NYC '95 part 1

By the time I moved to New York City in the spring of 1995 I had been thinking about it and talking about it for a long time. I had been to visit the city and stay with friends on many occasions. Now I had a close friend with a spare bedroom in the Lower East Side ready to welcome me in as his roommate.

A serious relationship had recently gone down the toilet when my girlfriend moved away, back to her hometown some 4 hours from Cincinnati. We tried to make it work before, during and after my brief stay in New York City. But long distance doesn't work.

I honestly don't know what I expected to find in New York City. When I moved there I was already 27 years old and starting to get my first gray hairs. So I wasn't naive, I'd like to think. I had no starry eyed fantasies of setting the world on fire. As a semi-accomplished musician, I think I just wanted to see what it would be like to live in Manhattan and try to get some action and traction. There was very little of either to be had. Elsewhere in this blog I have written about my audition for the late great Adam Schlesinger's band called Ivy. Aside from that, there were no major auditions for me in the big city. I met a lot of musicians and even jammed around a little bit here and there with a few new friends I made. Mid-90s New York City Music scene was overrun with Glam Punk D*Generation wannabes. I got the sense that anybody who wasn't into that sound and that look wasn't going to fare too well at many auditions. I like that stuff. But it's a grain of sand compared to all the other influences and styles that have shaped me as a guitarist. What would that make me, if I was willing to move to New York City from Ohio, and get the latest Punk Rock haircut and fashions just so I can play in a band? I was a little fish in a big sea of posers. Suffice to say I went to New York City with some questions and I would come back with some answers.

D Generation:

I quickly found a job at a CD store called Sounds in St Mark's Place. I'll never forget the day my friend Devin from Cincinnati walked through the door and saw me working there. I had left Ohio without having an opportunity to say goodbye to many people I knew. Devin did not know that I had left Cincinnati and here I was already ensconced at a new job in the Big Apple. A couple of people I worked with at Sounds were straight up shitbags, including the proprietor who was shady as the jungle. I sat down for a tokie smokey acoustic jam one afternoon with a co-worker ironically also named Devin and everything we did together just clicked. Right out of the gate we sounded like Gastr Del Sol. For some reason we just didn't pursue it. Most likely because Devin was one of those guys who was on another planet 24-7-365. A non-linear thinker.

Gastr Del Sol:

Another guy I worked with named Mike Cohen was a genuine dyed in the wool New York City hardcore Bob Dylan fan who had traveled all over the country to see Dylan dozens of times. We hit it off right away and quickly realized that we had been at some of the same shows the previous summer. Mike had all kinds of great stories about all these legendary small club gigs that Dylan had played around New York over the past few years. Mike was only a few years older than me but he was so wise and well traveled that he seemed much older. Funny bastard too. After work we used to go to a tavern located directly under the store and drink tall ice cold cans of Sapporo.

I met Ellen Cleghorne from Saturday Night Live when I was working at Sounds. She was super nice. Big smile, beautiful eyes. Every time she came in we all would just swoon. Jon Stewart was a regular customer there. He would stand around and talk to us for several minutes each time he was in the store. Because we had an elevated counter, I can still see him walking right up to it and resting his chin on the countertop as he spoke. Jeff Buckley was in the shop fairly often. His hair dyed black at the time, he was the most soft-spoken person I've ever met. His every utterance was barely above a whisper. And he always reeked of pot smoke. His career was just taking off at the time. He seemed dubious.