As Good as it Gets--a journalistic essay on being an amateur music in New Haven

As Good As It Gets
By Evelyn Shih

It is October 30, and in keeping with the Halloween theme, the three members of local New Haven band MurderVan are rocking the Café Nine stage in black and white face paint. Not quite Marilyn Manson, but as their punk songs crash through the wooden beams of Cafe Nine, you almost have to wonder if that was what they were going for.

The mood is bacchanalian: tonight is the third of nine anniversary nights for the music bar, and it is completely, oh most definitely, devoted to punk. Anyone who is somebody on the local punk scene, and anyone who is into punk is here. MurderVan, the first band up, froths up the atmosphere with their driving, full-bodied riffs. Chuck, the doorman, is bobbing his head and trying to keep up with the frenetic beats. A skinny man with an alarmingly thin neck and a ponytail of gray hair, he has the unfortunate look of a bobble-head.

But inside the door from where Chuck is perched on a high stool, the patrons seem to be enjoying a truly “sick” set. Some are standing with their beers and grooving to the grungy sound, while others mill around the bar. A man with a shaved head and not a few body piercings nods his head in time next to where I am sitting. His eyes are closed, as if in prayer to the gods of rock. Café Nine is their cathedral tonight, as walls of pure energy in sound emanate from the stage.

Welcome to the Nine, billed as the musician’s living room, where much of the audience consists of local musicians, where everyone knows your name—more, they get your music. New Havenites have come here for decades to play original music and network with other creative people because this is virtually the only place in town where you can do that, even if you’re a no-name amateur stringing along a day job. If you get a gig here, the crowd listens. They feel your music. They know you’re gonna make it big.

And you should be congratulated. According to James Velvet, legendary in local music circles as the front man of the late-great Mockingbirds, it’s hard to get a gig playing your own music these days, even at a local bar like Cafe Nine. For every band that gets to play there, there may be ten more trying to get in.

Welcome. If you’ve gotten this far, you have finished your first rite of passage on the way to rock and roll stardom, but you should know—you’ve got a long, long way to go.



Speaking with James Velvet, who at 54 sports a head of white hair over a strong, beaky nose, it is easy to feel that up-and-coming New Haven bands like MurderVan are on a fast track to nowhere. Original music is a hard sell, and always has been—James knows that from over twenty years of experience as an amateur musician in New Haven. Café Nine is a rare outlet for local bands to play their own music; most bars are only interested in cover bands, and larger commercial venues go for the national acts. Over the years, however, the independent music scene has become harder and harder to break into for new musicians. As equipment dropped in price, more of the middle class population gained the means to fuel a rock ‘n’ roll dream, and the ranks of the musicians grew. Unfortunately, the ranks of listeners only seemed to shrink, drawn away by other entertainments like dance clubs. DJs may be doing original mixing, but the music they use is all major label. Music by local bands playing independent music have a hard time getting any air time, let alone gigs.

“Twenty years ago, I wouldn’t go for less than $100 a night,” said James. “But everyone you saw the other night at Café Nine was playing for free. Sometimes when I’m playing acoustic in a coffee shop, I play for pass-the-hat and for selling my record and maybe free coffee.”

I drove with James Velvet to the weekly recording of his radio show, Local Bands, the only radio show dedicated to original local music on the 50,000 watt WPLR. James and his friend Rick Allison have been hosting this show and playing mail-in submissions of original music in the Connecticut region for seventeen years—they’ve seen a lot of bands like MurderVan come and go.

You may think you’re going to make it to the top of the charts when you’re twenty, he tells me as we drive along, but if you’re still playing when you’re twenty-five, you know you’re not going anywhere. You’re not looking up, starry-eyed, counting the days and temping at a coffee place until you make it big. I do some math: by that measure, James himself has been disillusioned about becoming a famous musician for almost 30 years.
So why, then, would he continue to play in local bands, host a radio show, write songs, and cut records like those shrink-wrapped copies of his album that I held in my hand? He had a break-even philosophy, he told me. You make maybe 200 copies of your CD and you try to sell all them, mostly at gigs or to longtime fans. If you’re lucky, you’re able to do that, and then you’ll have the funds for your next record.

For James Velvet, that’s enough. Assuming they stay together, is this all a band like MurderVan can look forward to? A never-ending struggle to support an expensive hobby? As they fight their war of attrition with irrelevance, who is listening?




