The Barryfest Chronicles

All signage found February 6 – 24, 2009 in New Orleans, LA

Before attending their concert at the House of Blues on Saturday, I was about as familiar with Better Than Ezra as are most people of my age.  Prior to the show, my interaction the New Orleans-based power trio was pretty much limited to the presence of “Good” on the 1990s one-hit wonders playlist a friend and I created during college.

Before I go any further, let it be know that this not an indictment.  We queued up this “Remember the 90s?” playlist every chance we got, and I still find a good excuse to listen to it at least once a month.  And this is not part of some semi-ironic hipster-doofus creem dream, my friends.  If you catch me drinking a High Life while grooving on “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth (With Money In My Hand),” it is because I non-satirically enjoy both the Champagne of beers as well as Primitive Radio Gods’ most well know contribution to popular music.

While I don’t have much to say about the bands of varying musical inclination that showed up just long enough to drop these gems on the world before they went back to doing whatever it was they did before their heady, two-month amble around late night talk show stages and alternative radio stations, I’ll defend the brilliance of these chart-toppers until my last breath.  Give me “Save Tonight” or give me death.

But as far as seeking out any of these artists when they hit the road? C’mon.  “Good” is a fantastic song, but is it any better than “Pepper” or “Flagpole Sitta” or “Counting Blue Cars”?  No one can really say for sure.  So for me, that puts Better Than Ezra in about the same class as The Butthole Surfers, Harvey Danger, and Dishwalla: pretty much off my radar at almost all instances that I am not listening to their most well known songs during a leisurely game of caps or on the first leg of a road trip.

Even if I was the least bit curious, why would I want to ruin any of these masterpieces by doing something foolish like putting them in the context of a full album or live performance?  That’s a high risk, high reward endeavor I never planned to undertake.

But as I have learned pretty much everyday since I got down here, few things go as planned in Big Easy.  New Orleanians my age love Better Than Ezra.  I’m talking “I have their demo EP on bootleg cassette” love.  I’m talking “I’ve seen them about 13 times” love.  I’m talking “Fuck Endymion, let’s I’m going to the BTE show at House of Blues” love. (And, yes, I’m talking “I affectionately refer to the band by a moniker” love).

With that in mind, I joined a large group of natives at the House of Blues on Saturday for Better Than Ezra’s annual Mardi Gras swoop through the Crescent City.  And you know what?  The put on an awesome show for a raucous crowd in an incredible venue.  I still think they fit the classical definition of a “one-hit wonder,” but I realized that their one-hit was not just some sort of concession they were willing to offer in exchange for a moment in the sun.  As I found out over the course of the night, “Good”  was one of a long line of upbeat, accessible rockers that have kept the band going strong for over two decades, the only difference is that it was released as a single at the exact time it happened to perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the moment.

Better Than Ezra came off as a group upon which MTV and popular radio stumbled, not the other way around.  Because unlike most of the other catchy tunes from the one-and-done groups I listened to in middle school, the song that sent this group into the stratosphere was pretty similar to the rest of their material, not a blatant attempt to make their sound more radio-ready.  I realize this is just a veiled way of saying that all their fucking songs sound exactly the same, but their consistency is admirable, even if it comes at the expense of diversity.

I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather listen to 12 different variations on “Good” – a specimen to say the least – than sift through 90 minutes of post-grunge schlock-rock in a dingy club waiting impatiently for the Screaming Trees to launch into a spirited rendition of “Nearly Lost You,” a song that was their only hit because it is the only thing in their entire cannon that is actually tolerable.  And I am sure some of the poor, uninitiated schmucks that got roped into a Blind Melon show during “No Rain” hysteria didn’t much care to watch Shannon Hoon warble around the stage in a heroin-induced stupor as wave after wave of heavy distortion and feedback rang their fucking bells when they expected a short set of mid-tempo toe-tappers performed by mandolin-wielding long-hairs and fat chicks in bumblebee costumes.

I will stop myself before this devolves into a missive on the relative artistic integrity and relative importance of every band to be featured on a Buzz Ballads compilation, because as I said before, taking too close a look at any of this is a zero sum game at best. I’ll just say this:  Better Than Ezra game me exactly what I hoped for but had plenty of reason not to expect all.  And it was good.

Happy Mardi Gras, everyone.

This afternoon, I was trying to fish out a tip for the barista at Rue De La Course when I found a relic from the previous evening crumpled in the back pocket on my jeans.  A quarter page, bi-fold pamphlet titled The Only Doorway was mixed in with the loose dollar bills and bar tab receipts one would normally expect to come across after a night out on the town.

