Oh man. Last night's concert was awesome.
First off, Brooklyn is a pretty cool borough. Marj and I took the subway from Manhattan, and from the time I got off the subway to the time we got to the concert, it seemed like the entire borough is populated by an age group that ranges from 21 - 31, and its a very eclectic mix at that. Marjorie said we were in the Bardstown Rd. part of Brooklyn. I told her we were giving Btown Rd way too much credit.
So Marj and I got off the subway, and as we walked to our concert at Brooklyn Bowl, we heard another concert going on down towards the waterfront. I recognized the music, and we realized Weezer was doing a concert, and it sounded huge. I heard "Jonas" and "The Sweater Song" live for free as I walked to a bluegrass concert. Its pretty neat having a loud rocking soundtrack as you walk the streets anywhere (this kind of ties to yesterday's e-mail about having entrance music), but for it to be Weezer as I walked through Brooklyn? Can't beat it.
It was a short walk from the subway to the Brooklyn Bowl. I wouldn't have minded a longer walk if it meant being serenaded by Weezer moire, but whatevs. The venue was hidden in what looked to be a re-emerging, formerly-industrial part of the area. The only thing that separated it from some dilapidated, poorly lit buildings was some pink and red neon lights. It's kind of how Jillian's in Louisville used to stick out from the crummy houses and boarded-window businesses.
But when you walk in, its beautiful. Darkly lit, the entire inside is about the size of Tailgaters Music Hall in Louisville, but its decorated with a Coney Island boardwalk theme. There are tables and booths and swank leather couches that serve as tables for dinner or drinking or watching concerts. There were two massive bars, each with at least 3 different draught stations. Behind each bar, instead of having shelves of liquor (which is hidden beneath the bar), the shelves are loaded with
shooting range targets. You know the flat, metal ducks and flags that you see in movies when a guy tries to impress a girl by shooting the flat, metal little targets with a BB gun? The entire back bar was covered in them. Very cool. And there was an entire wall of the weird, furry clowns that people throw balls to knock down.Also, this place got huge kudos from me for not having a single macrobrew available. Of the ten beers at each draught station, they were either Brooklyn Brewery beers. Six were from the Brooklyn Brewery. two were from Sixpoint Craft Ales, and two were from the Greenpoint Brewing Company. I tried three different beers throughout the night, and the Kelso Nut Brown made love to my tongue like Antonio Banderas. It was a gentle beer/tongue lover.
I haven't mentioned yet that there was a bowling alley. Only about 20 lanes. But music never sounded so awesome as it does when you hear bowling pins being knocked down and big heavy balls cruising down a wood lane. I'm not a bowling connoisseur by any means, but I couldn't get over the fact that the pins were all hanging from strings like marionettes, which made replacing them after every set easy. But the technology there, it must be old, blew my mind, because the strings never interfered or prevented pins being knocked over. You'll have to see it to know what I'm talking about.
(OK...some quick internet research tells me this is called string pinsetting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEqSrZR0h2c. I never saw it take as long as it does in that video, but I challenge the Engineers to figure out how it works.)
The band was pretty incredible, too. Greensky Bluegrass was like a jam band for bluegrass. Very funky. Varied between being heavy and then back to light-hearted. Not like the bluegrass that dad used to take me to when I was younger. Its painfully obvious that bluegrass music itself is not entrenched in the Northeast, though. There were probably 100 people standing close to the stage to watch the music. Everyone else in the building was a casual bystander. I got really excited and sang along when they started playing Bob Dylan's "The Man in Me" which I recognize from the Big Lebowski soundtrack. When the band mentioned at the end of the song that it was from Lebowski, an over-weight drunk man that looked like Oliver Platt started shouting quotes from the movie. I must have been the only one that recognized them, because once he caught me smiling, he started shouting them at me. Oh well.
Of the 100 of us standing close to the stage, there were a handful of cute, drunk girls that tried to dance to it, and one guy trying to dance. This poor guy tried all of his tried-and-true NYC dance moves to make them fit for bluegrass, but he couldn't nail it down. But what was cracking Marjorie and I up was that he was switching through his repertoire of dance moves, one after the other, several times throughout the course of one song. So you'd see him thrashing like he was at a metal concert, then flailing his arms like he was at a hip-hop concert, and then he'd get chopped-and-screwed and start dancing in slow motion like he was listening to some trance music. Poor guy. I figured out how stoned he was when he started getting infatuated with the big ceiling fan. When people drop what they're doing to start staring at ceiling fans, you know they got their hands on the good stuff.
In general, the closest anyone got to decent bluegrass dancing was a couple that met on the dance floor and started some improvised ballroom/swing dancing. It was kind of neat to see two strangers meet up on the dancefloor of a bluegrass concert and just start dancing like that. Anyone else just looked weird trying their NYC dancing. I just leaned back and tapped my foot in time with the music and felt like I had achieved the correct way to enjoy bluegrass. I asked Marjorie if she knew of dances to bluegrass. She told me that in elementary school, mountain cloggers would come to school to demonstrate bluegrass dancing. Duncan, can you confirm or deny this? Either way, I didn't run home to get my wooden clogs so I could do a wood-heavy tap dance at the Brooklyn Bowl.
We ended up leaving the venue around 11:30 because we were both getting pretty tired. We walked to the subway. It was about 85 degrees still, and Brooklyn had taken on a hot-trash smell. The subway station felt at least 10 degrees hotter. And we happened to leave our concert right before the Weezer concert ended, because right before we boarded the train, about 300 people joined us. So the 30-minute ride home was jam packed with hot and sweaty Weezer fans. We both noticed the unique artisan cheese smell of the crowd. Not appealing.
And that was my night. It could not have been much more fun, and if anyone comes up here any time soon, that's going to be a new destination.
No comments:
Post a Comment