And we’re off to New York City. NEW YORK CITY??!?!? Yes. New York City. Someday I’m going to have a really cool friend invite me up there for a week and I’ll Live with them and they’ll show me the ways of the rails and I’ll walk around a lot and get a feel for how to feel comfortable in New York City. Not this week though. Today it’s wham bam thank you ma’am… an in n out surgical strike designed to get in, play, feed and get back out again. By midnight we should be over the border and well on our way to our beds / floor space in Pennsylvania.
We’re playing the Living Room. I’ve flirted for years with trying to get a gig there. I’ve had their open mic on my schedule off and on for eight years and whenever it starts looming on my calendar I think that it’ll be easier to do something else. Tonight we’ve been championed by John Platt of “On Your Radar” and Gordon Nash of the Budgiedome, placing us on a coveted stage, and I have high hopes of not failing them. I want to tear the fucking roof off.
I don’t think I’ve ever spotted the Statue of Liberty any closer than this, but managed to snap a shot of her as we were entering the city. She’s smaller than I expected!
Being a musician sure is an interesting career. Just when you think it’s all taking off it has a habit of stalling, and while you’re not looking someone takes notice. For the first time in years we’re throwing caution to the wind regarding our route – rather than skirt the tolls and sidling in from the West, we’re arrowing straight up I-95, aiming straight for the heart. Heather mentions that it’s strange to be reminded that New York is so close to us, but the city doesn’t hold too much mystique to me. It’s just a tense, dense knot of too many people trying to get someplace other than where they currently are…
and so I can count on traffic, pedestrian and car and bicycle and occasional beagle herd. I can count on the GPS spinning like a Bermuda Triangle-bound compass, and of some tense moments thinking “is THAT my turn?! Was THAT my turn?!!?”
I plan to curse most enthusiastically at taxis.
I lied. It’s not that we’re “throwing caution to the wind”. We’re just taking the simplest route – and leaving over two hours of leeway built into our schedule for screwing up.
Which, in hindsight, was perhaps a mistake (the timing, not the cursing). Driving in New York City is a bitch, but parking is doubly so. It’s 11 at night, it’s post gig, we’ve et and we’re on our way to our friend Jade’s place in Pennsylvania. We’ve spent over $20 in tolls and another $15 for parking which could’ve been minimized by optimizing our arrival time. There was a narrow escape with a meter maid who was eyeballing our 3.40pm ticket expiry as I arrived at the car at 3.39pm. I asked people about advice on parking in the area and everyone looks at me like I’m crazy. Indeed – I’m the only person I talk to over the course of the whole night who came in a car, one of the few who even owns one. Heather’s is the only hard shell case in evidence. Everyone else has backpacked their gig bagged guitars and banjos, violins and cajons and basses and accordions.
Eventually, at the advice of the bartender I track down a parking garage that is $1.50 an hour rather than 50 cents every ten minutes (one hour max). We load in, I move the car, we move on.
The gig was fantastic. It was our first full room in New York City, and though that probably had very little to do with US – it had EVERYTHING to do with our New York City patron saints: John and Gordon.
As usual, folk audiences are never quite sure what to make of us – and the other two acts for the evening are certainly much more traditional: PJ Pacifico is nothing short of one of the finest male voices I’ve ever heard Live and Mary Lee Kortes pulls an enjoyable persona of a fictional character from the 30s – but we ARE finding the niche of people who are willing to make that leap out of the folk mainstream and into the ilyPOOL. Indeed, I almost thinking that with some of the crowd it’s becoming kind of cool to like us – that we’re almost a bit subversive – with all of the mystique and appeal that comes with that.
For a musician who is generally the only guy not drinking at the party – for a rockstar that DOESN’T have a girl in every town, has only been drunk once, and doesn’t have any sort of drug habit more serious than morning coffee, it could be kind of AWESOME to be the bad boy!
Eh. I’ll keep dreaming. The only subversion I’m REALLY committing is not bringing a wooden instrument.
At the show we spotted a bunch of familiar faces. We got to hang out with our friend Bambi (originally from NC), Bruce (originally from MD) and Karyn Oliver (originally from Boring) – all now happy New Yorkers. We saw a number of people who we’d met at Falcon Ridge – it was SUCH a change from our last New York City experience, playing to three of Kristen’s old friends and the two trapped people who’d wandered in for coffee. Nope – the Living Room really Lived up to its hype with a great audience and great sound.
But, enough about that, let’s talk about wardrobe. I don’t often put TOO much thought into what I’m going to wear for the day. I’m pretty much a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy, and though there’s a certain amount of logic to WHICH t-shirt, generally I like everything I own and, with rare exception, am perfectly happy to wear anything in my closet. (the exceptions being: the John Darnielle and Van Halen shirts with the word “fuck” on them, the biker festival shirt with the Confederate flag on it, the octopus shirt from Kristen because it’s white and kind of makes me look fat, the tie-dye shirt from JP Hops in Texas for similar reasons, the Dune shirt from my father because it’s ultra-thin and always makes my nipples stand proud AND the shirt from the Beehive in Pittsburgh that has a half-naked chick on it)…
Okay, actually – that’s a fair number of shirts that rarely find themselves on my body outside of the privacy of my own home – but today’s choice was a rarity in my “folk venue” wardrobe: t’was my Adult Swim Mooninites t-shirt. I wore it because… well… maybe I AM a bit subversive… I wore it because the guerilla ad campaign with a neon light version of the characters got pulled out of the Holland Tunnel after being mistaken for a bomb – and there was a big legal blow-up and Inignot and Er are KIND of acknowledged as terrorist threats.
I had to represent.
It only made it better that another scrap of that campaign still survives around the corner from the venue we played – a big graffiti mural of a Squidbillies character. Hee!
And what’s the best part about the shirt? Almost no-one recognized it. The only person who DID, and who commented on it, was the fiddler for the first act who also HAPPENED to be the violinist who tours with the Indigo Girls. As we passed on stage she looked at me and said “I hope you can see this. I’m doing it as hard as I possibly can.”
Great show. Played to a great audience. Actually made a PROFIT in NYC. Had a great dinner at world-famous (from “When Harry Met Sally”) Katz’ Deli…. but THAT was what made my night!
