"Will You Be a Witness for Me?" (Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Bell House/Howard Tate, Big Apple BBQ, 6-13-09)

(Photo via Ken Foto's Flickr (Full Set))

"Brooklyn, your city amuses us.  We've decided to spare your town."

Ron House is a dangerous man.  Sure, yeah, the head of brushed-back silver hair and the softened torso might under worse circumstances suggest "middle management" or "owner of a hardware store" - "We're just an oldies act," he said at some point during a set that seemed as present and necessary as the CDs he chucked into audience members' faces - but there's a fire in his eye that shows a love of fury and hilarity, a recklessness in his movements that shows a playful conception of where the line between the two lay.  He can be sweet and self-effacing but he means all of it, all of it.

The editor of Agit Reader, a Columbus, Ohio native who'd put together a line-up of bands from his home town to celebrate his website's first anniversary, introduced the set as Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments' "first New York show in... 75 years."  It was nothing but an old band running through old songs, but it didn't feel like that, it exceeded all my expectations.  It's not something I'm going to cross off a checklist and leave behind.

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - Half Off (mp3)(buy)

"Do any of the bloggers in the audience know how many songs we've played?"  House came out in jeans (not trendy jeans, not tight jeans, just jeans) and a stretched-out t-shirt that revealed a farmer's tan and he paced and he flopped on his back and he howled and laughed and howled.  He was incredulous when the crowd cheered for "Fire in the Swimming Girl," perhaps afraid that we'd cheer anything, but it's such a lovely and honest piece of poetry that it deserves some noise.  "My Mysterious Death" was the opener, House locking his elbows and joining his wrists and faux-dramatically repeating the song's five-times clap.  "Down on High Street" was the extended closer, with House passing the mic to the crowd and laughing as he let them howl a bit, with guitarist Rob Petric - impressive but unshowy all set long - letting loose windmills.  In between there was "Is She Shy," "Whisper in You Mouth," "Cheater's Heaven," "Rump Government," "Spasm of Morality," and maybe "Outside My Scene."  The band's young bassist stepped forward to dedicate "El Cajon" to the band's old bassist.  The only thing sadder than being an oldies act, House told him, was "being a young person in an oldies act."

They didn't play "Half Off."  They didn't play so much!  Come back!

TJSA wasn't the headliner.  Times New Viking (myspace) was, and House affectionately said that they deserved it.  "We're old and they're young and we're so fucking jealous..."  When TJSA got dragged out for an unexpected (by them) encore, they waited for the younger band to join them.  "Bottle Island" featured a trio of drummers who rotated around the set; one of those was TNV's Beth Murphy, an unlit cigarette hanging on her lower lip.  Some drunk (I'm assuming he was related to the magazine) came over and tried to light it, seemed to singe her hair instead.

House left the stage asking us to stick around for the younger band.  He called them "the best band to ever come out of Ohio" after he'd just spent a whole hour proving otherwise.

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"The hardest job in Columbus, Ohio is following Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments," TNV drummer/singer Adam Elliott said at the top of his set.  It was unavoidably anti-climactic and I didn't stick around for much.  I have seen them before and they are fine, and seem to be serious about what they're doing; you could do just as well, yourself, but they are fine.

They went on way too late, after midnight, because the early openers were given way too much time.  El Jesus de Magico (myspace) were stunning at the start, a slow psych noise jam saturated with creepiness.  But a frantic second number squandered the atmosphere, a broken guitar string killed the momentum.  The Mad Scene (myspace), the only non-Ohioans in the line-up, probably deserve some sort of respect because of their pedigree, but having weathered a performance I find it impossible to give them any.  Painfully dull and at times borderline incompetent, all specifics about their performance were pushed out of my head by thoughts of suicide.  Each new song became God Hates Me, every lyric was God Hates Me, every chord was God Hates Me-diminished-7th.

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Howard Tate - Get it While You Can (mp3)(buy)

Howard Tate (myspace), legendary soul singer, ups and downs, gone and back.  The new material might not have the punch, but his long, sad story's only dug the old stuff deeper.

