Years of playing music with the same people grants you special powers: You anticipate where everyone’s heading and sense in advance what you’ll find when you get there. After the show, you can discuss how it went, without hurt feelings.
“There’s a bond,” says Rane singer and guitarist Alan Venitosh. “It’s almost like being on the same sports team. You connect.”
Rane, a jamband (the label “soft prog” also appears to have stuck) from South Windsor and Enfield with an elevated sense of songcraft, was an East Coast bar/college fixture from around 1996 to 2008.
During that time, the quintet released eight studio albums, opened for Tom Petty, Santana and Guster, played more than 500 shows and won a number of regional music awards.
Last November, Rane’s original lineup — Venitosh, guitarist Ryan Bowman, bassist Dan Prindle, percussionist Kurt Rinaldo and drummer Travis Lamothe — reformed to celebrate its 20th anniversary at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass.
Rane’s reunion mini-tour continues this week with a March 25 show at Hartford’s Arch Street Tavern. The band hopes to play together as often as possible.
“Some of us will be 40 in the next year or two,” Venitosh says. “Let’s get the engines running. … There are things that can still happen.”
Venitosh, Bowman and Lamothe met as students at South Windsor High School. In December 1995, Venitosh answered an ad posted at Daddy’s Junky Music in Vernon: “Bass player looking to join a band.”
Soon Prindle arrived at Venitosh’s house, wearing an Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe T-shirt.
“I instantly knew he was going to be in my band,” Venitosh says.
Rinaldi, an Enfield resident whose father directed the music programs at South Windsor High School, joined a few months later.
The recording bug bit Venitosh early. He blew up his dad’s cassette deck by plugging in a guitar, and later bought a four-track recorder from high school friend Alex Grossi (now the guitarist for Quiet Riot).
South Windsor High, meanwhile, purchased a Crest 24-track mixing console from Vermont rock band Phish; Rane’s earliest recordings were made on that console and now-outdated ADAT digital technology.
“I had no idea who Phish was, but my teacher had just bought this board,” Venitosh says. “That’s the folklore behind [the first recordings]. Eventually I became a fan of Phish, so that was pretty cool.”
After graduation, band members left for college, knowing they’d return home on weekends to play.
“We supported each other through school, and we used our dorm rooms as crash pads to bounce us off to our next gig as needed,” Venitosh says. “We set it up so that Boston to Hartford was the main stretch. From there, we could slingshot to Portland, we could slingshot to Rochester or even down to Philadelphia.”
Rane’s second album, “At War with the Moon,” was first offered for sale at a UConn show in 1998. The band’s producer, having driven to Toronto to retrieve the physical CDs, pulled into the parking lot just minutes before showtime.
“Camelopardalis” (named for a giraffe-like constellation), from 2000, had a larger budget — tens of thousands of dollars — and involved a big-name studio and engineer. The band gigged like crazy. In 2002, Bruce Menard replaced Lamothe, who yielded the spot to drummer Bryan Kelly (Venitosh’s current bandmate in acoustic project the Auburn Mode) a few years later.
At various points throughout the 2000s, Rane intersected the Northeast jamband scene, while never fully being embraced by it. (There’s a sizable collection of live Rane shows posted to archive.org, many of which were recorded by taper Jesse Hurlburt.)
Studio work continued; Venitosh enrolled in the music production program at the Hartt School, and Rane built its own studio, recording three albums’ worth of material (with Venitosh engineering) and releasing it all as a triple album (“The Hope Seed,” “From the Vine Vol. 1” and “From the Vine Vol. 2”) in 2003.
Venitosh wasn’t thrilled with the sound quality. “We all agreed tracks would sound better if we had a [recording] professional with us, but we needed to learn,” he says. “We needed to figure it out.”
Still, every second of “Magnetic North,” the band’s final studio effort from 2005, was meticulously planned out, with detailed song grids, click-tracks used to transition between tempos and songs, and meandering jams intentionally trimmed, leaving room for atmospheric fade-outs.
“It’s so much more satisfying on a classic album to listen to the outro chorus-repeat with a face-melting solo as it fades,” Venitosh says. “There’s just something about that.”
Rane stopped playing regularly together around 2008. As 2016 approached, longtime friends — including DJ Wade Wilby (also known as Wyllys), who’ll open at the Arch Street show, along with the Dan Prindle Band — offered to handle marketing and social media if the band would reunite for a few gigs.
Wilby, from Enfield, is Rane’s unofficial Neal Cassady/Ken Kesey character. “He had visions, he had thoughts: ‘Guys, I’ve been over here, you need to see this’,” Venitosh says. “He had concepts and lyrics. He went to school for literature and he has a way with words. He guided some of our lyrical concepts.”
Essentially what Wilby and others said was: “You’re grown up. You’re married. You have kids. It’s time to celebrate.”
“We quickly realized that they were not messing around,” Venitosh says.
At the November Iron Horse show, Rane pulled in songs from across its catalog — the moody waltz-time of “When We Ride” and folk-prog textures of “Circus Ride,” from “Camelopardalis”; “Magnetic North”‘s chiming bro-beat number “On Better Days”; “The Gauge,” a galloping, wandering rock song from 2005, with unpredictable dynamic shifts and a finger-pop figure from Prindle — while leaving ample room for improvisation.
“It’s a little less risky at the moment, but we’re still talking on that same level musically,” Venitosh says.
RANE performs at Arch Street Tavern in Hartford on Saturday, March 25, at 9 p.m., with Wyllys and the Dan Prindle Band opening. Tickets are $10 to $12. archstreettavern.com
