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

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

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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 ?” 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!). music spilled out of LES tenements at midnight A few years later, around 1994, the Mercury to the era when Charlie Parker lived right around Lounge opened up farther East on Houston, and the corner from Tompkins Square Park to the that soon became my second musical home away night Lee Morgan was shot at Slugs…There was from home, for a while became my other favorite something so wild and untamed and Rousseau- place to play—in fact, my band Gods and like about the vibe that shimmered off the greener Monsters, a free-floating collective of insane pastures of the Park that summer of my coming- experimental rock and jazzers which I had into-my-own as a Downtown musician. There debuted at the Knit in the summer of 1989, was a whole different feel and atmosphere about rapidly became kind of the house band of the it, far, far different from the relatively uptight Merc Lounge for the first couple years of their West Village where I had labored for years in existence. (The proprietor Michael Swier had relative secrecy on music I rarely got to perform operated several other LES bars before his first in New York—only in studios on the West Coast, foray into music; he had brought the club up from and in concerts in Europe and the US with Capn’ scratch and literally built the stage by hand.) Beef. With my expanded Gods and Monsters lineup For a long time then, the Knitting Factory was boasting three singers at that time (Richard my base, their musical habitués my peeps. There Barone, Dina Emerson, and the eponymous was a very enjoyable downhome downtown Emily), along with Jonathan Kane on drums and bonhomie/ultra-Jewish vibe about it all that Jean Chaine on bass, we used to really pack them connected to my grandpa’s tales of his early in there on the weekends. I remember Richard adventures on the Lower East Side. Barone, an excellent and underrated singer and And the food was always so tasty around performer, trundling his actual original ‘60s there. I loved traveling over from the West mellotron (think the intro to “Strawberry Fields Village just to sample the culinary delights of the Forever”) over from the West Village where he LES, especially the strip down Houston Street. lived not far from me in order to play with us— From Yonah Shimmel’s knishery to Russ and what a trouper! Daughters fancy fruits and nuts to Katz’s More rockist than the Knit, the Merc Lounge

3 suited me fine as a place to try out new songs and kosher winery morphed over the years from bagel new players. One night I went down there to and coffee Sunday morning klezmer-klatch, to perform with Peter Stampfel, former Fug and one full-service boho book and record store with a of the founders of the legendary Lower East Side little music on the side, then to expanded band The Holy Modal Rounders, shortly after refurbished performance space and stage. Sadly, we’d made our debut as The Du-Tels at the it was later bedeviled with problems of plumbing, Knitting Factory 2 months before. A whole heat, rising neighborhood rents, and the general battalion of Village Voice music critics were change that scarred and mutilated the face of there, plus all the old LES folkie sentimentalists much of the Lower East Side, post 9/11, as and many of the up-and-coming freak-folk realtors and developers began grabbing up as brigade. I remember getting up on stage with much available space as they could while the Peter after my traditional Katz’s double grabbing was good, ripping the neighborhood frankfurter with kraut pre-show chow-down, asunder in the process. picking wurst fabrik out of my teeth—and yea They closed down the premises of Tonic in verily we came, we saw, we played every song in 2007 after a last gasp sit-in and multiple media our repertoire and then some twice as fast as we protests and manifestos that failed to convince the ever had before…and the gleeful shouts of joy Bloomberg administration to offer the full weight and pleas and requests for more more! more! of its civic support to one of the last outposts of came thick and fast. It was a triumph for me to musical art for art’s sake on the Lower East Side. play that night with Peter in his old (And did you really expect the Bloomberg neighborhood. It felt absolutely glorious to be administration to act any differently?). alive and making music for the friendly folks on And yet, one door closes and another door the Lower East Side… opens… Couple years later Tonic opened its doors For me, the opening a few years ago of NYC right off Delancey Street across from Ratner’s poet emeritus Bob Holman’s Bowery Poetry (later the Lansky Lounge). This former kosher Club—a charming performance space and bar, wine emporium started out proudly as the anti- quasi-coffee shop and browsing nook, situated Knitting Factory, an appellation arising over a directly across from the recently shuttered dispute concerning Michael Dorf having CBGB’s—came right on time, to say the surreptitiously set up mini-spy cams in the Knit least…This particular club still preserves a fair main space to broadcast 24/7 the comings and simulacrum of the spirit, the heart, a certain je ne goings and bleatings and nose-pickings and sais pas of the best of the Lower East Side clubs generally irreverent behavior of any musician in of yore, with resident poets and NYC bohemian rehearsal or performing there in the mainspace fixtures such as Taylor Mead guaranteed a over his short-lived Knit-TV streaming video permanent residency. Political and poetic and channel. When found out about this he literary and aesthetic discussion groups get free brought der Zorn Gottes down hard on the Knit, reign to commingle there with agit-prop theater and pledged to boycott playing that club ever groups and free jazzers and rock operas…And I again. He set up camp just down the road apiece can (for the moment, anyway—keep watching in the former Kedem wine and juice emporium, this space!) still play whatever I feel like playing, transforming it instantly into the mega-hipster on the cozy, comfortable stage of the Bowery hotspot Tonic. Poetry Club. For several years, Tonic became the in-spot for the nomadic downtown crowd who had become suspicious of the swollen Internet era Gary Lucas boom Knit juggernaut and their ambitious plans 1/15/08 for world domination…I liked playing both the NYC Knit and Tonic just fine…Feh on “which side are you on!?”… Under the benign auspices of Melissa and her husband, the former Kedem

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