New Heathens

Plugging Away

nate — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:50:45 +0000

As always. On the next one.Photo by Roscoe at Evie's Terrace.

60 Minutes on a Montana Creek

nate — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:09:41 +0000

Flew to the homestate a couple weeks ago and my schedule was so tight I could only squeeze in 45 precious minutes to cast to Rocky Mountain trout. Fortunately, an interview appointment I had was bumped back 15 minutes. The extra time made the critical difference between my 7th and 8th trout.

Chronologically: First, little brown. Then after busting off a bruiser, I caught this beautiful, native Westslope cutthroat. Hello state fish! Don't see you back east!Then another Westslope, a little bigger.Then I lit into a run of rainbows; all good-sized, hard-fighting, and with beautiful crimson bands. I must've just been lucky enough to hit this stream during the one magic hour between when the water warmed enough for trout to be active, and the flood of spring runoff. The session came full circle with this leaping brown trout, my second, caught during my bonus 15 minutes. Fishing time in Montana is special.

Video Proof, Rough Audio, Approximate Setlist

nate — Thu, 03 May 2012 16:25:20 +0000

From Monday's Last Call at the Lakeside Lounge. Rumor has it there are more official bootlegs of the night yet to come.

This is "$1,000 Car" by the Bottle Rockets. Mark Spencer, from the Blood Oranges, wears the white jacket and plays the white Telecaster. Roscoe is stage right with the Gibson. PA speaker is obviously directly in front of the video microphone.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ihtqeefVfw

Here's another website with some cool pictures from the show.

And here's the night's setlist, because a few folks asked me to share, and, what, some people are too cool to party with a steno notepad?

Roscoe Trio: Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, guitar; Chip Robinson, guitar; Phil Cimino, drums; Alison Jones on bass

1. Girl That I Ain't Got (Roscoe ) 2. Monkey With A Gun (Yayhoos) 3. Started (Chip Robinson) 4. Garbagehead (Roscoe) 5. $1,000 Car, Bad Actor (Roscoe -- written with Kasey Anderson, lyrics held up by Nancy Elgin) 6. "She Could Have Been A Diamond" (Jimbo Mathus) 7. I Don't Wanna' Hang Up My Rock 'n' Roll Shoes (written by Chuck Willis, dedicated to Levon, sung by Roscoe and Jimbo) 8. Tangled Up In Blue (Dylan, sung by Mary Lee Kortes) 8. Total Destruction to Your Mind (written by Swamp Dogg, sung by Roscoe with Andy York on gutiar) 9. I Wanna' Be Your Dog (by The Stooges, Charlene McPherson on vocals) 10. Gloria (written by Van Morrison, Lenny Kaye on vocals, Boo Reiners on guitar, Roscoe [!] on drums) 11. This Is Where I Belong (Kinks) 12. I and I (Dylan, Chip on vocals) 13. Workingman's Blues (Merle Haggard) 14. Raw Power (by The Stooges, Kenny Soule on drums, Erick Hartz on guitar) 15. Power Lounger Theme (Roscoe, instrumental) 16. Sway (by the Stones, Chip on vocals) 17. ???!!! tune I didn't recognize from the Lakeside Lounge jukebox!

(Postscript 5/4/12: Both Roscoe and Jay Sherman-Godfrey informed me that the last tune was "Cinderella" by The Sonics.)

Lakeside Lounge, 1996-2012

nate — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:37:41 +0000

And as also seen in the New York Times.

ONE LAST PARTY BEFORE AN EAST VILLAGE BAR SHUT ITS DOORS

The Lakeside Lounge, an East Village rock ’n’ roll bar with a passionate following, went out on a high note early Tuesday morning when it ended its 16-year run following a raucous party and a spontaneous jam session.

So many well-wishers poured in to pay homage that around 70 revelers spilled out onto Avenue B, where they pooled around a stage-side window to watch the final show. Inside the dark, cozy dive, around 200 people punched their last requests on the jukebox, posed for a few takeaway pictures in the old-time photo booth and hollered at the band to play just one more encore.

