Geezer Palooza Rehearsals

RBL Unplugged

From a recent rehearsal for Geezer Palooza:

The Rover:

In My Time of Dying:

Also, from an earlier rehearsal, something very much plugged in:

How Many More Times:

One Night Only

One Night Only

One Night Only is the name the RB Laurence Band gave to our show in the THS auditorium. How it is that we were given the run of the place is hard to fathom; Russ (the drummer and keyboard player) just seems to have been awfully good at talking the school administration into letting us have our way with their facilities.

Long thought (mercifully) lost to history, the evidence of this show has finally resurfaced.

It's probably true that we all need a myth or a legend of the self to survive high school. Because the selves we actually have, though immensely preoccupying, don't amount to very much in anyone else's eyes but our own. And we don't even amount to that much in our own eyes either when we're 16 or 17 or 18. So, you have to start working on your own legend or walk around in the raw.

Which is one way to answer the question that this RB Laurence show from 1986 is bound to raise. What were we thinking? Just who did we think we were?

When we took the Tenafly High School Auditorium stage in January 1986, the RB Laurence Band had played exactly once in public, at the THS talent show some months earlier. Yet, somehow we managed to finagle our own showcase, our own "concert" in front of our peers. I remember that we set about doing this in the most ambitious way possible. We spent endless hours in Russ's basement working up songs. Jason, Dave, Russ, me, and also Andy Markham (since then become the renowned Andy Action). (oh, and Franklin Parlamis on keyboards too). Zeppelin songs, which we felt were our strong suit, made up the core of the set, but we also drew from a number of artists, classic rock staples of the time: Van Halen, Billy Squier (he sounded very Zeppelin-ish to our ears back then), Rush, Deep Purple. The Who. Triumph (good God, why Triumph? you ask. There really isn't a good answer to that one, but  to this day, even listening to my out-of-tune guitar and thinking about how hokey the lyrics are, I love hearing Russ's falsetto harmony with Dave on this one, and I suspect that the lyrics--with their exhortation to, well, follow your heart, actually meant something important to 18 year old me.)

As we found out, not all of these bands' songs suited us. But at this point, not yet fully committed to an identity as "the band that does Zeppelin" we were determined to give them a try. So, after many hours of rehearsal, which still didn't feel quite like enough, we hit the THS auditorium stage and did our best to emulate the kinds of concerts we'd been to, complete with extended guitar and drum solos and various bizarre antics. From a personal standpoint, watching this show again, I'm struck by the fact that it catches me at a moment when I was still trying to split the difference between Van Halen-inspired shredding and a looser, bluesier (ok, sloppier) Jimmy Page imitation.

This certainly wasn't our best performance as a band, though parts of it still seem quite good to me. I would say you can almost feel us tiptoeing through some of these, trying our best not to mess them up, rather than just going for it and confidently playing our hearts out, as we did a few months later at the Battle of the Bands, or as we also did later in the Tomassi's parking lot at Matt Hermann's birthday party. But we learned a lot from doing this, not least of which was that it wasn't that hard to cast a tall shadow if you could just talk someone into letting you on the stage.

A sampling of the songs we played that night, first the Zep songs:

Whole Lotta Love:

Black Dog:

Communication Breakdown:

Rock and Roll:

Celebration Day:

No Quarter:

Heartbreaker Solo:

Stairway to Heaven:

A sampling of the non-Zep material:

Lonely is the Night (Billy Squier):

Smoke on the Water:

Limelight:

The whole show can be heard in more or less its original order here. One Night Only
(and yes, the audio and video are slightly out of sync, but this was the eighties and out of sync was pretty much how things were).

-JBK.

Drums in the Deep

Drums in the Deep

Something's brewing in that old abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. Mysterious noises have been heard thumping and banging away at strange hours. Livestock have gone missing or have turned up with strange haircuts and unusual appetites.

What rough beast now slouches toward New Jersey, its hour come round at last?

RBL reunion: coming somewhere in Summer 2013

Bring It On Home:

The Lemon Song:

The Rover:

Ramble On:

In the Before Time (part 2)

Face Down

It was more than just a band name, it was an attitude, a likely way of landing after a night out chasing the dream. . .

In a previous post I mentioned that McKenna and Koslow were in separate bands in high school. Koslow played with Reilly in the RB Laurence Band. And McKenna played in Face Down. If RBL were like a cult, performing ritualized re-enactments of the great gods of Zeppelin, Face Down captured something more of the contemporary sense of what classic rock was in 1986. They performed Blue Oyster Cult and Bad Company, Pat Benatar and The Who, Dire Straits and The Eagles. Where RBL chose a band of brazen rock icons to imitate, Face Down chose songs to fit their strong suits as musicians and as people. Well rehearsed, tight as a drum, they showed how well a bunch of kids could take the sounds of the radio and turn them into something at once raw and polished, fierce and poised.

With sharp two-guitar work from McKenna and Salman Ahmed, solid bass playing from teen heart-throb, John Devlin, fierce drumming from Gerry White (currently the drummer in three different bands, Baby Teardops, Labretta Suede and the Motel 6, Sleep to Death), Face Down featured strong vocals from both Ahmed and Marissa Nashel, who came to belt, wearing a fringed leather jacket and stalking the stage during her featured Benatar song like she was looking for the guy who did her wrong somewhere in the audience so she could tell him off to his sad little face.

