Funny folks

Meet the Goonies, a ska-meets-hardcore unit about to save the world

by Don Fluckinger

At first glance, Christian Bauman would seem better suited to be the lead singer of a metal band than to the quiet confines of the folk-music circuit: the tattoos, the Army stint, the Eastern Pennsylvania/New Jersey upbringing. In fact, he's a well-read, well-mannered type who's lived a life's worth of experiences before age 30 and has turned those experiences into narrative snapshots with his guitar and voice.

Bauman, who is one-third the folk group Camp Hoboken, joins Greg Cagno and Linda Sharar at the Fox Run Concert Series, held this Sunday in a home in Sudbury. The venue holds one of the more elaborate "house concert" series, the unpublicized cutting edge of the folk underground held in dozens of homes across the country. Fox Run collects a $10 ticket fee for the artist and a $5 donation for either Justice Resource Institute's Boston Outreach Program or Women's Protective Services.

So how did a guy like Christian Bauman get caught up in this scene? His music career began in high school playing drums, where he and Cagno joined a rock band who concentrated on Jersey stuff -- Springsteen, Billy Joel, "a lot of Skynyrd, but we refused to play Bon Jovi," he laughs. Then he and Cagno started hanging around Godfrey Daniels, a Hoboken club where John Gorka led a weekly open-mic session. Moving through the New York folk scene, Bauman fell in with veteran singer/songwriter Jack Hardy, who taught him more about songwriting. But it wasn't enough.

"I was kicky, I was restless, I was bored by all these songs that I heard every week about life in New York," he says.

"Bear in mind, I was 18, I was 19, 20 years old [and] thought I knew everything," he adds. "As a big reader, I was fascinated by people like Ernest Hemingway. I wasn't interested in insular, introspective writers. I was interested in people who went out into the world and got their foot blown off and wrote about it. So on a whim, I joined the Army and got more than I bargained for."

He was shipped off to Somalia, where he served in Mogadishu and Kismaayo. After that, he took a breather and ended up in Haiti, one of the first hundred troops aground. Somalia, he says, felt like a hostile place; the soldiers weren't necessarily welcome. He came out of Haiti "feeling good about life," because the Haitians made the soldiers feel as though they had saved the day.

There's little direct reference to Bauman's time in the service in his music, excepting "Kismaayo," a song from his first CD, and "The Places You Will Go," a wry musical interpretation of DA Pamphlet 600-1, "Information for the New Soldier."

Most of his tunes are acoustic vignettes of interesting people he's met, and of the interesting transitions in our lives and how they rearrange what we hold dear. His songs are funny and upbeat, perhaps reflecting his luck of coming through dangerous circumstances unscathed.

After leaving the Army in '95, Bauman continued his music career, recording a couple of CDs and touring the country. Camp Hoboken started out as an informal group who camped out at the Falcon Ridge folk festival.

And they began performing together, discovering that as a threesome they could get into clubs where one or all of them otherwise couldn't. And though they don't play officially as a "band," they back each other up on solo efforts.

Several songs are tunes associated with the group, crowd favorites performed best together. So far, they're the comic-relief tunes -- Cagno wrote one called "Hollywood Comes to Hoboken," based on the true experience of his car getting towed by Ron Howard's Ransom film crew. Another crowd-pleaser is Cagno's "Bob Luciano's House," about the guy in the neighborhood with the free weed, Bauman says.

Sadly -- though each group member plays on one another's albums -- it's not likely that Camp Hoboken will record their own CD. Sharar has made waves in the Boston area herself, having contributed to the Respond CD, an all-women-songwriter project benefiting Respond Inc., a nonprofit domestic-violence relief agency. Cagno is working on a new album, as is Bauman who recently signed with PrimeCD, the home of Jack Hardy and Christine Lavin.

Camp Hoboken play at 7 p.m. on May 30 at the Fox Run Concert Series in Sudbury. Tickets are $15. Call (978) 443-3253 for reservations and directions.