spooky

The Road Southern Breathes Again

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Jesus. It’s been a couple of years. Sorry. After a very long time of riding the fence on what I’m going to do with this WordPress account I keep paying for, I finally made a drunken text to TRS’s fearless photog, Andreea, that we’ll be back on these NYC streets making record of its country folks & Americana scenes.

ME Album release flyer

To solidify this promise, I also drunk texted Mary-Elaine Jenkins that we’d be there to cover her album release show this Saturday at Rockwood Music Hall.  Needless to say, The Road Southern is as happy as we can be for her! Did I normally use exclamation points in these posts? Looks weird. Whatever. Show’s at 9pm! Tix here.

I first heard Mary-Elaine’s smokey voice & spooky tunes a lifetime ago, at least 4 years feels like a lifetime in this city. The venue, Goodbye Blue Monday, doesn’t even exist anymore. Nor does the Super Collider where I’d write of her & others while I sipped a beer or two or three; however many it takes to get the job done. A semicolon? I haven’t bothered with them in so long they look weird & probably wrong, too. Anyway. Just about everyone else I’ve covered in this blog has moved away, packed it up for some place “easier.” But not Miss Jenkins. Too much grit. She keeps marching right the hell on. That’s my favorite thing that people do. So, I’ll march myself over to Rockwood & hear me some great music by the well practiced but still wild Mary-Elaine Jenkins.  Why not go see my NYC-lifetime friend kick a lot of ass with a lot of people who’ve come to get their asses kicked by her? No reason to not. I mean, we’re still here, too.

The Drunken Text: “First, me & Andreea will def be at your Rockwood show. Second, but also first, grats! ‘Proud of you’ seems condescending. I’m glad to know you. I’m glad 4-5 years ago I stopped to listen. Your stick-to-it-iveness was inevitable. So, I’m proud I’m intuitive enough to make you a friend. I’m grateful that you, as far as I know, call me one, too.”

 

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The Girl on the Balcony (short fiction)

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            It’s stopped raining, and with that I take the last beer in my fridge to my apartment’s small balcony. I like the earthy aroma that rains kick up, which I’m told is from bacteria spores lying dormant in the ground until a summer storm churns them into the air. In Brooklyn, you don’t always get such a natural delight, especially in smells, but my tiny balcony overlooks Greenwood Cemetery, which is old and larger than most of the city’s parks. The brief afternoon storm has driven everyone off the grounds. Usually, at dusk I see art students in groups with their sketch pads and charcoal, tourists, neighborhood walkers, and, here and there, one or two folks paying respects to the deceased.

The dead are not in the well-kept ancient graveyard, either. But, they wouldn’t be. That’s not where they horribly died, if they died horribly. I’ve been privy to dealing with and studying the dead for nearly twenty-five years. They don’t hang around cemeteries.

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How Long’s It Been?

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A year and a half-ish. That’s a long time for a blog to go quiet. Most of the people I’ve written about in these pages are gone. Nearly every one of them. You’re all gone now. It makes sense. This was mostly about Southern and/or country-ish music. I don’t really get out to see anybody play anymore. No time.

I write now. I’ve been working in earnest on a novel. I think I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in previous posts. It’s a ghost story. I like it so far. Maybe I’ll make this blog about that. Is that interesting? To talk about my wannabe writer life? Maybe I’ll comment on some shit I see out there in the world and on the news. I’ve decided not to let this blog die, even though with everybody gone I feel like it should.

We’ll see.

Here’s a Southern gent I can’t get enough of right now.

Ruby Rae @ Hank’s Saloon

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img_20161013_214826I 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.

 

beauty-and-garbage_edited

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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