No Context

By Zach Baron

“It touched my heart. It touched my soul.” My Morning Jacket’s Jim James was the first performer at Sunday night’s “Revenge of the Book Eaters” to mention 826NYC, the nonprofit tutoring organization for which “Book Eaters” was a benefit. But if earlier acts failed to mention the reason they were there, their behavior – relaxed, corny; “adult contemporary night here at the Beacon,” said Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew – betrayed it anyway. As Jon Dolan once wrote in these pages, “the vissitudes of Meaning” are a problem for these bands, the honest-indie-falsetto set, because where they’re from (the left, the middle class, Canada), they were taught Meaning was their burden.

No shortage of it at the Beacon Theater though: a benefit for a writing skills tutoring agency whose doors are open free of charge to any student in the city, staffed and funded by Dave Eggers and cash floating loose from the McSweeney’s publishing concern, staged amidst tiers at the Beacon Theater. Call it a night off for “Book Eaters” roster – Feist, Britt Daniel, A.C. Newman, Jim James, Grizzly Bear, This American Life’s Sarah Vowell, and host Demetri Martin – because for once none of them had to wonder if they were doing the right thing in the right town at the right time.

Neither did anyone in the audience—an explanation maybe for the enraptured cheers that rained down on the acts between songs. The joke – there were a lot of jokes – subtitle for the event read: “A show that reminds you of the eternal question: Words or Music—which is better?” Neither won; say what you will about the Believer, McSweeneys, Eggers, 826NYC (and 826LA), but these are people who fully recognize the equal validity and blurry edges among the comic art, visual art, fiction, nonfiction, film, video, music, etc they cover. If anything their tastes run too literate: what the Beacon could have maybe used was a bit less culture, not still more of it.

When Grizzly Bear stretched it out they covered “Graceland”; the only song I caught by the opening act (A.C. Newman?) was a King Missile cover of “a love song about being devoured by wolves”; Jim James’ gesture at discord was to shrug at his Christian rep: “Some people think this song is about god, but it’s not.” Then again, you also forget there’s a subspecies of rock bands whose singers can really sing. James is the most demonstrative about it – it’s what’s got My Morning Jacket their rep as live gods, I think; never seen em – but, for instance, Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor is so undemonstrative with his own falsetto that you could spend their whole set wondering where that impossibly high-pitched noise was coming from.

One possible explanation here for the whole Feist=Starbuck equation, which I admit to being way more familiar with than any of her albums: a), charisma, which she has, e.g. her charming reading of a couple stories from the 826 program, and b) the very specific manner in which she sings, which at Beacon took the form of a kind of icy enunciation that seemed to exist in a small pocket of space she drew around herself for the occasion. If nothing else her music has the illusion of intimacy, and what moves product quicker than that?

Sitting down in the upper deck, the action below was more vaudeville or variety show than club thing—amazing how the introduction of the slightest difference in occasion and tone makes all kinds of performers regular people again. At the end, Demetri Martin called all the bands back onstage for a “we-are-the-world, but without a song” encore, and no one even tried to bow.

We asked for a comment from Little Steven Van Zandt about Hilly Kristal's death and here's what we got back:

Losing CBGB meant it was only a matter of time before Hilly followed.

It was his whole life.

He created the space to allow Indie Rock, Pop Art Rock, and Punk to be born.

There would be no Ramones without Hilly Kristal. And who would want to live in a world without them?

He loved this city and in the end, the city spit in his face.

CBGB was a tragic loss New York will never recover from and maybe its better Hilly doesn’t have to watch the town that invented personality slowly turn into the Mall of America.

Rock and Roll will miss him.

And a statement from Handsome Dick posted on the Dictators site:

photo by Tricia Romano

The light has gone out of the Bowery.

CBGB founder Hilly Kristal died yesterday. Somewhere, electric violins are playing.

