DJ Peretz, aka Perry Farrell, for the Jewish Holidays; Roni Size Reprazent at the Hammerstein; The Johnsons
It's always nice to do something on the Jewish holidays. Especially when what you're doing is drinking Red Stripe from an open bar, and watching Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in The Thief of Bagdad, and twirling noisemakers and grooving to the DJ while trying to decide whether the guy in the leather pants and the Rick James t-shirt is or isn't in costume. (Verdict: not in costume, just a dork.)
Purim is a great holiday on which it is a tradition to get so drunk you can't tell the difference between Mordechai and Haman?hero and villain, respectively, of this tale from Jewish "history." There's a heroine, too?in fact she's the main character?Esther, a commoner who becomes a queen and saves the Jewish people as well. Every year around the world thousands of little Jewish girls dress up as Queen Esther and feel pretty and special. Best Female Costume, Makor Purim Party, 2001: a woman in a blonde beehive wig and pink beautician's smock with nametag reading "Esther." Best Male Costume: a tall guy in a Red Army officer's uniform cap and greatcoat.
Apparently Perry Farrell is still a big draw. Or perhaps it was the promise of free hamantaschen. At any rate, the event is sold out well in advance, with people coming to the entrance of the club, excuse me, "culture center" on W. 67th only to be turned away because they didn't get their tickets ahead of time. Some take this as an opportunity to make asses of themselves, wheedling and whining at the folks at the door, but most are pretty gracious about it. A guy in a buttondown and khakis attempts to make it downstairs carrying a bag of food. He's stopped by a burly bouncer: "I'm sorry sir, this is a strictly kosher establishment. No outside food allowed." Later on, I spot the same guy, apparently not suffering from malnourishment, dancing with a new friend. Makor is like that: some people find it too much of a Jewish singles scene. I'm pretty indifferent to that aspect of the place, and perhaps for that reason have always enjoyed it.
At first I go back and forth between the silent movie and the Portland-San Antonio game in the lounge at the other end of the long, low-ceilinged space. About a third of the people are in some kind of costume, mostly the silly hat/blue wig/mask variety. There's a guy with real waist-long dreds, and another with fake ones under a Rasta hat. One woman wears a white gown that sweeps the floor; several others are in fetish wear. The oddest costume, considering the nature of the event, is a guy in a black hooded monk's outfit with an upside-down cross around his neck.
All of a sudden, as happens at these affairs, the place is packed. The second of the three DJs is on, people are getting drunk and starting to dance. The mood is happy: people came to party, but not in a driven way. My plus-one arrives, pushing through the crowd; "I can't believe I found you!" We dance to a variety of groovy, sometimes vaguely Middle Eastern beats, including a version of "If I Were a Rich Man" with slightly tweaked lyrics, next to a girl who's about twice the size of most of the women there, but lighter on her feet than half of them. She seems to have a new friend too.
A couple of beers later I'm thinking it's been a while since I danced like this. The crowd is getting wilder and the fat girl is now wearing the Red Army officer's cap. They announce Perry and everyone's screaming and clapping and twirling their noisemakers as Farrell, ne Bernstein, makes his way to the stage, wearing a white jumpsuit covered in silver sparkles. No more dreds, just a full head of brown hair. Looking damn good, really. He takes the stage and fumbles with his mixer, repeating the same joke three times, clearly ripped on something. Then at one point he makes another wisecrack?"How great is it to be here and be a Jew but not have to think about anything"?and the crowd's with him all the way.
Tired, Plus-One and I sit down in a booth just in time for the platters of free hamantaschen as Perry launches into a surprisingly heavy and hard-edged techno set that sounds a bit amateurish but doesn't discourage anyone, except us, perhaps, from dancing wildly. "You know, I'm surprised I didn't pass out," says Plus-One, munching. "Um?you mean from drinking without eating dinner?" "No, I mean when Perry was getting up onstage, he was so close to us. I could have touched him. When I was 16, I think I would have passed out?I was so into him."
When I was in high school, I was the only one of all my friends who didn't see Jane's Addiction. But tonight it doesn't matter.
