PREVIEW: David Greenberger and the Huckleberries perform (at last) “Universal Preservation” in (where else?) Universal Preservation Hall, Sunday, Jan. 19

“I want you to make something for us,” Phillip Morris invited David Greenberger in 2018.

“Something” is “Universal Preservation,” a two-CD album of words with music, and a one-time-only performance by Greenberger and the Huckleberries on Sunday, Jan. 19 at Universal Preservation Hall (UPH). 

David Greenberger, left, and the Huckleberries: Sam Zucchini, Chris Carey, James Gascoyne and Peter Davis – shown in the balcony of Universal Preservation Hall. Richard Lovrich photo

CEO of the Proctors Collaborative that operates UPH (also Proctors in Schenectady, Albany’s The Rep and Troy’s soon to reopen American Theater), Morris commissioned the project to honor the rejuvenated UPH, a former church.

In David Greenberger, Morris found a kindred spirit. Drolly accepting, resourceful, clever, relentlessly hard-working, a comprehensive and detailed archivist to whom nothing is too mundane to record, Greenberger has for decades preserved universal human truths gleaned from conversations with oldsters. In print initially, then performances, they mix poignancy, offhand poetic beauty and deadpan wit – hilarious and touching by turns.

He first found those aging friends, and his life’s work, in a nursing home.

Old Material, New Vision

In Boston to study painting and play bass in the rock band Men & Volts, Greenberger became activities director at the Duplex in 1979. When he found the newsletter he published there of interviews with the residents was of less interest to the residents than to his artist and musician friends, he began collecting interview gems in “The Duplex Planet.” A vividly eccentric magazine, it continues to this day and has spawned print media including books, comics and trading cards. 

After Faber & Faber published his illustrated book “Duplex Planet: Everybody’s Asking Who I Was” (1993), Greenberger hypnotized Conan O’Brien and Chuck Woolery on national TV with the droll, deadpan tale of an elderly gent describing favorite foods while graveside at a friend’s burial. 

Shops stock his books in both humor and social science shelves, earning critical plaudits beyond categories. Blurbs on “No More Shaves” (2003) quote Richard Gehr who dubbed Greenberger a “stand-up sociologist” in Rolling Stone while Ann Powers noted in the New York Times that Greenberger’s pieces “possess this unsettling combination of wisdom and disconnectedness, representing the mix of vitality and decline that is the daily experience of their tellers.”

Greenberger creates The Duplex Planet and its offshoots, and makes art and graphic design works, at the Greenwich home he shares with the similarly versatile and creative Barbara Price. An end-of-life doula (counselor) and advocate for elder care, visual artist and blogger, she is also a community catalyst and valued editor, including former managing editor of “The Duplex Planet.”

Old People, Now

Greenberger’s multi-media enterprise stems from his interest in old people, here and now. Rather than paging through scrapbooks of memory, their confining common role, he engages them in the present. For example, he played spiky modern jazz and roaring rock for an elder fan of big-band swing, then published his reactions as a record-review column. Greenberger doesn’t deny the passage of time; he turns it inside out.

As he wrote on his site, “From the start, my mission has been to offer a range of characters who are already old, so that we can get to know them as they are in the present, without celebrating or mourning who they were before…I try to recast them as individuals…typical in their unique humanness.” Greenberger shares their “rich language of personal poetics, accidental utterances, and exuberant expressions that are the result of the brain working faster than the mouth.”

Greenberger became a proxy-mouth, performing monologs of his conversations, adding music for flavor and framing. He honed what became the blueprint for “Universal Preservation” in performances across America including in 2001 at Albany’s Larkin and many Caffe Lena shows with Jupiter Circle, Chandler Travis, and A Strong Dog, also title of a CD. 

Words, Plus Music

Musician collaborators include Birdsongs of the Mezozoic, the Shaking Ray Levis, Paul Cebar, members of Los Lobos (“Growing Old in East L.A.,” a PBS co-production with Price and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media), and Keith Spring on “Take Me Where I Don’t Know Where I Am.” He made two albums with NRBQ’s Terry Adams – their “Duplex Planet Radio Hour” was a live performance at NYC’s prestigious avant-arts St. Anne’s Center. Greenberger cast many musicians behind words of late-in-life poet Ernst Noyes Brookings, notably Dave Alvin, the Incredible Casuals, the Figgs and Michael Eck.

