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I nominate our very own TIM to be our special envoy to meet with Lu & her peops and get this curfew thing straightened out once & for all!
Whaddya say, Tim? 😉
Agreed, Ray. McSorley’s Light or McSorley’s Dark. Back in the day, if you wanted food, you could have a platter of cheese & crackers, with raw onion on the side…yum! Haven’t been back in ages; the menu may be the same! As for the lavatory, there was one – – ladies used the stalls; guys used the “trough.” 🙂
“Valuable” information for those of you heading to NYC in October…
August 5, 2007
For Beer Tastes, on Beer Budgets
By SETH KUGEL (NY TIMES)Visiting the big city can leave you parched, especially in summer. It’s easy to develop a more-than-one-beer thirst as you gamely tramp from museum to museum, from landmark to landmark.
But hunting cheap beer on the New York City bar scene is a bit like trying to find a cheetah on the African savanna. Sure, $7 pints dot the landscape like plump antelope, but the rare sub-$3 brew lurks in the underbrush like the fleetest footed of the big cats, hard to bring down without the help of a skilled guide savvy in sniffing out tell-tale footprints or happy-hour specials.
But unlike cheetahs, cheap beer won’t dash off at 70 miles an hour when you find it. For example, you have two hours to enjoy 50-cent Bud and Bud Light drafts at Bourbon Street on the Upper West Side on Fridays from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
Bourbon Street is hardly genteel: bras hang from above the bar and snapshots of women who had apparently until recently been wearing those bras are posted on the wall, a nod to the Girls Gone Wild traditions of the real Bourbon Street. Hey, at two 10-ounce brews for a buck, beggars can’t be choosers. (Apparently, a significant number of beggars do like this kind of thing. The place gets crowded, but not so much so that it’s hard to place your order.)
The fratty Upper West Side bar scene is not for everyone, and although a dive bar is a dive bar, at least the surroundings in the East Village are more eclectic. Maybe the best deal — with no happy hour restrictions — is the $7 pitcher of McSorley’s at Cheap Shots, a narrow, raucous bar on First Avenue. Unlike most of what you’ll find at less than $2 a pint, the amber brew, with origins at its namesake pub a few blocks away, is never compared to bodily fluids.
At McSorley’s itself, a mug of about 8.5 ounces goes for $2.25 and is also available in a darker version. That’s a decent price, especially considering the old-school saloon atmosphere that includes sawdust on the floor.
Anyone planning to assault the overpriced, overhyped meatpacking district later in the evening might consider fueling up at McKenna’s a few blocks east of there with a few cheap ones. P.B.R. goes for $2 a can, even as its price elsewhere in Manhattan seems to be edging toward $3.
Near the South Street Seaport, the $5.75 quarts of Bud Light or Coors Light at Jeremy’s Ale House are a surprising value for a tourist spot. A quart, for the lactose-intolerant or metric-loving among you, is 32 ounces, equivalent to two pints or nearly three cans of beer. As at McSorley’s, you have to tolerate a beer stench. When the brew is this cheap, spilling a bit doesn’t bother anybody, and the bar’s slim profit margin doesn’t leave a big budget for mops.
Most of these spots are bargain islands in a sea of exorbitant brews. But the capital of cheap beer in New York City is the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a one-stop hop on the L train from Manhattan. You almost don’t need guidance, as the bustling blocks around the Bedford Avenue station are crowded with bars where both prices and atmosphere are surprisingly pleasant.
Even so, a couple of deals stand out: From 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., seven nights a week, Levee offers dollar cans of Carling Black Label, the result of its dollar-off-all-drinks happy hour. Black Label distinguishes itself from P.B.R. and other bottom-of-the-barrel brands by actually having some taste. But if it’s not enough for you, the dollar-off deal knocks down already reasonable prices on pints of Brooklyn Pennant Ale (to $3) and Yuengling ($2).
