Strapping Fieldhands w/Escape By Ostrich, Harpoon Forever, Aaron Rosenblum
Ding Dong Lounge
Saturday, July 28

Better than: Being in the maze.

There aren't many people actively watching the bands at the Ding Dong Lounge on Saturday night, though the music doesn't get ignored either. In one part of the room, a bachelorette party proceeds with proper drunkenness and high fives. Elsewhere, patrons shoot pool. The tabletop Galaga/Ms. Pac-Man twofer sees some action. And a few dozen people stand in a loose arc around the small stage watching subterranean rock lifers and future-lifers go through their Saturday night paces. If the audience makes up the majority of the people in the Upper West Side bar, it's only by a slim margin, but it's a small bar. But it is also totally not depressing, despite the lack of spectacle or even raucousness on the part of the bands or crowd. Each faction in the bar seems in rare and perfect harmony with the others.

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Xeno and Oaklander, Guardian Alien, Black Jeans, Uumans
You Are Here at Secret Project Robot
Friday, July 27

Better than: A shvitz.

There are probably better times than mid-summer to build a massive maze installation in an un-airconditioned DIY venue. Nothing disproves this theory on a throbbingly humid Friday in Bushwick at the cheekily titled You Are Here, a month-long happening in the boxy multi-use confines of Secret Project Robot. Nearly as soon as omnipresent psych-jammers Guardian Alien start, one can feel the humidity begin to gather. The band members are spread out throughout the room and—though the plywood-frame-strung-with-taut-ribbon maze walls are see-through—the mood turns claustrophobic almost instantly.

The previous act had been Russell Butler (a.k.a. Black Jeans), a San Francisco-based solo synth dude with a basso voice and dreadlocks. It had been oppressively hot in the room then, too, Butler's undulating bleep-beats seemingly pinned down by the air. But Guardian Alien, led by drummer Greg Fox, are five strong, and each body exerts itself and destabilizes the heat-balance even further—all the more so when Fox wraps up his gong invocation and crashes the band through a double-kick-pedal-driven noise-wall. Metaphoric, of course. It's almost impossible not to feel trapped. Guardian Alien's pummeled drones don't provide the release they do under other circumstances, but they're not supposed to. Escape isn't an option. A thermometer near the venue's front door reads well into the 90s. All five musicians lean into their instruments at full force, singer Alex Drewchin contributing with a guitar of her own and an array of pedals and noisemakers.

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Dirty Dancing w/Vaz, Prince Rama, Telepathe
McCarren Park basketball court
Wednesday, July 25

Better than: Watching at home.

Somebody finally figured out how to get people to show up and sit through opening bands: just make the headlining act a free outdoor screening of a beloved movie. "I see a couple of new faces in the crowd," Vaz guitarist Paul Erickson remarked early in their set, the McCarren Park basketball court already filled with a not-insigificant amount of people staking down blankets and chairs for the sundown showing of Dirty Dancing. The trio leaned into their instruments—two guitars and a drum set—delivering Sonic Youthy, ecstatic-sludgey, brainy, thrashy rockisms that were probably pretty awesome. But it was also rather hard to tell. As is tradition, the opening acts were also mixed at a far lower volume than the headliner.

At a precarious time when any L-train passenger might spontaneously combust into a @NYTOnIt-lambasted trend piece, the decision to have local promoter Todd P. book music for Summerscreen's weekly series in Williamsburg is a profoundly sane one. After all, he's already been in many a trend piece for his ambitious DIY repurposing of spaces into concert venues. By that standard, his Summerscreen bookings in a major public park might be his most legit venture ever, but possibly also his most bare bones. A performance on the blacktop of a basketball court in the blasting sun of a July evening, through a tiny PA at a vastly reduced volume and without a stage, is probably not the best place and method for a band to get themselves across to even a captive audience. Plus—at least during Vaz's set—the PA kept crapping out.

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Phish
Jones Beach Theater
Wednesday, July 4

Better than: Putting the freak flag in permanent cold storage.

"Goddard College!" Phish leader Trey Anastasio called out between verses during "Alumni Blues," the band's opening number at Jones Beach on Wednesday night, a rare onstage shout-out to the band's Vermont alma mater. Anastasio wrote the doofy blues-funk number around the time he transferred into Goddard in the mid-1980s, a school with self-structured curriculums that make Hampshire look comparatively square. The band members threw themselves into their obsessions, studiously following their curiosities through jazz, fugues, classic rock, improvised music, and intense practice routines, absorbing the idyllic weirdness of the place as they formed their identity. In a sense, Goddard thusly became the spiritual alma mater for pretty much every jam band formed in the past 20 years. Nobody to blame or credit but the wonders of progressive liberal education.

Wednesday night, during the second of two sold-out shows at Jones Beach, the Vermont quartet celebrated the birth of the nation during a pleasant evening at Robert Moses's cement and sandstone jewel, but mostly showed why they're Goddard's most distinguished alums (give or take David Mamet). Long before it became fashionable to hate Phish—or even to like them—the band was blessed with a profound and palpable outsiderness, which they channeled into their music and made a successful career. This outsiderness keeps away many and draws others defiantly close. During the two set, three-hour show, the band did almost nothing to invite in the former, plenty to please the latter (plenty to confound them, too), and continued their decades-long battle with whether or not to let their freak flags fly. Sometimes, they flew.

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Matthew Salacuse

WFMU DJ, music journalist and frequent Voice contributor Jesse Jarnow has just released Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo and the Rise of Indie Rock (Gotham), a voluminous tome that dissects Hoboken's finest Amerindie pioneers' journey from their childhood beginnings all the way to their current place as ageless innovators.

