“All the kindest of hearts you always had on display,” Sloe Guns frontman Eric Alter sings, completely deadpan, hitting a jangly peak on his Telecaster. Then lead player Mick Izzo slinks into a subtle, blue-flame slide riff on his...
“All the kindest of hearts you always had on display,” Sloe Guns frontman Eric Alter sings, completely deadpan, hitting a jangly peak on his Telecaster. Then lead player Mick Izzo slinks into a subtle, blue-flame slide riff on his Les Paul. “Every night I get down on my knees and pray you’re not my guardian angel.”
The Sloe Guns released that genuine classic, which you can download for free at their music page, in 2001. As revenge anthems go, it’s one of the subtlest and most venomous ever. What’s the likelihood that the band would still be together, more than twenty years and a lockdown later, and playing Connolly’s on 46th St. this Jan 13 at 10 PM?
In the two decades since they started, Alter, Izzo and a series of competent bassists and drummers never quit. The venues may have shifted from dive bars to public parks, but there hasn’t been a year that the monthly live music calendar here hasn’t listed a Sloe Guns show. They got their start picking up the tail end of the “alt country” era of Wilco and Son Volt, then took a turn into more jamband-oriented southern rock before returning to their sharply lyrical Steve Earle-style roots.
Back in 2001, the Sloe Guns were a hot ticket on the New York Americana circuit (yup, there was such a thing). That’s why it felt weird to see them play to a sparse crowd on July 16th of that year at Tobacco Road, a new spot which had taken over the sketchy Sapphire Lounge jazz club space around the corner from Port Authority. For that matter, it was weird to be able to come down from a stoner rooftop party a few blocks north to see a band who seldom ventured north of 14th Street. The show was tight; the highlight was a surprising, offhandedly brief version of their signature murder ballad, Dillon.
The Sloe Guns also hold a place in history as being the last show this blog’s owner saw before 9/11 (as Katherine Watt has documented, that date fatefully changed how American sovereignty would become null and void). On September 10, 2001, they took the stage at Brownies, the 169 Avenue A space that would become the Hi-Fi and then a series of cheesy tourist traps, That night, Alter and Izzo worked more of a warm southern jamband sound. Did they know on a subconscious level how much the hope implied in the epic Wildflowers and the wistful, loping Coming Home would be decimated after the neocons in the Bush 2 cabinet took power?
So it was validating to see the band play Tompkins Square Park about fifteen years later. Alter’s masterfully picked Fender guitar intensity and Izzo’s offhandedly sizzling lead lines were a throwback to a better time and place, through a setlist that in many ways mirrored what they played that fateful night at Brownies. Little did we know how much the world would change since then. Catch the band at a refreshingly laid-back Irish bar if you want to teleport back to a more optimistic point in New York music history.