When you think of a typical French Quarter souvenir, I’m not sure if literature extolling the virtues of receiving Jesus Christ as your personal God and savior makes the short list, but this type of shit is actually more common than you may think.

New Orleans is full of sin, and wherever you find sin you’ve bound to find a few people trying to offer salvation.  And when religious zealots descend on Bourbon Street, they are usually armed with megaphones and offensive placards reminding all the Democrats, drunks, rock ‘n’ rollers, adulteresses, potheads, homosexuals, lesbians, Masons, Shriners, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Evolutionists, Catholics, Satanists, Abortionists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, liberals, fornicators, prosperity preachers, atheists and “worldly lukewarm once saved-always saved Christians” that they are in imminent danger of eternal damnation.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

These obnoxious bigots start making a scene around the time Mardi Gras rolls in by harassing every poor soul that drifts into earshot and relish the opportunity to take the fight to any inebriated onlooker that dares to inquire what, exactly, they are trying to accomplish with their message of hate.  If you test any one of the shitbirds impeding your safe passage through Jackson Square, you learn pretty quickly that they’re not just throwing this nonsense around for effect and don’t take their intolerance with cream and sugar.  They devour and expel that poison neat with the rocks on the side.

So when I noticed a huge PVC cross off in the distance as my friends and I were leaving Pat O’s after putting in some heavy work at the Piano Bar, I braced myself for an explosive encounter.  I realize that an “Eat shit and die, you anti-Semite fuckstick” – no matter how artfully delivered – only fuels these sad, sad individuals’ fires and adds little to the philosophical discourse, but what can I say?  After a few Hurricanes, I usually don’t have the wherewithal (or desire) to stop myself from shouting the first bit of reactive gobbledygook that pops into my head.

I had an expletive-laden opening argument primed and ready but instead of crude signs and small-minded rednecks, I was greeted by thoughtful individuals speaking with 12 inch voices and respecting everyone’s right of way.  And even thought I was part of a pretty tough crowd – one which was both shitfaced and 70% Jewish – their message stuck it’s landing a lot more than expected considering it was coming from the New Testament.

See, instead of using a fucked up notion of spiritual superiority as a cloak for violent prejudice in the manner of most Bourbon Street evangelicals, these people just seemed like they might be on to something hip and wanted to spread the word.  Even though we were less than polite at times, their pleasant demeanor and cooler heads prevailed and the entire encounter made a lasting impression on me.

To be honest, though, I still don’t understand why The Bible, out of all the hundreds of thousands of works of literature produced in the annuls of human history, has developed such an incredibly fervent following.  Sure it’s a pretty cool story, but so are The Odyssey, Don Quijote, and The Lorax.  Even a nearly unreadable mess like Naked Lunch sheds some light on the human condition if you catch it right, so where are the barkers on the street spreading the gospel of doing bag after bag of heroin and staring at your toes for days on end?

I am guessing that this is where “faith” comes in, an idea that I have spent many years disparaging in the bitter, condescending manner favored by modern-day secular intellectuals such as myself.  But even though I wasn’t buying much of what those good folks were selling and still think religion is pretty asinine; their patient way of carrying water for the topic lead me to believe it shouldn’t be looked at with any more disdain then most of the bullshit I do in my free time.

After giving it plenty of thought, I can’t really think of any material difference between those kind missionaries dispersing fliers outside Big Daddy’s Female Impersonator Show and yours truly spending $12 to play Gaucho all the way through on the jukebox at Monkey Hill, except for the fact that the Jesus freaks were surely a lot more genial and probably had much purer intentions.

I guess it is in everyone’s best interest to find a few things that they love and are not afraid to share with the world.  For me, these things include an ironic jazz-rock band known by most people my age either as a punchline in a Judd Apatow flick or “that dude who did ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’”  For others, it may be a belief that your personal relationship with an unseen almighty being determines what happens after you shuffle off your mortal coil.

These are two very diseparate things for sure, but trying to objectively judge one as more valid than the other is really just a waste of time, time that would be much better spent partying with whatever it is that happens to get your rocks off.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Good luck finding The Rusty Nail on your first attempt.  Seriously.  This place is less than a five minutes from my apartment and it took me at least ten tries over my first six months down here before I successfully made it there when I actually looking for it, as opposed to the few times I did actually stumble upon it during daylight hours when I was still learning how to navigate the narrow, pothole-littered streets of the Warehouse District and subsequently forgot it’s location by the next evening when I was looking to check out it’s capacity for partying.

