“It was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.”
— Ralph Ellison
Prospero’s Cave is an over-rosewooded bar buried behind some placards selling photographs to tourists on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, NY. It’s a favorite of writers, comedians, and far too many puppeteers. For a brief period of time, Prospero’s Cave tried hosting musical acts. These are some interviews with the patrons who attended those few shows.
Jessee Holkins, 26, Puppeteer. June 12, 2006. Yeah, I usually order with my puppet — so what? What’s it to you? Would you rather I order with something slightly less non-puppety? Sometimes it’s just the small ones. Other times I bring out the ceiling-pushers. You’ve to be careful with those guys. Hands big enough to knock over a table. Either way, I’m not the only one who orders with their puppet. I wouldn’t call it a crutch, no. A crutch to what, first of all? It’s not like there’s any sort of confusion as to what’s going on here. There are people and there are puppets, and a distinct line that separates the two. Anyway, I order with my puppet what I’d order in real life. Scotch, soda. Bowl of peanuts. If I feel like throwing the peanuts at somebody else, then I can do that, as it’s, y’know, just a puppet.
Double anyway, that’s how I started off the night when I saw I Bet You Can’t Remember Who Else Was On Ed Sullivan When The Beatles Played (Sullivan Doesn’t Count.) I was having too good a time. They were playing a song called Elephant, and after, the singer said I got brownie points for irony. I’d forgotten how much I love small-venue shows like these. Just unabashedly love, man. Nothing blocking my way. Ah, man, man. There were only some twenty or thirty people on the floor, and that was it! None of that rote learn-one-joke-that-several-thousand-people-can-understand business. I sat atop the speaker with my puppet and both of us just head-banged — don’t you love how it’s bang? like you’re expecting something to go ka-pow while you’re doing it? like you’re all set to break a board and get your blackbelt? — through most the rest of the night. But: sitting atop a speaker! With a puppet! And everyone else was dancing around them! That groundswell feeling. Man … You do realize that if you publish this the way I think you’re going to publish it, I’ll end up looking like I’m talking to no one, and, therefore, pretty crazy, right? You’re fine with that? Well, aren’t you nice?
Molly Houseboat, 23, Musician, June 28, 2006. I played Prospero’s Cave sometime in early May with a very, ah, ‘Keith Richard’d’ Keith Richards. The best way to sum up the evening? I introduced the next number as something by Paginni and he started doing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Just goes to show you, I suppose.
Maxwell Robertson Kossak, 31, Writer, June 31, 2006. Sometimes I forget how much I love silence. I just love silence — how, bit by bit, like stagehands dismantling a set, all the things that are noisy can just be carried away, scooped out … Can I tell you about how I once fought for silence, and how it felt once I won? … I’m there eating dinner one night, and I just can’t stand the noise. I couldn’t tune it out, for some reason. So I get up — I’m there with Theresa and Ken — and I start taking the forks and knives out of everyone’s hands, indicating that they should mime their meals, because — and I point back to M. and T. — both of them are sleeping, even though they’re not, and everyone complies, even the band playing that night — so it was an easy battle, yes, yes, though maybe battle was the wrong word, or the enemy was something else, something elsewhere; the battle was just the act of passing through the telescope, that’s what it was: everyone miming their dinners, the musicians their instruments, and the bartender an invisible glass, and the three of us, strangers to nearly everyone … scooping pockets of noise …
Keele Stoneward, Musician, May 8, 2006, Banned. My rhyming dictionary is now demanding royalty checks.
George Rorschon, Owner of “Prospero’s Cave.” July, 3, 2006. Bandroid was a three piece outfit — a drummer, a guitarist, and a cellist. They did a panoply of stuff, but one surefire thing you’ll probably hear them doing again — at least, judging by the crowd — was the blues. A cello doing the blues has something rusty in it, like a church choir/ plant hybrid growing up through a covering of disused pipes … There’s a late-night Tennessee train crawling on all fours quality to this. Their best song starts off like this:
Woke up this mornin’
Got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my face
and found that I had no head.
Oh, babe, why’s bein’ king got to be so hard?
It’s called, “Louis XVI Blues.”
Chesterfield Hortonwit, April 10th, 2006. There’s a jazz pianist who’s been trying to get a show on the road so long we started calling him The Ever Ending Tour. His name’s Theo, and he wears a trenchcoat, fedora, and sandles in all sorts of weather, and I kind of want to ask him why, but I haven’t yet. He has this friend, “Ben Franklin,” or Ben Franklin, depending on who you’re talking to, who’s always carrying around this giant sack slung over the shoulder that he says is filled to the brim with the heads of dead Presidents, and whenever he or Theo need any advice, all he needs to do is dip their hand into this talking, elected apple barrel and out they come. I’ve yet to see this in action.
