First show in my new hood

Wrote the following on the Jones Street Boys show at Pianos on 3/2. It may eventually be published in Plateau, in a reworked form....so, here's the orig:

Having been turned away from the show I wanted to see at the Cake Shop with a smug "We're sold out," I said screw it and just went next door to Pianos. I saw the second half of the Surefire Way's set, which I won't say anything further about, and then watched a nice dissonance-inflected pop set from Philadelphia's Bebek. Having felt like I had just seen Blondie on mescaline, and having kind of liked it, I went out to the bar and had a beer and a smoke.

I made my way back into the place as the Jones Street Boys were setting up, saw an upright bass and a mandolin and thought "Oh, fuck. I'm about to see Alison Krauss and Union Station. Awesome." What I saw was in fact not Alison Krauss and Union Station, but something quite different....

The Jones St Boys are five dudes based in Brooklyn: Walt Wells on upright, Sam Rockwell on drums, Jonathan Benedict on keyboards, Danny Erker on mandolin, guitar, and lead vocals, and Jon Hull on harmonica, accordion, and lead vocals. Generally you'd place them under the category of "alt-country," although they probably have a little too much energy and originality to be contained within such a tired-ass genre of music. At times, they channel a bit too much O.A.R. and not enough Willie Nelson and Neil Young for my taste--but their sheer honest enthusiasm and versatility always saves them. If nothing else, you will walk away from their show with a healthy dose of the Warm Fuzzies from seeing five country dudes just plain play their hearts out. I mean, by like song 2 they were all drenched in sweat from the strain of putting every ounce of fucking strength they could muster into the thing. And it never hurts to have multiple lead singers (Erker and Hull switched off, and Benedict even sang one towards the end) and like half a dozen different instruments to work with. Everyone sang harmony, cracked jokes and swigged buds between songs.

Essentially, you have here your basic country music setup of guitar, bass, drums, and vocals, and your basic country subject matter centered on chicks, beers, smokes, leavin' town, love, heartache, family, and death, and then you have various black sheep thrown into the mix: poppy keyboards straight out of Neil Young's "See The Sky About To Rain," Hull's accordion and harmonicas (all 207 of them holstered in an army green belt a la John Popper), and Erker's electric mandolin (I'd heard of these, from that Dylan song---er, wait, that was an electric violin--but had never actually seen or listened to one and didn't know they really existed). Strangely enough, electrifying the thing had the effect of making it sound like the clean, bright electric guitars of the Cure, which was an interesting thing to add to a predominantly country sound. The mandolin and the keyboards together could lift songs up to a kind of out-of-place poppy bliss at times, which unfortunately you can't really get from poor Mrs. Krauss.

About midway through the set, Erker asked the audience if they were "ready to see the biggest mouth in the room explode." Hull starts singing the song pretty normally, and he then gets to the chorus. What happens there could definitely be called an "explosion," but "eruption" or "supernova" could also pass as an accurate description. Like, who the fuck let Joe Cocker into the building? Clearly Hull gets high with a little help from his friends. This song was also the first time I have seen someone headbang while playing harmonica. Those things must be, like, all used up after a full set of that kind of wailing. At times you could be forgiven for thinking a pigeon had managed to dive bomb into Hull's throat and his writhings were actually attempts at exorcising said demon. Or, said differently, Hull's, uh...good at harmonica.

It's hard to decide whether the energetic pinnacle of the show was the Joe Cocker Moment or the finale: the last song ended and Hull told the sound dude he could cut the mics, "but don't start the music yet--we got one more." The Jones Street Boys gathered together in a line, Hull in the middle with his harp and Erker quietly strumming his unplugged acoustic as the crowd gradually settled down and then stopped rustling around all together, and there was a remarkable quiet in the little room--a marked contrast to the chaos just outside the door and in the streets, which was heard occasionally as someone came in or left the room. Hull started singing solo, accompanied by the lone, spare guitar chords, and the other guys joined in, singing slowly and with painful regret, "Goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew; goodbye to the flowers, goodbye to you. We're off to the subway, we mustn't be late. Going to work, in tall buildings." I don't know whether anybody else in the room was from a small-town, Anytown USA, but I do know that if they were, they must have been fairly heartbroken too.

So. "Alt-country." Alt-fucking country, for Christ's sake. I have often related the opinion that country music is a static art form--no one ever really innovates, they just continue to make more versions of the same stuff that people have been making for like a hundred years or something. Same subject matter, same basic sound. Not that that's bad necessarily, but it certainly isn't fresh and exciting. The Jones Street Boys have not disproven this theory--but perhaps they have stretched the boundaries of their genre enough to achieve a reasonable level of originality, without wandering far enough off the beaten path to find themselves totally lost.