“Thank you for 16 lovely years,” Eric Ambel, 54, one of the owners, shouted into a microphone before leading his band, the Roscoe Trio, through a set-closing number.

Jim Marshall, 52, the other owner, stood on a chair to see above a crowd packed so tight that hardly anyone could inch to the bar for a drink. “There are so many faces here that I haven’t seen in years,” he said. “It reminds me of the old days.”

Scores of musicians, most of whom had performed at Lakeside, crowded in front of the band, and many fought their way onstage. The guitarist Lenny Kaye, from Patti Smith’s band, sang Van Morrison’s “Gloria.”

“This bar is for musicians and the people who like to hang around them,” Mr. Kaye told the crowd. “We’re going to miss this joint.”

Some traveled from out of town to say goodbye to the venue. The guitarist Sam Madison, 47, and the singer Jeff Holshouser, 43, from the band Hank Sinatra, flew up from Raleigh, N.C., and said they had abstained from alcohol that weekend just to more heartily toast Lakeside all night Monday. “We came here to pay tribute,” Mr. Madison said. Troy Lavayen, 25, a medical transcriptionist from Paterson, N.J., said, “Nothing else feels like the Lakeside Lounge.”

As Mr. Ambel chipped the first chunky and mercurial licks from his guitar, Daisy Reinhardt, 44, a fashion designer, danced wildly in front of the band wearing a sparkling red blouse. “I can’t believe I won’t get to do this again,” she said. Beside her, Nancy Elgin, 48, a copy editor, sat on the concrete floor where she had staked out a spot early. “I’ve seen more shows here than anywhere else,” Ms. Elgin said.

Charlene McPherson, a New York singer, put fists into the air with her frenzied performance of “Now I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges. “This place closing is a big, fat drag,” she said. Jimbo Mathus, formerly of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, strummed a mandolin and sang harmony on Chuck Willis’s “I Don’t Wanna Hang Up My Rock ’n’ Roll Shoes.” Mr. Ambel dedicated the song to the drummer Levon Helm, of the Band, who died on April 19. Chip Robinson, a songwriter, who played guitar all night, sang “Started,” an original composition, as well as “Sway,” by the Rolling Stones.“Musicians like us are going to scatter like rats when this place is gone,” said Jesse Bates, 49, a singer and a mover by day who said he would return with his truck later in the week to help empty the vacated Lakeside Lounge.

Outside on the sidewalk, fans smoked cigarettes, sipped from beer cans hidden in brown paper bags, and nipped whiskey from flasks. Deep into the morning, the Lakeside Lounge’s renowned jukebox played tracks by Little Richard, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Temptations, Doug Sahm and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Meanwhile the photo booth pulsed with light as a stream of people mugged for the camera and pocketed their picture-strip souvenirs.

Mary Lee Kortes performed Bob Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue,” alongside her husband, Mr. Ambel. “Thanks for making Lakeside so great,” she said. Andy York, from John Mellencamp’s band, played guitar on an incendiary cover of “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” by the soul singer Swamp Dogg. This reporter sang “$1,000 Car” by the St. Louis band the Bottle Rockets, who performed at Lakeside’s opening celebration on April 4, 1996.

“Keep playing!” shouted Doug Arbesfeld, 56. “What are they going to do, shut the place down?”

Though Lakeside’s wake at times felt like an endless Saturday night, eventually it, and the bar, wound down. At a high point, Mr. Ambel performed “Garbagehead,” a song he wrote in the late 1990s about, and for, the Lakeside Lounge. Some, like Mr. Arbesfeld, climbed on their seats and yelled along with the tune’s ribald refrain whose first word is a profanity followed by “it’s all right!’’

For one last night, it was.

****

(11:37 a.m. This concludes my dream, two-week beat of writing about nothing but my favorite New York City bar, and Montana buffalo. If this blog reprints any more stories from the New York Times, people are going to think it's The Huffington Post.)

****

(3:28 p.m. Okay, no sooner had I made a crack about The Huffington Post than I saw I had my picture in The Huffington Post, singing at Lakeside last night. Remind me to make fun of them more often. They had a nice little story about the Lakeisde.)