Tate's an odd looking man, a little round head on a big round body, a hairline that starts on the far side of his ears and rises into a half-crown.  He's not the exciting, charismatic showman some of your classic soul men have been.  He is humble, possibly because he's been humbled, he is apologetic because he is kind.  He pulls out a new song, says without emphasis, "See what you think of this."

He's recorded three full albums since an enthusiast's manhunt found Tate preaching at his own church in New Jersey.  (He calls himself an apostle, holier folks can debate semantics.)  That those records aren't very listenable has nothing to do with the man's voice.  He's always relied on his producers for his material, and even when reunited with Jerry Ragovoy, the man who penned Tate's strongest stuff, the songs and their production haven't felt necessary.  His latest, 2008's Blue Day, has a single interesting track; "If I Was White" is Syl Johnson's watered-down retake on his classic "Is it Because I'm Black?"  It's an interesting choice because Tate's not an angry singer.  (There are some gasps near me when he slips Bush and Cheney's names into his cover of Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927.")  But "White" comes dressed in the tired comfort of a used, clean sound, gets reduced to a shrug.

That's not the new song he plays here, for us.  He sings a different Day track, "Improvising," and when he does so he dons specs and consults a music stand for the lyrics.  He does so without noting the irony.

It's unfortunate that no one's found the skill to capture Tate on disc, now, because he's definitely got something to say and the ability to say it.  He takes amazing, unexpected chances with his falsetto.  He's not just grateful, but helplessly sincere.  And the classic songs he recorded for Verve in the sixties - songs that duck cruelly in and out of print, "Stop," "I Learned it All the Hard Way," "Baby, I Love You," songs later made more famous by fans like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin - aren't trotted out for pure nostalgia's sake, they're relived.

His best song, one of the best songs ever, "Get it While You Can," is so much better here than it was on record.  Because it's a song that gets bigger the more you have to look back on, it's an old man's song.  With no pandering and zero bombast, Howard Tate had me in simple tears.

Also at the BBQ:  Jacob Blickenstaff Photography, Sonic Parthenon

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For those of you who don't know, the "Big Apple BBQ" is a temporary performance art piece wherein a dozen or so giant truck things with restaurant names on them encircle Madison Square Park and pump out food smells.  A corps of volunteer actors fills the benches and tables around the park all day pretending to eat food prepared off-site.  Visitors to the exhibit are invited to wait in snaky lines in front of the truck things, lines that never ever move, until they decide they are tired of doing that.  Then, they go to the long running performance art piece known as "Shake Shack," where the line is slightly shorter and moves slightly faster.

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It's excellent practice for New York's Foodie population.  If this recession gets good, you'll see all those same people lining up for free soup, using $5,000 cameras to snap pics of stale bread and government cheese.

Government cheese!  How long has it been since you've heard a good government cheese joke?  Man, I miss those.

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Stunned by Michael Jackson's death.  Not only was his pop inescapable for a good chunk of my adolescence, his pop cultural presence was.  From syndicated reruns of the animated 5ive to The Simpsons to that bit after The Simpsons where he went crotch-grabbing tire iron crazy to the 3-D House of Epcot to the torture scene in Three Kings to a horde of jumpsuited Filipino inmates.  He crossed boundaries - allegedly, of course, some he should not have - in ways that seems either unlikely to be repeated or unlikely to be noticed, now, yet one of my fondest memories of his career was the liberating moment Nirvana knocked him from the top of the charts.

It was a big mess of a life, and who knows what all was going on upstairs, but I do hope he found some peace in there somewhere.

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I hope Justin Timberlake did not wake up this morning with a renewed sense of purpose.

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I had The Poster.  I don't think I'd ever watched a full episode of Charlie's Angels, but for some reason I had to have that poster.  She was so pretty, almost as pretty as Daphne on Scooby-Doo.  I was six years old and in first grade and she was tacked up above my bed.  When my best friend from school slept over once he climbed my headboard and kissed her, with tongue.

I just thought she was pretty.

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"Know About the Amazing Connections Between Art and Insurance"

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tags: howard tate  tjsa  

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