Rick Allison and his dog welcome us into his house and down to the basement, where he has installed a home recording studio to run his freelance voice over business. Rick is one of those people who look like their pets: his longish gray hair flops down the back of his head like a mane, and he smiles a large, wolfish smile. I’m not intimidated, but I am strangely relieved to be invited guest.

The wall of the recording studio, Rick’s inner sanctum, is chock-full with his battered professional LP collection, but on another the stacks and stacks of CDs are all amateur ventures. Somewhere in “the nether parts” of his basement, Rick assures me, are many more boxes of locally recorded LPs and cassettes—the weapons of choice in the 80s. He can be pretty sure, he says, bending over to look for an old favorite, that he’s got the largest collection of Connecticut music in the world, right there in his basement.

Of course, that was probably because no one else bothered to collect it.

James tosses two packages and one unwrapped CD on the counter: this week’s submissions, fresh additions to the collection. Slim pickings. “It varies by week,” he explains. Some weeks, James and Rick get more music than they know what to do with.

James received one of the CDs in person while dropping off more copies of his record at the local record store today—“I’m huge there,” he jokes in an underwhelmed voice. “I sold five records.” There, he bumped into another guy who was dropping off a cd for his band, called Album, and was asked eagerly whether he would “take a copy for the show.”

“Lemme tell ya, Album’s going to be mighty excited,” says James as he and Rick listen to the CD. “ ‘I met this guy at Cutler’s and now we’re on the radio!’” James acts the part of the excited young man. “And the other guys on the band are going to think, ‘This guy’s a hero.’” The song drifting out of Rick’s complex sound system does, in a way, sound heroic. A sweet emo-pop melody coasts on top of a heavy rhythm section with a distinct touch of grunge, and the entire band swings up to a respectable climax point. Dynamic shifts sound almost pro—I can picture a music video matching the sudden drops and expansions in volume. But as far as I can tell, the song is about being a young man in his early twenties in suburban Connecticut. Not quite the stuff of epics.

James taps a pen on his yellow legal pad, where the Local Bands program line-up for the past four years is recorded. They sound good enough to play, he’s thinking. But he can’t resist shaking his head. They still think they’re going to make it big. “It’ll wear off in a week, this whole being on the radio thing.”

“A week?” says Rick, incredulous.
“Well, maybe a month.”
“A month? I was thinking a couple of days.”

James shows me the CD case. “You see how it looks all nice, almost like a professionally produced album. What happened was probably, not that they did it themselves, but maybe they have a friend or a girlfriend who is good at that kind of thing.” Nowadays, it’s relatively easy to put together a disc. Most bands also have websites, where random browsers can hear their songs if they so wish. The internet is an indispensable new self-promotion tool for amateur bands.

It’s just not easy to get a gig.

“The tools are more available to people, but maybe that makes the crapshoot even worse—maybe it means there are fewer hurdles to jump before you can get out there and get your heart crushed,” says Rick. Just because you have an album and it looks great, doesn’t mean anyone will ever listen to it.

But James has a slightly different take. “It’s a lot easier now to do all this, but in a way it really is just trappings of fame, and it’s seductive. A lot of the stuff we hear on this show is made by people who enjoy the trappings.”

Like Green Day or Nine Days, Album has their own flash website with cool graphics and show dates. They have a CD worthy of sitting next to all the other offerings on the shelves at Cutler’s. They perform at least once or twice a month to a real crowd. Even if their lyrics could be cleverer, they have the right sound. There is no difference between Album and a band with a major label contract. Except for the fact that Album is about to be played on Local Bands.



Local Bands plays during the boondocks of radio programming time: 10 pm on Sunday nights. It’s nothing glamorous, but the show has “dodged the bullet” and avoided being cut many a-time. Seventeen years is an amazingly long run for a show that doesn’t bring in much revenue—but somehow, Rick and James have been allowed to keep on plugging.

The Local Bands theme comes bouncing into our headphones: “Relax—Take Off Your Slacks” has been the theme since the beginning of the show. The sax and synth instrumental track smacks loudly of the 80s, and by now, it’s starting to gain accumulate a kitschy vintage feel. James cut the track himself 20 years ago.

