Lucid Culture

They’ve been sort of the opening act du jour on the

country circuit, opening for Merle and Willie Nelson

and Jerry Lee, et al.. If this is an attempt to get some

notice from the retro country crowd, it ought to work.

Hell, this ought to get them on the Grand Old Opry, if

they don’t mind songs about cocaine at the Ryman

Auditorium

The Jack Grace Band’s last album I Like It Wrong put

in some serious overtime on some of the better

jukeboxes across the counry. In fact, you could say

that it was the party album of the summer of 2004,

Suffused in booze and tested live on crowds of drunks

in dives all over town, those songs were every smart

party animal’s alternative to Jimmy Buffett. It may

therefore come as some surprise  that the new album by

the Jack Grace Band is an attempt to - gasp - make a

serious record. I say record because the cd is divided

into a distinct side 1 and side 2. A concept album, no

less, complete with little instrumental fragments

separating the songs, and something of a central,

unifying theme. The most surprising thing about it is

that it actually works. Tight, focused, thoughtfully

conceived, in other words, everything Grace’s previous

work was NOT. Which ironically was always his saving

grace - the band may have been a little loose, the

whiskey may have run rivers but you always knew that

if you went to see these guys live you would have a

good time. While it doesn’t look like anybody left the

bar for very long to make this album, it’s a hundred

eighty degrees from what you might expect after

hearing the last one. Is it possible that Grace has

actually matured?

The Martini Cowboy is packed with haunting, gorgeously

old–fashioned, 1960s style country songs with tasteful

electric guitar, soaring pedal steel, piano and a

rhythm section that swings like the dickens. You can

dance to this stuff more than you can Grace’s older

stuff. Because ultimately that’s why honkytonks exist:

where else can you squeeze your cheatin’ lover against

the jukebox and sway to the strains of Merle Haggard?

Who happens to be exactly who the first song, the

album’s title track, evokes. Straight up. When he’s on

top of his game Jack Grace’s songs sound like country

classics from 40 or 50 years ago. The cd’s second song

Broken Man continues in a purist vein, driven by Jon

Dryden’s beautiful, incisively minimal honkytonk piano

“I’m not gonna go out there tonight,” swears the

Martini Cowboy. He’s been burned too many times. Which

leads perfectly into the next song, Cry, a sexy bossa

beat and groovalicious bass player Daria Grace’s

bop-bop backing vocals only momentarily distracting

from its eerie minor-key drive and bitter lyrics. When

after a surprisingly jaunty, jazzy guitar solo the

thing stumbles out of its groove and literally falls

apart, the effect is nothing short of heartbreaking.

The album’s next track Trying to Get Away from Nothing

at All zooms in on our protagonist trying to pull

himself away from the brink. It’s a showcase for

Grace’s voice, a big, Johnny Cash style baritone that

can handle the over-the-top whiskey-drinking anthems

and the dark, disturbing ballads with equal aplomb.

After that song, we get Sugarbear, another  minor-key

Waits-esque number with ambient steel guitar, and

Rotary Phone, arguably the album’s best song , a

haunting, skeletal minor-key blues: “Let me tell a

story about the way it used to be/With a rotary phone

don’t leave a message for me/You’re gonna be an old

man too…”

The last song of the “A side”, What I Drink and Who I

Meet at the Track (Is My Business) is completely

self-explanatory - it’s one of those songs that

someone should have written long ago, and that it took

this long before someone did is a mystery. It’s a good

thing that it was this guy who wrote it and not Neil

Sedaka. I mean, can you imagine Neil Sedaka at the

track? No, you can’t. He’d get killed before he got to

the stands.

The “B side” begins with Uncle Luther. By now, the

Martini Cowboy has fallen in love. His Uncle Luther is

moving back to the shack he hasn’t lived in for ten

years and the Martini Cowboy has to get out. But

that’s not what’s bugging him. It’s that he can’t stop

thinking about her. Yeah, her, and it scares the hell

out of him. The following tune, Verge of Happiness is

so George Jones it’s not funny, in fact it’s scary,

right down to the vocals. Nobody ever did desperate,

lost love songs better than Jones, anyway, so it makes

sense. Happy in the Fall continues in the No Show

Jones vein  “I’m happy in the fall, but I don’t like

the landing,” Grace muses ruefully as the band swings

behind him. The album’s climactic track, Something to

Look Forward To - where the guy finally gets the girl

- is a bit of a letdown. Like at the end of Siddhartha

when the guy finally gets to India and all he finds

is…OMMMMM (hey, this is a serious album, I’m

trying to be serious about this).The cd concludes with a

real old-timey number called Spike Down, which sounds

like an electrified version of some obscure 19th

century folk blues.

