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Fiery Furnaces at the Bowery Ballroom
Saturday, October 6 2001
Some of you may recall Mikila, the University of Texas student who started writing to me years ago as one of my early readers and who now lives with her boyfriend above a bar somewhere in the East Village. She wrote to me a week or so ago saying she'd been only a few blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11th but had survived well enough to be sending and receiving email. What's more, it turns out that she's the drummer in a band that would be performing tonight at the Bowery Ballroom on the Lower East Side. The band currently works under the name "the Fiery Furnaces." I've been remiss at seeing rock and roll shows in New York, so I'd arranged with Gretchen to go.
We showed up at the Bowery Ballroom little after 9pm, having bubbled up out of the F station on DeLancey and walked through the increasingly Chinese Jewish neighborhoods along the way. The Bowery Ballroom features several levels: a cozy low-ceilinged hang-out place in the basement and, above that, a high-ceilinged balconied ballroom for stage shows. The Fiery Furnaces were in the middle of one of their songs when we arrived. There she was in the back, Mikila, pounding on those drums with what looked to be exceptionally heavy sticks. Interestingly, despite the fact that she was performing a live rock and roll show, she retained all the understated unassumingness I'd remembered from hanging out with her in her apartment. In this context it made her look sort of overwhelmed and tired, but she was playing very well. In front of her were the two other members of the band, a brother-sister duo. While she played guitar and sang, he played endless showy riffs on a 12 string, one of whose strings hung useless and dead. Gretchen was appalled by the singer's haircut, which was a longish mop with a face-sized hole cut in one side and that's where the singer's face emerged. Around the face-shaped hole, all the hairs had been bent inwards. I reflection on the snapshots and yearbooks I've seen and couldn't remember this particular style ever having been in fashion, though the in the early 80s it would not have been considered too strange. Despite her hair, I really did like the singer's voice. She could do subtle nuanced things with the back of her throat that, in my book, put her voice a notch above the vocal stylings of the Crissie Hynde, which it otherwise resembled.
Many of the songs had a sort of half-cooked feel to them, like they were still very much works in progress and no one had decided when exactly they should end or how many times a chorus should be revisited. On several occasions it was clear that the other bandmates expected the singer to be back at the microphone, but she was still a few feet away. Whatever, it rocked! Despite themselves, the audience of stylishly sideburn-and-thick-rimmed-glasses-equipped shoegazers could be seen bobbing their heads ever so slightly to the music. At one point Drew, Mikila's boyfriend, who happened to have the longest hair of anyone in the entire building, shouted "The drummer rocks!" (Correction, it was actually Drew's friend, a certain Chris P., who heckled the band in this manner.)
After the Fiery Furnaces were done, I went up to say hello to Mikila, who was just emerging from a cocoon of admirers. She was delighted that Gretchen and I had come and immediately invited us to come hang out with her in the Fiery Furnaces' exclusive hangout spot, a curtained room just to the right of the bar in the ballroom's balcony. There Mikila gave me a Fiery Furnaces CD recorded back before the band even had a drummer. Soon the curtained hangout was completely crowded with people, most of them Mikila's friends. One guy even had special contact lenses designed to give him the eyes of a vampire. At first I thought he must have taken some sort of fun party drug and this made me slightly envious.
I went and bought everyone a round of beer, Budweiser of course, and then we all sat around having intelligent conversation as best we could amid the loud dissonant harmonies issuing from the two-person band now playing. One of the things we talked about was the quality of the air down near the World Trade Center. Authorities are saying it's perfectly healthy, but even if it was terribly toxic, would they tell us anything different? No country, no matter how rich, could afford a full-scale abandonment of lower Manhattan. But the guy with the vampire eyes, he's not taking any chances. He told the people at FedEx or wherever he worked that his lungs and throat were hurting and he wasn't going to work in lower Manhattan anymore.
After the dissonant duo was done, we were treated to the feel-good melodies of Beulah, a California band I'd heard on KCRW a few times. Those hanging out in the Fiery Furnaces hangout were dismissive of the lack of edginess coming through the curtain ("A horn isn't what I think of when I think of edgy"), but the shoegazing crowd had swelled and some in its ranks were even bouncing up and down a little. While of the songs had the catchy feel-good qualities of Superchunk, most of them had that characteristically Britpopesque flavor so favored by KCRW.
After the show, Gretchen and I were stumbling back to the Q, since it seemed closer than the F. We hadn't had any dinner, so we ducked into a little hole in the wall Pakistani restaurant, the kind of place that always seems to be closing down the moment you arrive but turns out to be open 24 hours a day. On the door was a big paper American flag and on the front of the counter, just in case there was any misunderstanding, was a big flag-adorned sticker reading "God Bless America." A television within view of the register was playing Pakistani entertainment television. A traditionally-dressed woman and a more casually-dressed man were cavorting provocatively in a field with an eroticism impossible to match in our media paradigm, where scenes can so easily escalate to shots of naked breasts. Gretchen ordered us two large samplers of several vegetarian dishes, and we were charged only $10. We devoured the food on a stoop out in the trash-cluttered streets while rats cavorted beneath a nearby taxi cab.
Before we continued to the subway, I found a sheltered place to piss against a wall along an adjacent street. It was only then that I realized that on either side of me several homeless people had set up discrete nests where they were now spending the night without the comfort of a fiery furnace. The temperature was somewhere down in the forties Fahrenheit.
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