Eva Neuberg
It's St. Patrick's Day and we're going to see Roni Size Reprazent at the Hammerstein Ballroom tonight. We wander through the light drizzle to the Tribeca Grand Hotel for a drink. It's built like the Death Star and has a doorman, a greeter and bathroom attendants to give you paper towels when you're done washing your hands. We sidle up to the bar with plush chairs and order whiskey. Cyrus the bartender is a consummate pro. He gives the impression that if you ordered a made-up drink, like a Pol Pot Filibuster on the rocks with sour mix instead of lime juice, he'd know how to make it. I light up a cigarette and say hi to the drummer from the Foo Fighters. We all chat for a while.
"What did you cats do today?" he asks us.
"Not much," I reply. "Woke up at like 3 and watched some of the parade on tv. What about you?"
"I jammed with Queen."
"No shit."
A lot of people hate drum 'n' bass. It's music that polarizes. Either you're a freak for big dubby basslines and drum breaks, or you get fed up five minutes after the DJ spins the first dark-step plate and leave your favorite watering hole, muttering and perplexed. Nobody's ambivalent; therefore it has power. It is black music, with roots in dancehall, which can be linked rhythmically to funk, soul and, earlier, jazz and swing. James Brown's funky drummer was one of the first junglists. Throw in heaping portions of electronic bleeps and hiphop-esque beats at 180 bpm's and you're close.
Reprazent is a conglomerate. Roni Size is the visionary and driving force behind coproducers Krust, Die and Suv. MC Dynamite and Onallee are the vocalists. These guys are godfathers of sorts; their first full-length, New Forms (1997), spawned the mainstream's short-lived flirtation with the already established and flourishing UK drum 'n' bass scene. The most recent release, In the Mode (Mercury/Talkin Loud, 2000) is a more streamlined and aggressive dancefloor record, featuring vocal cameos by Method Man, Rahzel and tonight's special guest, Zack de la Rocha.
We step off the E train at 34th St. and walk half a block to the venue. Outside, as a security guard gets friendly with my body and pocket contents, the thumping is already audible. Brendan says, "This is good music to work out to," and starts doing jumping jacks. My chest is vibrating with the sheer magnitude of sound. Back in the day, when low-rider pickups were all the rage in Altoona, IA, juniors armed with a bottle of strawberry-flavored Boone's Farm wine and a copy of the Booty Bass Vol. 4 CD would bump up and down the main drag of any nondescript Midwestern burg, looking for girls with braces and heavily sprayed bangs, and fighting with longhairs listening to Helmet in their mom's Corolla. Some of these cats had laughable sound systems, and even more laughable rides; old workhorse S-10s, beat up by years of hauling dirt, made new by paint and chrome mags. The most nonthreatening, docile Debbie Gibson song would send the weak spots in the chassis into fits of coughing and shaking and bring on a barrage of harassment by wiggers in the school parking lot to "git tha rattles out nigga."
But there were the authentic crews from Des Moines who would roll through, slamming Onyx with tinted windows and everything. It was rumored that one of these guys wound up in the hospital for the rest of his teens. He had apparently placed his sub and bass bins behind the driver's seat and long exposure to the vibrations associated with low frequencies, amped and blasted, had actually shifted and moved his vital organs, like cereal boxes settling to half-full en route to the store.
We feel the bass here. It's bumping and out of control. I nod to blistering beats that pop in time like wind-beaten bubble wrap. Hooky basslines slug into us, starting audibly and then causing liver damage and shin splints as they morph into subsonic ranges. Over by the sound booth, I see two mixing boards with lots of flashing lights and LCD screens. Ryan, who is busy filming the event, tells me that the big board was brought by the Reprazent crew from the UK, delivered to the Hammerstein in a Penske truck, and blows the bass much harder than can be expected from anything stateside. He says this with a knowing wink, and we move towards the DJ booth to catch a glimpse of Suv at the decks, whose backspins and seamless mixes take the playback of pre-recorded music and modify it into new songs. He is turntableism personified.
As the lights go batty and they fire up the fog machine, signifying the beginning of the show, Size appears behind his board like a dredlocked wizard, triggering sounds and samples from an apparatus half NASA, half airport coin-operated tv booth. The mechanical science that goes into recording music like this is present even in the human modifications of the live show. The live drummer, Rob Merrill, plays tight breaks spit-shine-polish-perfect. The outcome of bassist Si John's modifications are sonorous, like aliens landing during an electrical storm. Even with such cyberstandards to live up to, these guys don't screw up. It amazes me that music so controlled is the catalyst to so much reckless loss thereof, as the crowd goes bananas. Wild out.