There’s not a weak song on this album - which is more

impressive than you think. Hell, even Sergeant Pepper

had that stupid, phony raga tune that Harrison sang.

And Merle Haggard’s greatest hits albums all seem to

have those horrid pro-Vietnam War ditties he wrote

before he woke up and smelled the coffee. So the

Martini Cowboy’s in pretty good company. If this

doesn’t get him the big record deal (memo to the band

- WATCH YOUR BACK), Jack Grace can always fall back on

his side project Van Hayride, which plays country

covers of Van Halen songs. I’m not making this up. Not

a word.

This cd and Grace’s others are available at shows and online,

http://www.jackgrace.com

Jack Grace plays the Ear Inn, way west on Spring St. at midnight on May 14

Dobson, a jazz/pop singer who’s now playing guitar as well, has become one of the few NYC artists to get any press in the NY Times, and she’s earned it: she’s what Norah Jones should aspire to be in a couple of years. Dobson has paid her dues playing small clubs over the past several years and sings in a lower register than Jones, but still invites the inevitable Norah comparisons since she’s moved away from jazz toward a more pop style. Her stage persona is more confident, more world-weary and decidedly more mature, perhaps appropriately so. She has a fondness for minor keys and rhythms like bossa nova and  tango which are well suited to her sultry delivery. Now if only she could stick to doing her own, surprisingly compelling original material instead of covering the likes of hacks like Richard Julian (who duetted with her on one of his songs and added absolutely nothing: to paraphrase Billy Preston, nothing plus nothing makes nothing).

Van Hayride, the headline act, shares a rhythm section with Dobson, the only conceivable reason (other than careless booking) for them to have followed on the bill: But segue or no segue, they were tremendous, and had the audience in hysterics throughout their completely over-the-top set. Van Hayride features the hardest working man in country music, Jack Grace as frontman plus the piano player from his country band along with guitarist Steve Antonakos (what NYC band is this guy NOT in???), doing country covers of Van Halen songs. These guys are smart: they know that 99% of heavy metal is comedy, and that Van Halen were its finest Borscht Belt practitioners. Grace does a spot-on David Lee Roth parody: during one song, he lay on the floor, the mic just out of his reach, as if so wasted that he lacked the eye/hand coordination to reach out and grab it. “Where’s my mic tech,” he growled. On another song, he slumped backwards against the drum kit, his head up against the kick drum. He put the mic everywhere but where it should be, and made  his bandmates  laugh to the point where they were screwing up. Which is all part of the act. Van Hayride is a thorough reminder of A) how moronic Van Halen’s lyrics were, B) how even stupider Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing was and C) how absolutely necessary Van Hayride is. And it’s a good thing it’s these guys doing it. Grace is the consummate showman, whether fronting this unit or his own far more serious yet still gutbustingly funny band, and he’s never lacked for excellent players behind him. Antonakos plays Eddie Van Halen’s lines pretty much note for note, albeit without the fuzzy distortion or garish flourishes.  Van Hayride are in a four-way tie for funniest New York band, along with Tammy Faye Starlite in all her many incarnations; cover band hellions Rawles Balls, whose most recent shows have turned into bacchanalian karaoke sessions; and Cocktail Angst, the Spinal Tap of lounge bands.

To fully appreciate Van Hayride, it helps to know the source material (Doug Henwood, I know you’re out there): there’s a certain target audience here, specifically those who were subjected to the stuff on FM radio in the early 80s (Van Hayride proudly declares that they’re a “David Lee Roth only” Van Halen cover band). But judging from the response of the crowd in the club – a broad cross-section of ages and locales – you don’t have to be a Van Halen fan (or hater) to get a kick out of this. Next time they play, you might as well jump (:”So that’s what the song’s about?” Grace asked quizzically as they reached the end). Van Hayride plays every Sunday in May at 10 at Banjo Jim’s.

