It was sometime after midnight in the wee hours of January 8, 2003 at the C-Note, and the East Village club was packed. Earlier in the night, the crowd had been treated to one of the best Americana triplebills...
It was sometime after midnight in the wee hours of January 8, 2003 at the C-Note, and the East Village club was packed. Earlier in the night, the crowd had been treated to one of the best Americana triplebills of the year. Erica Smith channeled her inner road warrior and shook off the laryngitis which had threatened to derail her solo set, a lustrous and nuanced mix of Appalachian folk tunes and a reinvented sea chantey. She closed with her best song of the night, the soaring retro 60s soul ballad Love You All the Way.
Kings County Queens followed with a similarly luminous, low-key hour onstage, but their performance had a seething undercurrent that peaked quietly when bandleaders Chris Bowers and Daria Klotz joined voices with a simmering calm throughout the vengeful anthem How Do You Sleep. Headliners American Ambulance broke in a new rhythm section with a set of acerbically political, twangy highway rock and roaring, Stonesy songs. They dedicated their lone cover, a snidely countrified version of the Clash’s Death or Glory, to the club’s talent buyer: he’d recently reemerged after going off on a bender when Joe Strummer died.
Among the crowd at the bar after the show were a future daily New York music blog proprietor and a pretty blonde from the neighborhood. They’d been circling each other for a few weeks, and had fallen into what could charitably be called a cycle of missed signals, or, less charitably, a comedy of errors fueled by massive amounts of intoxicants. In 2003, the New York music scene was quite the party, at least if you were young and had money, or knew someone who was part of it.
The man behind the bar that night was Jack Grace, and the top guy in the city’s thriving and volatile Americana scene had brought his acoustic guitar with him. In between pouring drinks, he serenaded the customers with his big baritone voice and a long succession of Neil Young songs. Entranced, the blonde turned to the future blog owner and told him to keep his voice down. Grace ran interference: “Who are you, the human volume control?”
Two decades later, Grace is still going strong and is no less of a wiseass. In those days, not only did he have the voice, and the often ridiculously funny songs, but he was also fast becoming a hell of a lead guitarist. He’s an even better one now – and he’s playing Feb 22 at around midnight at a familiar haunt, the Ear Inn, which has been around a couple of centuries longer than he has.
It’s been awhile since this blog was in the house at one of his shows. But looking back on his heyday in this city, Grace fine-tuned his signature mix of surreal outlaw country, brooding Tom Waits-influenced narratives and increasingly frequent detours into high-energy Tex-Mex sounds through a lot of hard work. He was as likely to play an off-night just to keep his band in shape, or work up new tunes or jokes for the stage show, as he was to take the odd bartender shift for some extra cash.
On Thanksgiving Eve, 2002, the future blog owner and the blonde went up to Rodeo Bar to watch Grace work organist Nate Smith into the mix, with Dan Hovey joining the band on lapsteel and lead guitar. On what was the coldest night of that winter so far, the band segued from Grace’s vaudevillian, Waits-ish Lonesome Entertainer into a full-length, pseudo-countrified cover of the BeeGees Staying Alive. Later in the set, they moved from South Dakota, an oddly prophetic Black Hills shout-out, into Whole Lotta Love and then a haphazard final verse of his stoner country hit Worm Farm.
Then a month and a day later, the two returned for another Grace gig at the Rodeo. By now, Smith had figured out how to fuse his soul organ into the material, more Amy Schneider than Brent Mydland. This time the place was packed, the two had to wait until the second set before they could find seats at the bar, and the band were a lot tighter. The highlight of the night was I’m Not Here, one of Grace’s best songs of the era, a cynically dissociative rugged individualist’s lament
The party continued after the show many blocks further south at the Magician on the Lower East Side. This time, it was the future blog owner’s turn to take a stab at running interference with a degree of diplomacy. To what extent that succeeded we’ll never know. Sometimes things are best left in a haze of smoky memories.