Maybe it's that this is a full-blown live show. If it was a rave, complete with poster-sized flier sporting a sky motif with a slick graphic that read Tranceadelic or Global Groove, the place would be overrun by 15-year-old candy-ravers wearing nasty UFOs soaked to the knee in discolored fluid, sucking on ring pops and pacifiers, flashing glow sticks and epileptically passing out in the middle of the floor on six hits of E. The next day they would resume their jobs standing outside piercing shops on St. Marks Pl.
Nope, this is otherworldly and fresh. The inhabitants seem to be here for the oil-slick booms and cuts rather than Special K and Vicks Vapo-back-rubs.
After the show, we walk out the double doors and run into two party promoters from the marketing company upstairs from Brendan. They give us big, triple-paneled fliers for the city's after-hours events. As we're leaving, a member of the event staff, beer-bellied with a headset and credentials proudly displayed, lumbers out and says, "Okay. This message is for you flier-hander-outers. For you to be here, you have to remain outside the perimeter of the awning."
"You mean over there?" the girl promoter sweetly asks, pointing to the drenched street. "But it's raining. Could we please stay here?"
"I repeat," he says even louder, "over there, where the awning ends and the rain begins."
Ben Phelps
The art on display consisted of zigzag lines of red tape on the white walls. There wasn't much to say about it, but a couple took pictures of each other standing against a point where a bunch of the lines intersected. I went into the back room, where the music was, but there was a really annoying disco ball twirling above the keg and it hurt my eyes, so I left. I couldn't see the band anyway. It was the first of four, with local rock gods Oneida headlining, and the Johnsons before them. There isn't a stage at Good/Bad Art, so you have to really get down in front to actually see the bands. This can be a lot of fun.
People kept arriving, some of whom I knew, and I kept drinking and talking, and trying to decide whether the people I didn't know were more or less my age or significantly younger. I can't tell anymore, and I started to wonder what exactly I was doing here. The Johnsons had just driven up from Pittsburgh, so most of them left to get fried chicken at one of those places whose names begin with a "K" but aren't Kentucky. I went back into the music room to check out the second band, who were making a great big rockin' racket with what turned out were only two people?a black-haired white guy on guitar and a Japanese-looking girl pounding away frantically on the drums. They kept getting into some good stuff, but then the guy would blow it by ordering the crowd to do silly things like crouch down on the floor and then get up again. The front half or so of the audience obeyed?including me. Afterward I felt pretty foolish.
The members of Oneida were in the crowd, grooving on the bands and talking with friends and consuming impressive quantities of whiskey. They'd struck me as pretty normal-looking onstage, but offstage they seemed kind of large, physically, and larger than life in a certain way too. The crazy intense energy they channel and create when they play, the vibe that's earned them a cult following, seemed to hang around each of them like an aura. The good-looking one was wearing a jacket with funky-looking fur attached to it, which led to some caveman jokes.
When the Johnsons took the stage the evening became worthwhile. It was the Johnsons Big Band?six people on instruments that included stand-up bass, portable Hammond, trombone and kettle drums. There were two singers and they were both great, as was the guitarist, a spacey-looking guy with asthma so bad he'd had to spend the first part of the night in the car rather than the venue. One singer reminded me of Mark E. Smith, but better, as he roamed around with his mic on a cord, sometimes with his back to the audience. Sound-wise, everything the Johnsons were doing was right?rough, and plagued with technical difficulties, but edgy and driving and groovy all at the same time, somehow just right without being overly familiar, unlike so many bands now who are basically imitating the Stones or the Beatles or the Beach Boys. I was dancing, happy at last. My boyfriend was shifting his hips back and forth a little bit, which is like dancing for him. Most of the people up front were people who already knew the Johnsons, or Oneida, who apparently really dig the Johnsons. I glanced back and saw that the crowd was sparser than it had been for the Mussolini-inspired act earlier. The Oneida fan base appeared to not realize their heroes were rocking out down in front. When the Johnsons finished their set it was 1:30, and I had to work the next day, and someone who said he would get us high had inexplicably disappeared, and Oneida plays all the time, thank God, so we left.
Eva Neuberg