Knowing what time the bands start at this semi-annual outdoor deepfried food festival is always a crapshoot: the schedule on the festival’s official website didn’t gybe with stagetimes the day of the show. Reportedly this is par for course. Word on the street was that Demolition String Band’s 1 PM set was excellent. Hazmat Modine took the stage at just a little after two, looking like they’d just crawled out of bed, the lot of them (and there are a lot of them: two harmonicas, trumpet, bari sax, a rhythm section with a tuba substituting for bass, and two guitarists who traded off on lapsteel and banjitar). Confined to a set that ran just over 45 minutes, there was a minimum of the expansive, frequently exhilarating soloing that they’re best known for. Instead, they worked on squeezing in as many songs as they could from their wildly psychedelic new cd Bahamut along with some road-tested crowd-pleasers. They opened with the exuberant So Glad, frontman Wade Schuman and his sparring partner, Randy Weinstein trading bluesy harmonica licks over a bouncing reggae beat. Later they did a spirited cover of the Irving Berlin novelty tune Walking Stick: while it’s easy to see this song becoming totally Sesame Street (perhaps as its creator intended it), Schuman worked the lyric’s innuendo for all it was worth. Trumpeter Pam Fleming stole the show as usual with a flamenco-flavored solo, particularly apt since the song is basically a tango. When her 12 bars were up, she paused for a second, gave a quick look to the band as if to say, “look out!” and then launched the song into the stratosphere with one of her trademark crescendos.

Though Schuman looked sleepy and wasn’t nearly as boisterous as he usually is in front of the band, he had no difficulty getting the crowd hollering, with a long, James Cotton-inflected harmonica solo that he took by himself as the band looked on, singing through the reeds as does from time to time. He also added some unusual textures by playing through a wah-wah pedal on a couple of songs. The band wound up the set with an especially terse version of the title track from the new cd, a calypso-flavored behemoth about “the largest thing that never existed,” which seems to be some kind of Borges reference. The crowd didn’t want them to leave: perhaps because Hoboken is replete with blues cover bands, this exposure to something far more authentically blues-based went over particularly well.

Afterward on the Sixth Street stage, local guitarist Karyn Kuhl and her mostly female backing band stomped through a painlessly formulaic set of punky pop with cheerleaderesque vocals and forgettable lyrics. Their best song was a minor-key blues that Kuhl said they’d never played live before.

Back to the main stage where Dr. John was headlining. He’s a hot-and-cold performer: when the mood strikes him, especially in a small club, he can be electrifying, but he’s just as likely to take the money and phone it in, especially at an outdoor festival. Happily, the Night Tripper was in a particularly dark and stormy mood, the result being a fiery, impassioned, hourlong show. Before launching into the two-part post-Katrina salute to his hometown, Sweet Home New Orleans, he berated the audience to give their money only to smallscale charities: “With the big ones, the money disappears before it gets there.” A bit later he did a bristling, impressively fresh take on the old standard St. James Infirmary Blues that he ended by pounding out the opening hook from the famous Grieg A Minor prelude.

“We call ourselves Dr. John and the Lower 9/11th,” he told the crowd. He posed the rhetorical question of why they’d continue to dwell on something the rest of the world has pretty much forgotten: we’re tough customers, he said: “We carry a grudge.” This was still a party (it’s always a party when the Doctor is in town), but a defiant celebration delivered in minor keys. No Iko Iko: we got Gris-Gris instead and it was clear that Mr. Rebennac felt like he wanted to hoodoo someone. At the end of the show they lightened up a bit, the drummer showing off his collection of funk beats before bringing Dr. John back to the stage for the encores.

 Despite a degree of disorganization, the Hoboken Arts & Music Festival always has somefirst-rate performers on the bill: the Moonlighters, Patti Smith, Mary Lee’s Corvette and Laura Cantrell have all recently played there, and it’s safe to say that this fall’s lineup should be a good one.

Guitar-slinging southpaw siren who made her mark here in New York before finding acclaim and a prestige niche in the fashion world, then moving out to Indiana to start a family. She remains a potent force in rock. This album, her fourth, may or may not be her best: the jangly Heliotrope, the lush, sensual Action Hero Superstar or the self-titled power pop tour de force that she put out after that one all have their moments. This is her most diverse effort to date, showcasing her redoubtable pop melodicism, political fortitude, keen sense of humor and even a goofy psychedelic side. It’s a loosely thematic collection of songs about conflict.