But the showstopper of the night, the song that really blew the roof off was Hotel California. The idea of pulling this off was, in its way, every bit as audacious as RBL doing live Dazed and Confused. Because it's a long song, with lots of parts. Because it's got a lot of strange lyrics that can be a tough sell. Because it's got a whole bunch of very recognizable guitar licks and if someone hits a clam or gets lost in the middle of those harmony guitar parts at the end, forget it, you can stick your steely knife and a fork in this beast because it's done. It's one long tightrope this band chose to walk, all together, balanced up on each other's shoulders. But they came through with grace and power, a bunch of kids doing the work of grownups, owning the whole thing like they made it themselves.

Here is the version they performed at the soundcheck the day of the Battle of the Bands, paired with a picture of them in all their teen heart-throb glory. Feast your eyes, feast your ears. Brace yourself for the  coming reunion gig. . .


Face Down's set list at the BOB (not in original order):

Burnin' For You (Blue Oyster Cult)
Rock and Roll Fantasy (Bad Company)
Sultans of Swing (Dire Straits)
Behind Blue Eyes (The Who)
Take It Any Way You Want It (Pat Benatar)
Hotel California (Eagles)

In the Before Time (Part 1)

Land of the Lost (and Found)

Before there was Mrs Henry, there was high school.

Not high school like today, where the guys all have their hair cut like Justin Bieber and the girls all think Madonna’s old and the eighties are just a bunch of John Hughes movies that their parents insist are funny even though they’re so, like, not. Not like today when everyone zombie-walks through the halls with eyes fixed on their social-life-in-a-box, too busy twiddling  away with their thumbs to scan the halls ahead for some beautiful face to hope will say hello or some scary dude to hope is not in the mood to noogie.  Not like today when MTV is showing “Drunk People Eating Each Other’s Faces and Talking Shit” 24 hours a day. Not like today when you no longer have to sit through Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for the hundredth time in hope that Hot For Teacher or Unchained will be up next.

Back then, in the before time, if we knew one thing about music, we knew we had missed the chance to see the greatest band of all time by mere inches.

Zeppelin was gone.

They were just the other side of a fissure in time that separated us irrevocably from the golden-age of rocking. We were like Dark Age villagers scavenging in the ruins of an ancient fallen city, once glowing magnificently with incomparable vitality and power. Or like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, on the beach way out in the Forbidden Zone, knee deep in the surf, angrily pounding sand and cursing the bastards who had blown it all up, there in the shadow of the broken torso of the Statue of Liberty washed ashore in an utterly irremediable future. All that was left to us were posters, records, and midnight showings of Song Remains the Same. 

The Song of What Remains

Before you could watch anything you wanted whenever you wanted, courtesy of the intertubes, there was only one way to see Zep in their glory days, and that was to go to the little movie theater in Fort Lee at midnight, pay three bucks or whatever it was and plop yourself down in a seat, and stare at the screen, waiting for the past to live again.

The movie starts out weird: a Prohibition-era fantasy sequence in which pinstriped gangsters with Tommy guns (played by Zep’s management team) mow down some baddies, whose heads pop off, shooting vari-colored liquid into the air, like decapitated soda fountains. (I am not making that part up. Check the internets if you don’t believe me). Then telegrams go out to all the band members, each seen in his “home.” Jimmy Page sits with his back to us by a peaceful lake, turns when he hears us coming and shoots glowing beams from his eyes like a battery-powered Godzilla. Robert Plant frolicks with his beautiful family on a lush Welsh hillside, looks up from the telegram he’s just received and says, “but that’s tomorrow….tomorrow…tomorrow” and off we go, rushing with the band into Manhattan, into the bowels of Madison Square Garden.

Then we’re in a vast, pitch-black space. It’s incredibly disorienting, like trying to find your way around a big dark room, feeling with your arms in front of you for some landmark or light switch. There are occasional whistles and shouts, which give you the sense that there are people out there in the distance whom you can’t see. Someone says “let’s go” and the drums bash into that great open-hi-hat beginning from Rock and Roll, the lights go on and bam, there they are. Led Zeppelin, live and in color.

The four of them on a tiny, bare stage, right up on top of each other like they’re playing in someone’s basement.

Plant bare-chested and golden-haired, with a cucumber stuffed down the front of his jeans, Bonham, pure Barbarian Drummer, Jones with the Carol Channing hairdo, and Page, wearing his wizardy dragon-suit, more full of wiry, agitated motion than we could have suspected from studying his frozen rock-god gestures in our posters. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had shook-off his marble-calm, leaped down from his pedestal and gone gyrating into battle with Goliath right before our eyes.

From this point on we sat with jaws dropped, the past momentarily a living, breathing, peerlessly highly-rocking thing.

To the Battle of the Bands

In high school, the members of Mrs Henry played in separate bands. McKenna played in Face Down, about which I will say more in a separate post. But Koslow and Reilly played together in the RB Laurence Band (named for a classmate who was not, in fact, part of the band, a fact which seemed to confuse literal-minded teachers and classmates who puzzled as to why he wasn’t going to be onstage with the band that bore his name. To his credit, he shouldered this burden with equanimity and even a kind of perverse pride--the best kind, really).

