"Let's Do Drugs"
...And other top pop hit takeaways from a life-affirming weekend of live music.
There is a point to the title of this post beyond the sensationalistic, and I will get to it (eventually).
But this is only partly a review - with selected recommendations - of NOBRO and the several other bands I saw last weekend (July 11-12) at a small outdoor festival on Staten Island. It is, more so, an article about live music in general and what it can do to and for you, and how the joy of seeing a group perform in a copacetic, communal environment is distinct from listening to that group in isolation as a recording artist. It is an article about one festival in particular, the annual Maker Park Radio Anniversary weekend, but also more universally, about how people and place can come together to create something magical, something you have to attend to understand.
You hopefully have (had) one of these in your own life, and if so, please don’t hesitate to shout about it in the comments. For me, it’s something I felt during the years I attended Burning Man with my older son, while watching him grow from pubescent to high school senior. For others, it’s something still found at Glastonbury, despite and away from the media’s glitzy glare. It’s an atmosphere I frequently felt at the old Marquee Club as a teenager and into my early 20s, and it’s something I inadvertently helped to co-create with my weekly club night Communion at the Limelight in the early 1990s.
And it’s something I noticed two years ago when I went down to Staten Island with my younger son Noel, in part to see his fave band Geese perform at the Maker Park Radio Anniversary Festival weekend, but with the added bonus that the core promoters, Kristin Wallace and Tom Ferrie, who founded Maker Park Radio in 2017, are among my best friends, that the event provided an opportunity to see them again and, thanks to a crash pad in the basement of their house just ten minutes’ drive away, hang with them the morning after.
It turned out to be an amazing Saturday afternoon and evening, an event I later lauded on these pages as my Top Show of Summer. There was a certain je ne sais quoi in the park, which could hardly be put down to the location itself: a compact slab of reclaimed green space rising up from off one of the less salubrious blocks of the Manhattan-facing waterfront, with uneven ground compensated for by a hilltop vantage point, and the lack of residential neighbors facilitating maximum on-stage volume. Completely “staffed” by volunteers, the event hosted stalls that lived up to the Maker part of the Maker Part concept, had a couple of local food vendors, a beer table that serviced the Island’s two craft breweries, and the bands happily hung out at their merch tables next to the stage. As for the audience of around 2-300 people, they danced, jumped around, smiled at each other, kicked back on the hilltop, picnicked at the tables, laughed, and moshed their way through Geese and the preceding bands, in part because the music invited it, but more so because the atmosphere encouraged it.
At the end of that Saturday night, local legend Kevin Devine took to the stage of his home borough for what was apparently a rare set of his Staten Island-specific sentimentality, one that not only brought out a large audience of grown men with lumberjack beards and beer bellies, and equally hardy ladies, but brought many of them to tears. Staten Island is a hard place to fall in love with, but it’s as seriously fucking real as Springsteen’s Asbury Park, and its inhabitants display an even greater sense of home-Borough underdog pride and loyalty than their brethren across the river.
To be clear, this weekend festival is not the only event that Wallace (a highly disciplined former booking agent and tour manager) and Ferrie (a harbor boat pilot by day, a veritable music lover at all hours, and an outgoing personality who puts ideas into action) promote. There have been hip-hop, soul and rockabilly concerts (Lee Fields and Boz Boorer among those to have played); two weekends of Punk Rock Mini-Golf, also with live bands, which I have yet to attend, though the props are strewn around their house, the Captain Sensible dummy visible through an upstairs window from their back garden; and an annual record fair held at one of the breweries.
So, when I saw that Jon Spencer was headlining the 8th Anniversary Fest this year, knowing his rhythm section personally (that of the Bobby Lees, Macky Bowman and Kendall Wind, two of the finer students to have emerged from Rock Academy over recent years), and recalling that the Saturday morning Maker Park radio station host Lorenzo Mameli had long requested my presence on his show if the stars ever aligned, I checked that the basement was available, packed the custom-molded earplugs (my tinnitus is still very real and the earplugs an essential accompaniment), and took the painfully long drive down on the Friday afternoon.