The cd opens with a deadpan, Lilith Fair style take on the 80s karaoke/action film chestnut Eye of the Tiger. It’s hard to tell whether this is a joke – Nuss is known for her wit – or if it’s an attempt to mine some genuine feeling or pathos from the song. Either way, it’s hilarious.  Featuring a deliciously terse electric piano solo, the cd’s following cut, Saboteurs is a fiery, garage-inflected minor key broadside at toxic people: “Sometimes it seems that they’re the only ones around.” The next tune Landscape, with its swinging retro 60s piano melody and whispery vocals, sounds like classic Mamas & the Papas. We also get a blistering critique of all things zeros, cast as a hard-hitting early 80s new wave/punk hit (What’s Wrong With Me); a sunny, Farfisa-driven Carnaby Street-style 60s pop hit (Mermaid); a girl-power anthem (Sex Is Sex); the anguished tale of a Vietnam vet (Shell Shocked) and Drive, which is simply one of the sexiest songs ever written, this version far more sensual than the faster, percussive version that appeared on her previous album.

As usual, Nuss has a stellar cast of backing musicians, perhaps most notably bass goddess Ann-Marie Stehn, late of Skinny Ruth and notorious Starbucks house band Antigone Rising (who deep-sixed her because she was too much of a rocker). Fans of the A-list of rock sirens: Neko Case, Mary Lee Kortes, Erica Smith, Aimee Mann – will find plenty to feast on here. Leslie Nuss doesn’t play many shows in NYC anymore, but a return trip every now and then is always a possibility. peep the website for info, http://www.leslienuss.com. This cd is available at shows and online at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/nuss4

The best cd of 2006 was the one I didn’t review last year. No great surprise – always behind the eightball half the time. This is the concluding chapter of Wynn’s “desert trilogy” that began with 2001’s volcanic tour de force Here Come the Miracles, followed by the erratic but frequently brilliant Static Transmission. Wynn is the Carl Yastrzemski of rock: he’s been so reliably good for so long that he gets taken for granted. Oh yeah, Steve Wynn, great live performer, hundreds of great songs, a gazillion albums. The guy from the Dream Syndicate. Yeah, him.

Yeah, this album. Unlike its two predecessors, it sounds like it was recorded old school, 1960s style in a couple of days’ time, everyone in the band coming in knowing exactly what they had to do and pinning the meter to the red when it was their turn to record. At this point in history, Wynn and his band the Miracle 3 are the best straight-up rock band in the world, bar none. Their live shows are legendary (check out the goodies up on archive.org), so much that it begs the question: why get a Steve Wynn studio album when you can hear him and band at their molten-lava best in concert or on a bootleg? Answer: their studio albums are shows unto themselves. For all I know, this one was probably recorded more or less live: at least that’s how it sounds. The band is more terse, more focused than ever, especially noisemeister Jason Victor on lead guitar and the nimble, inventive Dave DeCastro on bass. As usual, drummer Linda Pitmon distinguishes herself as the best in the business: like her idol Keith Moon, she’s all about surprise, throwing accents and rolls in when least expected, making the most seemingly random beats absolutely crucial to the song.

Wynn’s stock in trade is menace, and this album is no exception, from the title’s bomb reference to the hot pepper glowing fire engine red on the album cover. He gets a lot of Neil Young and Velvet Underground comparisons, and while both influences lurk in the background, three times removed, he’s established his own signature sound. It’s basic two-guitar, meat-and-potatoes rock, frequently based around a central riff (think the Stooges or Kinks), colored with all kinds of delicious noise and overtones, driven by a relentless, dark lyrical vision. There’s less guitar dueling here than there is in his most recent work, but the intensity is undiminished, from the cd’s pummeling opening cut Wired (“oh no, why am I wired this way?!?”) through its closing partita, the haunting No Tomorrow, a remarkably successful shot at ending the album on an uplifting note without getting stuck in cheese. Otherwise, it’s pretty much nonstop adrenaline. The album’s second cut, Cindy, It Was Always You features lyrics by acclaimed crime novelist (and screenwriter for HBO’s The Wire) George Pelecanos: it’s ostensibly a lament for the girl a guy never got, but Wynn delivers it with characteristically evil glee, sounding like a serial killer. The following cut, Freak Star continues in a similar vein, Victor and Wynn’s sinewy guitars coiling and uncoiling and licking the melody like flames around a gasoline tanker that’s just jackknifed on the freeway. Plenty of other good songs on the album: the darkly amusing, stomping Bruises (“I fall down easy but I get up slow/I really really hope that the bruises don’t show”); the macabre urban blues All the Squares Go Home, and the similar, quietly ominous Turning of the Tide. There’s also the frenetic Wild Mercury, a worthy, out-of-control follow-up to Amphetamine, from Wynn’s previous album: Wynn has explained how this is what happens when guy from Amphetamine keeps doing what he’s doing and goes from blissed-out, adrenaline-fueled ecstasy to being utterly impossible to deal with. The album ends better than I thought it would after hearing most of these songs live. Its final cut is in two parts, the first a gorgeous, fast anthem, staring death straight down the middle of the blacktop. But then it morphs into a happily stomping retro 60s pop hit that owes more than a little to All the Young Dudes. And it works, because even though the mood changes, the band keeps cooking, all the way through. What remains is burned around the edges and very tasty, maybe something akin to the goat curry that Wynn credits for helping with the creative process out in Tucson where this and his previous two studio albums were recorded. Since being recorded, this album has been superseded by a live version, Live Tick, released in Europe last summer, all the more reason to pick up this one and then hear how they’ve mangled it even more. Albums are available in better cd stores, at shows and online at