Rick starts right in. “Have you had enough turkey yet?” The show was set to air the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

“I lu-uhve turkey, man,” says James, gesturing with a pencil in the air. James has suddenly put on a stage voice. He gesticulates so earnestly that he looks like he might fall off the stool where he is precariously perched. The two begin a free form, back and forth stream-of-consciousness spiel. “Turkey everywhere—turkey in the straw, turkey in the recording studio,” spins James. “I had some turkey at the Corner Richard’s Gourmet Deli, lemme tell ya…”

Richard’s Gourmet, along with G Guitars, is sponsoring this episode of Local Bands. After another short pitch for the amazing turkey sandwiches at the deli, the two turn their attention to the first track of the show, fresh out of a bubble-wrapped package.

“This is Rosie Coppola, with Avalon.” And we are off the air. James lifts the foam earphones and leaves them cinched at his temples. He slumps, idling while Rick goes about his business at the switchboard, swiveling on the stool like a restless little boy. He begins to tap the drum part of the song on his yellow pad. Despite their graying or white hair, these two remind me of college boys working on an audio-visual project.

“I think Rosie probably figured she was going to the top, twenty years ago,” muses James, still drumming along with the catchy pop refrain. “And I think she probably just figured out ways of making a living without going to the top.” I am surprised: the woman singing sounds like she can’t be over twenty-five. The portrait on the CD cover shows a young-looking woman, thirty at the most. Yet Rosie has been making a life in amateur music work for as long as I’ve been alive. With her current husband, Rosie runs a studio and a music school, bringing up a new generation of aspiring pop musicians in New Haven.

I can’t help wondering: are these kids going anywhere? Twenty years from now, as they near middle age, will their voices be heard on Local Bands, young and unchanged?



Local Bands gives the WPLR somewhere to send all the local artists begging for airtime. When asked by licensing agents if they serve the community, they can point to James and Rick. “ ‘Well, there are these guys…” says Rick in a blustery imitation of a program director.

But do they serve the community?

“That I don’t know,” says Rick, leaning forward. “Is it just encouraging them in the foolish idea that they’ll become rich and famous and the next rock star. I mean, perhaps we are one little part in that enabling structure.”

“It does give them a chance to point to the show to say, we were played on WPLR.” When James and Rick first got the show together, they were excited about being on air, themselves. They used to drive around in James’ car—what was the model again? A 1986 Pontiac Bonneville, just a classic car. Didn’t even have a radio. Brought the FM boombox in the car, and listened to their own show. That might be how some of these people share the show—at 10 at night on a Sunday.

But it’s a snowball’s chance in hell for a band to make it beyond local fame, as far as Rick can tell. On mainstream radio, anything people haven’t heard before is “bad music.” Making it big enough to be recognized as “good”—that would be like getting struck by lightening over and over again. If the song is perfect, then you’re waiting for the right person to get you into the door, and if the people are right, you’re waiting for the right moment—and by the time that comes, everything’s likely to have fallen apart.

What does it take, really, to make it out of New Haven, out of Local Bands, and onto the Billboard Top 20?

Actually, James and Rick have never played music on their show by the most famous local musician. Michael Bolotin, now known as Michael Bolton, worked out of his house in East Haven, where he produced his own music. He took a job as a staff writer for Columbia Music, writing generic songs for generic stars, until finally his own career as a pop singer took off on its own. Apparently, you have to be willing to work in the machine and do the drudgework.

“And maybe,” quips Rick, “losing a vowel out of his last name was the right thing for to do.”
But Local Bands isn’t here for the Michael Boltons of the world, who aspire to bring their talent at sappy, saccharine pop to the national stage. It is here to keep the spirit alive, the spirit of getting some people together in a band and playing your own music, your own way. Rick points to an unlabeled CD lying haphazardly on his desk. It’s a demo from the high school kids who practice next door. He can’t play it, because the quality’s not good enough—they haven’t learned to record properly—but still, they’re doing some cool stuff with their songs, and it was endearing that the entire band trooped over to knock on his door like a bunch of trick o’ treaters on Halloween.

When these kids do get their act together and record a decent album Rick can play on the show, their song will never beat Bolton’s “Go the Distance” in terms of airplay. But if they’re not looking for that, if they just want an outlet for something great they cooked up with their friends, all the hard work will have been worth it.

What these kids have is what the best of the best musicians keep alive within them, even if they are worldwide superstars. They keep that first-time excitement, that amateur’s passion—they keep that inner child alive, loving the music for music’s sake.




