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East Side, Far Side—All Around the Sound

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East Side, Far Side—All Around the Sound EAST SIDE, FAR SIDE—ALL AROUND THE SOUND a/k/a IT’S NOT WHERE YOU’RE FRUM, IT’S WHERE YOU’RE AT By GARY LUCAS I’m looking over yonder’s wall into the valley of eventual conscription into the Polish army, of the shadow of the (partially) fallen Eden which was mandatory at the time for all male known as the Lower East Side from the vantage citizens. He arrived at Ellis Island with his mother point of 30 years residence in the West Village. on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, circa 1897, You’re probably wondering why I’m here…as in, speaking only Yiddish and Polish. She intended what the heck is an to move immediately unreconstructed denizen upstate to Syracuse, of the far West Village where family awaited doing in a book devoted them. to the Lower East Side? But due to the ban Well, as an avant- against travel on the garde musician who has High Holy Days, they toiled for years in the were detained a couple of vineyards of myriad days on the LES. The transient clubs/watering local Hebrew Aid holes du jour/toilettes Society gave them situated on the Lower temporary shelter on the East Side, I gotta right to Bowery, an experience offer my two cents plain Gods and Monsters debut at the old Knitting Factory my grandfather was on what is basically a on Houston Street in July 1989, l to r: Paul Now, Gary never to forget. It was a Lucas, Tony Thunder Smith, and Jared Nickerson very boring cultural turf primal memory war conducted on the rapidly shifting grounds we emblazoned in his consciousness, wherein he first New Yorkers walk on—grounds once abounding tasted the hitherto unknown sybaritic pleasures of with the jouissance of spontaneous space for all, life in these United States, as opposed to the present-day manicured On his first night at the temporary, the playgrounds reserved as the exclusive purview of Hebrew Aid Society folks running the shelter millionaire bohemia…grounds currently being made a gift of bananas to everyone there. It was auctioned off/offered up/plundered anew by the an exotic delicacy my grandfather had never seen great historical leveler/gross revisionism of the before in Poland, let alone tasted. He tried to eat developer’s wrecking ball…all this in the name of one, skin and all, with predictably disastrous progress/urban gentrification/capitalism run consequences. The result was a lifelong aversion amuck. to the offending fruit. But boy, did ever he grow But despite not actually living there (traitor!), to love the Lower East Side! The great banana I do have a deep genetic/historical connection scar notwithstanding. with the LES, beginning with my peripatetic Over the years throughout my childhood, he grandfather Samuel Goldman, née Pekarsky. constantly sang the praises of the neighborhood’s Born in 1892 in Jedwabne Poland, my Yiddish Theater, its naughty burlesque houses, its grandpa was smuggled out of the Old Country at fine kosher restaurants, ascribing a magical aura the age of 5 dressed as a girl. Had he remained In to the place, imbuing it with a patina of rosy Poland, he would have had to face the heavy hand nostalgia. 1 So when I eventually moved to New York right, as it were—was at the old Knitting Factory City in 1977 with my newlywed Chinese/Jewish on Houston and Mulberry. bride straight from Taiwan by way of San In June 1988, a year or so after the Knit Francisco, I immediately gravitated to the LES, opened its doors, I was asked to mount a show having inherited his curiosity and love for the there, based on my credentials as “Captain vibrant Jewish and general immigrant cultural Beefheart’s guitarist.” And despite every fermentation. There, new art was busy being born imaginable catastrophe that could befall my debut daily like so many yeasty loaves of bread, new (for instance, my name getting left out of the ways of thinking and being swelling skyward, Knitting Factory ad in the Village Voice that new mornings shining down on a resurgent week), I managed to sell out the club through artistic community—and I was truly tempted to word of mouth alone. settle there. And after playing an hour-long set—in which But our best friends lived in the West I literally turned myself inside out, wringing all Village—and consequently we moved to an the changes in my soul and then some—I apartment to be closer to them. And in the West received multiple encores, was handed a fistful of Village I remain some 30 years later… (turncoat! dollars from the proceeds of the door take. I interloper!). remember coming back home to the West Village Anyway, always the maverick, I oppose the that night, marveling at how I had entered the chauvinistic viewpoint of many