<a href=” http://www.stevewynn.net “> http://www.stevewynn.net </a>

Wynn is back on his feet after a broken ankle and will appear on new albums coming out this year from Danny & Dusty and Smack Dab, so some area live appearances should be in store at some point

So often the best shows are the ones you never expect to see. The only reason I was there was because a friend of mine was tending bar and invited me down to alleviate the boredom on what was to soon become a slow rainy night.We had the place to ourselves til Masterson showed up. Neither one of us had any idea of what to expect and cynic that I am, I expected the worst. After screwing around with the soundboard for half an hour, the bartender and I finally got it up and running, soundchecked the guy and then kicked back with a beer. The club was empty except for us: Masterson’s crowd was depleted since he’d played a gig the previous night.

He piqued our interest during soundcheck: to say that his guitar skills are a cut above your average performer is faint praise, in this post-grunge era, but he impressed with his sense of melody and the licks he threw in between chords. Then he took a seat at the piano and showed us a rolling, gospel-inflected chordal style. He launched into his set before anyone else got to the bar.

Two hours and three sets later, he’d made a fan of everyone who’d braved the rain. What a discovery this guy is: you should see him. He’s British, sounding a lot like a young, pre-delirium tremens Shane McGowan, casting himself as an acoustic punk gutter poet of sorts. Most of his vivid, hook-driven tales of life among the down-and-out take place in “twisted nightmare alleys past rotten rags and half-chewed chicken bones,” to quote a line from one of his songs.  He delivers them in a hoarse, soul-inflected voice (which rang especially true on a rousing cover of Sam Cooke’s Change Is Gonna Come).

The first of the night’s two best songs was a surprise cover of the obscure Clash b-side Gates of the West (available on the Super Black Market Clash anthology), an apt choice for an expatriate. He didn’t do it note for note with the original, but the bittersweet longing of someone who made it “from Camden Town Station to 44th and 8th” and still feels like an outcast here rang true.

The other was his strongest original, a brilliantly catchy portrait of dejection and despair in the London slums. While Masterson’s lyrics generally express optimism despite all odds, this haunting story of a junkie, his prostitute girlfriend and their sketchy neighborhood doesn’t end well: To his credit, Masterson could have gone all mawkish and romanticized it, but he didn’t.

In what amounted to about two hours onstage, he did several other impressive originals (sometimes more than once for the sake of latecomers), including the fiery Can’t Control Myself and My Only Way Out; Avenue Walk (a piano song that could be a dead ringer for a swinging, country-inflected Sam Llanas Bodeans hit); Metropolitan, a London cityscape set to a rolling piano melody, and the 6/8 cabaret blues The Actress, which casts drugs as an actress who’s always there for the “show, show, show.” Mighty good stuff. Masterson is a rock band type at heart, but he’s a passionate performer and an uncommonly intelligent songwriter and for that reason very much worth seeing play solo. Fitting that I’d see this guy for the first time on a rainy night in what used to be a slum.

Masterson has a demo cd that’s worth taking home for the songs even if it doesn’t capture the fire of his live performance.    

