On a fog-thick night in July 2021, DeAngelo Nieves pointed his electric scooter east from his father’s farm in Goshen, Mass. and rode 11 hours to Provincetown. A guitar was strapped to his shoulders, and a backpack was wedged between his knees.
“I had to go to my happy place,” he says.
Before long, Nieves was playing saxophone and trumpet for the Dirty Rotten Vipers, a 10-piece jazz band known for its rollicking shows on Commercial Street. Now a Provincetown mainstay, Nieves also brings his own blend of folk, alternative country, and reggae to solo performances in the town’s restaurants and alleyways.
There are some songs he plays every day: “Never Going Back Again” by Fleetwood Mac, “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. “Those are money songs that don’t suck,” he says. “Life’s too short for ‘Wonderwall.’ ”
Nieves spent his childhood in Enid, Oklahoma and his high school years in the Connecticut River Valley town of Greenfield. Though no one in his half Puerto Rican, half Black family played music themselves, Nieves says, he absorbed their R&B, gospel, and hip-hop tracks, recording them on cassette so he could listen on repeat. Trumpet was his first instrument at age 11; guitar, drums, bass, trombone, mandolin, and saxophone followed.
In school, “my band directors would always scream at me to focus on one thing,” Nieves says. “But I wanted to play music so bad in the beginning. And if you understand music theory, then you just have to teach your body to make the note on that instrument.”
When his best friend left for Boy Scout camp every month, Nieves would borrow his sax and apply his trumpet skills to the new mouthpiece. It worked. And he wanted more.
“In eighth grade, I made a bet with one of my friends that I could play cello better than him, even though I’d never played it,” Nieves says. He talked his orchestra director into lending him a cello for the summer, and he persuaded the school to replace his Spanish class with a musical elective. By the fall, he played cello well enough to join the school orchestra.
Fast forward to Memorial Day 2002. 17-year-old Nieves was working at a Greenfield café when two older coworkers learned he had never set foot on the Outer Cape. A late-night bong hit turned into a road trip to Provincetown.
“I brought my guitar and played on Commercial Street,” Nieves says. “A few songs in, I had already made 30 bucks. Everyone was so nice — I didn’t understand it. I made a week’s worth of pay compared to the café.”
For the next six summers, Nieves returned to Provincetown for days at a time, playing guitar at house parties, crashing on couches, and doing his best, he says, to “never spend money.” New friends at Twisted Pizza and Victor Powell’s Workshop gave him free slices and storage space for his instruments.
But Nieves still found it hard to afford housing on the Outer Cape. After living briefly in western Mass., he moved to South America to learn Spanish and Portuguese, spending six years jamming, translating, and teaching English in Argentina and Brazil.
“I needed to take the business out of the art for a second,” Nieves says. “I was constantly playing with people, and my whole idea was to learn, learn, learn, learn.” He sang around blazing campfires. He played trumpet at Machu Picchu. And in January 2020, he took a bus from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Cusco, Peru and met a fellow passenger who lived in Provincetown.
“I ended up running into her in three different cities,” Nieves says. “It was the first time I’d thought about Provincetown in a while, even though it’s probably the happiest place I’ve ever been in the States.”
Back in the U.S. during the pandemic, he decided moving to the Outer Cape was worth another shot. That’s when he left Goshen with little more than a guitar, a folded-up bicycle, and a snowmobile helmet. “The last 10 miles were a blanket of fog, and I had to get gas three or four times,” he says. “I kept meeting people who were like, ‘Where are you going? Man, you look insane right now.’ ”
He told them, “I’m going to P’town.”
Within weeks, Nieves “fell in instantaneous musical love” with local pianist Will Harrington, who founded the Dirty Rotten Vipers in New Orleans in 2023. Nieves now lives on a sailboat in Provincetown and plays “whenever it’s not raining,” a lifestyle made possible, he says, by support from the Grilled Cheese Gallery, Crown & Anchor, and other local venues that support musicians.
Last Monday, Nieves took the stage at the Crown in a floral shirt and checkered shorts. As he tuned his guitar, he showed the audience a transparent geodesic object called the “almighty tip orb.”
Nieves eased into his mellow setlist with “Beautiful World” by Colin Hay, “1979” by the Smashing Pumpkins, and “Look at Miss Ohio” by David Rawlings and Gillian Welch, all of them sung in a gentle croon. Knees swaying, eyes slightly crinkled, he smiled through lyrics that he described as “super sad but super sweet at the same time,” wincing with emotion when he slowed down to hit the high notes.
Nieves closed the first half of his set with a dexterous rendition of a money-song-that-doesn’t-suck, “Never Going Back Again.” It was an apt choice for a musician who plans to stick around.