This afternoon, the two of them invited me along to the Antique Store to get some ice cream. You must be kidding, I said. We’re not, Theo replied.
George Rorschon. I mean, there are plenty of kids who’ll just shout dance in the middle of their meals, then get up and start jitterbugging and cockroaching or pogo-sticking or whatever the hell it is these kids do these days.
They tried couches for a while. They took everything out onto the street corner — the tables, the counter, one passed out customer, everything — and they brought in couches. The bartender just put all the drinks and glasses on the trunk in front of him until the density of the glasses and the variety of the heights … it made for a nice Wizard of Oz homage, a city of glass, a light store yet to be opened up, turned on, tuned in, tuned out, Ram Dass’d, and all that.
Maggie Nist, Bassist in “Brandroid.” Simon played guitar on the walk home. He’s never without his art. He started to play 80’s hair metal. He laughed. That look: why are we doing this song? We sung it anyway.
George Rorschson, Owner of “Prospero’s Cave,” May 31, 2006. I don’t know what just happened. — was playing tonight. A chandelier of empty roadside diner coffee pots hung from the ceiling. “Roadside Diner Night.” Anyway, they’re a nice band. A nice, simple punk band. Everyone’s all around the band, thrashing themselves about, when, next thing we know, the audience pushes all the members off the instruments and out the door and started doing the songs themselves. I’m wondering if we should call somebody.
Theo, Pianist, “Brandroid,” April 1, 2006. They first met at an apartment warming / birthday party for a mutual friend, where everyone brought along giant trashbags filled with things the givers didn’t want — AOL cd’s, old newspapers, magazines (already scissored), earlier drafts of this story, cardboard coffee cup holders — and all the gifts had been “opened” and now everyone was driving slowly through the party with their wine glasses at the helm (passing through floating dialogue like, “This wine is kosher, right?” “There is no pig in this wine” and “Just because I ride a horse on a yacht doesn’t make me a WASP.” “While that may be technically true … ” “Look —” ) and Kenny Burrell guitar sailing off the turntables when Simon overheard a man who had filled his glass entirely with olives — hereafter referred to as Mr. Olives — proclaiming to Maggie, “Hey, you’re an architect?” — She had studied it in school, still put in hours at a firm in Williamsburg — “Well, you know what they say: ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’” Then he smallbarked a laugh, and Simon’s patience evaporated in a poof! and he interrupted.
“Why not?”
“What?”
But before Mr. Olives got the chance to demand an explanation from Simon, he was hit with air guitar chords (E to B7, if you want to play along at home), then heard the following song:
I was sittin’ in the shadow of Gehry’s sundial
Doin’ everything the man advised
Thinkin’ ‘bout structuralists, oh man,
It could only bring tears to my eyes.
I was seriously thinkin’ about continuing the song
when the — joke broke an’ got old.
I’m saying things I can hardly believe
I really need some editorial control.
And the rest of the party joined in on Radio, Radio! while Mr. Olives kicked a piece of trash in frustration.
Chesterfield Hortonwit, April 10th, 2006. “George Washington’s Mum used to write him letters that would send him to bed with crippling migraines.”
The sack ruffled in protest. Adams grinned.
Mr. Olives, 2006. Mr. Olives has just bought a forty-year old nylon-stringed, classical Aria, slightly chipped, but with enough color on it that it could blend in with the houses of Mexico. He strummed a syncopated beat, varying the bass notes at the bottom of some chords. The 5 a.m. tune-up: winter cars and winter guitars aren’t too far apart for him — get ‘em good, get ‘em started early. He started this when he was young, too. Open strings: childhood. Like a fishing bob, that thing, rising up, percolorating the clouds.
Maggie Nist, July 5th, 2006. What’s the most practical way to live on the moon? I have this stack of books at home about the World’s Fair and the Home of Tomorrow, the Whole Earth Catalog and all these Asmiov books and books about Robert Goddard and Oppenheimer, and, still, nada. I mean, I’m sick of all this retro-future posturing we’ve been going through for the past few hundred years, nor am I insensitive to the rain of geopolitical negotations that will come, but what’s taking so long? What’s the first step? What’s the second?
I read somewhere that a nation’s language exerts a ‘gravitational pull’ on the structure of its music. Think about all that language buried in the earth and floating through the sea. But that’s sure saying something about the musicians they put on that satellite and shot into space. (“It was in the air and it was in the books.”) Who’s next, I wonder?