For upcoming gigs click <a href=” http://www.myspace.com/adammastersonmusic “> http://www.myspace.com/adammastersonmusic</a> 

Absolute hubris, right down to the cd packaging. Luckily the songs on this potently twangy NYC band’s third release have the muscle to stake a claim to a place in the Americana rock pantheon. The cd opens auspiciously with the slowly unwinding anthem Wild Sun, a majestically climactic number that bears some resemblance to the Wallflowers’ classic Sixth Avenue Heartache. Driven by lead player Mick Izzo’s searing slide guitar and anchored by Hammond organ, it’s a beautifully troubled song. The band has thoroughly thrashed the cd’s next tune, Try, in live shows for over a year and it’s evolved into a catchy number that evokes early Wilco, with an unexpected modulation toward the end. Nice barrelhouse piano from studio keyboardist Patience Clements. The ep concludes with Into the Sun (Sun Sessions – now you get it, right?), a stomping R&B-inflected number that sounds like something off of Aftermath by the Stones, but produced with care on fat-sounding two-inch tape. The Sloe Guns are a dynamite live band: when frontman Eric Alter trades off licks on his Telecaster against Izzo’s Les Paul riffage, it’s nothing short of exhilarating. See them if you’re into this kind of stuff. CD’s are extremely inexpensive, available online and at shows. The Sloe Guns play the Mean Fiddler at 10 PM on Sat May 5 <a href=”http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pageartist.cfm?bandID=1508“>http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pageartist.cfm?bandID=1508</a>

I don’t know what happened to this guy. He just snapped. Maybe it was
the bad dayjob - that happens to a lot of people. Whatever the cause, the
result was the first instant classic to come out last year, the high point so far in the
career of the American Richard Thompson. White is a virtual anomaly among US rock songwriters, a brutally cynical, dazzling wordsmith with equally spectacularly guitar chops and a straight-up rock sensibility. No solipsistic folkie whining here. No cheesy synthesizers or dated 90s trip-hop production. This album ROCKS….quietly. White’s tasteful, minimalist production sets his Bowie-inflected vocals soaring over tersely
arranged acoustic and electric guitars and a string quartet. Chamber rock has never been so exhilarating.

White’s back catalog, notably his previous release, Lovely Invalids demonstrates a sardonic wit and a wickedly playful, literate lyricism. He never met a pun he could resist (unless the boss asked for one) and employs devices including personification, metonymy and meta in ways that few English-language writers have done outside the covers of a book. Here, he succeeds at being clever without being too clever by half: the substance of this album matches its style, milligram for milligram. I believe that is how bile is measured.

The album opens with the psychopathological Things Kept Falling: “I’m not alone in this,” White taunts. As Mary Lee Kortes has noted, bad relationships are the gift that keeps on giving: and either this guy has had a spectacular streak of bad luck, or he’s a particularly gifted observer. Maybe both. On the album’s title track, he gleefully recounts to an ex how he “mined your broken heart for an album cut.” But no one escapes White’s minesweeper approach to hypocrisy. In the equally gleeful New York supremacist anthem L.A. Is Not the Answer, he takes a swipe at the trendoid lit crowd: “Tell Joe Henry to call me/I haven’t heard from Bill Vollmann in so long…” In Can You Lie?, he mines the irony of duplicitous actor types trying on roles for size for all it’s worth: “I want to know if you can lie convincingly to me/If you break character I’ll see/I will!”

Undertow, with its haunting minor-key chorus is pure symbolism, the booze ebbing back, yet all the while taunting the boozer that sooner or later he’ll fall off the wagon because “you were paralyzed and I set you free.” In the album’s concluding track, So Long, yet another ex will “Call me up, tell me about the weather, how everybody is so thin out there.” White’s terse response is, “I think I’ll extend my visa,” presumably in some distant foreign land.

The album’s centerpiece - and arguably the best song of the year - is Hole In the Head, a particularly timely take on deadend dayjob drudgery. It works equally well as Barbara Ehrenreich-style journalism, mise-en-scene piece and rock tune:

I can’t believe what you say/You’re a liar
Please don’t look so shocked/Hell, you could retire on all you stole
And I’m not gonna look anymore/Unless I’m buying
Tell you the truth, I’m tired of not trying to care in any way
I need this job like a hole in the head
I need a hole in my head to do this job
I need a head for some reason that escapes me now
There’s no escaping you

White’s two guitars and bass (he plays all the instruments) maintain the song’s claustrophobic intensity all the way though to its final ominous, ringing minor chord. Yet there’s more than just spleen here. White knows that banality of evil can sometimes be very funny, if in a blackly humorous way, and there are as many laugh-out-loud jokes on this album as there are instantly recognizable moments for anyone who’s ever been screwed in a relationship or struggled to refrain from decking an obnoxious boss.
Maybe But Probably Not ranks with Armed Forces by Elvis Costello, Mirror Blue
by Richard Thompson and Mad Within Reason by LJ Murphy as one of the
alltime great pissed-off lyrical rock records. It’s also a trenchant warning not to
ever, ever mess with a songwriter. They always get even in the end. By the way, as an interesting bit of trivia, former Scout drummer Nigel Rawles overdubbed drums on many of the songs. For those of you who may be unaware, in modern recording it is customary to record drums before the rest of the band, which is logical enough since the band needs a beat to follow. It’s a credit to White that his timing was good enough for a drummer to follow without stumbling, and it’s a credit to both musicians that they could pull this off and make it sound like a seamless whole. White has since taken a Jonathan Richman-esque stance on gigging: he’s vowed only to play free shows within walking distance of home. To catch this purist in action click
http://www.wardwhite.net

