but I didn’t really take it that seriously. I just did it as a hobby, but that last semester of school, all three of us were no longer involved in athletics and Derek kind of had some history on the drums and Joey started getting obsessed with the guitar when COVID first hit in March of 2020. He had a lot of time to himself, so he dove deep into it because he had nothing else to do. With no intention, we all just started jammin’ out for fun during our last semester of college, which was still pretty weird even though we weren’t in quarantine. Then during that first summer when the restrictions started getting released, we had a bunch of original material, which at the time sounded like crap but we thought was really cool, and we put on a graduation party in our backyard where we played our first gig.

That was during the summer of 2021, and it was our first gig ever, even individually. We’d never been part of a band, we’d never been part of anything like this and this was all of our first project. We had no intention of it being as serious as it is now, but during that first summer we hit the bar scene around Portland as much as we could and things started getting a little more serious as we started getting bigger gigs. We bought a school bus from a school district in Southern Maine for $600 because it was at an auction, so we decided to bid on it. Once we converted that, we decided to hit the road not too much longer afterwards while not knowing what the road meant or what it actually meant to tour. We all had jobs at school and we all just wanted to keep getting better, so it naturally started becoming more serious.

Ever since we got that bus about two and a half years ago, we all just wanted to go for it. We initially didn’t think that it was going to be anything close to what it currently is, but with this upcoming show at The Press Room, we will have had 113 gigs. We’ve traveled all over the country, especially in the South, the East Coast and the Northeast, and we’re grateful for what we have going on in Maine and slowly in other areas of New England. It’s a really weird and hard thing to navigate, but as of right now, we’ve done everything all on our own.

RD: How long did it take to fit out the bus to use it for touring, playing shows and to make it a liveable place? Did you guys hit up a lot of thrift stores to find different things?

KH: It sat in a storage parking lot for a couple months because we didn’t know what to do with it at first. We were also trying to figure out how to get it on the road legally, which was a big concern. In Maine, you can’t register a school bus as a motor home without it having a working kitchen, sink and bathroom, like an actual RV. This isn’t that by any means, but in Vermont, you can register anything as long as it’s insured, so we got it insured and we got it registered with the Vermont plates. Then we brought it over to the Maine DMV and switched it over to Maine plates because if we’re obviously a band from Maine, we want to have Maine plates.

With gutting it, we cut out all the seats with a torch because it took forever to do it by hand. We were all underneath the bus hand cranking seats out bolt by bolt and we realized that it was going to take us way too long, but gratefully, Joey’s father is a mechanic and he has a torch. We torched all the seats out, except for the front ones, and it took us a while to figure out what would work best and how to organize this thing so it works really well. We put in two sets of bunk beds, which are something that you get from L.L. Bean for camping, and they’re honestly pretty comfortable. We put in one of our couches that we had and we put in a sofa that we had for a hangout space, and then we had a friend of ours build a space for storage in the back for shelving for all the gear.

RD: That’s amazing.

KH: It’s not crazy luxurious because we also bought the bus for $600, and there was also the fear of what would happen when this thing breaks down. It made it a full year of driving it on pure blind faith and it was running great. We had to do maintenance things like oil changes and stuff like that, but it ran for a whole year without any problems. It’s now broken down three times, which is unfortunate, but it still seems to be reliable in many ways. It’s not like we live there, we just use it for the road.

RD: Yeah, it’s more like a utility than anything so you don’t have to purchase a hotel room. Last month, you guys just released your “Elodie” EP, so what was the experience like making it? Did you guys do it all yourselves with the production and engineering or did you guys work with someone? Did you make it in the bus?

KH: I wish we made it in the bus, that would have been sick, but we have a studio space that we share with several artists in Portland, which we’re super grateful for and this is all relatively new. We worked with an engineer and producer named Matt Perry at the space throughout the course of this year while gigging. We were probably tracking from March until August, but we were also playing out so much that we were piecing away things as we were gigging. In a lot of ways, it was super nice in terms of not needing to pay a decent amount up front. Going to a nice commercial space but you only have two days to record four songs can be a rough environment to work in sometimes, so being able to have the space where you can just plug away as you see fit and really kind of explore things the way you’d like to is a really nice setup to have. After we tracked everything, we sent it over to Jon Wyman to mix and then to Adam Ayan to master, which was the first time we had done anything like that.

It was really valuable and we’re really happy with the route that we took with the EP because we were able to save so much with the tracking that it felt like we totally made the right decision.

RD: It’s cool that you had that structure. From listening to the record, it’s evident that you have quite the vocal range, so how do you harness this ability? Have you been taught how to sing? Did you take lessons when you were younger, or did this come naturally for you?

JH: I don’t really know. I don’t have any training, per say, I just grew up singing a lot while being involved in choir and chorus. Like I mentioned earlier, my family is very musically oriented, but I really started to develop my voice through the band. I think I’ve been getting more and more comfortable as we’ve continued writing and the process of production. I’ve explored how low I can go while also hitting that high note that needs to be hit, but it’s really through the band that I’ve been able to figure out my approach along with listening to my instincts.

RD: What are your thoughts going into this show at The Press Room in Portsmouth?

JH: I’m super stoked for it and hopefully this will be the best show we’ve had at The Press Room. We’ve played there a handful of times over the course of a couple years, but most of them have been either opening gigs or co-headline gigs, and this one has us playing with The Rock Dwellers, who are local to the area. We’re also working with Loco Mojo, which is a student organization at the University of New Hampshire that’s within the music scene and they’re helping promote it, which is really cool. That’s really helpful and I think it’s going to cap off a big goal of ours, which is by the end of this year to sell out or come close to selling out a venue outside of Maine. We’ve fortunately sold out quite a few shows where we’re from in different areas, but we’re trying to figure out how to pull that off while on the road.