If you’ve been around the scene as long as James Velvet, you learn to count your blessings. You’re happy with your local audience, because you know it’s hard to have any audience. To get into a place like Café Nine now, a band has to get the attention of the bar owners or their bookers, playing for nothing sometimes to prove their mettle. “It’s competitive as hell!” he says, still amazed. “Eventually it’s going to be where we have to pay to play.”

James had been a bartender for Mike Reichbart, the founder of Café Nine, when the Mockingbirds were just getting together thirteen years ago. They were the first band ever booked. “Mike was having a party for his friends,” he told me, “and he asked us to play there. It was so successful that within a month he had live music their five or six nights a week.” Café Nine, like Local Bands, became a venue beloved by local musicians because of its distinct dedication to amateur music.

The Mockingbirds were lucky. Because of their initial connection to the Nine, they secured a once a month gig. They had a presence on the New Haven music scene—mention the name of the Mox in the New Haven Advocate, at Richter’s Bar, or even at Toads, the place that shuns local bands for national acts, and you have instant recognition. The Mox played from the back of the room, not on the raised stage, and fed off the energy of the tipsy Saturday night throng. They would go on with a rough idea of a new song, and wing it, working off their combined energies to spin out improvised riffs. They knew how to drive a crowd wild. It was these performances, every month for twelve years, which made them a local legend. If you stay around long enough, and play for the love of music, someone out there will hear you. And you will start to know their friendly faces, recognize their cheers in the roaring, beery hullabaloo.



The story of Café Nine is a little bit of a legend in itself, right from when it started as BluBartz Café in November of ’72, opened as a haven for “young radicals.” Mike Reichbart, just out of college in ’71, took a gamble and bought a property that quickly, as he says, became a “vortex for all sorts of people.” It’s not me, he says, it’s just something about the place that brings together people of different backgrounds. This was a friendly place, a place to shoot the shit and get a beer, and engage in symbiotic relationships, share the love. You’d get a Biker dude, and a Surgeon from Yale meeting up at the bar, and all of a sudden the Biker is the godfather of the Surgeon’s baby, the Surgeon gets his own bike, and everyone lives happily ever after in the United States of America.

Music was almost an obvious choice. So many of his friends were musicians, growing in New Haven, where music is the only a way to really share an experience fully, so that you both feel it. You get people up there, never met before, graphing their souls to each other. Sometimes you’d get Bobby and then Eddie Buster, brothers, played in the Count Basie band, coming down for the Saturday afternoon jam, and then you have the young musicians, maybe 16 or even 20, who all knew they had chops, but were a little shaky. And some people say, oh musical exchange is like a battle of the bands, but Café Nine’s an ego-free zone, Mike always said. So you have these amazing guys, the Busters coming back to New Haven, wailing on the corner of State and Crown, this music that you couldn’t hear even at Lincoln Center, it was so good, and after the jam they’re over there in the back saying to the young fellas, you gotta hike up that third note, or smooth that over there, and catch that cue.

And it’s sort of a wholesome atmosphere we had going, especially with those Saturday afternoon jazz jams. It’s like those girls, those two little white girls 11 and 13 who used to come to the jams to play the saxophone, real sophisticated, right out of milkin’ cows in Wisconsin, and you’d think their role model would be Kenny G or something, but without even batting an eye, and no prompting from their mom, they tell Mike that their role model is Sonny Rollins. Sonny Rollins! Mike would be proud to call them his own daughters. This is how you pass the torch. You just have to live it. You just have to feel the music.

And Mike has had more than his fair share of glorious music. If he and his wife were to die tomorrow, and going to heaven were based on the good music you had heard while you were alive, they’d be going to heaven several times over. He never regretted it for a minute.
It was never really for the money. In fact, Mike would say most of his time they lost money—although when Jimmy Velvet and his Mox played, that was always a good night, financially. It’s funny, you think about how many people are in New Haven, and a space like Café Nine with space for 100 people should be packed every single night, because there’s music every night, but no, Mainstream America goes to New York for the live music. They don’t appreciate, or don’t understand, or they’re afraid of coming down and commingling with humanity, you know, because it’s such a diverse space, and even before 911 people had problems thinking on a communal level. And they’re missing out because the music is always exceptional, always honest. The world just doesn’t know. Mike loves the people of New Haven, but they just don’t know these things. They just don’t hear the priceless music that you couldn’t buy, that you couldn’t hear again if you wanted to. And you admit that you’re bitter, because the music is such a wealth, but in the end the world doesn’t know.