It was mid-May, 1999, unseasonably cool for the global warming era. The plant kingdom was in full sprout. My girlfriend and I wandered down Broadway toward Battery Park. As we reached the park, there was no indication that there would be any greater quantity of illegal drugs there than on any other day, or that anyone would be ostentatiously indulging in them.

I was sober.

We were going to see a free show by John Brown’s Body, the best white reggae band ever. I say that jokingly because they’re also one of the best reggae bands ever, irrespective of anything that pigmentation might imply. That they’re worth seeing while sober attests to how good a live band they are: you can be completely free of any pot-induced bullshit and still enjoy them because they’re not any more self-indulgent, repetitive or clichéd than, say, Bob Marley.

As we approached the stage (this was in the days when you could do that, before the Park Pigs began setting up a labyrinth of barriers worthy of the king of Minos), we could smell what people were there for. There were lots of cops, but not in anything approximating the kind of numbers you see today when they do dry runs for a post-9/11 catastrophe, massed with sirens and lights under the Williamsburg Bridge.

 I approached one of them and struck up a conversation. He wasn’t stoned as far as I could tell and seemed pretty blasé about the whole thing. “What’s it like, working this thing?” I asked him. He laughed. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

 Eventually a small handful of the more obvious pothead kids were led away in handcuffs. Yet for the most part, the cops kept a respective distance and the revelers did the same. John Brown’s Body did a very short set, about 25 minutes. Then some guy from a popular Wetlands band – I forget the name – got up and launched into a pretty bad Shabba Ranks impression. So we wandered back in the direction we had come. It was a pleasantly mellow, predictably amusing afternoon and although it was only eight years ago, it feels like a lifetime.

As cruel as this irony is, if you go to the parade this year, don’t bring pot.

In honor of this week’s pot parade (Saturday), all the acts listed here are graded for stoner quotient on a one-to-ten scale, with zero being zero, ten bordering on hallucinatory, and five being mildly stoner-friendly. Disclaimer: Lucid Culture assumes no responsibility for any potential buzzkill brought on by paying any mind to these ratings, especially as we have no firsthand knowledge of what any of these acts sound like, stoned.

Thurs May 3 Rachelle Garniez plays Barbes, 10 PM. Sort of the prototypical panstylistic rock goddess. Accordion is her main axe but she’s been playing a lot of piano lately too and the results are delicious. Never met a style she couldn’t master and make indelibly her own: psychedelia, saloon blues, ska, noir cabaret, you name it. Also a terrifically clever lyricist and a sometimes mesmerizing, reliably amusing live performer.  Caveat: since being discovered by the NY Times this club gets CROWDED – if you don’t get there an hour before showtime you may not get into the tiny backroom performance space. Stoner quotient: 3. Lots of intricacy, frequent displays of virtuosity, a good sense of humor, but there’s a consistent vision at work here and it’s pretty dark.

Fri May 4 Aloud plays  Crash Mansion on lower Bowery,  10 PM, free w/rsvp to rsvp@newyorkunderbelly.com Too bad their albums are so overproduced because these improper Bostonians are an excellent live act. Guy/girl vocals and clanging guitars that sound best when they delve into 60s Kinks/Britpop hook-driven songs.  Stoner quotient: 2. This is straight-ahead stuff and other than some intriguing chord work, there’s nothing here that’s remotely psychedelic.

Later Fri May 4 Megan Reilly plays Lakeside, 11 PM. Charmingly oldschool-style country chanteuse whose latest album is a surprisingly effective collection of reworked rock standards by such oddball choices as Thin Lizzy.  Stoner quotient: 0, would you get high before a Loretta Lynn show?