As Bison Return to Montana Prairie, Some Rejoice, and Others Worry

nate — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:56:16 +0000

As also seen in the New York Times. (The sixth most read and sixth most emailed story on nytimes.com on 4.27.12)

WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.

That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.

“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department, who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.

But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.

“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.

When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.

Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.

“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.

The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.

“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.

Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.

“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.

The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.

Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.

The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.

“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.

The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.

She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.

But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.

“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.

Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.

“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”

‘This Reporter’ Spent a Lot of Great Nights at the Lakeside Lounge

nate — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 05:44:27 +0000

As seen in the New York Times.

For 16 years, the Lakeside Lounge employed a formula that never changed: a handpicked band every night, a jukebox loaded with classic songs, a cadre of quick-witted bartenders working under strings of colored lights, and an old-time photo booth that spat out strips of pictures shot using real film.

While the bar, on Avenue B in the East Village, held true to the rock ’n’ roll vision of its co-founders, Eric Ambel, a guitarist and record producer, and James Marshall, a disc jockey, the neighborhood gradually acquired a new personality. Upscale restaurants replaced drug dens, seedy gave way to hip, and hangouts for musicians and artists vanished. With rent and expenses rising relentlessly, the party at the Lakeside Lounge will end on April 30.

“The economics of the new East Village caught up with us,” said Mr. Ambel, 54.

Many music fans are mourning the passing not just of a nightspot, but of an era. “We learned how to be a band here, and so many others did, too; where are we all going to go now?” Mo Goldner, 43, asked as he leaned against the bar for a farewell toast. Mr. Goldner’s band, Spanking Charlene, has for years played a monthly gig on Lakeside’s small side-room stage.

The Lakeside Lounge opened in April 1996, taking the space previously occupied by a rehearsal studio and a Jamaican restaurant. The bar’s name was an allusion to the summer trips to Wisconsin that Mr. Ambel made with his family while growing up.

Mr. Marshall, 52, who had worked for WFMU-FM in Jersey City, helped fashion the ambience by installing the photo booth. He filled the jukebox with a collection of music far enough from the mainstream to function as what he called “a self-cleaning oven.”

“If someone wasn’t cool enough to spend a quarter hearing Howlin’ Wolf, we didn’t want them in there anyway,” he said.

In 2009, Van Morrison was interviewed by The New Yorker at the Lakeside Lounge because, he said, of the jukebox. This month, Elvis Costello dropped by for a listen. In December, the Alabama Shakes, an up-and-coming band, played a secret gig between sold-out New York shows.

“This is the machine I heard stories about,” said the band’s singer, Brittany Howard, as she flipped reverently through each selection on the jukebox, which glowed like a beacon in the dark space.

Mr. Ambel, who had toured with Joan Jett and Steve Earle, strove to make Lakeside a pleasure for its performers. Unlike New York rock clubs that cram in several acts a night, Lakeside made its one nightly band the star attraction. Musicians played on quality house gear, including warm-sounding tube amps and solid drums. Mr. Ambel personally booked each act and fostered a scrappy community of garage rockers, soul belters, country weepers and urban bluesmen. (This reporter played there with various bands over the years.)

“Making sure the bands had a good experience and were treated really well has always been real important to me, because I’m a musician,” Mr. Ambel said.

In its earliest days, the Lakeside was a musical beachhead at a time when Avenue B still bristled with danger. Once, as Joey and Dee Dee Ramone played, audience members watched the police raid a nearby crack house and line suspects up against a picture window beside the stage. Iggy Pop was a neighbor for a time and also an occasional patron. The owners recruited a roster of bartenders from their circle of friends who were savvy enough to handle Lakeside’s dynamics.

“There are certain things you don’t want to have to tell a bartender,” Mr. Marshall said. “Like, ‘Don’t charge Iggy for a drink.’”

Alex Feldesman, 39, a bartender at Lakeside for 13 years, said, “if you like the bar, the bar likes you.” Another bartender, J..D. Hughes, 47, described working there as, “like bartending in your dad’s basement.” Erick Hartz, 50, likened it to a “clubhouse.”

