Meeting Steve Van Zandt & Mooning Maxwell's; Too Old For NoID; Internet Jazz
How often does one get to meet Steven Van Zandt and moon Maxwell's from the sun roof of a moving van, all in the same weekend? Answer: Whenever the Greenhornes are in town.
It started at the Mercury on Friday night, where Little Stevie (to whom I dutifully surrendered my Greenhornes CD upon request) stopped by to watch Cincinnati's pride, as Cavestomp!'s Jon Weiss put it, "dumb down the rock so us smart people can understand it." Things got pretty dumb pretty fast, as soon as Greenhornes drummer Patrick "I Can't Explain" Keeler unleashed those octopus arms, and Craig Fox (the only frontman who actually stands a bit off to the side) started screaming over some dirty, dirty riffs. Thereafter, it was all dancin' down front and spittin' beer in the air. One red-haired girl went instinctively into a Mick Jagger chicken strut, and as was indicative of the crowd, a circle quickly formed around her.
On Saturday, Handsome Dick showed the band some New York hospitality. Many fans caravaned over from the Mercury (although "strutter" was no where to be seen); apparently the dudes in the band were absolutely mobbed by young nubiles and scared shitless from the experience. It seems these shy, retiring musicians have the same palpitating effect on today's impressionable hearts as the officers at Meryton did in Austen's time. O, happy combination! With that much sex, sweat and electric guitar in one room, I bet even Dick thought about having a drink.
Thankfully, the band spent the next night playing DC's Black Cat, giving locals time to wring out their panties before hopping the PATH train to Hoboken for the Monday show with Detroit double threat the White Stripes. Greenhornes manager/rock critic/babysitter Todd Abramson met me at the door with another copy of the band's new self-titled LP, adding, "don't go givin' it away to Max Weinberg or somethin'." Luckily there were no members of the E Street band in attendance, although "strutter" made her presence felt early by shouting a request for "I Can Only Give You Everything," which the band has been known to cover on occasion. "Is that a promise?" an alarmingly good-looking man replied from the stage. While he searched the crowd, the strutter, no doubt completely overcome, cowered behind anonymous patrons. Then the Greenhornes, a band who will actually play songs people scream at them, kicked out the jams. After the set, which thanks to the audience's enthusiasm lasted even longer than their previous two, it was apparent to everyone, including Jack White, that this was the best damn bar band in the world?excluding possibly Australia. I myself was so lit I tried to convince guitarist Brian Olive, whose Cherokee name is "Boy with Penetrating Stare," to play my birthday party. He agreed to do it "for weed," but then again, I think he may have been high. Shortly thereafter, Todd came by and told me to "move it along."
The night ended, for me, with mooning the club, although I think the only person who saw was the guy driving the van, whom I'd just met. Hey, not many people would have the presence of mind to accelerate when a naked stranger is on top of their car. I've only done that twice in my life, though I wish the last time hadn't been three days ago (once more around the club, cool van guy). What a weekend. Hey Greenhornes, thanks for givin' NYC a triple shot of that stuff.
Tanya Richardson
I'd never gone to one of my brother's gigs before, but he promised to comp me if I went?so I show up at 11 and find him bouncing inside the ropes. "Daria," he says, "I want you to meet Deborah." Deborah's a reporter from The New York Observer who's trailing my brother around for a story. We smile at each other for about a second before my brother taps me on the shoulder. "I have to go inside for a second?don't say anything stupid." He comes back with our comp tickets, and we sidestep the snaking line of whiteboys calling each other nigga and the little girls dressed up like Denise Rich. "I feel like a pedophile," I tell my friend Lara. And not just me?downstairs at coatcheck, we overhear two guys prepping each other for the big night. "What's the magic phrase?" one guy asks the other. "Statutory rape," they chant in unison.
At 24, we're the oldest women in the place by about eight years. Most of the men, on the other hand, are in their 30s. Lara and I don't even bother. "Well, if they're here, they're not interested in us," she says. The girls are truly beautiful in that way that only 17-year-olds are truly beautiful?sebaceous glands in check, another two years of adolescent skinniness. Little Paris and Nicky Hiltons. These girls already look like their mothers?rich divorcees shopping for Mr. Mogul III?with heavy black eyeliner and bare-back catsuits. Their less-developed friends, girls with braces, hold each other's hands on the way to the bathroom as they readjust their squeaky unformed breasts under their halter tops. Their boyfriends, confronted with this excess of unsupervised sexuality, have no idea what to do. The 30-year-olds lurk hopefully by the bar.
