Local singer and music memorabilia collector to perform with his big band

BY LEIGH BLANDER

When you step into Matt Arnold’s office at the Star of the Sea Parish Center you might think you’ve entered a music museum. Arnold, the church’s music director, is an avid collector of vintage 78 rpm records and Jazz Age memorabilia, including a century-old Victrola.

“When I was growing up, my dad loved big-band music and my earliest musical memories are of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and big-band singers like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby,” Arnold told the Current. He remembers listening obsessively to a Benny Goodman cassette in his dad’s car when he was 9 or 10 years old.

“From there, I went down the rabbit hole of even earlier music in the 20s and 30s.”

Arnold will perform with his own 11-piece big band, Matt Arnold and His New England Yankees, at the Warwick Cinema on Thursday, June 22, at 7 p.m. A tenor, Arnold will sing hits by Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Rudy Vallee, Sinatra and more. His wife, Holly, also a professional singer, will appear as a featured soloist.

The band will play in one of the Warwick’s theaters. “It’s an intimate space,” Arnold said.

“There will be a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of music, a little bit of everything.” He hopes to chat with the audience after the show.

Back in his office, Arnold

Blander churned out copy and candidate profiles to go up online. Olson described it as building the plane while we were flying it.

Meanwhile, three other founders, Salem State University Instructor Jessica Barnett, retired Associated Press Bureau Chief Ed Bell (that’s me) and Attorney David Moran structured the business side, gaining 501(c)3 tax exempt status from the IRS shows off some of his 4,000 records, the oldest being a 1900 recording of opera star Enrico Caruso. Asked about his favorite, he hesitates.

“That’s like picking a favorite child,” he laughed. “I suppose it’s the record that started it all. ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Benny Goodman.”

Also in his office: an antique Victor 10-50 Automatic Orthophonic Victrola. “It was the first successful in-home record changer and was introduced to the market in the fall of 1927,” he explained.

“Owners could load up to 12 and nonprofit incorporation papers from the Massachusetts Secretary of State. We also went about recruiting a talented and highly regarded board of directors. All are Marblehead residents who shared the concern about a news desert in town and volunteered countless hours to the cause.

We made our plans with equal portions of hope, optimism and a deep and abiding love for the town of Marblehead.

Of course, there were others who stepped into the breach, too. One was a blog started by the class to talk about his lack of math skills and was told “this is not self-pacing; you’re going to have to keep up with the work.” records at a time and listen to almost an hour of music without having to get up and change the record or wind the motor. Not a big deal now, but at the time it was revolutionary.”

Arnold has owned more than 30 Victrolas and phonographs since he started collecting when he was 12.

He also has two large megaphones that were owned by crooner Rudy Vallee, Arnold’s idol. The singer used the megaphones before microphones appeared on the scene. Speaking of mics, Arnold has a 1930 RCA microphone that he’ll use in his former political office holders and the other a weekly print edition from a daily newspaper company based in neighboring Lynn. We welcome the competition, and we wish them well.

We have been blown away by the warm reception the people of this town have given us. When you tell us that you love our paper, we are thrilled. And we thank you for your support.

We adopted the non-profit model because as hundreds of newspapers shut down across the country, it has become upcoming show.

“I have some unpublished recordings by Bing Crosby and I discovered the only known piano recordings made by Hollywood star Ramon Novarro. They were donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences a few years ago. I found them in a dusty record shop in North Carolina,” he said.

His interest in vintage items doesn’t end with music. Locals may have seen him driving around town in his 1956 pink Cadillac Seville.

“It popped up on Facebook two years ago and I convinced apparent that the for-profit model is not sustainable. We do not want to see what happened to the Marblehead Reporter happen again. Hence, we are out and about town raising money to augment our advertising sales. We are holding “listening parties” to hear your thoughts and seek your financial support. We have become members of the Institute for Non-profit News (INN), which gives support to us and similar enterprises across the country. Under our non-profit model, all the money we receive stays my wife we had to have it,” he said. Still, he’s happy to be living in modern times.

“I love the time we live in because I can enjoy all these different eras. I think it would be fun to go back and visit these different time periods. But I never feel like I was born at the wrong time. I like air conditioning too much.” in Marblehead and goes back into the product. As we gain our financial footing, we hope to beef up our sports coverage, have regular contributors from the high school and increase our coverage of culture, arts and social events. We may even add a political cartoon and a crossword puzzle.

To learn more about Arnold’s concert, visit thebeaconmarblehead.com/ special-events.

At a recent listening party, someone asked, “What is the secret sauce that makes your newspaper so good?” In a word, our answer was love. We love our town, we love to write and we love our newspaper.

Gilliland said shortly after starting at what was then Salem State College, he and his wife Amy had children, then came promotions on the job and suddenly the decades flew by. Then COVID19 hit, and Gilliland happened to run into an old friend, Frank Twiss, the coordinator of the fire science programs for both North Shore Community College and SSU. Gilliland said he asked Twiss if the credits from those earlier classes were still good or if all was lost.

“He said ‘Absolutely not,’” Gilliland said, adding that within days Twiss had set him up with a counselor who put together a flow chart of what he needed to do to graduate. “At age 58-59, I started online and plugged away at it for two years, and in May, I finally graduated.”

But if it weren’t for the support of his family, some great professors and two amazing math tutors, Gilliland said he might have quit.

“I joke that I majored in fire science and administration and minored in quantitative math,” he said. “It was my very last class and had it been my first … I would have never made it.”

Gilliland said he visited his math professor prior to starting

Amy Gilliland pushed her husband to take advantage of SSU’s math lab, and Gilliland said he was glad he did. Not only did he meet Alex and Penelope, the two young math tutors he credits with getting him through the class, but he also met other classmates, who up until then had lived largely online.

“And I realized 60% of the class was failing,” he said.

Gilliland said he was told not to worry; they would be graded on a curve. He was shocked and delighted when he received a C for the class, he said.

“I had never been humbled like that in my life,” he admitted.

“I thought ‘I deal with $4 million budgets, and I can’t do quantitative math.’ I never sweated out anything like that.”

It gets better.

When he arrived at SSU’s O’Keefe Center for graduation, they handed him his number, telling him where he would stand in line, and a gold cord. “I said, ‘What’s this for,’” Gilliland recalled. “‘Cum Laude’ they said.” He had no idea he would be graduating with distinction, he said. Is it important?

With a degree in hand, Gilliland said he will be able to teach fire sciences once he retires as chief, which he thinks will be fun. And getting the degree was important to him, but whether it’s important to the job is perhaps more a matter of opinion.

“There is a saying, a medical student that got a D in class is still a doctor,” Gilliland quipped. “Obviously, people look at the degree.”

However, Gilliland noted that neither former chiefs, Edward Creighton nor Barry Dixey, went to college. He called Creighton, who was at Pearl Harbor during World War II, a great chief and said he’s yet to meet anyone better with budgets and numbers than Dixey. That said, Gilliland said he would urge today’s firefighters, including his son Liam, who has been on the job for seven years and has a degree in criminal justice, to get a degree in fire science. And if they can, do it in person. Gilliland said while he thoroughly enjoyed his college experience, quantitative math aside, he thinks he would have liked it more had he been able to take the classes in person versus online. He would have liked the in-person exchanges and discussions, he said. But a degree is a degree, and he called walking across the stage to accept his simply awesome. “I don’t regret it,” he said. “It was a great experience and I’m glad I did it.”