The New Weird America in Queens

A Queens bar. This one called the Shannon Pot. Conveniently located in a crock of shit neighborhood, just beneath the Courthouse Square 7 train stop in Long Island City, within walking distance of at least three major strip clubs. Tumbleweeds would roll here if there were any in town.

I'm here to witness a friend turn 30?James, a well-educated bum/banjo player who's been counting the days since cashing out of his downward-spiraling dotcom a few years back. He looks like a stock foot soldier from any Civil War photograph: long, bushy black hair, goatee and an unkempt cragginess reminiscent of the mid-60s Dylan. The banjo brings it all together, which he keeps in a black case. It's with him tonight, as the invitation asked us to "bring our instruments" if we had any, meaning he had a mind for jamming with friends on his specialty, mountain music, or as the estimable wanker Greil Marcus puts it, music of the Old Weird America.

He hadn't played in a few weeks, the last time being a bizarre gig in the South Bronx in a glitzy 80s-style bar next to a police station, the audience being half ultra-cool Japanese kids in vinyl pants and shades and half off-duty cops staring into their beers. Turning 30 certainly qualifies James for being old and weird, and it gets no more American than an Irish bar in a run-down Queens neighborhood. If you ever get lonely for sane, slightly used white people, no matter what the 718 neighborhood, they can always be found in a bar like the Shannon Pot. It's a nice place, the New York equivalent of one of those warm, well-lit taverns in a werewolf movie, the night outside filled with menacing shadows, but plenty of spirits on tap to qualm those fears while the 7 howls just overhead.

I'm one of the first there and give James his present?an American flag pin, which he immediately puts on the lapel of his winter coat. "I don't trust you anymore, man," I tell him, employing that old hippie pun. He points out that I must not have trusted myself for the past few years. He looks nervous, as the bartender has informed him that tonight is "DJ Night," meaning his dreams of bringing the Grand Ole Opry to Long Island City for his birthday might be deferred. We don't know what DJ Night implies, but can see a small sound system set up by the front window.

Time passes, drinks flow, friends show up. It occurs to me that everyone James knows is a well-educated bum. All of us are either out of work, trying to make something happen, comfortably settled into day job/"writing when we can" setups or all of the above. Most of the crowd is former NYUers like him, washed up on the dotcom beach, or as James put it, left holding the bag, of course not yet realizing we're all left holding the bag in some sense. But 30's one of those dramatic ages, where nothing happens but the sweet cracking sound of young people driving themselves crazy with fear and self-deception, two things that make America great. James and the rest of us are at least getting well-oiled enough to keep those illusions at bay?even the two weird cats James doesn't appear to know who look like bikers, one a dead ringer for Lou Adler, and the other a clean-shaven Levon Helm type.

The DJ shows up?a husky Latino in his 30s, wearing a white dress shirt and carrying two microphones. So this is what it comes down to?karaoke. He's good at it, too, starting up with some Sinatra and working his way into disco and pop classics. It's only a matter of time before Jordan, a born ham who used to work with James, grabs the mic and tears into a surprisingly potent take on "I Will Survive" that brings the house down. We all agree that he should tank the movie idea he's been working on and become a wedding singer. Soon the only black guy in the place, a George Foreman lookalike, tears into some Righteous Brothers classics to great applause.

But something odd is about to occur. A few people took James up on his musical offer and brought along fiddles and guitars, even a stand-up base. James was hoping the itinerant old-time music band he had been playing with would re-form for the night, but the fiddle and guitar players had recently broken up with each other and were not looking to emulate Fleetwood Mac. But the musicians here have been plotting. Like the insurgent hippies they thought they were six years ago in college, they launch a musical insurrection against DJ Night, led, strangely enough, by the biker who looked like Levon Helm, picking up a guitar and feeling his way into "The Weight." Fiddles and banjo kick in, everyone sings along, even strangers at the bar. The DJ looks exasperated at first, but I see a glint in his eye. He simply sits by the window, mic in hand, smiling and nodding along. The gang of drunken pickers fumbles along with another Band song, and when it fades, the DJ bolts from his chair, flicks on the CD player and cuts straight into "Proud Mary." This man isn't stupid.

They trade songs like that for an hour, the DJ making sure to pick country classics (he does look like Freddy Fender with short hair), which the musicians would sometimes back him on, their reedy fiddles awkwardly mixing with his casio-beat karaoke. Eventually, the DJ wins out, it being his paying gig after all, and the musicians, encouraged by the bartender, retreat to a back room to explore those aged Appalachian melodies only true aficionados of mountain music will know.

It was great fun to watch James turn 30, through the alcohol haze, as he graciously accepted pints of Guinness and shots of Jack in volumes that would have felled lesser men. It was similar to the night he and his band of vagabonds with BAs played for Jordan's birthday party a few months earlier in another great Queens dive, O'Hanlon's, just under the N train Ditmars stop in Astoria. James and the band picked away on well-worn Americana while Northern Alliance fighters kicked Taliban corpses in the head along dusty roads on the muted tv above their heads. Some drunken bastard with a handlebar mustache kept spouting insane bullshit like, "I bet Robert Mitchum would have liked that song!" And James' birthday ended up a milder juxtaposition of what can sometimes be found in the wilds of any 718 neighborhood in the opening days of the 21st century: a glimpse of the New Weird America.