The kids in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- the dynamic "youth ghetto" of the moment -- figured out years ago that they had to dream the new world into existence through sculpture, graffiti and music in order to rise above the roar of diesel-spouting delivery trucks speeding down Flushing Avenue. It was about five years ago that I attended my first Happy Birthday Hideaway (HBH, for short), a seemingly never-ending semi-weekly house party in the 'Burg. The drinks were plentiful and cheap, the crowd was young and relatively unpretentious, and on a hot summer night you could climb out the window onto a cast-iron ladder to a roof overflowing with revelers and simply escape your dead-end administrative job, your cramped studio apartment and terminal money woes. Rise above, indeed. My inaugural Happy Birthday Hideaway party was a blur of good weed and heady, g rrrl-chant artpunk emanating from the "stage room" of the house. A deejay spun a cold, German-sounding techno (Autechre?) in someone's bedroom. It was unforgettable. I forgot everything. It was great.
Fast forward to February 2003. Brooklyn's music scene has become the toast of what is left of American independent music. Bands as diverse as the Rapture, Black Dice, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, W.I.T. and A.R.E. Weapons are rediscovering a more innocent time in New York's history when living here involved putting up with blackouts, burglaries and budget crises (that last one sounds familiar...), but, as James Chance said in a recent NY Press interview, you could afford to be creative and not have to hustle two or three jobs just to make rent. Now we've got 9% unemployment (y'all know its more than that), a gaping hole in our cityscape (not to mention our hearts and minds) and a creeping dread that Washington really doesn't give a shit if all of us Northeastern anti-war liberals get dirty-bombed to Buffalo. What's an unemployed artist/musician/writer to do? Get up on stage, plug in the geetars and synths, and dance like Shiva at the HBH, y'all.
From the moment I entered the ground floor doors, I noticed that the HBH had changed for the better. The stairs, roof and walls ascending to the second floor entrance had been "black-box" painted like a theater, so only the angry, red glow of hanging bulbs lit our way up. A scrim of white curtain shrouded the door, with HBH hostess D. in her usual spot to meet and greet all 300 of us. Tonight's feature act was Guitar Wolf, a Japanese, punk rockabilly band with one foot in the Cramps and one in Gene Vincent's motorcycle boots. When we arrived at 11, a still-moving queue was already snaking down to the last step before the sidewalk. We headed straight for the stage room catching sight of a raised bar that had replaced a libation-ladeling card table.
Undoubtedly, the best thing about seeing shows at the HBH is the oneness the band and audience share in the creation of new styles and scenes. The bands know it, too, but in a far more primal sense. The HBH is all about erasing the imaginary wall between audience and performer. Playwright Richard Foreman--a mad genius and fellow New Yorker--goes to the extent of even putting up a plexi "hockey wall" before the stage in his performances to slap viewers in the face with this separation, but the HBH is all about breaking it down.
"Hi, we're X-27. Are y'all ready to DANCE?!?" the lead guitarist shouted leaning forward, panting into the microphone. That particular word "dance"-it seems so foreign to New Yorkers. People don't (or should I say didn't used to) dance at indie rock shows in New York. The movements and instrumental vibrations stayed locked in the stiff legs of so many concertgoers I've seen over the years. Patriot saint James Chance was once known for physically assaulting New York audiences at the Mudd Clubb for not getting up and dancing to such funky shit as his cover of James Brown's "I Feel Good," and I have seen little real dancing (violent slamming doesn't count) in more than a decade's worth of shows around town.
But now, this new (yet old) sound-bass-driven melody, mid-tempo (sometimes programmed) drumbeats, and screeching shards of fractured Fugazi-derived guitar--has us shaking our asses in the BK in nihilistic abandon. X-27-if indeed this is their real name, since many at the HBH are up-and-coming indie bands playing under pseudonyms or collaborative side-projects-are a band to watch judging by audience reaction to them. Kids were pogo-ing like crazy at the word "dance!" It didn't hurt that X-27's female bassist (a bleach blonde punk rock cutie) handled her bass with such gusto and menace that her energy ping-ponged across the stage into the male guitarist's fingertips. A few more years with this lineup and a John Doe - Exene Cervenka - like relationship could bear some truly ripe fruit. There were elements of Gang of Four, Mission of Burma and Wire in X-27's groove, but also a welcome fourth ingredient, Blondie's later taste for the dancefloor rhythms.
Fewer than ten minutes after X-27 left the stage triumphantly, a guy with close-cropped hair and bangs hanging into his eyes in a buttoned-up oxford shirt and shorts walks into the middle of the crowd with a microphone stand while four young women dressed in Miss America-style gowns and sashes take the stage. We had no idea what was happening 'til the gals with a flourish of their hands announce "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Coachwhips!" Then all hell broke loose.
The Coachwhips are apparently a believer in that Lightning Bolt school-of-performance-thought that stages separate people from art. So, they break the frame and let the messy colors splatter onto everyone in earshot. In this case, that meant nearly spilling my beer on myself when the crowd started pogo-ing around the band, which had set up their guitar and drums in the middle of the dancefloor. The noise was poppy, abrasive punk, with garbled, filtered vocals squalling above it. Nothing special, time to go, so we thanked our host and headed down the stairs. They were turning people away from a line now snaking out the door onto the street.