The Duplex Planet, Live at The Larkin, Fall 2001. From left: Pete Toigo, bass; David Greenberger, spoken word; Terry Adams, piano. Michael Hochanadel photo.

However, on his new “My Autobiography Vol. 1,” Greenberger parcels out his own story, gleaned from decades of daily diaries, for others to speak: more than a dozen relatives (mother, daughter and granddaughter) and friends including Marshall Crenshaw, Penn Gillette, Geoff Muldaur, Louie Perez (Los Lobos), Mike Watt (Minutemen), Georgia Hubley (Yo La Tengo) and Chandler Travis. Tyson Rogers assembled the music, some from decades-old Greenberger recordings.

A musician himself, Greenberger chooses his players well, at the mic or on instruments, including the versatile, skilled crew he built for “Universal Preservation.” 

First, he collected conversations at Saratoga Springs Senior Center and Home of the Good Shepherd.

Next, he built a band he calls the Huckleberries. “All of them are full time musicians in the area,” Greenberger noted. Multi-instrumentalist Peter Davis, formerly on “Prairie Home Companion” has played hereabouts for 50 years; he plays reeds, piano, mandolin and guitar in “Universal Preservation.” Chris Carey plays guitar, keyboard and bass guitar. James Gascoyne plays guitar, banjo and string bass. Sam Zucchini plays drums live on Jan. 19 but didn’t play on the recording, where Greenberger played some bass.

“I directed the music into as wide a variety of moods and modes as we could so I could respond to those with the texts I developed,” said Greenberger. “I worked on the text concurrent with directing the music into shape over the course of four or five studio sessions with the musicians”  – at Millstone Studio in Ballston Spa. Grafting monologs to music, he adjusted timing and instrumentation a bit in “reverse engineering.” In Men & Volts, music followed lyrics. Now, “What I do with the monologs and music is the reverse of that for the most part.”

Create, Then Create Again

Completing recording and mastering in late 2019, they planned a live show. “We were going to perform at the reopened UPH, for which this was commissioned,” said Greenberger. Then Covid brought empty marquees everywhere. Released in 2022, the pandemic orphaned the album, without the live event that would have celebrated it as the occasion it now becomes.

On record, music and words fit well. In the reflective “Outdoor Person,” the music sounds like The Band, for example. “Soarin’ Dreams” sails on chiming Afro-pop guitar while “Piano Lessons” avoids the obvious, surfing on guitar riffs before the namesake instrument kicks in. “Lobster Bagpipes,” melodic cousin to the jazz standard “Killer Joe,” relies on organ and drums to funky effect.

They echo traditional and modern jazz, rocking romps, folkie antiques and classical reveries, mostly at thoughtful tempos but occasionally busting out in exuberance. Words and music fit and flow, paired either directly or ironically.

Of 44 pieces on the “Universal Preservation” two-CD album, they’ll play 24 live on Jan. 19. Reviving the live project after the Covid hiatus, “Everyone needs to learn what they had only done once,” said Greenberger of ongoing rehearsals. “The pieces will be bit longer live. Ninety seconds (duration of some pieces)…is too short in a live setting.”

Greenberger credited Philip Morris for inspiring and supporting the “Universal Preservation” project. “He’s the visionary, the one who said ‘Let’s have lunch, I want you to make something for us.’”

“David’s work is spectacular” said Morris, “(as is) his notion of capturing the historic essence of the church – built Episcopal, converted to Baptist then reimagined as a performance site.” Now, “A few years later, we look forward to finally sharing this story.”

David Greenberger and the Huckeberries perform “Universal Preservation” on Sunday, Jan. 19 at 3 p.m. Tickets: $25.50 518-3346-6204 www.proctors.org

Terry Adams, left; and David Greenberger, goofing on David’s glasses on an Albany backstreet. I made them do that.

Fired-up words and music at the Larkin. From left, Pete Toigo, David Greenberger, Terry Adams.