Some of the place’s color came from the regulars as much as the bartenders and musicians. Danny Ly, 50, enjoyed a pint of beer and a shot of whiskey at Lakeside almost every night since 1996.

“When I’m in Lakeside it’s like I’m Frasier Crane from ‘Cheers,’” he said, enjoying a couple of his last.

Leslie Day, who worked at Lakeside since it opened, said she loved its characters, but noted, “there aren’t as many as there used to be.”

And there are fewer places for the characters to go. The Life Café, which was next door, closed last year, as did the nearby music nook Banjo Jim’s. So, too, did the Mars Bar, an artists’ hangout on Second Avenue. Mr. Ambel said rent and expenses had more than quadrupled since the mid-1990s, forcing him and Mr. Marshall to face the prospect of deviating from the formula that had served Lakeside, its musicians and its patrons so well.

“I can’t raise drink prices too much, I don’t care to have a D.J. in there, I don’t want to have five bands a night — that’s not what we’re about,” said Mr. Ambel, who will play with his own band at the closing party.

Email Subject Line: “Remember This Prick?”

nate — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 13:17:35 +0000

The sender was my good friend Eric Seftel, with whom I logged many a mile in his big purple van for New Heathens shows. Attached was this picture from an NYC bus stop.The incident he's referring to happened back in 2006 -- one of the first blogs on this site -- and it's still pretty funny. Click here to read about how the New Heathens once got "Fostered."

Just Like

nate — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 01:40:29 +0000

Went to Paddy's Service Station in Newark for an oil change and Bossman Matt's 7-year-old daughter was there because she had a half-day of school today. Matt, owner of both New Heathens records, pointed at me and asked, "Do you know who this is?"

"No," she said.

Matt -- who nicknamed me -- said to her, "This is Mr. Fabulous. We call him that because he's a great musician and songwriter."

Without missing a beat she says, "Like Justin Bieber?"

The pissed-off 10-day record

nate — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 14:22:42 +0000

Like I imagine every American ought to, when I heard the news that 62-year-old Bruce Springsteen's new album Wrecking Ball hit #1 on the charts, I reacted like I do when I find out a United States Olympian has won a gold medal. Go team!

I was surprised to learn from The Boss' Rolling Stone interview with Jon Stewart, that he wrote and recorded eight of the 11 tracks on his new record in just 10 days. Springsteen told Stewart that for most of the sessions he woke in the morning, wrote a song, and had it waxed by the time he went to sleep. He said he even shelved around 40 tunes he'd been tinkering with to infuse Wrecking Ball with the energy and immediacy of tracks written and recorded in a single day. Like "Death to My Hometown."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgcJDNcyRFA

The way Springsteen made Wrecking Ball reminded me of two other fairly recent records that I love, both of them also by veteran artists. One was Living With War by Neil Young, the other wasThe Revolution Starts...Now by Steve Earle. Young and Earle both said in interviews that they made those records by waking in the morning, writing a song, and recording it that same day. Here's Neil recording, "After the Garden."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnqkSMj5yh4

All three albums were hailed as the angriest, most political records ever by their respective artists. Like Steve's "Revolution."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR80U_DQwFE

Understand that I'm a guy who ~~blogs too much about buffalo~~ presses, stresses and obsesses about writing songs; reading many an interview with successful songsmiths; spending hours vainly exercising my mediocre guitar skills; and despairing when idea after idea is nothing I'd ever have the stones to let anyone hear, let alone cop to creating.

I can't help but wonder. Can you really write a great record that fast? Do you have to be a genius like Springsteen, Young or Earle? Do you have to be pissed off about politics too? Are there other great records out there that have been written and recorded like this?

On the flipside, it took Leonard Cohen five years to write his (apolitical) masterwork Hallelujah.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q

Somewhere in between, I'll finish writing the songs for my next goddamn record.

Rex-Goliath

nate — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:11:09 +0000

I rock like a fish.(Thanks to Pete Smith, blonde hair, blonde guitar, for the pix. J.D. Hughes on drums, Gitano Herrera on guitar & skull scarf, Robbie Sokolowski on bass.)