Sat May 5 the Sloe Guns play the  Mean Fiddler, 266 West 47th Street between Broadway and 8th,10 PM. When the frontman’s Fender gets to trading off with the lead player’s Gibson, new elements could be created: it’s rare to see two such potentially exhilarating soloists in the same band. That the frontguy chooses his moments so judiciously says a lot about his taste. The songs are consistently melodic and tastily twangy in a Steve Earle kind of way, highway rock with a master’s in music. Stoner quotient: 5, going up to 8 if the band does the dueling guitar thing.

Also Sat May 5, 10 PM Luminescent Orchestrii (sp?) play Barbes. Gypsy music. Lots of people in the band: they will take up half the room. It’s ecstatic and danceable. Stoner quotient: 10. Those gypsies introduced ganja to the rest of the world, after all.

Sun May 6 it’s the Hoboken Arts & Music Festival on Washington St. Just get off the Path train and keep going the direction you’re going as you exit. The main stage is at Washington and Newark, around the corner from the Rite Aid.   Twangmeisters Demolition String Band open it at 1 (one) PM (stoner quotient: 7, with the amazing lead guitar). Afterward, sprawling global panstylistic improvisers Hazmat Modine hit at 2, (stoner quotient: 10 – even though nobody in the band seems to be a stoner, their extended jams and tradeoffs between guitar, horns and reeds are exquisite and ecstatic), then it’s the Night Tripper himself, Dr. John around 5 (stoner quotient: depends on what mood he’s in, could be very straight-up, one song after another or he could be in a more expansive mood and if that’s the case the meter goes up to about 5).

Sunday May 6, sort of a big deal: Lower East Side denizen and panstylistic rock goddess (I know this is the second time I’ve used the phrase, but it’s accurate) Jenifer Jackson is moving to Austin so this is her last show here for awhile. She’s playing Rockwood at 8 PM sharp with Roland Satterwhite on violin and Oren Bloedow (from Elysian Fields, etc.) on lead guitar. Stoner quotient: 8 – expect amazing solos and musicianship in general, and Jackson’s pastoral, sometimes tropically-inflected psychedelia is the perfect vehicle for it.

Also Sun May 6 at Barbes starting at 7 it’s Michael Hearst’s SONGS FOR ICE CREAM TRUCKS. This is what the club has to say about it:Are you tired of hearing the same old two or three ice cream truck songs over and over? Michael Hearst certainly is. That’s why he’s created an entire album of NEW songs for ice cream trucks. Hear him perform these songs live for the first time tonight with help from Greta Gertler (keyboard genius), Ron Caswell (tuba) and Allyssa Lamb (keyboards – she’s one of the girls from Las Rubias del Norte).

There is an after party and it’s at the bakery next door.  Hmmm…I think I know what these guys are up to. What’s that smell? As a special bonus, Stephane Wrembel, who is the closest thing to Django Reinhardt stateside, plays Django covers afterward at 9. Wrembel more than maybe any other guitarist in town knows that the guitar is a percussion instrument. Stoner quotient: 10. That gypsy jazz will keep you entranced for as long as the guy’s playing. 

Mon May 7 Rev. Vince Anderson plays Black Betty, 2 sets starting around 10:45. Moist Paula from Moisturizer on baritone sax. Torbitt Schwartz from Chin Chin on drums. The Rev. himself on piano and organ. Stoner quotient: 10. As intense and in-your-face charismatic as the Rev. is, their extended jams get pretty wild and go on for what seems forever, and the new guitarist is working himself into the mix very well.

Tues May 8 Randi Russo and her band play Cake Shop, 8 PM. The dark southpaw siren writes fiery, lyrically scorching, occasionally macabre songs that use noise as a complement to melody: no matter how close to the edge they careen, the tune is always there. Stoner quotient: I’d guess about 5. The band is more psychedelic than ever, but this is relentlessly intense, haunting stuff, not for the faint of heart, even though some of it is occasionally very funny. A-list songwriter Dan Penta’s latest project, the roaring punk/metal Whisper Doll headlines around 11. Stoner factor: anybody’s guess. I can’t hear myself think just thinking about them.

 Wed, May 9 Sean Kershaw And The New Jack Ramblers play Rodeo Bar, 2 sets starting at 10:30ish. The baritone frontman from the Blind Pharaohs has surrounded himself with some of the crème de la crème of NYC’s country/bluegrass scene. Stoner quotient: 5. Nice interplay and tradeoffs on solos, but would you really want to be stoned while surrounded by screaming brats from Baruch and the outlying counties?

 By the way, if you know of a good show that’s not listed here that you think gourmandizers (Hilly Kristal’s word - I dunno if it’s really a word) would enjoy, put it up!