I arrived midway through opening band Balaclava’s set. The Queens-based group describe themselves as “grime covered punk,” an apt description for their Tascam-recorded Bandcamp releases and their hard-driving live show. Performing per their name – i.e. with full-on head coverings, far from ideal in the midst of an NYC-in-July heatwave – invited the obvious comparisons, including from promoter Tom, who remarked to me almost immediately upon arrival, “Look, we got our very own Kneecap.” I was tempted to respond “Yes, but what do Kneecap sound like?” But I thought it more fair under the circumstances, to listen to Balaclava instead. They fulfilled what seems to be a defined role at the Festival – that of incendiary local opening act intended to ramp the energy straight up to eleven.
That energy was quickly channeled and amplified by A Place To Bury Strangers, last year’s headliners who had agreed to step in at just two days’ notice to fill the Friday mid-evening slot after Horsegirl canceled due to illness: a more positive endorsement of the Festival would be hard to find. And it is onstage that A Place To Bury Strangers, who have been operating at the margins of popularity for decades now, clearly excel. Guitarist Oliver Ackermann, bassist John Fedowitz and drummer Sandra Fedowitz (all of whom sing to different degrees) set about partially to deafen the audience but also to entertain that audience in the process.
That involved Ackermann abusing one Fender guitar to the point of temporary ruin, at which he promptly picked up another – which was revealed to be sawn off directly across its top half, but no less playable for that performative statement (see below). Ackermann also led the audience in a circular mosh dance, and Sandra Fedowitz was last seen taking a hand-held drum into the audience to perform rhythmic duties with the kind of shit-eating grin you can only display when you love what you’re doing.
My DJ pal Lorenzo Mameli was unimpressed, viewing A Place To Bury Strangers as tuneless noise. I disagree: it’s performance art noise rock as audio-visual catharsis, and it comes from a place of deep technical and musical know-how. After all, Ackermann has his own pedal company, Death By Audio ($200 pedals available at the merch stand), and the group’s most recent long-playing vinyl excursion, Synthesizer, comes in a 12” sleeve that forms the basis of a playable circuit board. (Really.) You might not be whistle their tunes on the way home, but you sure as hell don’t forget seeing them.
Friday night closed out with Dan Deacon, another act whose recorded output barely hints at the accompanying live show. Deacon’s long recording career straddles electronic music, cinematic compositions, and classical excursions, though there is also a definite pop-dance element at the heart of his albums on Domino. But, and especially as backed only by drummer Jeremy Hyman, his live show is all about the audience interaction. Sure enough, there were mass invitations to participation, ranging from individual dance-offs, to dance leadership groups (see below), a steadily growing dance tunnel that eventually snaked around the whole park, on to Deacon’s take on the Wall of Death Moshpit: a set-concluding Wall of Life, at which the two opposing sides of his audience run into each other with intent of high-fiving as many fellow fans as possible.
It's a truly feel-good show, Deacon’s free-flowing hyper-narration serving as its own form of audio entertainment in-between his vocoder and percussion-drive dance raves. But it’s far from vacuous. It’s fueled by love – not just for his audience, a fervid assortment of 30-somethings who grew up with him back in the oughts, but for humanity in general, and at a time when the social political landscape of the USA is being (d)riven by hate, the ability to spend ninety minutes of a Friday night outside in NYC, enjoying the high-fiving, tunnel-snaking, unison dancing of a 300-strong crowd of happy Deacon fans served to remind that, in author Kurt Vonnegut’s words, “we're dancing animals.”
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith, promotes a festival of words every weekend, and once during the week as well. You can support its continued community effort with a donation by way of a paid subscription. $6 a mo. or equivalent in your local dinero gets you all the archives, exclusive posts AND the monthly Crossed Channels podcast. And as they say on the ads - of which there are NONE here - “cancel anytime.”
The following morning, despite some understandable exhaustion, I was back down at Maker Park by 10am to join Lorenzo on his radio show The Rocker, where for three hours, he practices what it says on his tee-shirt: “World Off. Music On.” Indeed, it was a pleasure to be with a host who knows his music and likes my own. It was also a pleasure to look out from in front of the mixing board and mics to the park over the road, where Tom was already back on site assuring that the stage and PA was successfully put back into place (all equipment had been stored indoors overnight, this being an unsecured area).
Such “shop front radio” as this was once dominant in the USA, and it’s made a comeback in recent years. It keeps local radio connected to its local community - and it pays off in returns from that community. From its modest beginnings (initially posited as occupying a vacant container in the Park, which had been cleared out a couple of years earlier by the Maker Space’s founders Scott and DB; they were in attendance at the festival, positively glowing at the fruits of that early hard labor), Maker Park Radio now broadcasts 24/7 and has hosted regular DJ shows by such well-known names as Vince Clarke and Vernon Reid. More than anything it’s helped give Staten Island a foothold on New York City’s musical cultural map.
