NYC '95 part 2

Back in Cincinnati when my girl dumped me I was bummin' and hurt bad. So I drank a lot and tried to make time with everything that moved before splitting town. Though to be fair that was pretty much my MO throughout my early twenties long before I ever moved to New York City. If I say those days are kind of a blur it is because I engineered the experience to be that way with weed and alcohol. It's a miracle I remember as much about it as I do. One chick I was seeing actually made the drive up to New York with me in a rental van crammed with records, guitars, and three cats. She was a stripper. I was under no illusions about the nature of our relationship.

When we pulled up to my friend's apartment building at 205 East 14th Street we found a parking spot right out front. This is absolutely unheard of in New York City and I worried that this which seemed like good fortune might actually be a bad omen. I was concerned that I not burn too quickly through whatever small reserve of good karma I'd brought with me. The way I'd been living, it probably wasn't very much.

How many delis are there in New York? I mean it's gotta be like a dozen on every block. Directly across the street from our apartment building there was a deli where you could get a giant vat of scalding hot coffee and a fresh bagel with cream cheese an inch thick for 2 bucks. This became a daily ritual from the moment my feet first hit the ground and there were some days when it was all I would eat.

Raven Above, Don Van Vliet

Because I had been to the city many times before I did not feel the need to indulge in any touristy stuff upon my arrival. I did a lot of walking around the city, exploring neighborhoods I hadn't seen before and getting more familiar with areas I already knew and loved. Mostly I haunted Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Around the corner from Electric Lady recording studios on West 8th was a little coffee shop on Jane Street where I played a couple acoustic gigs. As I recall, even my friends in the city didn't come to see me play but maybe once. I played an afternoon matinee at the legendary Sin-e' on St. Mark's Place. Again, nobody there. Still, it felt good to hit the bricks and drum up a few gigs within days of my arrival. I was closing in on 30 and still felt a very strong urge to play the Greenwich Village coffee shop scene inspired by Dylan and so many others who did the same thing over 60 years ago. Almost immediately the experience rang hollow. I was proud of myself for making it happen so quickly and I was excited to do it again and again. But already I was wondering: to what end?

In the New Yorker I read about a Captain Beefheart exhibit opening in a gallery uptown. Not memorabilia from his music career, but actual paintings by Don Van Vliet himself. So I got my load on and took the subway up there. The gallery was smaller than your average coffee shop. But the paintings were huge. As I recall they could only fit 8 or 10 of them in there. The gallery was serene, classy and quiet as the tomb. In my leather jacket and torn jeans I felt almost as out of place in there as the good Captain's beastly paintings. Each of them well over 10 feet tall and looked like they were painted with two bricks and a broomstick. Gallery staff probably saw a lot of weirdos pass through there to check out Beefheart's paintings. In comparison, I may have looked relatively normal. I had to chuckle. Partly because I was so stoned. But mostly because I could not help but feel like the Captain had put one over on the art world just like he had done to the music business years before. These canvases looked like they could have been done by an 8-year-old. Granted, an 8-year old from another planet. But you get my point. I cut a picture of one of the Captain's paintings out of the New Yorker magazine and put it in my Trout Mask Replica jewel box. Now I see it every time I listen to that CD and it takes me back.

Drawings by Al Hirschfeld

I did a lot of walking around the city on my own. On one such occasion I was stumbling drunk when I happened to pass a gallery that was showing the work of legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. You've seen his work a thousand times. What you may not know is that he has a daughter named Nina and he hid her name in almost every one of his illustrations. There I was in the wee hours of the morning, seeing double blurry with my beer goggles on, trying to find "Nina" in the many Hirschfeld drawings that I could just barely spy through the darkened gallery's storefront window well after closing time. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. But I can't quite see that too clearly either.