While Face Down pursued a more varied repertoire (Blue Oyster Cult, The Eagles, Pat Benatar, Bad Company), The RB Laurence Band focused increasingly over the year or so of its existence on one thing: playing Led Zeppelin. The reason for this was simple enough. Its singer sounded amazingly like Robert Plant. A sophomore when his bandmates were seniors, David Simon had the lungs of a rock-god. His friend, fellow sophomore, Jason Reilly, rounded out the lineup on bass with dependable groove and a bass-player’s poker-faced calm in the face of the perpetual chaos that seemed always to surround the RB Laurence Band, truly a band that never quite knew what it was doing until it was done.

If you played in a band at Tenafly High School in 1986, there was one major event which dominated your existence as a band, and that was the Battle of the Bands, held in the spring, though the precise date now escapes memory. Usually, there were four bands. There was an ongoing jazz-fusion ensemble, Anonymous, which endured like a guild or a secret society, older members choosing new members each year as if they were Skull and Bones or Masons. The initiation rites were shrouded in secrecy but we were all pretty sure that bonghits and Spyro Gyra were crucial elements. Apart from Anonymous, in 1986 the bands that year were Face Down, The Shade (playing Genesis, Duran Duran, Phil Collins) and Couleur, who played Talking Heads and some other stuff your chronicler can no longer recall.  The RB Laurence Band came to play Zeppelin (and one song by The Firm, the band Jimmy Page formed with Paul Rodgers the lead singer from Bad Company, our one concession to the fact that it was, in fact, no longer 1975).

And what Zeppelin songs did the RB Laurence Band play? Well, in a nod to sanity, we did play a couple of short and tight ones, Immigrant Song and Rock and Roll (with an intro lifted from a bit of live noodling between Plant and Page in Song Remains the Same). But in a nod to obsession, and in a characteristic embrace of projects that were at most a nail’s breadth either within or beyond our capability, we performed our own version of the monstrous live Dazed and Confused that we’d spent hours watching on the big screen in that seedy theater in Fort Lee, hours more listening to in our rooms.

Koslow bought a violin bow and an orange satin footman’s coat, in an effort to be as Jimmy-Page like as possible.

Everyone else in the band stood up at his full height and agreed to imagine for a half hour that he was, in fact, Led Zeppelin. The results were, to judge by the feeling the band had themselves and the reaction of others, both plausible and raucous.

There was video taken of the show (of the entire 1986 BOB, in fact), which this blogger would be happy to once again get hold of. Inquiries have been made and I continue to hope that it will turn up. In the meantime, however, here is another kind of document. Audio from the soundcheck done the day of the BOB paired with photos from the BOB itself.

The videos are crude, but hey, it was the eighties, when it wasn’t perceived as a particularly weird or antisocial thing to perform a fifteen-minute live Dazed and Confused complete with violin bow solo, when in fact an audience of high-schoolers knew exactly why you were waving that bow around. Because in 1986 Zeppelin were six-years and a world ago gone, but, for a few minutes in that high-school auditorium we kinda sorta made it seem they weren’t. 

The Set:

1. Immigrant Song

Simon wails like he's come to loot and plunder. What else can you say?

2. Rock and Roll

Acapella Simon to start, then a little call and response lifted from live Zeppelin antics. Abrupt beginning to the song which is then played like a stampede. Koslow plays the solo like someone is giving him a hotfoot.

3. Closer

Believe it or not this was an actual hit in the eighties (The Firm's version, I mean. We used to go see Firm concerts in the desperate hope that somehow Page would finally play some Zeppelin songs. Everyone would get horribly drunk in anticipation, then drunker still in disappointment). This one has a sax solo by a freshman named Marco Schnabel (yes, the guy who went on to direct Love Guru.) His friend and fellow freshman, Andy Markham also sometimes played drums for us when we'd do No Quarter or Stairway and Russ played the keys. Now he's an actual real-live drummer. Apparently we did not stunt his growth as a musician, only perhaps, as a human being. Matter for a future post.

4. Dazed and Confused

Here's where it all. . . ends. . .

Violin bow solo, the works. Listen for the way the band comes tumbling out of the guitar solo at about 10:18, Simon wailing like a banshee. Nuts.

Mrs. Henry "Alive" at Foxwood Drive

Mrs Henry: Alive at Foxwood Drive, front cover

A genuninely "live"album probably only in the sense that at the time when it was recorded all band members were in fact breathing and their brain waves were (for the most part) not flat, Mrs Henry's Alive at Foxwood Drive nevertheless continues in the grand tradition of not-quite-live live albums represented by such landmarks as KISS's Alive, Ted Nugent's Double Live Gonzo, Frampton Comes Alive, Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan, Aerosmith's Live Bootleg, and Rush's All the World's a Stage, to name just a few.  These were albums designed to bring the concert experience home for the poor saps who couldn't score a ticket or a ride to the show when it came through town. The music was typically awash in stadium size reverb, embellished with added bullfight-cheer style crowd noise and epic stage banter. Notoriously, the music was often also "improved" in the studio.

Mrs. Henry: Alive at Foxwood Drive, back cover

So, presented here is Mrs Henry in fair simulation of its brutal live glory (actually recorded on the technological equivalent of an etch-a-sketch in a basement during rehearsal) playing to an enthusiastic crowd (bullfight cheers added later). And yes, we admit it, some songs have had a little help here and there (a fuckup or two deleted through the magic of the computer-thingy). But all in all, we hope you'll enjoy this little piece of lost eighties music history, presented as it almost, nearly, possibly could have happened. Feel free to roll a j on it.


