This is the second installment in an occasional series exploring Plymouth’s fast-growing live music scene.

This is the second installment in an occasional series exploring Plymouth’s fast-growing live music scene.

How did it happen? How did this little blue collar downtown known for its preppie clothes stores and luncheonettes become an oasis of live music?

You could do the research. A musical anthropologist might write a thesis on it, but why bother?

Why bother when you have the living “Hitch-story” still on his feet, guitar strapped to his back strolling these same streets and willing to talk about it.

Brian “Hitch” Hitchings, singer, songwriter, guitarist and one-third, one-fourth or one-fifth – depending on the year – of Plymouth rock’s history-making jam band, Third Left.

Hitch is an original, maybe the original.

Sure, there was live music in Plymouth before Hitch and friends appeared on the scene, but not much.

And if you were looking for original music, not just cover bands, BH (Before Hitch) there was hardly any.

Where would they have played, anyway?

The courthouse was an actual courthouse 10 years ago.

Where the Main Street Sports Bar now sits was the Colonial Restaurant.

Where Speedwells sits today there was a used record store - not classic reissues on pristine vinyl but old albums that had seen their day.

The Pillory Pub was a souvenir store, Driftwood was adrift and the Tavern on the Wharf was full of fried fish.

Ten years ago downtown Plymouth featured a classic All-American Main Street, which is to say, showing its age and fading fast.

The early years

Twenty years ago Hitch was at Plymouth Community Intermediate School and in his first band, Running with Scissors, with longtime collaborator, Zak Fey.

“Somewhere there’s a VHS tape of our award winning performance at the PCIS talent show,” Hitchings said.

Running With Scissors played back yards, front yards, and nsometimes someone even let them in the front door, but they never had a gig downtown.

The reporter’s notes are a bit muddled here. Hitchings agreed to an interview at the restaurant of his choice and he selected Dillon’s Local, where it was a bit loud sitting right next to the band, and a little dark.

“I thought it would be quiet on a Monday, a good place for an interview” Hitchings said, smiling at the band members, “but look what music does for a restaurant.”

He’s a player and a promoter.

“Look what music does for a restaurant, and what it's doing for a town,” Hitch went on for a moment. “When 2020 arrives this place is going to go crazy!”

Hitchings puts 2020 into perspective: more people, more gigs, more music.

Hitchings has played on a rooftop on White Horse Beach on July third, at the center of the hurricane called Brown’s Bank, at an all-women college, a few stops on what many would say is a magical, musical mystery tour.

On this night, after the interview, it’s going to be at the Monday “Acoustic Nights” upstairs at the Middle Street BBC.

Different venues, over 20 years, but the energy is the same.

He’s a mischievous spirit, a trickster, a troublemaker, a hell of a musician, and he seems to know everyone.

He doesn’t drop names. They come off his fingers like notes from his guitar.

Names of local bands, names of local bars, names of local musicians, some here, some gone, none forgotten: Oneal Armstrong, Hayley Sabella, the Skybox, the Crow’s Nest, Upstairs at the Colonial, Speedwells, T-Bones, Johnny C, Johnny Souza, Ricky T’s, Cabbyshack, Sean O’Tooles, Brian Stratton, Brian Rojik, The Infractions…

He knew the chef at Dillons Local too, and when the waitress came to take his order, he knew her as well. He has his own menu item at Dillon’s Local.

Order “The Hitch” and you’ll get a classic grilled cheese with a sidecar of bacon.

That’s not a typo. It’s not a side order, it’s a side car: the sandwich comes hitched to a massive stack of bacon.

He’s supposed to be talking about the history of the music scene in Plymouth though and is gently reminded for the first and not the last time.

He should know that history. He was there. He is a big part of the history of live music in Plymouth.

After Running with Scissors it was The Basics in high school, the Cosby Twins (a fraternity house band) at UMass-Lowell and then several iterations of the band that emerges out of Cape Cod Bay at low tide every year, 3rd Left.

3rd Left is itself a long list of players who have come, gone, returned in different disguises: “There was me, Zak (Fey) and (Bryan) Pierce, then me, Zak, Pierce, and John Chebator, who played lead guitar and backup vocals.”

There was a time, he admits, when neither he nor Zak sang. “Too shy,” he said.

There was the Hitchings, Fey, Pierce, John Chebator, Andrew Cardoso (aux. percussion, backup vocals) version of the band. This was the band that started to break big, locally and throughout the region but still had few places to play in town.

Hitch stops digging in his pile of bacon to give a nod of approval to the Lindsays, the live entertainment at Dillon’s Local this night, then he wanders a bit off subject again, says that the bartenders, the waiters, the chefs and the musicians are all in this together.

“We’re all just trying to entertain the customers,” he said.

Then he thinks to mention the “T-Bird.” Zak Fey’s dad, Tom Fey.

“I have to pay homage to the T-Bird,” Hitch says. “Without the T-Bird there would be no Scissors, no Basics, no 3rd Left.”

Over and over again he mentions the Feys, as if they live on a mountaintop and dispense musical wisdom to anyone willing to make the climb.

The Feys are a musical family and a musical force in Plymouth. They play all over town, in various iterations, and mostly they’re an inspiration.

Musicians will always talk about the excitement of having a place to play when they start out and they’re often not talking about a paying gig but rather, that place or person that encouraged them to play, that offered their basement or garage, that saw something in them.

The Feys are that and more, Hitchings says.

There’s Father Tom, the T-Bird, Hitch’s longtime bandmate and drummer Zak Fey, his brother Chris Fey, a pianist, guitarist, singer and hell of a drummer as well, pianist and singer Dan Fey, singer Ben Fey, pianist and singer Sheila Fey, multi-instrumentalists Pat “The Future” Fey, and youngest daughter Mal Fey, who sings and plays piano and guitar.

This is a family that would need more than one psychedelic bus if they went on the road.

After a moment of silence in their honor, Hitch returns to the subject at hand.

“Running with Scissors faded fast," he said. "Couple years go by and we started a band called The Basics when we were juniors in high school. Me, Zak Fey, Andrew Hill (bass and was also in Running with Scissors) Andrew Cardoso (vocals).

“The Basics was our first try at writing original music. Zak's dad recorded us with an old reel to reel. We played a battle of the bands at the Orpheum Theatre, but mostly high school graduation parties.

“We jammed at Handlebar Harry's too, but then Cardoso went off to UMass Amherst and left the Basics. That shook us up a bit, but then me and Zak start trading vocal leads and getting more confident singing.

“Our senior year at Plymouth North we meet Bob Torrey and his band Dead End Avenue at Ricky T's Blues Bar, where he would let us youngins play.”

There’s a seminal spot: Ricky T’s, at Cordage, at the end of the tracks, a sparsely decorated bar on the ground level of Building 1 at Cordage where you could hear live music most nights of the week.

The Basics played there – though half the band was underage – as did Bob Torrey’s band, Dead End Avenue, and a host of top local blues players.

They weren’t being paid, but Hitchings says you could feel something happening, momentum building.

The mountain of bacon had been laid to waste, and looking up with a grin Hitchings asked, “Do you remember Sean O’Tooles?”

Follow Frank Mand on Twitter @frankmandOCM.