James Velvet keeps on writing his music and playing on the New Haven scene because he believes in the communal spirit of Cafe Nine. Even if the world doesn’t know you, there is a small world here that will love you and applaud you until you hang up the guitar and sing no more. Economics may keep Mainstream America away from Local Bands and Cafe Nine, but in a way, Mainstream doesn’t matter.

In the end, it’s having an outlet for personal expression that is important for Johnny Java, James Velvet’s Mockingbird bassist and longtime friend. “If I couldn’t play music, I think I would wither and die,” he says.

Tonight, James is introducing me to his current band, the first after the Mox broke up last December. I am sitting at a table in Richter’s Bar with the Nortons, James, which consists of James on the bass, Mox bassist Johnny on the drums, and a young twentisome Calvin DeCutlass as the songwriting front man.

We are having a beer at Richter’s because James drinks for free there. He points out the corner where he and Johnny played covers long ago, shaking his head. “That was crazy,” he says.

Johnny gives him a wry look, as if he can’t believe they did that, either. But at least they have a lifetime of free beer. And he’s glad he did his time here—learning covers gave him stylistic range, so that now he can take a hand in arranging the original music for the Nortons. It’s like a muscle, really: the more music you learn, the more you can play. And when you play well, music repays you many times over. It becomes an emotional and spiritual outlet. He takes a sip from his glass of beer.

The creative act can be addictive. A well-groomed middle-aged man with short black hair, he is surprisingly tender about his music. “It’s Love, really, that you feel for it,” he says, trying to explain. “It’s like love for a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Music affects your personal relationships, because your band is your mistress.” One bad gig can be devastating to Johnny—it can gnaw on him for days and weeks, because a woman he loves has been mistreated, and you just can’t let her be trampled on like that.

The remedy for this devastation is not getting picked up by a record label, or getting wide national acclaim for his work. It’s not recording more albums for distribution on CD Baby or IndepenDisc, two online venues often used by local indie musicians. For Johnny, it’s really all about playing another gig—this time, a great one.

If you don’t set your sights on Bigtime, you can’t fall from merciless heights. You can’t fail, because nothing defines your success other than your own sense of good music. You make your music as good as you want it to be, not for the CD store sales. You don’t hit your height as a young man and quit music at 30—no, you can keep playing as long as your fingers can keep moving, because you’re not selling your youth. You’re not selling your image, or your ability to speak for the young and hip consumer generation.

You’re on stage, more focused than you thought you could be, drinking in the sight of the crowd there to see you, and pushing the music forward, faster, upward, and away. It doesn’t get any better than this.




There is a lull in the middle of MurderVan’s set. The lead vocalist seems to be considering what to play next. “Cock Burn!” yells someone from the audience. He grins almost devilishly in assent, and gives a nod to the other two band members.

A lanky young man with the beginnings of a beard, the lead singer starts them off with a series of high-pitched bleeps on his guitar, beating out a paranoid, cagey rhythm pattern. When he gets a good beat going, the band joins in, and the vocalists stretches his neck out, screams: “Cock burn, cock burn, cock burn! What I have is cock burn! Cock burn! Cock burn!” The band is spinning the rhythm faster and faster, in danger of wheeling beyond rationality, beyond control—the crowd is with them, cheering and whistling as the momentum of the climax breaks—and finally, they’re past it and the seismic wave of sound crashes down. They’re blasting the song forth, expanding to a heavier, slower beat while carrying the momentum of the crash.

The vocalist swings his guitar back with the thurst of the final chord, eyes closed and cast upwards in ecstasy. Silence as the reverb dies, slow and lovely. He turns back to the audience, a boyish smile gracing his face in acknowledgement of the cheers and good-natured hoots. He’s back to being a mortal now, an average early-twenty-some working in New Haven. He wipes the sweat from his brow.

MurderVan has their own website, and a music fan can download their singles. They have gigs all up and down the New England coast. They might make it out of New Haven someday—they’re still young. This band could be it.

But right now, as they bask in the glory of that spectacular set, none of that matters. They are trying to affect nonchalance to no avail. A visible glow beams from beneath the face paint, a touch of exultation. This is a night they won’t forget.


Sources:
Observations 10/30/2004
Observations at Local Bands 11/23/2004
Interview with the Nortons 11/23/2004