Being married to a professional musician can often be a challenge. When both husband and wife are professional musicians and play in a band together, the disadvantages can often outweigh the advantages. Take the case of guitarist Scot Gibbs and his vocalist wife, Amberly Gibbs.
The greatest challenge is for Mrs. Gibbs to get respect as a female musician. “It’s really hard for Scot to show up and say ‘my wife sings.” People assume she isn’t that good. They assume she’s a Yoko Ono who can’t sing for beans. Sometimes Amberly Gibbs goes as far as to say to her husband, “Don’t tell them I’m your wife. Don’t tell them your wife is here.”
Her husband laments the lack of respect for women in the music scene. “There’s great female musicians. The most popular band in Manchester is Mama Kicks with Lisa Guyer, and she’s a killer artist,” Mr. Gibbs said.
“You have to have a thick skin, you know what I mean,” Amberly Gibbs asked. “Once I get a chance to sing, then they go ‘oh, OK.’ It’s getting that initial first shot.” Amberly said there are not a lot of female musicians out there. Scot Gibbs admitted that Common Knowledge, the six-piece they co-front, is the first band he played in that had a female singer.
The Gibbs met in the band Common Knowledge in 2000 and they got married in 2003. Bandleader and bassist Bill Ingalls had tapped Scot Gibbs to play guitar in 2000. Ingalls had tapped Amberly Gibbs in 1995, though she had never sang in a band before. She had only played saxophone in school. Yet, Ingalls had heard her singing aloud to music in a club she managed and bartended and he knew he was onto something big.
Amberly Gibbs had worked at a lot of different clubs where music was featured. Classics Restaurant n Manchester, New Hampshire had a show band, and she had lived with two of the musicians. She had a saxophone-playing boyfriend at the time and she gleaned a lot of knowledge in that previous relationship. When Mrs. Gibbs first started playing out with Common Knowledge, she would have the lyrics in hand for confidence. “It’s been a learning process,” she said. “It’s just morphed.”
The Common Knowledge set list features songs that many people don’t usually hear from a cover band. “Most of the ones you don’t recognize are probably my choices,” Scot Gibbs said. “I have pretty wide ranging taste and I brought in a lot of fairly obscure ones.” Amberly Gibbs, though, is a big fan of singers like Susan Tedeski, Melissa Etheridge, Annalan Myles.
“Those seem to be songs,” she began, “you can play them 150 times, and people still want to get up and dance to them. I’m trying to morph my material more into more current things like Brandy Carlisle, and Serena Rogers, that kind of more rock-pop. It’s got edge. I like songs that have a little edge to them. I don’t like things that are pretty straight. I have a hard time at the blues jam because all my songs aren’t straight, One-four-five blues. It’s hard to get up and play with just anybody. Those things have stops and tempo changes and breaks.”
Common Knowledge has always been a classic rock cover band. They have morphed into a classic rock and blues. Their band goes over well with biker crowds like at Bike Week in Laconia, New Hampshire and biker rooms such as a Maine honky tonk named Bentley Saloon.
Scot Gibbs had an originals project called Ten Story Love that he formed with local southern New Hampshire artists Brad Page and Mike Haught. Haught and Page were the musician friends who got Gibbs back into the local music scene when he returned from college and life in the mid-west. Mr. Gibbs described the trio as punky and power pop. “Scot plays everything,” Mrs. said. “He plays punk. He plays reggae.” His favorite punk band is The Ramones.
The Ramones were a pure American band, Gibbs said, because they had a sense of humor whereas the British punk bands were angry protestors. And The Ramones aimed at Gibbs’ generation. “The Ramones played pretty intense music, but it was in a line I think back to the Phil Spector stuff, a big wall of sound.”
Mr. Gibbs lived in Boulder, Colorado when he was a student in 1968, during the time of political/social turmoil. He saw Roland Kirk and Tommy Bolan at small clubs there. Boland’s album cover for his Ultimate record shows him playing the drum set that belonged to Gibbs’ drummer. Mr. Gibbs also performed at a Boulder club called Tlagi where he saw such luminaries as Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, and Roland Kirk. “It was very eclectic,” he exclaimed. “They had everything.” Another club he hung out at was The Fox Theater where they had Missing Persons in the late 1970s.