From a Buick 6

The Roots

Night Train

Down Home Girl

The Wasp

The Wicked Messenger

To download Mrs Henry's Alive at Foxwood Drive just click on the links below.

From a Buick 6
The Roots
Night Train
Down Home Girl
The Wasp
The Wicked Messenger

Sidewalk Santa, The Video

Thrill to the exciting new video from our defunct band.  Mrs. Henry and Friends presents Sidewalk Santa: The Video, featuring exciting dance performances from Santas all over the world, plus the music of Mrs. Henry.  Ho Ho Ho!

Please do not attempt these moves at home without the assistance (or at least the nearby presence) of trained medical personnel.

The song, Sidewalk Santa can be downloaded here:
Sidewalk Santa

Sidewalk Santa: The Lost Christmas Classic Obama Doesn't Want You To Hear

A musical vision takes shape

Sometime around the holiday season of 1989-1990, before Mrs. Henry had officially embarked on its year-long Hootenanny, its three charter members--Reilly, Koslow, and McKenna--repaired to the town of their birth in order to visit with their apprehensive families, plot their future course, guzzle, and take a run at writing the world's most face-meltingly rocking Christmas song. Something must have been in the eggnog, because after locking themselves away for no more than a few hours McKenna and Koslow had composed a truly distinctive take on one of the great traditional themes of the season: drunken Santa. Gathering in Russ's mother's basement, with its liquor cabinet that had launched a thousand brandy fueled jam sessions, the future members of Mrs. Henry joined together with a few hometown friends to bring their musical vision of festive debauchery to life. The results slur for themselves.

          Christmas, Christmas time is here
          Santa's coming now don't you fear
          He's down on the corner he's ringing his bell,
          Been drinking since morning, he's feeling real well.
          [...]
          Mother's don't let your children go near
          Santa's in a stupor, the elves are drinking beer.
         Christmas isn't safe, anymore.

It has been reported that Billy Bob Thornton actually used to listen to a bootleg version of this recording in order to get into character as the foul mouthed "Bad Santa." But although pathetic dissipation is the song's lyrical theme, its music roars with animal health, like a wild boar on an exuberant holiday rampage.

Billy Bob listens to The Henry

You can hear The Who, AC/DC and the Kinks in this one, but also a characteristic Henry breakdown in the middle--the burbling Strat, the interlocking guitars, the varying dynamics, the Townshend-like clarity of the breakdown's lyrics, offering a different, more reflective take on the song's closeup, rather enthusiastic portrait of squalor.

         We cannot condemn Santa's folly--
         Christmas is the season to be jolly.
         The birth of Christ is surely cause
                     for celebration.
         Santa chose to celebrate
         with drunken dissipation.

Thus, the basic ingredients and sensibility of The Henry are here already, very much present, half a year before the band's official founding, and this take (in fact the third and best take of this song) captures much of their loose and loud live spirit. (The song was played live a few times as well, something which we are hoping will turn up soon in our search of the archives.) But there is an important difference from other Henry songs here. Careful listeners may notice that the singer is someone other than Koslow. And this is where the tale of Sidewalk Santa takes an interesting, some might say (while scratching their chins), very interesting turn here (Glenn Beck fans, take note!)

For while we are now able to disclose the fact that the singer on this version is a high-ranking member of the Obama administration, we are not at liberty to reveal his precise identity, nor in fact how high-ranking he actually is. This has led certain conspiracy enthusiasts to suggest that he is none other than Barack Hussein Obama himself! Unfortunately we can neither confirm nor deny this perfectly understandable rumor. Does the Obama administration want to keep you from knowing that our President once sang of Santa, "He's down on the corner in all kinds of weather,/Shouting 'Hey girls, tickle your ass with a feather?' " Give a listen, judge for yourselves.

We're Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny. We purport. You decide.

Sidewalk Santa in its original packaging

To listen to the song, click here: Sidewalk Santa

Of Nixon Masks and Tape Machines: Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny Remastered and Remembered

"Unsubtle?" Silber uttering the immortal first words of Julep
Hootenanny.

Julep Hootenanny is the demo tape recorded by Mrs. Henry, probably sometime in early Fall 1990 (exact dates are hard to reckon because most of the bands records were destroyed in a bizarre mid-nineties housecleaning incident). Once praised as "not exactly total garbage" by future MTV grandee, then local New Brunswick radio poobah, Matt Pinfield, Julep Hootenanny has since come to be regarded by certain members of the cognoscenti as a document that, as one critic put it "fills a much needed gap" in the recording history of Mrs Henry.  Described by some as a kind of  "savage journey to the heart of the American Dream"; it prompted others to declare that "there's nothing in the First Amendment that supports [such] horrible and disgusting projects," Now, at long last a new generation will be able to judge such questions for themselves. Once thought lost to history, recently discovered in an ancient Etruscan shoebox by a crack team of Italian archaeologists digging for treasure in the New Brunswick sewer system, digitally remastered and prosthetically enhanced, Julep Hootenanny redivivus!

