The Suburbs are what they used to be. As the economy tanks, the upcoming generation heads back home and everything begins to mirror Donna Gaines’s “Teenage Wasteland” -a netherland of boredom, poverty, dead end jobs.
The difference between urban and suburb rock is, at the very least, the difference between public and private transportation. In NYC we don’t care a shit about cars because a) there is nowhere to park and b) we can get anywhere easily enough and c) who can offered insurance?
In suburbia car insurance is like life insurance: it is the telescope from which everything is seen.
In urban areas, on Ludlow Street, there are six clubs a block banging it out out on blocks all along Soho.
In suburbia, where I was yesterday, in New Brunswick, this aint that.
But it is still the spirit of rock and roll and I mean the real spirit: the place may be different but the concrete and clay tumbling blocks of rock are built the same.
They are built in the basement of homes like this, two story houses in the middle of the outskirts, always the bridesmaid towns. This home is owned by Marissa Paternoster, lead singer of Noun and Screaming Females and there is a mural she painted behind the make shift stage. Actually, since it is on the same level it isn’t even really a stage . Though it is a pretty good metaphor for the levelling out of performer and fan.
The New Brunswick basement is oppressively hot and the audience is youngish -late teens, early 20s. Don Giovanni records are putting it on but it is all word of mouth. I’ve been told not to post the address and if I didn’t know Joe Steinhardt I would never have heard of it. It is, in fact, a wonderful mix of mainstream indie, Andy Hardy’s lets put on a show, a remnant of when Don Giovanni records was less successful and a battle against the great recession where job and money is scarce. The woman at the door to the house who is taking money for the bands suggests a dollar.
The audience is uniformly white and uniformly middle class despite the plethora of tats and buzzcuts. The girls are cute, sorta the un-Guido sorta chicks my nephew Jeff ends up with. The guys on dates. They aren’t the wasted 90s mall rats of Gaines’ rock desert going nowhere in slow motion or Win’s nostalgic twitness or even Eric Bognasian’s behind the 7-11 going nowhere. I realize I am transmogrifying a scene… The scene is a new dystopian rock and roll bastion of hope. The bands may be down, and their audience may be struggling, but they come together as friends, as equals, in a world of sweaty screaming rock release.
They are also going their separate ways for awhile. Joe is going to college and his girlfriend and muse Stefani is going to college as well, she will be 3000 away in Seattle. Zac, Joe’s partner in both a hardcore band when they were in their teens, and in Don Giovanni records, is holding down a full time job. Everybody is growing up, everything is getting bigger. A band like The Measure SA won’t be playing basements all their lives even though I’ve seen em at Bowery Ballroom and preferred them at New Brunswick. They are on their second album. Screaming Females are on their second album. Modern Hut is getting ready to make its move. It is an insular scene but everybody is lining up to get in.
And the fans? They are getting older as well. If they were sixteen years old when this began, they are twenty-one now. Will rock stay with em? Will it be put away for other things, job, marriage, kids…
Woody wrote about the music elsewhere so I will just add some thoughts on my buddy Joe -because, man , can this guy write songs. After Modern Hut’s set I ask Joe how he wrote the bridge to “Time” -it is a marvel of construction, a song within a song and pure melodic heaven. He laughs at my question. He can’t answer it. There is no answer. There is no answer to why such wide melodies (all of them: the bloke is a melody machine) are wedded to such a pained world view. Joe has everything he wants right now, so if you were to ask him where, on a brand new song, a line like “If this guitar could talk I’d tell it to shut the fuck up” or, also on a brand new song, “I just don’t care anymore, if you’re looking for my body check the bathroom floor” comes from he would not have an answer for you. In person he is a really, really nice guy. Helen adores him. Jumping into a mosh pit with Zac and another guy for the Measure set, cheering on his bands, telling jokes (about how his last band, the late and very lamented “For Science” , nearly got thrown off their label after performing a set drunk), he is a very cheerful extroverted fellow. But suicides occur in his songs, girls go and never come back, hearts are operated on not loved… What’s that about?
I think it is New Brunswick. I think there is something both dark and light in the air in New Jersey and I think it is a scene made for rock, made for happy songs about sad things.