When asked what he majored in, his wife answered for him. “He was majoring in I Don’t Know What I Want To Do,” Amberly said, giggling. Then Scot added “I was majoring in My Dad Getting Me Out Of The House.” He never graduated because he was too busy playing music. Boulder being a political town, student protests closed the school down at one point. His draft number never got called, so he didn’t have to serve in Vietnam. “In the 60s music was a lot more important in people’s lives,” he said. “It held a different place in my life.”
At a place called The Pioneer Inn in Boulder where Emmylou Harris once played, Gibbs and his band arrived to find their gig had been cancelled. The bar was being cleaned up after some guy blew his girlfriend away with a shotgun.
Many of Mr. Gibbs’s bands took a turn toward the surreal. He belonged to a Boulder band called Space Rangers that performed a rock opera in which each band member played a character. Gibbs portrayed a character called “The Doctor,” and he was decked out in a gold Lemay suit, and he freely admits that the two brothers who wrote it were smoking a lot of marijuana when they came up with the storyline. Space Rangers actually played out, including a gig at an all-you-can-eat rib joint in addition to several auditoriums shows.
Gibbs belonged to another band out west called Teenage Commies From Mars that he didn’t talk much about. It wasn’t a serious project.
Mr. Gibbs had tickets to the glorious, generational concert, Woodstock, but he only drove as far as Monticello, New York. He was lead to believe the concert grounds were another 30 miles away, and he didn’t want to walk that far. Remember, Woodstock attendees had blocked up the roads. Gibbs had borrowed his father‘s car without his father‘s permission and he didn‘t want to park it in a ditch.
“It actually affected me for a while,” he said. “There was that dichotomy between those who went and got the bragging rights and those who didn’t.”
Originally from New Hampshire, Mr. Gibbs was born in Plymouth. His current house in Bedford originally belonged to his grandparents, and he returned to look after it when his grandmother died, 21 years ago. Scot Gibbs did not get a chance to set down roots during his childhood. His father had worked for the national Forest Service and his family had to move around the country so his father could advance in his career. Scot Gibbs has lived in Oregon, Texas, West Virginia and New York state, and, like a child who wants to try everything at the ice cream stand, he drew in the musical flavors from each locale.
“In Texas, you get a lot of that Louisiana second line, Chris Kinner, Fats Domino. It’s just like in the air down there,” he said. “In West Virginia, obviously, there was more country stuff. I got a real education in American music from the way I grew up.”
Mr. Gibbs became interested in being a musician the same day millions of children around the country got the music bug. He saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. “Girls screaming. End of story.” One of the first historically important rock bands he saw live was Cream in Denver in 1968 at a placed called The Cow Palace.
Mr. Gibbs had gone to high school in Burlington, Vermont where he had seen acts like The McCoys and Gene Pitney.
Currently, Mr. Gibbs is going to push forward with some new projects, like resurrecting an older originals outfit he once had called The Plaid Jones Project. The former drummer from Plaid Jones, Dave Gagne, and Scot Gibbs together eventually became the Jimmy Lehoux Band. Jerrod Williams formerly of Eastern Sun and Tore Down House, and Dave Sterns, who owns Guitar Gallery in Amherst, was also in The Plaid Jones Project. The four piece, plus Amberly Gibbs, will reunite and they will write some original songs .
Mr. Gibbs has been writing songs for a long time. He won a battle of the band in Burlington at 14 when his then band The Castaways performed his song “You Lied.” He’s been writing songs ever since. He didn’t always record them, though. During his post-college years in the mid-west, Mr. Gibbs suffered a near-fatal skiing accident in Colorado that was a life-changing event. “Someone skied into his head,” Amberly Gibbs said. He received a concussion and he scored a three on the Glasgow trauma Score. “They airlifted you out,” Amberly said. He took a year off from playing and focused on songwriting.
Presently, Mr. Gibbs is also starting a second new project with Manchester drummer Rick King. Common Knowledge fans need not worry. Gibbs and his wife will also keep Common Knowledge while working on the Plaid Jones Project and the project with Rick King. King sometimes plays drums for Common Knowledge, when their regular drummer, Bob Pratte, can’t make it. Aside from the Gibbs, Ingalls, Pratte, and sometimes King, Common Knowledge features Steve Roberge on saxophone and harmonica, and, their sound man “Slutty” Pete Zona will join in on some vocals and some harp. Zona got his nickname “Slutty” because as a musicians he will play with anyone.
