Faces Of Nantucket: Cranberry Alarm Clock

“Most people start a rock and roll band when you're 16,” said Frankie Hunter on a recent spring morning at Jetties Beach. “We decided to start one in our 50s.”

Hunter is a vocalist and guitarist for Cranberry Alarm Clock, the band that has become a staple of summer around the island and especially as the de facto house band at the Sandbar restaurant and bar at Jetties Beach, where they play every Sunday.

Hunter, along with brothers Phil and Tom Proch, and Skip Curtin, now have a devoted following for their classic rock covers and Beatles tributes that fill the air at one of the island’s most popular summer destinations. And this August, the four members of Cranberry Alarm Clock will be taking their talents across the pond after receiving an invitation to play at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England, for the International Beatleweek festival.

The annual gathering at the birthplace of The Beatles brings together 70 bands from over 20 countries around the world to play and celebrate the music of the Fab Four. Cranberry Alarm Clock - which earned an invitation after submitting a video of one of their sets at Sandbar - is now raising funds for the trip through an upcoming showcase gig that is in the works, as well as merchandise sales, and donations from their fans.

“It's going to be incredible,” Hunter said. “If you're a Beatles fan, it's gonna be amazing. There's a real history there. You go on tours, you go to the houses, and you get to meet people from all over the world and all the bands. So we're going to see a lot of cool stuff. And then the standard is very, very high.”

The invitation to the festival shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Cranberry Alarm Clock, after all, was born out of a shared love of The Beatles' music, according to Tom Proch, who is the culinary arts teacher at Nantucket High School when he’s not playing music.

“Frankie and I were on a job site as I was doing construction for a friend, and Frankie has his own painting business, so we start talking Beatles, and then forget about it,” Proch said. “We were just like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to jam sometime.’ And then my brother, Phil, who plays bass in our band, moved out here. And I said, ‘We got to get together.’ ​​We started playing things we love and, you know, it went from there.”

Those first jams happened in 2014, and the initial trio - Tom Proch on drums and vocals, Hunter on guitar, and Phil Proch on bass - played informally in their free time. Three years later, Skip Curtin joined them, adding his six- and 12-string guitars to round out the band.

“When Skip got on, we were all like that’s the missing piece,” Proch said. “When Skip came in, it really kind of took off.”

The four musicians kicked around potential band names by text, rejecting some “whacky” suggestions such as “Holy Cow and the Calves” and “Jesus Coach.” They ultimately settled on Cranberry Alarm Clock as a Nantucket spin on the 1960s California-based psychedelic rock band Strawberry Alarm Clock.

They played their first gig together as a four-piece at Kitty Murtagh’s on St. Patrick's Day in 2017 and were quickly booked for other venues around the island. Around the same time, Nick Nass and George Kelly had taken over the town-owned restaurant/concession at Jetties Beach and created Sandbar. They soon booked Cranberry Alarm Clock to play the popular spot on Sundays, and the band has been a consistent presence there ever since.

“We call it our weekly therapy session,” Proch said. “We just jam it out. It’s so much fun.”