By Ari Abramowitz
Photo courtesy Michael Dorf
New York was a dump. Hell, that’s why I wanted to go there. Mind you, it wasn’t the rotten apple Taxi Driver dump of the late 1970s. But to a nice Jewish boy from Scarsdale, pre-broken-windows-policy New York circa 1990 was crappy enough to evoke that enticing post-Bohemian fractional-truth: in filth, sublimity.
Just over a decade earlier had brought the Talking Heads and the Ramones, followed by the Contortions, and Liquid Liquid, concurrent with Larry Levan spinning at the Paradise Garage and Kool Herc spinning in the South Bronx, followed soon by the Misfits, Agnostic Front and hardcore matinees at CBGB’s. This was sublime filth, and it came together in the later '80s as the "downtown scene."
This being New York City, Jewishness has a life of its own. There were two million Jews in this town but, other than the occasional chassid sighting, you wouldn’t necessarily know it. "Jews in New York" is simply a given. They’re everywhere and nowhere. Except that they could be very specific in the images I had in my mind at that time: Woody Allen, Groucho Marx, Neil Diamond, infinite doctors and lawyers. All worthy and noble people, people who carved their own way in the world, people who contributed deeply to society, people worthy of emulation. But they weren’t me. There had to be something else to Jewishness. This 17-year-old needed it, needed something to relate to: a Bar Kokhba, a Judah Macabee. The best my folks could come up with was Sandy Koufax.
Fortunately, New York is so massive and in such perpetual flux that you can leave any piece of your pre-existing identity at home, or ditch it around the block (and, as with an acrimonious ex, hope to not run into it again). As certain Columbia professors at the time might have put it: you can transcend the oppression of the signified. Or as a generation earlier might have put it: You can just be. You could just be by downing acid and walking over the Brooklyn Bridge or by throwing on a tight, fetching leather outfit and heading to an S&M ball or by going out to dance clubs until 1—in the afternoon. Or you could just be by going out several nights a week to check out live music.
It might have been "just being," or it might have been a search for transcendence, or it might have been running away, or all of them together. There had to be way to write an addendum to the Talmud or maybe the Zohar incorporating my 17 years of experience and only-just-emerging identity. Something that drew from the tradition but headed towards futures that were still unknown and unseen. Until that amendment was written, I needed freedom. From where I stood, freedom looked to be at the margins, at the fringes. The Knitting Factory seemed to me to have some claim to the margins, so the Knit was often my destination.
One of the heavyweight regulars at the Knit was Elliot Sharp and his band, Carbon. Sharp looked the part (shaved bald, dressed all in black, soul patch, long, vampiric, albino-spider fingers creeping up, down and across his custom-made double-neck guitar) and Carbon was the bridge from what I knew about music to where I was looking to go. It worked because Carbon was, really, a prog-rock metal band not far from my beloved mid-70s King Crimson, but alloyed by the noise and skronk of the avant garde—the asymmetrical, guitar lines, undulating bass, thumping drums, freaky electric harp and industrial sampling—and played by weirder looking people.
John Lurie & the Lounge Lizards had been around for aeons, and even then their reputation preceded them. The band always looked great, especially Lurie—every bit the "thin, white duke" that Bowie was, but more hip, more with it, less aristocratic, and with a little less hair. They laid down their "fake jazz" with so much style and authority that they owned the space. But it wasn’t quite jazz, fake or not. It was funk, it was bossa nova, it was African, it was New Wave, it was noise, it was the swingingest thing around.
But no one topped Naked City. This was the band of John Zorn, the man around whom the "downtown scene" really coalesced, the man who would compose jazz, metal, modern classical, klezmer, and much more in thousands of permutations. This was the band that could play 37 styles of music in 53 seconds. This was the band who could also cover classical musicians such as Debussy and Messaien. This was the band that could play a piece that sounded like Black Sabbath’s tour bus getting run over by a pack of a dozen elephants—for 45 minutes. This was the band who listed as its inspirations artists from avant-garde jazz (Anthony Braxton, Eric Dolphy) to death metal (Carcass) to classic rock (Little Feat, Led Zeppelin) to all kinds of pop (Carole King, Liberace (unironically)), to movie soundtrack composers (Bernard Herrmann) to cartoon soundtrack composers (Carl Stalling) to classical (Stravinsky) to funk (Meters)…and that’s only one-third of it. This would all be pretentious (and still might be, anyway) if these inspirations didn’t manifest themselves in the music. But they’re all in there, making Naked City the first ethno-thrash-surf-jazz band in history. They were simply the best band I had ever seen up to that point in my life.
I spent a year just being a new kid in New York, worshipping these guys: Sharp, Lurie, Zorn, and others. This was why I had come to the City. No signifiers, no signifieds. Freedom to just be. Except for one thing: these three guys, and many more in this scene, were all Jewish. Heck, even the guy who created the Knit, Michael Dorf, is Jewish. And I had no idea. Not until near the end of freshman year, when the Knit held their "Radical Jewish Culture Festival" and all of them were there. At this festival, "Jewish" could mean noisy, evil, prog-metal or jazz-funk hipsterism or ethno-thrash-surf-jazz or simply the most fresh, vibrant, and vital music that I had ever heard.
And they weren't just being Jewish, but standing up and being counted as Jewish—affirmatively, proudly, and awesomely Jewish. Is that why Zorn played a show wearing tzitzit and a t-shirt that spelled "abracadabra" in Hebrew? This all opened the way for me to discover the spectacular volume of essential Jews in music, and not just the Geffen/Azoff types: Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, Donald Fagen, Geddy Lee, Perry Farrell, Marc Bolan, David Lee Roth, even Gene and Paul and on and on. Jewishness had always been there and was always opening spaces for influential creativity, style, substance, virtuosity and soul. I may have had the ears to hear, only I didn’t yet have the eyes to see. They were only just starting to open.
Ari Abramowitz is a music writer and the author of The Pockit Rockit Music Finder.