"My Wearing a Nixon Mask is Unbelievably Unsubtle"

What you first hear when you fire up Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny is not a guitar or a drum, but an excited voice, saying something quite strange about Nixon masks: "My wearing a Nixon mask is unbelievably unsubtle. It is a pose. And yet, through my contact with other people who are posing, I discover their pose, through my pose. Does that make sense to you, Julian?" This voice will return at the beginning of each song on Julep Hootenanny, acting as a kind of MC, a demented presence shouting over the music, ushering in each song with a feral burst of speechifying, or a wild-eyed piece of spittle-flecked philosophizing. Many have wondered: who is this awful person, and why is he yelling like that? This voice in fact belongs to the band's erstwhile svengali, the future love guru, Robert Silber. He is yelling like that because Mrs. Henry was never just about the music (try as they might). Mrs. Henry was about making a ruckus. The voice of this strange man, hollering at the beginning of each song is a way of signalling that The Ruckus is parked in your driveway at two in the morning, honking its horn--neighbors be damned!--ready to pick you up, do donuts on the mayor's lawn, and peel off for parts unknown.

The Recording of Julep Hootenanny

Another question frequently asked about Julep Hootenanny is, why does it sound like that (i.e. crappy). To which one answer is, it's not crappy it's lo-fi, dude! Surviving members of the band have been pleased (and not a little surprised) to learn that today they can point to some sort of legitimate aesthetic affiliation for their sound, but the truth is that they had little choice in the matter at the time. Lo-fi was all they knew how to do. Russ has gone on to work briefly as a sound engineer in a studio run by a former member of the heavy metal band, Luftwaffe--where on one occasion he even had the opportunity to record "the Eddie Van Halen of the Accordion" (though apparently this didn't go so well)--and since then he has become an acknowledged master of home recording. But at the time when they made the Julep Hootenanny, Mrs. Henry had only a machine that looked something like this

Tape Machine

and none of them really knew how it worked.  They took turns grunting at it, pushing its buttons, turning its dials, praying to, cursing at, and weeping before it. At one point a crazed McKenna even attempted to set it afire, hurl it off the backyard deck and brain a groundhog with it before sanity momentarily--and anomalously--prevailed. On another occasion the tape machine, which had been perched on top of a half-empty can of Milwaukee's Best, crashed to the floor, nearly taking months of recording with it. Fortunately its fall was cushioned by a pile of emergency lo mein that Russ kept in reserve behind his drums. Besides the problem of working with any form of technology more complicated than a ham sandwich, other challenges included the fact that the room at Foxwood Drive in which the recording took place was small and acoustically hostile, and that each member of the band had to record his part separately, since they had no idea how to record the whole band at once, (though some naysayers have also suggested that this may have been because the band actually had no idea how to play together all at once).  Given these challenges, it is probably fair to call the sound of Julep Hootenanny a heroic achievement in adequacy.

The Songs of Julep Hootenanny

The songs can be downloaded here:
The Roots
Night Train
Maggie's Farm
Down Home Girl

The Roots

The first song on Julep Hootenanny, The Roots, kicks off the proceedings with a Stones-like riff and some drawling, sweetly melodic slide guitar (as well as some shouting from Silber about the uses of a Nixon-mask in revealing the performative nature of social reality). Fittingly for a song titled, The Roots, the music embodies the band's affinity for what is now called roots music. At the time, when they tried to explain the sound they were going for, the band called their music, "Industrial Country." However a quick google search of this phrase turns up lots of references to the state of economic advancement in various countries around the world, but none to a style of music. But if not all of Mrs. Henry's roots took firm hold in the earth, and, indeed, if little they planted proved right for the climate or the soil of their time, still, the music they made shows their determination to burrow down like groundhogs for the roots of the American musical tree.

As in each of the songs on the Hootenanny, the players are readily identifiable. Koslow sings (sort of) and plays rhythm guitar on a relatively clean sounding Strat; McKenna adds backup vocals and piercing lead lines on a Les Paul played with a slide he fashioned himself from the bloody fang of a Bengal Tiger; Reilly plays the drums with both wit and ferocity--part Fred Astair, part Incredible Hulk--and plunks on the bass like Pablo Casals pirhouetting in ballet slippers while wearing a phony mustache and a wighat.

Mrs. Henry's melancholy first bassist

(It should be noted that at the the time of the recording of Julep Hootenanny the band was without a regular bass player, because their original bass player had fallen into a state of near catatonic boredom and despair on the living room couch, and then left for Scandinavia, where that sort of thing is encouraged, and, indeed, often celebrated. Anyway, the band carried on recording, with Russ playing both bass and drums, although unfortunately he was not able to do this simultaneously in live performance.)

The Roots was written by Reilly, McKenna and Koslow in a true, if somewhat haphazard collaborative effort. Reilly wrote the music and a set of touching lyrics about mental illness. McKenna and Koslow kept the music largely intact, but set about rewriting the lyrics to suit what they considered a more Henryish sensibility. The result is a strange tale of family life, one in which "mother has suspicions about people in her tree," grandma "never lies about her sizes," and "Cousin Graham don't give damn," which is presumably why he is finally to be traded "for some marbles and a shoe." Although possibly the fact that "his teeth are browning by degrees" and he "keeps his pockets full of sand in case he finds his fleas," may also be contributing factors.