And making Jeremy’s Ale House seem both pricey and smelly by comparison is the Greenpoint Tavern, a beer joint from Williamsburg’s working-class days that has made a seemingly happy transition to modern life while keeping a handful of its blue-collar clientele — apparently they all find common ground in their love of hanging pots with plastic flowers. The standard, always-available bargain is a quart of Bud or Bud Light for $3.50 and, in a nod to people who think they’re being chic, quarts of Becks for $4.50.
But cheap beer in Brooklyn is more than Williamsburg. The call-a-spade-a-spade experts at Floyd N.Y. on Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill have comfy seats with a view of the boccie court, the perfect place to enjoy a “Crap-o-copia,” a bucket of ice jammed with six cans of whatever the beer-loving cat dragged in for $12. On a recent visit, that included American classics like Stroh’s, Schmidt’s, Genesee Cream Ale and Miller High Life. It’s easy walking distance from the downtown Brooklyn subway stops and is even on the route of the Brooklyn Loop of the Gray Line sightseeing bus.
VISITOR INFORMATION:
Bourbon Street, 407 Amsterdam Avenue, between 79th and 80th Streets, (212) 721-1332.Cheap Shots, 140 First Avenue, between Ninth Street and St. Marks Place, (212) 254-6631.
Jeremy’s Ale House, 228 Front Street, between Beekman Street and Peck Slip, (212) 964-3537.
McSorley’s Old Ale House, 15 East Seventh Street, between Second and Third Avenues, (212) 473-9148.
McKenna’s Pub, 245 West 14th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, (212) 620-8124.
Levee, 212 Berry Street, at North Third Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 218-8787.
Greenpoint Tavern, 188 Bedford Avenue, between North Sixth and North Seventh Streets, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 384-9539.
Floyd N.Y., 131 Atlantic Avenue, between Henry and Clinton Streets, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, (718) 858-5810.
I heartily recommend McSorley’s…a true dive! 🙂
Meat Puppets – “Rise to Your Knees”
Another successful reunion, imho, (Dinosaur Jr’s being another), with the Kirkwood brothers joined by new drummer Ted Marcus.http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-albums5aug05,1,6338896.story?coll=la-headlines-entnews
The new live album
Many beloved full-lengths are getting played start to finish onstage. Quite a throwback idea, in this era of iPod shuffling.
By Steve Hochman
Special to The L.A. Times
August 5, 2007The album is dead. Long live the album?
“People more and more are just downloading singles and individual songs, putting their iPods on shuffle,” says music impresario Barry Hogan. “The whole idea of the album as an art form is kind of forgotten.”
But not in concert. In the last few weeks alone, Los Angeles has seen a rash of acts performing complete albums: Sonic Youth doing its 1988 noise-rock breakthrough “Daydream Nation” start to finish at the Greek Theatre (and opening act Redd Kross presenting its 1981 teen release “Born Innocent”), D.C. rockers Girls Against Boys doing 1994’s “Venus Luxure No. 1 Baby” at El Rey Theatre and Louisville, Ky.’s Slint offering its influential 1991 indie opus “Spiderland” at the Henry Fonda Theatre.
In early September, Lucinda Williams goes for the concept crown by performing five shows at the El Rey, a different one of her albums performed each night — topping a three-night version of the same idea Sept. 5, 6 and 7 at the Echo by singer-songwriter Ben Kweller — and on Sept. 15, a Fonda show will feature Seattle grunge pioneers the Melvins and Mudhoney doing their ’80s groundbreakers “Houdini” and the “Superfuzz BigMuff” EP, respectively. In Las Vegas, Iggy Pop & the Stooges will reprise the 1969 proto-punk big bang “Funhouse” at the Vegoose Festival in late October.
And this Friday and Saturday, the work that 40 years ago arguably galvanized the notion of an album as an artistic statement, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” will get a Hollywood Bowl performance by Cheap Trick, accompanied by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and an Indian-music ensemble. (A first-act segment features Beatles songs sung by Aimee Mann, Joan Osborne and others.)