As we left some ice and snowballs rained down us from the roof. Some pranksters thought it was funny to hurl them on unsuspecting innocents below. Then a bottle fell and smashed. Then a pack of firecrackers went off.
Now, D. and her roommates work very hard to run a safe and jerk-free party, but give a monkey a brain...well, you know the rest. Despite the fact that the HBH is in a non-residential part of the 'Burg, cops have a nose for parties (remember the opening seconds of the Replacements "Kids Don't Follow"?) to which they're not invited. No one had to call them. A cruiser was passing just as the Ladyfingers went off and with all those kids on the frozen sidewalk, smoking cigarettes and drinking from hip-flasks, it all spelled "t-r-o-u-b-l-e". By the time my ride showed up, another squad car and an NYPD SUV full of cops in full gear had rolled up. I haven't heard from HBH about any new parties.
Is this the death of one of the longest-running house parties in Williamsburg, one that the Village Voice once even cryptically proclaimed to be so in its "Best of NYC" editions? Are young New Yorkers now reduced to re-populating anonymous bar spaces to find community in these jaw-tightening months ahead? Will everyone wake up from their war-assenting somnambulism? Can the evangelical sounds of Brooklyn rouse us from our slumbers? I can only live in hope.
You Are Free
Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall)
(Matador Records)
As a latecomer to the Chan Marshall wake (it's like a party, ya'll, but everybody's drunk and sad), I am kicking myself for not knowing better than to have picked up this native Southerner's last four longplayers sooner. Hailing from Atlanta, via Memphis (it has been reported but not confirmed) and other points Southern, Marshall (as her nom de plume Cat Power) can make you smile wryly and cry on her new CD "You Are Free", a collection of fourteen songs for acoustic & electric guitar, acoustic piano and drums (on a few). Her songwriting on this new LP is sure to lift the spirits of fans of Joni Mitchell, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and Delta blues masters like John Lee Hooker (whose "Crawlin' Black Spider" she adapts here as "Keep On Runnin'"). It's a bleak and harrowing--yet strangely redemptive path--Chan has apparently walked in the past five year's since she last released a platter of original songs, judging by the stories told.
The album opens with "I Don't Blame You" a lilting, solo acoustic piano number that details a lover's (and fellow musician's) struggles with his craft, the creative process and, presumably, a host of other demons. Here Marshall sounds her most Mitchell-like (think "The Last Time I Saw Richard" from Blue) in her tired, Southern drawl. On this and most of the CDs slower numbers, her pain gives angelic wings to the sometimes morbid topics, like a Flannery O'Connor heroine. "Free" adds perfectly augmented organ to a staccato guitar rhythm, pushing the refrain "don't fall in love with the autograph/just be in love when you sing that song/all night long" into Patti Smith territory. Marshall covers artist Michael Hurley's "Werewolf", crouching in the moonlit shadows, watching her werewolf cry and letting her lupine voice roll out almost like a howl. Australian David Campbell (of the sadcore, violin-driven band Dirty Three) adds a subdued cello to complement in a setting reminiscent of Sting's "Moon Over Bourbon Street" (sans saxophone). Chilling stuff.
Eddie Vedder and Dave Grohl also both add atmosphere to this album on several tracks, though they know better than to overshadow the playing and singing of a young woman with this much talent. Marshall is a musicians' musician and, like many in that category, doesn't play to the tastes of critics or the whims of the audience (her erratic stage behavior -- like that of, say, the Jesus and Mary Chain -- is well-documented) but rather, turns inward to deal with the silenced voices of her childhood on songs like "Names": "Her name was Cheryl/black hair like electric space/ she would pretty paint my face/she was a very good friend/ her father would come to her in the night/ she was a very good friend/she was twelve years old." The piano's notes stumble forward in lost memory, sounding like it was recorded inside a highway waterpipe and on other songs--like "Babydoll"--the dissonant, plaintive pluck of her six-string puts the listener in exactly the uncomfortable place that Marshall wants you to be when hearing these grim tales of drug and child abuse.
However, the lost love(s) Marshall has been chasing in the past five years occupy most of the album's fourteen songs, and she is at her most Southern on songs like "Fool" where the title is used more as a term of endearment than an insult. Drums kick in on the current single (available on selected websites as an mp3) He War with Marshall's amped-up power chords and our favorite Foo Fighter slapping the skins in a martial beat that wouldn't have sounded out of place on an Othar Turner fife-and-drum song (see the opening scene of "Gangs of New York"). Marshall declares, "I never meant to be the needle that broke your back," and immediately has us wrapped up in her angst, shuffling to the story she lays down of love gone bad. "You Are Free" is a powerful record that has a sisterly acquaintance with past masters like Harvey's "Rid of Me" (and even more so, its accompanying EP "Four Track Demos") and will likely end up on the "best of 2003..." lists of many critics (it's on mine). But more importantly, as great blues artists do, "You Are Free" cathartically explores the pain of romantic and familial relationships while revealing the beauty in this pain.