When CBGB closed this past October, Lenny Kaye remembered in the Voice:

Japanther on July 4, photo by Rebecca Smeyne

Getting tossed into that "experimental" genre dumpster often implies an act's insufferable seriousness, which is likely one of the reasons Brooklyn's lo-fi loft-space duo Japanther most often get thrown into the nebulous "noise" bin. It's not like they haven't the feigned art-world legitimacy of the "experimental" tag—they once composed a live puppet opera that later ended up as the basis of a video piece in last year's Whitney Biennial—but they also have a sense of humor. As in: their fist-pumping singalong, "River Phoenix." As in: they once bashed out this Young Indy ode while synchronized swimmers calling themselves Aquadoom splash-kicked in time with the beat.

As in: a performance piece with an animatronic dinosaur. . . voiced by anarcho-punk Penny Rimbaud?

PS122's fall calendar knows more:

William Bowers's work shows up on SOTC every Tuesday once a week. Read all his previous columns here.

"Did anyone see us open for 1990s on August 2nd at The Annex? How were we, really?"
'photo by marc nolte'

Provincializm: Let's Get Protean (or, Still An A.R.T. Fag)

Identity, schmidentity: projecting a coherent self is overrated, and probably, for those who can pull it off, the result of a dishonest performance. Anyone who has suffered under the hard bigotry of high expectations knows what a total bum-out it is to one’s American freedom to have some acquaintance, friend, lover, or fan crave consistency from you, pretending that contemporary Western personhood involves more than blood sugar, preadolescent trauma, central air, and matte effect texture gel. This week, between praying that a certain Winehouse doesn’t end up in the doomed-lover-archetype bracket (with Sid, Nancy, Romeo, Juliet et al) and pantomiming Greco-truckstop tragedies to that new Magnolia Electric Company box set, I’ve been compiling a register of those arbitrary music-crit charges used too often to unchristen bands, scrutiny-tics that the crit haphazardly employs so as to earn his/her (for some reason, usually his) laundry change by appearing to have made a trenchant, circumspect, epoch-straddling Point. One of the premiere roulette criticisms is to accuse an act of not establishing an identity, though any band with a peggable sound (such as Interpol, or Interpol) will later be ho-humly pilloried for “not evolving,” unless they dabble with newish ornamentation enough to get cited for taking an “ambitious misstep,” and so on.

Here's another SOTC dispatch from Everett True, publisher of Plan B. Read all his Sound of the City columns here.

photo by Cami D

. . . and Kisses

This week: Attention shifts to a meticulous German independent label

Or there would be no This Is Next, Volume 2.

Hilary Duff
August 27, 2007
Radio City Music Hall
By Ben Westhoff

Fresh off her Maxim cover shoot, Hilary Duff challenged her audience last night at Radio City Music Hall by playing songs written decades before some of them were born. Her hit Go-Go’s remake “Our Lips Are Sealed” and cover of Pat Benatar’s “Love Is A Battlefield,” for example, were clearly pandering to the parents in attendance.

You would pander to parents, too, if they were responsible for driving your fans home. Glow-stick bearing teens, pre-teens and kids as young as four, mostly perched atop dad’s shoulders or in mom’s arms, dominated the sold-out show. All girls, of course. At one point they closed a men’s bathroom, to men, so the little ladies could tinkle. I felt like a straight woman in one of those hard-bodied gay clubs.

Heavy Trash, "the late night bar band of your dreams," have a couple of upcoming New York dates. Quick refresher. "Heavy Trash have caught me unawares: channelling the humour and hoodoo groove of The Cramps and the Gories, dipping way back in time for the dangerous lilt of Gene Vincent’s ‘Cat Man’ and Link Wray’s twangin’ six-string, borrowing a lick or two from Eddie Cochran, swaggering their way through 12 songs of cutthroat romance and crocodile tears..."

Saturday, 09/08/07, Howl Festival @ Tompkins Square Park, free show, 2pm
Friday, 09/21/07, Luna Lounge, tickets on sale here.

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Heavy Trash, "Pork Chop"