Saturday, August 9, 2024 . 7PM . NO COVER CHARGE . FREE SHOW!
RORY & THE BLUES HOUNDS
Their music is so contagious, you’d think they’d regulate how much children can have. It caught Rory Malloy when he was young, by way of his brother a decade older, who introduced him to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Then Malloy got a taste of it himself and he was gone.
“I grew up in Queens, and my brother had a band,” Malloy recalls. “That was when the bug bit me. So I got a Led Zeppelin cover band, Kashmir in 1977. I started playing when I was 16. Those days they let anybody play – that was the whole thing. You got $100 for the whole band and we played every Sunday a bar like that during the summer.”
Sometimes that story spins off into a tale of chasing the dream, whatever it took, and how they found success. But after graduating from Providence College, Malloy allowed himself to be diverted in the worst possible way. He went to Wall Street.
“I worked right down at 30 Broad on the New York Futures Exchange for five years,” he says, and he hated it. “When the market went, and I lost the position I had, I could have gotten another one but I said, I think this is enough of that. I came up to Rhode Island in ‘87, and a friend of mine started a company called Liquid Blue. He made Grateful Dead t-shirts and bumper stickers. I worked for him and started playing again.”
A few years later, in 1995, he started the Blues Hounds with Jack Moore and Peter Breen. “Jack had just returned from Austin playing with Stevie Ray Vaughan and he came back here because he had family here,” Malloy says. “He wanted to get into a little blues trio, so Jack, Pete and I put the band together.”
The Blues Hounds have undergone a number of personnel changes in the intervening years. Many are now familiar with Moore from his present combo, Jack Moore & the Western Stars. Several female singers have come and gone, but Lisa Kay has had staying power of over 15 years, and now she’s even drawn the Blues Hounds into her own orbit through the Winehouse Project, which started six years ago.
“We started covering Amy Winehouse songs and we just kept adding them,” Malloy says of the genesis. “Then it just got serious. Lisa was so into Amy Winehouse with the costumes and the hair and the look and everything, so we got a horn section and backup singers. Now we take the Blues Hounds and the Winehouse projects and kind of put them together.”
“It’s almost the best of both worlds in that you get the Blues Hounds to get to with the horn section, and you know, we play a lot of Amy with that,” he says.
For Malloy a good show features a measure of looseness and interplay with the audience. They aren’t there to deliver a statement, they’re there for the good time, and that can only be had together.