A teenager comes up to me and asks for a light.
"Are you having a good time?" I ask.
"Uh, what?" and he walks away. Another boy passes me on the stairs, assesses my age, looks me up and down and screams: "What are you doing here?"
Then we make our way to the huge stage in the main room. It's always been my dream to do this, and I figure now's my chance: the kids can't dance, and they're too young to be real people, anyway. I start gyrating and pulling boys from their groups of friends to come dance with me. I suddenly notice a group of girls laughing and pointing. They're standing in a row, mimicking my hip motions. Their leader comes up to me.
"We want you to show us how to dance," she says. The bitches!
"No, why don't you show me how to dance? You're so much better at it." Even in high school, I was never good at this game.
"No, you're the master," she gleams.
I stare her down, restraining myself from whining: "This is my brother's party, and he'll throw you out if I tell him to."
But she senses trouble: "Let's go," she nods to the group, and they walk off the stage behind her, taking their men with them. Lara looks at me incredulously. "She hurt your feelings!" I deny it, but then I don't want to dance anymore, and we go back to the room near the bar.
The whiteboys have now cleared a space on the floor and are breakdancing, not badly, actually, as their girlfriends clap politely. The three of us discuss the fact that Black and White was actually pretty astute. But eventually we get bored, so I go outside to ask my brother when Nas is going to show. I can't find him, but as I'm getting harassed by the doorman?"All exits are final"?the kids at the front of the door begin shouting, "Raver, raver, raver," at me with increasing conviction. In a white tennis dress and leg warmers there was no way for them to know that I was aiming, not for raver, but for 80s tennis pro, a daring and even outre look in several fashionable circles. But I was still pissed off.
So I go back downstairs to collect my friends and my coat and get out of there, when a girl with a half-pink head of hair, a ratty dress, sneakers and ripped fishnets shyly looks up at me and tells me she likes my outfit. Back at the coat check, one kid didn't bring enough money for his jacket, so I hand him three dollars.
"Thank you so much, ohmigod, thanks." he says.
The coat-check woman pulls my hand to shake it. "That was nice," she says. She asks us why we're leaving.
"We're too old," we say.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four."
"I'm 26," she says. "You're babies! So go back in there! Have fun!"
But we're out the door as my brother's making deals on his cellphone and is surrounded by what look like bodyguards, and the three of us look for the nearest bar. We find an Irish pub on 7th Ave. "We're safe here," Negin says.
Daria Vaisman
Monday night and the place was nearly packed, though that only meant 20 people in this former laundromat, so narrow that a couple of audience members nearly got rammed by the slide of Steve Swell's trombone as he rocked forward and back, forward and back. But the acoustics are good and the music was driving and forceful, almost assaultive in the small space, yet tempered with a tremendous mellowness. Daniel Carter was, amazingly, equally adept on alto, tenor, flute and trumpet, while Dave Brandt and Tom Abbs set up a pulsating wall of drums and bass. This was completely free improvisation, and if it lacked catchy melodies there were certainly splintered fragments of melody, brought out by one member of the quartet, then taken up by another. Tongued flights of fancy from Carter, bowed groans from Abbs on bass, drones from his tuba and Brandt's quasi-Indian war chant pounding on the tom, all coming together in a kind of kaleidoscopic sound painting.
After the forceful first number the quartet went into a darker, more dirgey improvisation with some muted trumpet toward its end. Although the piece was impressively moody and ominous, the musicians occasionally seemed to be operating almost independently of one another, circling aimlessly. Then Abbs began a repeated, funky riff on tuba and Brandt picked up on it with a rhythmic tapping of mallets on cymbals, and the horns swung, yes, swung into action with delicate cross-rhythms and everything was upbeat and all right again, Carter on tenor with just the perfect hint of vibrato. You could hear the whole history of jazz in their playing, plus something utterly contemporary, down to the very second of the interactions of the musicians and the patrons and the venue on a cold night of a long, cold winter, that special quality of improvised music, the reason why Francis Davis titled a book of his jazz criticism In the Moment.
Yes, there was a lack of showmanship as conventionally defined, as the musicians seemed impervious to the audience except between improvisations and sets. There was a paucity of hooks and riffs, and maybe something esoteric in the head-noddings and exclamations that punctuate the crowd at these free jazz gigs. The overt seriousness of the whole scene can be offputting to some. But how wonderful it is that the scene is here, today, and in the most literal sense accessible, not yet residing only in a collection of stills and recordings, maybe someday the subject of its own documentary.
Eva Neuberg