The song is upbeat and Stonesy, and it has a truly rocking AC/DCish solo section in the middle. One thing that makes this part really soar is the way in which the solo carries on for an extra chorus beyond what we would expect, Reilly and Koslow giving each other the nod and deciding on one more hectic tobaggon run down the mountain, McKenna flinging himself down after them with no concern for his own personal safety. They then whip out of that last chorus and into the last verse, the one about Cousin Graham not giving a damn, as if they were the James-Younger Gang riding down a train with guns ablaze and dusters trailing in the wind.

Night Train

Silber on the Dictaphone
(artist's conception)

"I'm not just any slobbering drunk! I'm your President, goddamit!" bellows Silber into his dictaphone (the instrument on which all the talking bits of the Hootenanny were recorded) in a plausibly Nixonian expression of the outrage felt by a man of high position arrived among the seething masses, and now to his shock finding himself both unrecognizable to, and indistinguishable from them. In this way, Silber calls our attention to the double meaning of this song's title--Night Train as a kind of journey through the underworld, a place where President and prole ride shoulder by shoulder toward the same mysterious destination, and Night Train as a cheap disfiguring drunk.

With Silber's indignant Presidential cri de coeur, the sharp hooting of McKenna's slide guitar, and the full tilt chugging of Russ's drums, Night Train comes on like the Midnight Special suddenly barreling past from out of nowhere. We jump the train at the crossroads and then we're off on a breakneck ride down rails of song--over moonlit mountain passes and glimmering midnight plains, through tunnels haunted by the souls of blood-drinking railroad men, past the lonesome ghost towns of hobo legend, whistling down all the stations of drunken back-alley gibberish. Koslow reportedly penned the lyrics after ingesting a near-fatal dose of Robbie Robertson interview clips from The Last Waltz and as a result experiencing an influx of dangerously grandiose artistic ambition. Before the police were called in to restrain him, Koslow had not only attempted to make the world's densest spaghetti sauce, but had also taken every classic train song--from "John Henry" and "This Train is Bound for Glory," to "Mystery Train," "Crazy Train," and "Love Train,"--thrown them all in a bag, banged on them furiously with a nine-pound hammer, and then thrown the surviving bits in the blender with some gainer fuel and Old Grandad.

The result is a song that tells the tale of a living man who journeys into and through the underworld--"a man dies and sees light in the tunnel. I've lived and seen the same"--a lonesome traveller who rides through the dark polis of an uneasy dream on a train that is "never coming back."  On that journey he encounters the devil (no doubt wearing a Nixon mask), who "shakes his hand" and congratulates him on reaching "the promised land" (but just what is he doing there?) where he witnesses a "band of fallen angels...playing the blues." At the end he recalls the fate of John Henry--who, it was said, would only overcome the steamdrill when "the rocks in the mountain had turned to gold"--and the lonesome traveller sees for himself (or thinks he sees--"looking out the window I thought I saw a glow") this marvelous vision of transformation coming to pass--or perhaps he is really seeing the light of dawn breaking at last on the mountains, having somehow returned alive from his odyssey. But is he now waking or dreaming? Was the "night" through which he journeyed the land of the dead, or was it only the dark secret face of daylight America with its sleep mask on? Or, was it all really just the the bad dream of a wicked bender?

The last of these possibilities is the one so masterfully explored by McKenna in the lyrics he wrote for the breakdown section that occurs before the last verse. With the lightest of touches, McKenna makes us sharply aware of Night Train as a cheap ticket to the land of inebriation, and at the same time he connects that meaning to the song's other layers.  The lyrics are worth reading in full:

          Poor man lying in the Bowery slums.
          He thinks he's singing blues, but he's speaking in tongues.
          He's a paper bag prophet and a carpenter's son,
          Without a hope or a dime or a reason.

          He's got holes in his hands, wine in his flask.
          He talks to burning bushes, and also burning trash.
          The lord owes him a favor, but he is ashamed to ask
          About getting his wine, changed to whiskey!

Taking us out of the mythic landscape that Koslow sketches, McKenna gives us the hobo's gutter level perspective on things (to each their strengths). On Julep Hootenanny it is also McKenna who sings this part, which, in his characteristically perfectionist way, he recorded while snorkelling in a custom built tub of Night Train, "for the sake," as he put it "of authenticity." But for all that he sounds like Shakey Jake, McKenna's lyrics are just as symbolically rich as Koslow's.  In fact, Nikos Kazantzakis has cited them as the inspiration for his controversial novel The Last Temptation of Christ (as have the writers of the screenplay for Dude, Where's My Car).

McKenna recording his part for
Night Train

For who can the "poor man" and "carpenter's son" in the Bowery slums be, if not a brother of the Man of Sorrows? Like the speaker at the beginning of the song, who has seen the light normally witnessed only by the dead and lived to tell the tale, he is also a kind of "prophet," one who has the "holes in his hands" to prove it. But as a prophet he seems like a failure. Unable to perceive which things in his world really are signs of the divine, he cannot distinguish burning trash from the burning bush. He tries to sing the blues, but cannot help "speaking in tongues" instead. And when he finally summons the courage to ask the Big Man behind the bar for a favor, it will not be that the bitter cup pass from his lips, but that it be filled up with the good stuff. And so, with McKenna as our guide, our tour group exits the train of railroad myth and we wander down dark alleys in the shadow of the tall buildings of the cities of the plain, where we learn that wherever it is the Night Train is taking us, there are those among us who have already arrived.

