Back Into The Blogosphere
Hello, again. I’ve been, uh, busy. But I’m going to try and start keeping this blog updated regularly again. If you’ve only been looking at this page, I really recommend you also bookmark www.jerseybeat.com. Things are swinging over there – we have a new column by longtime contributor Johnny Puke, a new Rock N Roll Addiction column about City Gardens, the massive punk/HC/industrial concert hall outside Trenton that used to rule the Jersey scene back in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties, and we’re always updating the zine site with fresh reviews and interviews. So now, back to blogging…
Well, first things first; I finally moved!
We sold the old family house on Gregory Avenue – which took about a year, a total nightmare - but it’s finally over, and I now live in a spiffy co-op apartment about a mile north of where I used to be. I don’t want to post the address on here but you can find it on www.jerseybeat.com.
Here are some photos of the new place:




I love it so far. There’s a 24-hour Pathmark a block away, with a Dunkin’ Donuts and a Chinese takout place. A block in the other direction, there’s a pizzeria, a dry cleaner, and a deli… And a few blocks past that, an upscale neighborhood bar with yuppie chow (like $10 hamburgers and $12 wraps) and $5 Blue Moons.
I still need a kitchen table (a SMALL one, my kitchen’s tiny now) and I’ve been waiting for a new dresser for my bedroom to get delivered. Once those pieces are in place, I’ll be completely moved in. It’s funny, I thought I’d feel a wrenching sense of loss when we sold the house. My great-grandparents bought that house in the 1920’s; my grandparents lived there, my father was raised there, and he and my mom raised my brother and I there. But to be honest, an enormous sense of relief came with getting rid of the place, with all the many things that were either broken or needed replacing or updating. Now I don’t have to fuss with the leaky furnace every night or see a fuel oil bill ever again; it feels like a new beginning. It feels really good.
Now back to the music
Last Friday night, my friend Joe Evans (aka Joe III) put together a punk show at Lost & Found in Brooklyn to help celebrate the release of the first Chemical X DVD fanzine (you can find a review on jerseybeat.com) Joe’s a nervous little guy in the best of times, but this show proved especially stressful – there were all sorts of last-minute tinkering with the lineup, and then Lost & Found lost power the night before (which meant that the show might have to be done with a portable generator and very little in the way of house lights.) Luckily the power came back and eventually all the drama resolved itself and it turned into a fun night. Unfortunately I had some drama of my own, waiting six hours for my bedroom dresser to be delivered (it never did show), so I was late for the show and missed the debut of False Friends (sorry, Kelly Lynn!), but I did get to see Full of Fancy, the Steinways, and the ridiculously amazing Japanese noise band Peelander-Z. Joe III even got to relax and dance around by the time the Steinways were one, which was good to see.

Ah, but my weekend was just beginning. On Saturday (after waiting another couple of hours fruitlessly for my dresser to show up,) I headed down to Asbury Park for The Wave Gathering festival. This annual weekend event (this year was the third) brings Asbury Park’s music community together for wall-to-wall shows at clubs, restaurants, and retail spaces.
The artsy drag in Asbury Park is Cookman Ave, about a five-block stretch that’s lined with boutiques, antique stores, restaurants, and café’s. Lots of new businesses had opened since the last time I’d been there, which is the good news; the bad news is that just as many shops and eateries had failed and closed. (It’s ironic that the rebirth of Asbury Park back around 2000 really began with a string of art galleries on Cookman, which are now all gone.)