Scot Gibbs’ first guitar influence was Eric Clapton. The Blues Breakers album that featured Clapton caused a paradigm shift; it stands out to him for Clapton’s technique and tone. The Layla era of Clapton’s career was important to Gibbs as well. Mike Bloomfield from Paul Butterfield Band was another major impact on Gibbs’ style. Duanne Allman, too, was quite a major influence too. During a fusion period Gibbs was influenced by Larry Carlton, and his current favor players are Robben Ford and (Jackson Brown session man) David Linley
“Mike Bloomfield is a great forgotten hero of American guitar players. He doesn’t get named as much as Clapton and Page. But he was the first one,” Gibbs said.
Aside from Common Knowledge, Mr. Gibbs is the lead guitarist for the country-rock sensation in New Hampshire called The Jimmy Lehoux Band. The Lehoux band has rubbed elbows with many big names in country and rock over the years. They once opened for a package of Marshall Tucker Band and Little Fest. Lehoux Band also opened for Charlie Daniels Band in New Hampshire two times in the late 1990s. Gibbs, with the Jimmy Lehoux Band, won a battle of the bands at the Hard Rock Cafe in Boston. The prize was opening for Kenny Chesney the next day. Gibbs and Lehoux went to Nashville, and the pair drove up to Charlie Daniel’s house and they got to see his recording studio. Daniels was on the road but his employees were gracious enough to give them a tour.
Greg Gagne, drummer for Lehoux Band and Plaid Jones, Jimmy Lehoux, and Mr. Gibbs played a t a charity show called Wishstock, sponsored by the Make A Wish Foundation. This put the local Manchester area boys on stage with Charlie Farren from Farrenheit and Jeff Baxter from The Doobie Brothers. Baxter nodded to Gibbs to take a solo, and, although it gave him goose bumps on his arms, he did it, and he was happy with the board tapes afterwards.
Andy Gravas had once tapped Gibbs to play with him at a Nashville songwriters convention. Gravas, a Dr. John style keyboardist, on Music Row, picked up Gibbs at the airport and brought him downtown to play. Gibbs related that the two clicked and they played at The Bourbon Street Boogie And Blues nightclub.
Mr. Gibbs said it is unfortunate that rock musicians don’t like country musicians even though country and rock both have the same configuration of guitars, bass, and drums. “Nashville is the new L.A.,” he said. “There’s better players in Nashville than anywhere in America right at the moment.”
Gibbs, at one point, had owned 23 guitars. The Gibbs’s house used to be a museum of guitars. Then the Gibbs had two children, and the couple had to hide the gee-tars away some place safe. Mr. Gibbs left out a dobro once, and it got knocked down. Scot and Amberly both said that their four year old boy and their two year old girl are musically inclined, can sing, and that they like the music of country star Brad Paisley.
Mrs. Amberly Gibbs is also an interesting person. She got to drive Kenny Chesney’s tour bus during a meet up before a show. “Amberly is a very capable woman,” Mr. Gibbs explained. “I finally got married when I was 53. It took me that long to figure out:, marry a singer, a professional bartender, great wife, great cook.” Mrs. Gibbs, it was commented on during the interview, does not have the appearance of a bartender or a singer. “That’s the surprise,” she said, giggling.
“She broke up a fight between two bikers with a pool cue,” Mr. Gibbs said. “If you see that side of her it means you’re in trouble. She’s a very no nonsense woman.” She once lugged his equipment to a show when she was eight months pregnant. She also manages all the bands she and her husband belong to.
Mr. Gibbs has met many famous musicians like Stephen Stills and David Crosby and he has opened for many big names. His wife had interjected that he opened for many at The Capitol Center For The Arts in Concord and at Meadowbrook in Guilford. Molly Hatchet and Travis Tritt are among those he opened for with the Jimmy Lehoux outfit. He doesn’t jump at a chance to talk about it, though. His wife had to answer firmly “Yes” for him when he was asked if he met a lot of big names. “Hopefully, people don’t think I’m an inveterate name dropper,” he said.
Scot and Amberly Gibbs can be found at times performing in a duo and trio form of Common Knowledge. The two also enjoy the New Hampshire franchise of blues jams hosted by Wan-Tu Blues Jams, run and engineered by their friend from Common Knowledge, Peter Zona, and marketed by their other friend Brenda Cadieux.
“This is one of the most supportive music scenes I’ve ever been a part of,” Scot Gibbs said. “There’s not a lot of petty jealousies. People are very respectful of other people’s skills. Everyone pitches in and helps out. Uh, oh. He’s going to quote me now.”
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