DJ Ally Spins at the Raven
At the Raven Cafe on Ave. A, the night is as young as the people inside wish they were. Antique couches, a bar and a turntable crowd the barely lit space, and the air swaggers and sways to a static-laden pulse, a lolling, tropical upbeat. The anachronistically bohemian clientele wears skinny trousers, Fred Perry shirts and mod shag haircuts, hovering in the dark like the ghosts of the postwar British subcultures they have resurrected.
The night's soundtrack includes the Upsetters, the Impressions, Georgie Fame and other classic soul, reggae and British invasion artists. Paul Weller hollers, "This is the modern world that I've learnt about!" On the television, muted episodes of Ready, Steady, Go!.
DJ Ally's collection is unparalleled on this side of the Atlantic. At a time when recorded music is being stripped down to electronic codes, Ally spins a nightlife, and night livelihood, out of old discs with yellowed labels and big holes, rich with wear and encrusted with subcultural history.
Ally himself appears a bit worn and crusty, slouching and bobbing over the turntable with his yellow goatee and lethargic eyelids. The 28-year-old flaunts the thickest of New York accents?part Bed-Stuy, part Bensonhurst?though he grew up on Central Park W. He spins for free drinks and a cut of the bar, but primarily for a chance to do what he does best: hang out with people with similar musical fixations, and abandon himself to tunes that make everything feel all right for a little while.
"I've been hanging out since I was 11," he says. Over the past decade and a half, he's watched the skinhead scene rise and decline like a shallow breath in the belly of the Lower East Side. It began as a circle of delinquent teens characterized by a ferocious gang mentality and machismo. The scene has since quieted down and thinned out. Aging skinheads like Ally prefer anglophone alehouses and soccer games to hardcore shows and throwdowns.
My first conversation with Ally took place outside a club after a ska concert six years ago. As the between-band DJ, he complained that most of the audience, teenybopper fans of punked-up modern ska, had never even heard of the artists he played. But his grumbling revealed romantic resignation; he liked being the only one who knew the song in a room full of people who equated obscurity with good taste.
Barely 15 then, I was afraid he might dismiss me as another clueless youngster. But if you hang around him long enough, only 10 minutes or so, you discover he desires only two things: people to listen to his records, and someone to listen to him. His face scrunches into a wink now when he spots me among the Raven's listeners.
Between records, he recalls how New York City was much tougher when he was growing up?though largely by his own design. As a punk at the Collegiate School, he dodged the dress code by dotting his blazer with safety pins. Most of his one semester at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science was spent getting in trouble. One of his favorite stories is about how a day of cutting class ended in a splatter; he and his friends deterred a cop car by plastering the windshield with a fetal pig lab specimen.
Many of his buddies from back then?punks, skins and miscellaneous delinquents?now have jobs and families. But Ally never stopped hanging out. He has instead surrendered to scene inertia as a musical connoisseur.
His ramblings exude cynicism, apathy and other adolescent qualities he hasn't outgrown, even though he looks about a decade older than he is. His breath reeking of Newcastle ale, he complains of the monotony of serving coffee at a gourmet supermarket, of DJ gigs falling through, of the poor performance of his favorite Irish football team. But at the turntable, spinning some lustrously obscure Trojan or Tamla single, his heavy grimace achieves an odd levity. It's as if the record?about gangsters and shantytowns, about making love, about black power or just getting down?tells the story he really wants to tell. The musical fiction encapsulates the smart, cool defiance of 60s black music, the same defiance that incited British fans to step outside the confines of mass culture. Now, DJ Ally, who has been young for way too long, sets the rhythm of a comfortably outmoded underground esthetic.
By closing time he is almost alone. His gruff vocals freestyle over the last reggae song in patois, approximating the impromptu eloquence of the original Kingston DJs. The sound that keeps the Raven pumping runs on toughness and soul and old youth. Ally, in his penny loafers and cropped hair, is hopelessly out of his element everywhere but here. And he likes it that way.
DJ Ally spins Thursday nights at the Raven Cafe, 194 Ave. A (12th St.), 529-4712.