New Rick Barrys
Once you get off Cookman, though, Asbury is still the same dreary place – with the exception of The Saint, Main Street is lined with bail bondsmen, nail salons, tattoo parlors, cheap ethnic takeout restaurants, and boarded up storefronts. The boardwalk’s definitely showing signs of the much-ballyhoo’d rebirth, but it’s all behind schedule – there’s a lot of construction and new businesses about to open, but none of them managed to do it before the summer season started on Memorial Day. By Labor Day, though, the Asbury boardwalk should be a very different place than the boarded up wreck it was last year.
One of the boardwalk stores that will be opening this summer is called Style Rocket; from what I understand, it will be a high-end surf and skate shop, and it’s owned by my old friend Mike Pimco, who some of you might remember as the lead singer of Kid With Man Head (the punk band who ruled the Asbury scene back in the late Nineties.) Right now though, Style Rocket is just a big empty space with some mannequins; they had a few bands play in there for Wave Gathering, and the place had the acoustics of an airplane hangar. I’m eager to find out if Mike intends to have in-store live music once the place actually opens. (I remember seeing Kid With Man Head play a great in-store show at a record store down in Austin during SXSW once.)
Wave Gathering made use of many of the new businesses on Cookman Ave., Style Rocket, the (temporarily?) reopened Wonder Bar, Asbury Lanes, and the Saint, so visitors and the musicians who performed had a chance to see most of downtown. And everybody had the same question: Asbury’s on the cusp of a massive wave of gentrification. There’s already a strip of luxury condos at the foot of Cookman Ave (near the beach and the big gay hotel/nightclub, the Empress.) More condos are under construction just off the boardwalk, and more will be going up in the near future. But will the city and the developers have the wisdom to make Asbury’s music scene a part of the gentrification; or will greedy real estate developers stifle the local music scene just as they’re almost surely going to bulldoze Asbury Lanes and the Fast Lane in the months or years ahead? It’s fine to build places for rich people to live; but don’t you need a reason for them to live there too? So far, there are condos in downtown Asbury Park; but where are the supermarkets, the deli’s, the coffee shops, the drugstores, the libraries, the bookstores, the parks and playgrounds? And I can’t even begin to imagine how much money and time it will take to turn the local public school system around. Are those things on anyone’s agenda? Or are the developers just going to leave the rest of the city a crime-plagued ghetto and hope the rich folks behind their locked doors in their condos don’t notice?
Readymade Breakup
Wave Gathering certainly provided a blueprint of how the arts could become a part the new Asbury Park, so let’s focus on that. It was great to see every venue with significantly better turnout than last year, and it was especially gratifying to see so many local musicians (and even some of the touring musicians) hang around all weekend attending shows. That’s how a scene happens, whether we’re talking about Hoboken in 1980 or ABC No Rio in 1990, or New Brunswick in the late Nineties, or Asbury Park in the 21st Century. It all starts with the local musicians supporting each other, and it grows from there.
I spent the weekend with my friend Lazlo from BlowupRadio.com (we even managed to broadcast several sets over his Internet radio station with just my iBook and a Snowball mic,) and we caught everything from singer/songwriters in small café’s to big rocking sets at Asbury Lanes and the Saint. Here are some of the highlights:
Shane Cooley
We inadvertently caught Shane Cooley's set at the Twisted Tree Café, but both Lazlo and I were glad we did. Shane is a young singer/songwriter from Virginia who came up to Asbury for the weekend. He’s a sharp dresser with a pleasing, mellow style that reminded me a bit of the young James Taylor. Coincidentally, the first track on his new CD is called “My Asbury Park,” which isn’t about Asbury at all but rather about his own hometown, written and sung as a homage to Springsteen. It was definitely the highlight of his well-received set. www.myspace.com/shanecooley
If you’re vegan or vegetarian, the Twisted Tree is where you want to eat in Asbury Park. They have a wide selection of homemade vegan muffins and cookies, herbal teas, and a menu full of tasty vegan sandwiches. I’m not much of a tofu fan but I had their tofu “meatball” wrap and it was delicious. The meatballs were perfectly grilled and filled with nuts and spices. Lazlo (who’s a vegetarian) raved about his focaccia melt, which was a selection of grilled veggies and cheese in homemade focaccia bread.
After Shane’s set, I headed to the basement of Trillum Antiques, where the Aquarian Weekly was hosting industry panels on topics like management, studio production, marketing, and songwriting. I was on the Press & Radio Panel, along with radio personality Jeff Raspe, the Aquarian’s John Pfeiffer, rock writer Richard Skelly, and several other industry people from radio and newspapers. I think we gave the musicians in the audience some useful advice about how to present themselves, put together a presskit, and whatnot, as well as touching on ubiquitous topics like CD vs digital and the future of Asbury Park.
After my panel, Lazlo and I met up at The Saint, where we saw the new lineup of Fairmont (where singer/guitarist Neil and drummer Andy are now augmented with keyboards and a beautiful young woman on violin and backup vocals.) Lazlo and I agreed that it was the best Fairmont set we’d ever seen, and we’ve both been following the band since its inception.
Later we were back at the Twisted Tree for beautiful acoustic sets by Joshua Van Ness and Mimi Cross, which Lazlo and I broadcast over Blowupradio.com. Both artists filled the Twisted Tree and received warm and enthusiastic responses from the crowd. It was a big difference from the first Wave Gathering (I had to miss last year,) when many of the artists played to small or indifferent audiences, who were just in the venues to get a meal and didn’t care about the live music.
Next up, we walked across Cookman to the lounge at Synaxis, an upscale Greek restaurant, to see The New Rick Barry’s. Rick is one of the best singer/songwriters in NJ and it’s fun hearing him with a full band. The material seemed much more upbeat and light than some of the heavy political tunes he sings as a solo artist. 
Miss TK & The Revenge
We doubled back to The Saint in time to see Miss TK & The Revenge, the Asbury-based new-wave band that invokes the cheesy synth-pop of the Eighties, but with a more punky feel. They packed the place, as did local favorites Readymade Breakup (playing songs from a soon-to-be-released new album) and the Milwaukees.
Lazlo and I ended by the night by doubling back to Synaxis to catch a set by the Crayons, who also had a sizable crowd enjoying their breezy indie pop.
I slept over on Lazlo’s couch and we were back in Asbury the next day, early enough that I got to take a long, leisurely stroll up and down the Boardwalk to see all the new construction. We kept seeing the same faces – journalists Gary Wein and John Pfeiffer, Adam and Scott from the Saint, and musicians like Anthony Fiumano, Tommy Strazza, Joe Harvard, and others everywhere we went. Our Sunday itinerary included a beautiful set by singer/songwriter Alex Brumel at the Twisted Tree (he announced that he’s about to go into the studio to record a solo album,) 16-year old wunderkind Quincy Mumford at the Saint (the lad sounds like a cross between Jack Johnson and John Mayer, with some very appealing teen-oriented songwriting,) and the catchy pop-punk of Frank Bressi & The Chilling Details at Asbury Lanes (where I ran into my old friend Gentleman Jim Norton doing sound.) Other notables in town were Toby Record from the early Nineties New Brunswick punk scene (he’s now managing Miss TK & The Revenge,) Bouncing Souls manager Kate Hiltz (who had Matt Skiba from Alkaline Trio with her on Sunday!), and producer Jon Leidersdorff (who, it seemed, had just been in the studio with just about every local act we saw all weekend!)
There are a lot of questions right now about the future of Asbury Park, but I walked away this weekend believing that the Wave Gathering fest and the music scene it represents need to be a part of it.