Big Day Coming isn't just distinguished from the rest of the rock-bio pack by Jarnow's bottomless pit of Yo La Tengo expertise; his book also delves into a comprehensive history of the beloved Hoboken rock club/restaurant Maxwell's. YLT's husband/wife team, guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley, played their very first show there, and the venue plays host to their storied Hanukkah shows.

Sound of the City caught up with Jarnow to talk about how he came to discover his favorite band and, eventually, to write Big Day Coming.

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Akron/Family w/Stagnant Pools
Brooklyn Bowl
Friday, June 29

Better than: Fancy pants.

There's more than one way for a band to work a room, of course, but not all of those apply to playing in a bowling alley, and even fewer to the jeweled pleasure palace of Brooklyn Bowl, glowing proudly on the Williamsburg gold coast. For Akron/Family, innocent beardos weaned at the tail end of the neighborhood's previous epoch, their Friday night free show was a trip into the heart of the new Brooklyn. Over the lanes and below the bowling scores, shots of the band alternated with videos of perfectly coiffed denim models pouting in faux super-8, every now and again subtly reminding concertgoers that the show's price was brought to you (YOU!) by the graces of Ralph Lauren's Denim & Supply. As the band started their set with a sequence of quiet far-out folk numbers with hushed gang harmonies, bowling pins clattered like... bowling pins.

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The Ominous Seapods.

Through a series of maybe not-so-unfortunate events, I was a teenage jam band scenester, which, when properly italicized and luridly capitalized, sounds like a sordid music-crit version of a '50s exploitation paperback. But the truth is, I wasn't seduced by drugs, sex, or anything else until college.

There was a thriving local ska circuit on Long Island, where I grew up, and I went to a clutch of gigs at church rec centers and the occasional all-ages night hosted by the local metal club, The Roxy. But ska didn't offer what I wanted. Richard Brooks, the leader of local heroes the Scofflaws, was a bus driver at our high school, and I appreciated his obvious punkness. But getting out of my hometown was a priority. Despite being a b-side collecting fan of Nirvana and, through them, Sonic Youth, Mudhoney, and a few others, underground music in 1993 paradoxically seemed like something that you saw on television, not participated in yourself.

The jam band world was the first music community I had access to. As a suburban computer kid, I got online as quickly as I could, and found that Deadheads had the pre-WWW 1993-era internet well-colonized. I eventually made my way to Larry Bloch's Wetlands Preserve, the magically handmade club in pre-gentrified TriBeCa where somehow my pitiful fake high school ID that said I was 18 got me in the door. Not that I was trying to drink; I was there for the music, maaaaaaaaan. The idea of improvisation—something "new" every time—was throughly mindblowing to me, and the Grateful Dead seemed far more approachable (and fun) than, say, Miles Davis. But, inside Wetlands, I found a pretty complete world. There was a VW bus parked by the door, housing an environmental activism center (like, actual hang-off-buildings/throw-blood-on-fur-wearers activists); a wrap-around mural of a pastoral festival scene; hippie-built nooks; black lights; and a benevolently foreboding basement lounge. There was also a radically open-minded booking policy that included hardcore matinees, Allen Ginsberg readings, grrl-folk (including Ani DiFranco's first NYC appearance), and lots other surprises. Of course, I knew none of that then.

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Benjamin Lozovsky

Grimes plays Shea Stadium during CMJ 2011.

In New York's chaotic do-it-yourself music ecosystem, nothing is a given. A venue might combust as suddenly as easily a new one might spring up, making this list obsolete—yet that volatility is part of the venues' inherent uncivilized appeal. Who's to say where the next bunch of longhairs might lay stakes? Which nearest faraway subway stop will next be colonized for bands to play in their natural habitats without VIPs, bottle service, pre-sales, comically overpriced booze, or grown-ups? You might wake up hungover from cheap beer and smelling like cigarettes after a night at one of these venues, but you probably won't be wanting for loud music and warm feelings of New Yorkiness.

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"There are things in my life that no one can understand except Aaron," Mickey Melchiondo noted of his bandmate Aaron Freeman in 2007, when they—as Dean and Gene Ween—put out their last album, La Cucaracha. "We kind of have a parallel life. We went through everything together: junior high school, being broke, getting evicted, meeting our wives and ex-wives, having kids. We make, penny-for-penny, the same income, because we don't do anything other than the band. He's like my brother. And a lot of getting this record together was getting back to that. But there are other things where I can talk to anyone but Aaron."

Apparently, the same is true of Freeman, who perhaps accidentally announced Ween's breakup in an interview with Rolling Stone. "This is news to me," Melchiondo wrote on Facebook, "all I can say for now, I guess." Perhaps it's all a horrible mistake, something to be talked out as only two old friends can.

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The Beach Boys
Beacon Theater
Wednesday, May 9

Better than: You were almost definitely expecting.

Yes, John Stamos introduced them. And, yeah, they filed onstage, called out one by one by their bandleader in true showbiz style while the backing musicians—twice as many as original members—struck up a tasty groove. But then, there they are, the Beach Boys. "For fifty generations they are still going strong," Stamos says during the intro, a tongue slip, but it makes more sense with the sight of Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston. All around 70, theirs are faces that seem to have occupied vast tracts of time—'60s sunshine, '70s implosion, '80s chintz, '90s wilderness730151;and somehow survived into the second decade of the 21st century to arrive at the Beacon Theater for two shows this week. To point out that they are grandparents many times over is besides the point, which is that they're the Beach Boys.

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