“We want to present amazing records, as we see them, saying people should go back and listen to them as whole albums as intended, rather than just hearing a couple of songs,” says Hogan. The English promoter put together the Sonic Youth/Redd Kross, Girls Against Boys, Slint and Melvins/Mudhoney nights as part of the Don’t Look Back series, which he started in London as a spinoff from his annual All Tomorrow’s Parties festivals.
Reformatting the rock concert
HOGAN readily admits that this wasn’t a new idea when he first had the Stooges do “Funhouse” to start Don’t Look Back in 2005. Cheap Trick, in fact, had done a short tour in 1998 performing its first three albums in three nights at each stop. In the early ’90s, Roger Waters oversaw an all-star version of his Pink Floyd set “The Wall” at the former site of the fallen Berlin Wall. In recent years, Brian Wilson has led concerts of his 1966 Beach Boys landmark “Pet Sounds” and the reconstructed “lost” album “Smile.” Phish used to hold annual Halloween shows performing other artists’ classic albums. A regular series of club shows in New York, billed as the Loser’s Lounge, has featured revolving lineups doing the same thing, as have Susan Cowsill’s monthly Covered in Vinyl shows in New Orleans.And the phenomenon isn’t only about old music. Melissa Etheridge is planning a Sept. 25 New York concert of her new album, “The Awakening,” in its entirety and will likely do an online performance as well, and Sum 41 has a complete performance of its new “Underclass Hero” streaming on its website.
“There seem to be a lot more opportunities for fans to hear the classic albums, in many cases by the artists who originated them,” says Arvind Manocha, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn., who is behind the “Sgt. Pepper’s” event. “As bands started doing it and fans responded, the artists could break free of the standard concert format of playing their greatest hits and a few new songs.”
Hogan stresses that in the case of the old albums, this is music that changed a lot of lives, including his — a notion that causes Mudhoney singer Mark Arm to cringe a bit, given the historic association of grunge with slackerdom.
“Yeah, which is a horrifying thought,” Arm says. “I would hope it’s for the better, but you never know: ‘After listening to you guys, I thought I’d quit my job and smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot.’ Great. I’m sorry.”
Jokes aside, the musicians involved also relate to the fans’ attachment to full albums. Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos remembers that as a teen he and some friends in a basement band tried to play the Who’s whole rock opera “Tommy” themselves.
“When I was going to concerts when I was young, it would have been the coolest thing in the world to see a whole album from start to finish,” he says.
“When we did the Cheap Trick albums, it was just trying to put a new spin on something vintage,” he says, recalling the tour on which the Illinois band tried out the album-per-night format. “Great way to keep the fan base energized.”
But it’s also a way to keep the artists energized. Williams is excited about having an excuse to play songs she’s neglected over the years. She’s eager to see how the old material transforms through the lens of her own growth and changes, as well as in the playing of her current band, musicians who were not involved in the recordings. But mostly she sees this exercise, which she’ll repeat in New York late September through early October, as a chance to reexamine an arc of her life, with the albums running from 1988’s “Lucinda Williams” through 2003’s “World Without Tears.”
“When I look at my albums, I can see for myself a progression in terms of being an artist and a singer,” she says. “For one thing, it will be interesting to do these songs with a more mature voice.”
She almost thinks the series presents more of a challenge for the fans.
“If it was someone I was a fan of, I would want to go every night, like if Bob Dylan was doing this,” she says. “You don’t want to miss a chapter. But there’s the money part. People can’t afford to go to all the shows, so for some it will be frustrating to decide.”
Reinventing the classics
WHETHER it’s the artists’ own work or an icon’s classic, none of the people involved with these shows seems interested in merely re-creating the recorded versions. Manocha says he could easily have recruited a Beatles tribute band to do “Sgt. Pepper’s.”“We didn’t want it to be a Beatles impersonation,” he says. “But I remembered that Cheap Trick and [Beatles producer] George Martin had worked together in the past and thought maybe they’d be interested.”