It is literally located on the wrong side of a dead end street that is hidden under an overpass.  Its signage faces the opposite direction traffic would travel if the one way block on which it sits was not closed for road construction (which it has been at least as long as I’ve lived in New Orleans). Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always believed that if you make a habit of putting yourself in unusual situations, you can’t really get that upset when shit starts to get weird. And if you’re also prone to tipping the karmic scales with such flights of fancy as gratuitous alcohol consumption, light prescription drug abuse and unconventional party itineraries, you’re likely to find yourself on the business end of weird more often than not. With this in mind, I guess you could say I got exactly what I deserved when I decided to head into the French Quarter on a Monday evening last week.

Given the fact it was so early in the week, it didn’t surprise me when I encountered far fewer barkers in the middle of the street holding up signs advertising the drink specials or lack of cover featured at the trashy saloons that line the front of Bourbon Street than I was used to.  But even in this relatively serene setting, hip hop was still pulsing out of a fair share of dance clubs that were most certainly open for business.

I’ve heard “Lollipop” at least 350 times in the last year, but the song takes on a bizarrely fascinating and frightening sheen when it is accompanied by a tubby waitress sporting coke-bottle glasses and visible c-section scars gyrating on top of a bar in a haunting manner that is at once repulsive and mesmerizing.  That was the scene just beyond the threshold of a sparsely populated bar known as The Old Opera House, and even though I should be immune to the allure of Tha Carter III by now, the morbidly intriguing nature of what I was looking at gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

After hitting the snooze bar three or four times, finally slumping out of bed for a stretch and a bend, and throwing open the drapes in my room, I was greeted with a highly unusual sight this morning.  It was snowing in New Orleans for the first time in four years.  And this was real snow, too, not just the “icy mix” bullshit that hits the north shore every year around this time.  This was the big, fat snow that sticks to foliage and car windshields.  It’s the stuff that gets caught in your hair and that you can catch on your tongue.

Many national news outlets were quick to report that the last time it snowed in New Orleans was the winter before the hurricane season that brought a certain storm that “rearranged” the Crescent City as well as the lives of many of it’s most faithful residents.  But as I noticed ever since I arrived down here, the cumbersome practice looking at life as a series of allegories and metaphors – as opposed to the more classic traditions of kicking back and drinking it in -  is quickly going out of style among locals.

Almost everyone down here can do the math, so that fact that the last dusting of snow was so infamously followed by a historically severe summer is not lost on anyone.  But the first snowfall of the season is the first snowfall of the season, even if it only comes along once or twice a decade.  Headaches about road conditions and traffic – and any momentary confusion about the difference between “correlation” and “causation”  – quickly melt away when you catch a glimpse of a snow-covered palm tree in all it’s bizarrely majestic glory.

And even though the rising afternoon temperature has left amost no trace of the rare splendor of this morning’s blizzard, I’ve still got the same grin on my face I’ve been wearing since the moment I woke up today.

My brother has lived in New York City for almost a year and a half now, and this has given us two or three occasions to engage in the Manhattan version of our favorite shared pastime: walking around a major metropolis without the trappings of a destination or an agenda.

The starting point of our trip is usually determined by where we want to catch lunch and we head out equipped with nothing more than a comfortable pair of shoes and a good sense of direction.  No cabs, no subway, just two dudes who haven’t seen each other for a while running wild on the public thoroughfares of a big city. Read the rest of this entry »

There we were, taking the gritty-as-shit alternate route to Louis Armstrong Airport – forgoing the interstate, with its road construction and rush hour induced bottleneck circa the Causeway Blvd. exit, in favor of the scenic drive through the blocks of shotgun houses and tire shops in Hollygrove and then past the endless row of seedy motels on Airline Highway – when I had my second favorable encounter with the nefarious group of “musicians” know as Coldplay.

The first time I listened to this band with a smile on my face was over three years ago in East Troy, Wisconsin.  A variety of factors, not one of which even remotely having to do with the band itself, led me to purchase a ticket to see England’s softest rockers at Alpine Valley Music Theater during the waning days of the summer before my senior year of college.  And through another set of circumstances, again completely unrelated to the group of hacks crooning sweet nothings into the cool August air, I was breaking out into fits of hysterical ecstasy towards the end of the first set. Read the rest of this entry »