David Greenberger Brings the Wordsof Locals to Saratoga Springs’ UPH Stage
David Greenberger and the Huckleberries onstage at Universal Preservation Hall on Jan. 19, 2025. Photo by Thomas Dimopoulos.
SARATOGA SPRINGS — Area legend David Greenberger staged a performance at Universal Preservation Hall on Jan. 19, and he brought a quartet of musicians – collectively called The Huckleberries, along with him.
Perhaps best known for his 32 years of publishing The Duplex Planet – a periodical borne out of his Greenberger’s conversations with nursing home residents, the conversations have spawned a plethora of recordings and performances of monologues and music.
At UPH, attendees were treated to a 90-minute showcase during which Greenberger, wearing a black suit and blue suede shoes, spoke the snippets – word thoughts, conversations, and linguistic interactions of humans engaging with one another, many of them local to the Saratoga and Ballston Spa territories, and heard onstage for the first time. For the record, some of the monologues were based on conversations held specifically at the Senior Center, and Home of the Good Shepherd.
Backed by music and told in first-person style, by each song’s end one could imagine the spirit of the soul who first spoke them drifting up the vintage theater’s balcony staircase and taking refuge among the long wooden church-like pews, listening in succession to the next story in line, and greeting one another in the haze of the veranda’s mist.
The quartet of Huckleberries – Peter Davis, James Gascoyne, Chris Carey and Sam Zucchini – accompanied Greenberger in a variety of ways: keyboards, a drum kit, a stand-up bass with dual f-hole cutaways, electric guitar, electric bass, saxophone, and an assortment of string-and-strum noisemakers with odd shapes, among their arsenal.
“You may be wondering why they’re called the Huckleberries,” Greenberger told the crowd, in between pieces that related the storytelling standing of one person named Gilbert, and another named Jitterbug Frank, “Well as a kid I loved Huckleberry Hound,” he said, recalling the animated TV series with the protagonist dog. “I was in the fan club and everything.”