George Rorschon, Owner of “Prospero’s Cave.” July 5, 2006. The band stopped. Simon kept a beat. “Alright,” Theo said. “Now it’s time for a magic trick. I’m going to need twelve volunteers.” Twelve stepped forward. “Pick a card,” he said. “Any card.” He handed them out. “Alright,” he said. “Ready?” They nodded. The band continued playing. After a few minutes, they dropped the cards and rejoined the crowd. “Alright, here’s our latest single — it’s, ‘Did Malcolm Lowry Really Just Punch A Horse in the Face?’ Here we go!”
The rest of the songs that evening: Monkey Monkey Monkey Monk, A Mandolin Often Disappears in the Pneumatic Tube of a Thunderclap, Would You Ever Sneak Into Your Grandmother’s Room in the Middle of the Night and Beat Her Over the Head with a Canoe? Zane Gray and the Apocalyptic Moon Waltz, Please Stop Calling The Hudson River 13th Avenue, and Fuck the Police (Where Are They?)
Chesterfield Hortonwit, ctd. Bushes of roses tongue-loll outside the windows, now. It’s nice.
Frankie Riddleson, June 20th, 2006. Theo doesn’t grunt or sing or half-mumble-sing the notes when he’s at the keys, but she does, and she plays bass. — was from (neighborhood in Brooklyn), and she was first drawn to the stand-up bass because she could spin it. Her voice flies up like banners over an ancient city, sneaks to a hitherto unwinkable part of the car — she sometimes works the bass like a third hand at the piano — sometimes as a quiet buzz for those scrips of piano chords to half float out of and re-settle down upon — oh, sometime’s it all too much.
The Antique Store. The ice cream was three-hundred years old, vanilla, and had calcified to a dark olive.
It was kept in a see-through cooling tank and also contained ear-rings — “Ear rings?” Franklin asked. “Have any ice cream truck drivers ever tried to buy it off you?” Theo asked. “A few. But none of them for the right reasons.” — Franklin was thinking of pointing at the cone, saying, I was wondering where I left it, but there are only so many jokes we can say out loud, however much we love making hurricanes, and the only reason this one is being shared is out of a quiet, friendly affinity, and there’s an old frump of a woman perched on a stool behind the counter wearing chain glasses and watching the Cleveland Cavaliers on TV.
“I tell my husband this, I says to him, Lebron makes the players-turned-sportscasters want to retire. For chrissakes, just watch! He’s one of the few I’d actually believe could actually phone in a shot from home.”
She mimes throwing a shot out the window. A passing, sarcastic bird mimes being hit.
Chester, ctd. … and Franklin takes TR’s head out of the bag and it’s already in mid-sentence saying, Just because I’m decapitated doesn’t mean I can be any less productive. (I can blow my head up to the size of a mountain, you know! — Why is it all these editors for the weekly magazines can’t seem to catch a break when they try and write a book? Zakaria’s is circular, circular, circular and —‘s missing an apostrophe for my boy Franklin in the first paragraph — and then because Franklin’s finding it hard to shove TR’s head back into the bag, he brings out another head to shut him up, reaches down and the man is saying, “For the last time, Doris, that’s all I kn — ” And he stops, looks around, and TR stops immediately.
The second head’s eyes shot back and forth, examining the terrain.
“Does Doris know I’m here?”
“Who?”
“No? Thank Providence. Maybe I can have some time to myself.”
“Are you talking about Doris Kearns Goodwin?”
“Yes. It’s funny: I remember how the project began. I was hidden away in the kitchen cupboard, and the author had some friends over for a dinner party. It was in Western Massachusetts, I believe. And someone asked her, ‘What are you working on now?’ and you could hear her put the fork down and say, ‘Well, I’m very excited. I’ve just started working on a book about Lincoln.’ And the woman said, ‘Why, isn’t that wonderful? We’ve always loved living in Lincoln, and now there’ll be a book about it!’ And there was a pause, and another voice at the table said, ‘Think about the person seated across from you.’”
Chaz Perrault, July 5, 2006.
I came late to the show tonight, but what I heard when I entered was this:
“Yo, fuck the police!”
“Fuck the police!”
“Fuck the police!”
“Fuck the police!”
“Wait, wait, did you hear that?”
“I heard that, too.”
“Did you guys hear something?”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“…”
“Alright, I think we’re —”
“Fuck the police! Fu —”
“I think I just saw a blue light.”
“Clean up the cans! Clean up the cans! I’m here on scholarship!”
“No. Wait —”
“Fuck the police! Fuck the pol —”
“Guys, guys, guys, guys!”
“I’m starting to think these peach schnaps were a terrible idea.”
*
I grab a seat next to Olives who’s restringing one of his guitars.
“What are you up to?” I ask.
I can’t hear Olives’ reply over the singer introduces the next song.
“This is a song about waking up next to one you love. This is a song about knowing everything’s going to be okay. This song is ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’”
“Did he just —”
