I hadn’t been to Hank’s Saloon in years.  It is a hole in the wall dive in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood. Or maybe they’re calling that area something different now, I don’t know. It’s a block or two over from America’s worst Target store at Atlantic Center. Maybe you know it as where Barclays arena is, but if you ask me about the area, it will forever be where that fucking Target is. What am I posting about, again? Just start the song, and get back to me below it.

Garbage and Beauty. (The beauty is on top, the garbage is in the trash can under it.)

Oh, yeah, Ruby Rae whose refreshingly straight forward rock’n’roll performance has put me in this “fuck ’em” state of mind. A friend hit me up, said she’s going to see ’em at Hank’s, and that it’s near a particular Target. I said I know the joint. Hank’s hasn’t changed. Its Christmas-lights-lit ceiling reveals just enough of the found junk that adorns the walls to bring us to that exquisite place where beauty and garbage meet.

Front-woman Abby Hannan, I’ve heard it told, hails from Massachusetts, but I could swear by her rockabilly leanings that she rose up from the Okefenokee itself. Or, hell, maybe even cut her teeth playing just outside the French Quarter before or after Mardi Gras when them frat fucks or Daytona rednecks are gone away. Point being, she brought a rowdy and boisterous raucous to the tiny venue. Ruby Rae’s hard slamming fits and voodoo energy put a spell on the tiny and cramped stage, and opened it up. They made the scene feel expansive. Not like a bare and open plain, but the intimacy of a meeting in the woods where the wild is confined only by the outlying wilds. Such is the dark magic of good rock’n’roll in the tiny pockets of New York City.

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