 Mrs. Henry charges into
the last verse 

As important as McKenna's contribution to the lyrics of this song, what Night Train really shows off is his great skill as an arranger. Listen to the contrasting rhythmic and dynamic treatments of alternating verses, a characteristic McKenna gesture, one that he would use again to especially good effect in Mrs. Henry's version of the Dylan song "From a Buick 6." Here the headlong gallop of the opening verse slams through a tunnel and comes out the other side pounding on the backbeat as hard and heavy as John Henry driving steel with his nine-pound hammer. McKenna's slide cuts through the din as if he were Duane Allman brandishing a bourbon-dripping scimitar over his head. Reilly beats the drums like a caveman with a mastodon tusk, while his bass booms like a stampede of mammoths falling off a cliff. Through it all Koslow's guitar rings like silver coins jingling in a poor man's pocket. When McKenna's voice changes tone at the end of the taut, sinisterly ticking breakdown with its deftly interwoven chattering guitars, and he snarls about getting his "wine changed to whiskey," all hell finally breaks loose and the band comes charging down from the hills like the Mongol Horde with blood in their eyes and blades aflame in the fierce noon sun.

Maggie's Farm

Audience reaction to Mrs. Henry's first live
performance of Maggie's Farm

A good example of how Mrs. Henry was able to take other people's songs, especially Dylan's and make them their own. For this one, McKenna drew on his extensive hay baling experience in order to help craft a musical arrangement that would make listeners feel they were on an actual farm, hearing the oinks, the baas, the moos, and the yeehaws, swilling the moonshine and smelling the ordure. Again, the song begins with a fitting outburst from Silber, as he declares with giddy bemusement: "It's like some sort of filth magnet that keeps drawing us back in--the filthiest people in the world." In its original context, this no doubt referred to some scene of excess in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the dictaphone recordings heard on Julep Hootenanny were originally made. Here, the filth magnet is clearly the song itself, as McKenna's guitar begins a taunting schoolyard riff (nah nah nah nah nah, etc.) whose sing-song quality, together with Russ's ascending pickup notes on the bass, act as an invitation, pulling us into the song by our sleeve, and sending us spinning into a whirling vortex of muck. Before we know it we are hip deep in sheep dip and we like it that way.

As Dylan wrote it, Maggie's Farm is a protest song, a song about refusing to toe the line any more, a song about wanting to get off the "farm" of America-the-mad. It is an anthem of refusal, but an anthem for a nation of one: "I try my best to be just like I am, but everybody wants you to be just like them." In contrast, Mrs. Henry's version of the song feels much more communal, and it's worth thinking about just how this feeling is produced. To begin with, of all the songs on Julep Hootenanny, this one has without question Koslow's most committed vocal. But rather than a man desperate to escape from the farm, he sounds like he's actually having a pretty good time there. Judging from the sound of his voice it seems quite likely that he will stick around as long as Maggie will let him. But beyond the engaged vocals, the real key to this song's unusual blend of ferocity and goodwill can once again be traced to the musical arrangement--two aspects of which in particular stand out.

Maggie's Farm: Mrs. Henry's Peasant Wedding Dance

First is Reilly's bass, which, as it bounces jocularly back and forth from the root to the fifth evokes, perhaps, the sound of a bottom heavy Maggie bounding along, shifting her weight from one hefty cheek to the other in joyful holiday movement. Once it kicks in we realize we are at some sort of dance, and that modesty is going out the window. It's unlikely that anyone will be going home in their own clothes. Second, is McKenna's syncopated hoedown figures on the guitar, which conjure an image of cows and chickens, sheep and pigs all in their dancing shoes, stepping lively on a Saturday night to the sound of a greasy fiddle.

Maggie's Farm live: note the fancy stepping

Listen to the way McKenna uses his guitar to orchestrate a variety of different feelings of movement for the song, each one an accompaniment for a different invisible step. In the first part of the verse, when Koslow sings "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," McKenna plays a lightly syncopated part that sounds like pigs and cows, mules and sheep doing the two step in a circle, their steps jaunty but tightly controlled, like his playing.

After Koslow finishes the line, however, the dancers turn outward and happily wave their arms (or legs, hooves and paws) in wide, open movements--listen, now Mckenna's guitar opens up with longer, twangier notes and the chickens begin to flutter and jump. Then comes the breakdown, and, while Koslow sings "I wake up in the morning, hold my hands and pray for rain," McKenna plays loud, hard power chords, crisply starting and stopping while the animals step back in a ring, clap their hooves, and watch each other step forth to strut their stuff one by one.

Mrs. Cow shakes it like a Holy Roller

There goes Mrs. Cow, shaking it. Mrs. Chicken does...the Mashed Potato, and Mr. Pig jumps in and does the robot. Then, as Koslow shouts, "It's a shame the way she makes me scrub the floor," McKenna lets the animals pivot and twirl back into place with a do-si-do as the dance starts rolling round the barn floor once again. And then, with Koslow again singing "No, I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more," it's back into the two step with which they all began.

This song is Mrs. Henry's Kermesse and it bursts with filthy drunken peasant glee.

