Cat Club, New York, NY..... In part, I went to this show to see King Missile as the billed opener, but something happened and they didn't perform. It was a bummer, but the night ended up getting weirder and weirder. One member of the group I went to the show with was a very attractive woman, and at the show she met Jay Blumenfield, the guitarist for the band Too Much Joy. He bought her a number of Jagermeister shots during School of Fish's performance and she became more than a little bit drunk. She also knew School of Fish frontman Josh Clayton-Felt, and Josh invited us to come to an afterparty at the Limelight, the church-turned-music-venue on Sixth Avenue at West 20th Street. So my group, with Jay from Too Much Joy in tow, walked over to the Limelight for the afterparty. I was already starting to have misgivings about staying out too late, as it was a weeknight and I was on the air at WHTG at 6 AM the following morning. When we got to the Limelight, though, the bouncer woul...
Chameleon Bar, New York, NY..... I had what was really my only booked performance in a music venue as a musician. It was at the Chameleon Bar in New York City, and I was part of Nova Pilbeam, the acoustic duo I had formed with my college friend Marnie Dubow. We had named our musical combo after a British actress who, as a teenager, had appeared in two Alfred Hitchcock films. Nova Pilbeam was a cute and spunky young woman who had a memorable supporting role in Hitchcock's 1934 classic They Man Who Knew Too Much and then starred in his Young and Innocent in 1937. Two years afterwards, Pilbeam married the great-grandson of Alfred, Lord Tennyson until he was killed in a plane crash during World War II. She retired from acting at age 29 During most of 1990, I had lived in Chelsea -- long before the neighborhood's gentrification, back when New York was a very dangerous place. In fact, that year that I lived in a windowless basement apartment about 75 feet away from the 8th Avenue s...
The Ritz, New York, NY.... Karl Wallinger is fascinating to watch on stage. He's a left-handed guitarist, but like Hendrix, he plays a right-hand guitar. So all of his chords are backwards. On top of that, he normally strummed with a pick but he used fingers only for solos. Each time he went into a solo, he had an eye-catching way of tossing aside his pick to the stage floor to play with his fingertips. I was there with my friend Tim, and he bade me goodbye to catch a train back to Jersey during the encore break. Just as he was exiting the building, World Party returned to the stage with Sinead O'Connor in tow to lend her voice to a few numbers. World Party was originally scheduled to open for her summer 1990 tour (including when I saw her at Jones Beach ), but World Party ended up not being the opening act. Instead, that gig went to Sinead's boyfriend Hugh Harris. (Harris was described in the press as "her new man" or "reported paramour.") It seeme...
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