inveterate Lower sacred artistic lists of the East—a landscape East Siders and continue to side with Groucho looming large in my imagination fecund with all Marx (an original Lower East Side boychick if its received mythopoeia/jasmine and garbage ever there was one) on this issue—namely: I scent and sensibility. I had more than stood my really don’t want to be a part of any fraternity that ground. I had smote everything and everyone in would have me as a member… (No, just my path. That night I pledged to devote myself to kidding…and truth to tell, I don’t really feel a music full-time. Shortly thereafter I left my day part of the West Village community, either. I feel job of 13 years uptown for a nonstop life in a most excellent outsider wherever I walk the music, and I have never once looked back with earth.) regret. In any case—it’s not where you’re frum, it’s That was a true turning point in my life. It all where you’re at. happened one long hot summer night forged in Still, I have clocked many, many man-hours the rickety retro-fitted crucible of a former Lower on the Lower East Side over the years in my East Side sweat shop turned neo-boho capacity as a professional guitarist/songwriter/ clubhouse—the dear departed old Knit. composer/experimental music maker and short But the Knitting Factory wasn’t the only order chef of amusement. stickball game Downtown. The Lower East Side is essentially where I I remember playing the Gas Station that same further bolstered and burnished my reputation as summer of ‘88, tucked away on the corner of an avant-garde musician, a rep first established Avenue B and 2nd Street, an actual old Shell after spending five years before the mast with Station gaudily bedecked like a small-scale Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. That was version of Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. a gig where I earned my avant-stripes, to be sure, One mid-summer night’s daydream I was but a gig where I had to more or less totally wailing away to no one in particular on my ‘64 subordinate myself to Beefheart’s cranky Strat (audience size being always unpredictable, visionary genius. particularly at many of these underground clubs) , You might say I rose up to be Me—Gary having myself a high old time, fueled on Lucas—out of the fertile compost/slag heap whatever, amped and strapped and cranked up to abutting and abetting greater Houston Street. 11 and broadcasting my particular message to the My first foray into the public eye and ear of neighborhood-at-large at large decibels, sound downtown NYC as a solo guitarist—my coming rebounding and wafting ‘oer the street sur les out under my own name as an artist in my own rooftops du Loisaida, when a gaggle of elderly 2 black winos came shambling up to the fence that pastramarama, I was usually in kosher Pig surrounded this particular gasoline alley like so Heaven. (Another long ago and far away LES many George Romero zombies and began eatery, one exterior wall of which originally whooping it up in response to my guitar sported the prominent painted tuchis of un petit pyrotechnics, lustily shouting encouragement to cochon pointed south across Houston. It me after one particularly snarling, vicious blues— was visibly marred by the pelting of paint-filled ”Play it, man! Play it! That’s the TRUTH!!” balloons hurled from the far side of the road by At that moment I felt totally validated as a some decidedly offended kosher neighbors.) I musician… even more so than when The New fondly remember walking over to Katz’s one York Times came a’ calling to the old Knit and chilly fall day in 1993 in the company of Michael wrote me up as the “Guitarist of 1000 Ideas” after Dorf, then owner and chief mover and shaker of a show at their “What is Jazz?” Festival that same the Knit, with several other Jewish avant- summer. musicians, and sitting down en masse at a table I was free, white and already late 30- all ready for the ritual downing of massive something, but like the cat in Steely Dan’s marbled slabs of corned beef on rye, silver bowls “Deacon Blues,” I was riffing existentially on a brimming with half sour pickles and sour much higher plane than before—I was playing tomatoes in brine abounding—all to be washed just what I was feeling in the moment, exercising down with copious amounts of Dr. Brown’s Cel- those constitutional liberties guaranteed to all Ray and Black Cherry—to consecrate the Americans (and particularly New Yorkers) but beginning of our soon-to-be-embarked-upon tour rarely acted upon by most, partaking of that same of European cities under the aegis of the Knitting spirit ‘o jazz madness that has flourished way Factory’s JAM tour (which stood then for Jewish down East from the days when raucous klezmer Avant-Garde Music—but of course!).
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