After a Saturday afternoon spent sampling Staten Island’s coffee in a successful attempt to re-energize myself, along with spinning some of Tom’s ludicrously eccentric vinyl 45s, I was back down at the Park shortly after 6pm to catch the concluding moments of the night’s first of five acts: The Parallel Lines, fulfilling much the same role as Balaclava 24 hours earlier. With four more bands to come, they were quickly followed by Brooklyn’s Skorts, dressed far more sunny that their self-described “post-pych, dark-wave disco” might have you imagine. And indeed, while lead vocalist Alli Walls style occasionally recalled that of Sinead O’Connor’s early delivery’(see below), they can also do pure pop, as on “Eat Your Heart Out,” released a year back as the “first single off of the first full-length LP,” according to its blurb on Bandcamp, and subsequently followed by two more individual songs yet no apparent album. Regardless, Skorts are touring the US in August and have managed to line up European shows for November; perhaps that album, belated though it may be, is now just around the corner.
Brooklyn was further represented by The Thing, hardly the most original band name of all time nor, it should be stated from the off, the most original of bands either. But it’s important to observe that not every group should feel compelled to reinvent the wheel; some are quite happy just trying to make it rotate more smoothly. This version of The Thing (as opposed to the jazz, punk or experimental acts with the same name) take the conventions and even the cliches of classic 1960’s power pop, add a solid dose of early oughts NYC rock’n’roll, polish their three-part harmonies until they positively glisten, then wrap the whole in a showmanship evidently born of endless gigging and practice and two studio albums. Especially in this environment – early evening, outdoors, Saturday - it made for a captivating performance, winning many friends, even if few of us are in high places. Listening subsequently to that recorded output – noting a cover of Sonic Boom’s “You’re The One” among it – confirms that they have lots of what it takes. Whether or not that’s enough to take them higher may not be a question that needs answering. It’s enough that they are right here now. (Right below, too.)
Montreal’s NOBRO on the other hand, do clearly have what it takes to take them higher. Just this past March, the group won the (Canadian Grammys/Brits equivalent) JUNO Award for Best Rock Album with their second full-length debut Set Your Pussy Free. As you would hope with a title like that, this is not the 1990s, they are not an all-male Hair Metal band dictating conditions upon their groupies. Rather, NOBRO – the hint is in the name - are a quintet of furiously rocking females whose combination of glam-punk/power-pop/glitter-rock is delivered with a riveting ferocity that is as much about fun as it is about Riotous (Righteous?) Girl Power.
NOBRO prove that you can, in fact, have your proverbial cake and eat it. Opening number “Set That Pussy Free” (with the slight variation of title from that of the LP’) reveals itself as a dance routine. “Delete Delete Delete” (see below) is about our addictions to the Internet. “Better Each Day” is about spending a whole life running away (and liking it better that way). “I Don’t Feel Like It” covers similar territory (actual chorus: “I don’t fucking feel like it”). God knows what “Eat Slay Chardonnay” is about but it makes for some enjoyable audience call-and-response, and NOBRO are about nothing if not audience engagement.
And then there is “Let’s Do Drugs,” a hell of a singalong itself (see above), indeed the advance single from Set Your Pussy Free, the hilarious sleeve design for which adorns their Bandcamp page and also the Tee-shirt of consumer choice at the Maker Park Festival. (I bought one, Tom bought one, even Tom & Kristin’s teenage son bought one!)
It’s also a delightfully provocative title worthy of a conversation. Personally, I don’t “do” drugs (anymore), except that I am acutely aware and constantly angry about our definition of the very word. After all, I live in a country which can declare a never-ending “war on drugs” but have a “drug store” on every corner, a country that can prohibit natural herbs like cannabis for decades and send people to jail for daring to deal them, but which can legally enable a large portion of the nation to get hooked on opioids and further enrichen the Sackler billionaires in the process. We can sell power-enhancing supplements over the counter but require our athletes to avoid the merest traces of them. We can prescribe our kids Ritalin and the like but we forbid them alcohol (in the US) until they are 21, and God forbid we have a serious conversations about the of Psilocybin mushrooms that grow in the ground, let alone the psychiatric breakthroughs that can be had from the controlled use of MDMA or LSD.