Down Home Girl

The record from which Mrs. Henry took
"Down Home Girl," later discovered under
a litter box.

The final song on Julep Hootenanny is an almost lethally humid version of Alvin Robinson's New Orleans R&B classic, "Down Home Girl." Such a regionally specific song might seem like kind of stretch for a band whose members all hailed from the New Jersey suburbs, not one of whom could tell a chitlin from a grit if his life was at stake. But something about the song seemed right for the band, who had spent countless hours listening to a compilation record on which it was included, imagining themselves in some languorous, steamy and mysterious elsewhere. In fact the record was played until it was on the verge of melting down and burning a hole straight through to China, which it would surely have done, were it not for Russ's quick thinking, when he hid it one night beneath his cats' (Poopenstein and Mr. Longarms') litter box, along with an armful of other records whose repeated playing he felt was beginning to undermine the last timbers of his sanity. But, as it sometimes happens, where authenticity fails, invention blooms. And so, in their reinvention of an R&B classic can be heard the true original genius of The Henry, which lies in their conception of each song as a kind of contraption, a vehicle for moving its hearers from one state of being to another, a weird machine with carefully articulated, though strange looking parts, each performing a precise function--an iron beast at once whimsical and fierce, sinister and festive. And so, where another band might be content to reproduce more or less the arrangement and feeling of a song, playing it straight--and another might experiment by transforming the genre of a song--taking a soul classic and doing it as a country or a punk song, Mrs. Henry always stripped a song down to its gears before building it back up in their own image, and to suit their own purpose.

Mrs. Henry atop her contraption: an early prototype

Koslow's guitar stirs the song to life, like a an old circus bear lunging blindly out of its sleep. Reilly's bass rumbles along the bottom like massive underinflated tires rolling slowly down a country road, while his drums tick along with a kind of precarious dignity--like a threadbare southern gentleman, liquor oozing from his pores, tapping his way down the street with his cane, occasionally carefully taking his hankie from his pocket and delicately patting the beads of sweat from his steaming pate. Koslow sings as if had a head full of julep and a heartfelt conviction of unspoken naughtiness.Wreathing his guitar around Koslow's leering vocals, playing Lester Young to his Billie Holiday, McKenna gives this song its defining character of bizarre, cephalopod-like motion.

McKenna plays the "Down Home Girl" guitar part

Russ once described the sound of McKenna's guitar part on this song as evoking the struggles of a fat man trying unsuccessfully to wrestle his way out of a sagging easy chair. But another way to think of it might be as if it were the sound of a device for mechanized slinking, something with steel tendrils springing loose and tentacles wreathing their way through the air. It sits atop the Henry machine, purloining unattended juleps and making baroque, inscrutable and obscene undulations. Certainly, it is blues from another planet, and in its oscillation between the imponderably extended single line and the snappy imitation of a horn section (dooh-dooh dooh-dooh doot) it manipulates time and space like some kind of dark ancient machine from Mars.

But the song is more than a machine, it is also a kind of float, like something from the Mardi-Gras, built to carry its own brightly feathered tribe. At the prow sits Silber, once again. And he utters a kind of valediction for the Hootenanny. "I did my best to offend everyone. Have I offended everyone?" (shouts of no, yeah, not really, etc.) "Sheesh!" he chuckles, and then the song snaps into gear. This time, however, Silber's is not the only voice we hear. Through the magic of the dictaphone, the song hoists a small band of partygoers aboard its creaking vessel. About midway through the song we hear another friend of the band make a mock-earnest declaration to the dictaphone: "Dictaphone, this is Salmy speaking. I'm going to make a very frank statement. Something is going to go afoul here. I know it; I know it well." Today, of course, this would be a tweet, or facebook status update. But, in its time, speaking into the dictaphone was a lifeline thrown to memory, a way of being able to make a lasting record of an adventure in debauchery.

Koslow: "I want the reddest you've got in the biggest glass you can give me...not one of those dinky things. Give me, like a jug!"
McKenna: "I'm very glad Julian showed up.
Salman: "No one else is glad Julian showed up."
Katie: "I'm just a little nervous."

And with that little snippet of the milieu in which Mrs.Henry once moved, the song rolls on down the street, and the Julep Hootenanny cranks on, deep into the night, carrying its merry band of yahoos forth in song. For, despite being recorded one part at a time, Julep Hootenanny really does sound not only like the work of a band playing together in the same room, but like a band in the largest sense. Just as Greil Marcus declared that the songs of Dylan's Basement Tapes together projected the image in sound of an "Invisible Republic," the songs of Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny together also body forth in sound a kind of imaginary tribe, with their own customs and traditions and attitude toward life--

                                                 Mrs. Henry's Imaginary Tribe?

Listening to the Julep Hootenanny, we may conjure an image of the people of the Henry: they are a strange nomadic folk with leaky tents, odd cooking utensils that double as musical instruments, and very little common sense. They have a rather haphazard sense of direction, and a love of all things that bounce, twirl or flap with abandon. They drink a lot of Bourbon and Milwaukee's Best. They break into fierce dances of spontaneous civic feeling that are frequently mistaken by strangers for lunatic gestures of outrage. Let them take their place at  last among the great wandering tribes of America's sonic landscape, wild and unrepentant weirdos.

--Flail Marcus, 1-31-2011