Ironically, Carlos notes that he rarely listened to “Sgt. Pepper’s” as a whole album and that preparing for the concert has given him new appreciation.
“There are songs I’d skip over as a kid, ‘For the Benefit of Mr. Kite’ or ‘When I’m Sixty-Four,’ ” he says. “And now as an adult, I think they’re great. ‘She’s Leaving Home’ had no band on it, and it was a McCartney song. So I’d flip the album over right there. And now, suddenly, I’m going to be performing it!”
Of course, with the crush of such events, something like this can turn from cool trend to stale cliché pretty quickly. Arm isn’t too worried, though.
“It could very well,” he says. “But I guess the ‘classic albums’ are classic for a reason.”
Singer Lucinda Williams’ show full of emotion
By PAUL KOSIDOWSKI
Special to the Journal Sentinel
Aug. 1, 2007“It’s OK to feel good,” sang Lucinda Williams on Tuesday night during her first encore at the Pabst Theater.
The song, “Like a Rose,” goes back almost 20 years, but it’s not surprising that it has made it back onto Williams’ set list. With a bad breakup and the death of her mother behind her (events that gave her latest album, “West,” its grit and depth), and a marriage reportedly forthcoming, the reigning music queen of bittersweet loss and white-knuckle rage seems ready for joy.
And Tuesday’s 100-minute set showed that she was. Sort of. There was plenty of Williams’ dark side on display, but her writing has changed in recent years. On West, “Unsuffer Me” is a beautifully visceral reflection on the redeeming power of love. But the scorned-woman ditty, “Come On,” seems drawn from dorm-room banter. It just can’t match the primal, soul-baring rage of an earlier, similar song, “Joy” (“You took my joy, and I want it back!”).
Williams sometimes has a hard time inhabiting her songs on stage. Tuesday, she seemed to sing them phrase by phrase instead of spinning them into complete stories. She’s preparing for a marathon retrospective, a series of concerts in New York and Los Angeles in which she’ll perform every song she’s ever recorded, so one could excuse the huge binder of lyrics in front of her. But it’s a bit strange to hear those flayingly personal lyrics read off a cheat sheet.
Her voice, however, is a thing to behold – a potent combination of Emmylou Harris’s yearning warble and the Big River roar of blues greats such as Bessie Smith (she overwhelmed her guest Charlie Louvin when she sang harmony on “When I Stop Dreaming”). If you closed your eyes, the music sang forth gloriously.
A nagging cough interrupted the first few songs and gave the show a tentative start. But Williams eventually found her voice, whipping into a set that danced generously through her whole catalog. The band just rocked harder as the night rolled on, lead by Doug Pettibone’s guitar, which comes close to matching the sandpaper lyricism of Williams’ voice.
Eighty-year-old Nashville legend Louvin opened the show with a Grand Ole Opry-inspired set that showcased songs from his storied career.
Walking proof that they don’t write them like they used to, Louvin is still a soulful balladeer, even when he’s selling lines such as, “You’ve already put big ol’ tears in my eyes. Must you throw dirt in my face?”
From the Birmingham News…
LUCINDA WILLIAMS Sept. 22, 8 p.m. $30 through Ticketmaster. Alabama Theatre, 1817 Third Ave. North. 252-2262 or www.alabamatheatre.com. On sale at 10 a.m. Aug. 17.
No mention of Aug 10. Maybe Inside Job can elaborate…
Kinks – “The Ultimate Collection” (44 tracks on 2 discs).
Wonderful.
As Stan here would say, “God save the Kinks!”Sorry about that link!
There is an earlier thread (“Tickets”) that mentions tickets on-sale Aug. 17, with a possible pre-sale Aug. 10. “Check your local listings!”