Rant over. I’m not certain that any, let alone all of this, fuels the song itself. With its throwback references to a 1990s that NOBRO are surely too young to have partied through in anything but diapers, one would imagine that “Let’s Do Drugs” is tongue-in-cheek, a story song as much as a slogan. Or is it? When I bought the Tee shirt from them post-show, I posited the meaning of it. Let’s Do Drugs? “Why not,” responded guitarist/vocalist Karolane Carbonneau with the same impish smile she and lead singer/bassist Kathryn McCaughey (the group’s sole surviving member) sported all set long.1
And that’s the thing that really matters here. NOBRO drove down from Montreal for this single show, not for the money, but because they absolutely love what they do; it’s written all over them. And they are incredibly good at it too. After all, provocative song titles and singalong choruses are one thing: delivering a live show that is as high on energy as entertainment, as precisely professional as it is pure punk power, as athletic as it is artistic, and as loving as it is loud, takes some serious skill sets. NOBRO have all of this and then some. They drew the audience in from the opening chant of feminist N-O B-R-O (to the “tune” of “Hey Ho, Let’s Go”), and they never let us go. They distinguished themselves from Da Brudders, or The Runaways, Slade, or any other obvious archaic influence almost instantaneously with the presence of Lisandre Bourdages on percussion and keyboards, the congas in particular giving the rhythm an extra bounce. Nonetheless, the show reached its zenith when McCaughey handed off her bass to Bourdages and sang from the single-cube catwalk for about three songs (see below, on “Delete Delete Delete’”), during which she had the crowd sufficiently eating out of her hand that, when she urged them to “come closer” and suddenly launched herself on top of them, they crowd-surfed her respectfully around before she bounced herself back on stage and soon returned to the bass.
If I sound beyond enthused, then good: I was. But it’s a week later as I edit this and I’m no less excited by the thought of NOBRO onstage than when bedazzled by them at Maker Park. Performances like this – the ones that catch us off guard, the ones that leave us exhausted but wanting more, the ones we come home and wax lyrical about, the ones that we who never buy band tee-shirts buy the band tee-shirts of - are the ones we live for.
Does NOBRO’s recorded output match the quality of their live show? Does that matter? The communal performance and the isolated recording are the two sides of a musical act’s commercial and creative coin, but they are different sides all the same. With some acts, one is but the ‘Version’ of the other. And with other acts, they can be as distinct as a split-artist-45. I only truly love one album by IDLES, but I consider them the best live band in the world. Similarly, while Set Your Pussy Free is a great album, well worth its Juno, I’m not going to tell you that you can’t live without it. But I will promise myself this: if I see NOBRO are playing again within fifty miles of me, I fully intend to be there.
Following NOBRO was always going to be a hard act, and though you can credit Jon Spencer for being able to ramp the volume up even louder, and for all that Macky and Kendall were shit-hot tight alongside him, and for all that he has a following and knows how to deliver a live set, his music has never quite connected with me, and the performance was just too much too late in the night. I gave it thirty minutes and then had to call it quits.
Barely nine hours later, I was sharing morning coffee with Tom & Kristin and marveling once more about the vibe I’d shared in the two preceding evenings, and the similar one I’d witnessed two years back. I likened the atmosphere to that around the early Warped tours, when headline attractions rotated in and out of opening slots, and attendance at one’s merch stand within 30 or so minutes of performance was mandatory, even if your band name was Green Day. These Maker Park festivals are an example of how, sure, it takes a village, but sometimes all that village needs to come together is one person to have a good idea, and someone else to heed the call to volunteer; the energy snowballs from there. Generosity, friendliness and egalitarianism can be contagious, and when that contagion takes hold, it needs no cure.
Not until after posting this has it occurred to me that the Maker Park Festival was astonishingly drug free. I did not even smell marijuana the whole time I was not there, which you can’t say about Manhattan these days.
Wow! Thanks for the lovely and thorough recount of both days! I actually got a bit emotional as I read this piece because I feel like it truly conveys what we, as a collective of people who love music and respect musicians, are trying to do both on-air and at our events. There’s something truly magical that happens when folks come to Maker Park, and I think you’ve experienced it each time you’ve come. The bands seem to be more free and happy. I love that so many bands come early and stay late and just enjoy the vibes. Here’s to more successful events like these in the future. Cheers Tony, the couch in the basement will be there for you next time!
Checking out NOBRO!!!!