One time my friend Dave
and I were killing time at the store, looking at records without any specific
need to buy one. Manny noticed Dave looking at a King Crimson album and asked
him if he was a fan. Dave tentatively said “sure” and Manny said “You guys have
some time?” and proceeded to turn off the lights, close the door to his shop, sit
us down in a couple chairs, and play us an eight-minute segment of a live King
Crimson video with a stunning, acoustic Robert Fripp solo. Another customer
tried to come in during this and he wouldn’t let him in, telling him that he
was busy with us and he could come in in a bit. Once the video had played, he
simply and reverentially said (to the air more than to either of us
specifically) “And they say the man is just a master of electric guitar…”
turned the lights on and resumed normal business - as normal as he got anyway.
That was Manny in a nutshell - so invested in the actual music that he couldn’t
be bothered to let a customer in because he wanted to share the music he loved
with another customer. And Dave bought Larks’ Tongues in Aspic.
Another time, based on
the strength of the album Gravity, I was getting deep into the daunting
catalog of Fred Frith - the English guitarist/violinist/composer who was one of
the mainstays of art-rockers Henry Cow and about dozen other bands (including
John Zorn’s thrash-noise-jazz outfit Naked City) that I would soon learn about -
and I needed to get my hands on whatever I could afford. I went to the obvious
spot to find this kind of music - Lunch For Your Ears - and was a little
disappointed to find that the store wasn’t open (though I knew I had limited
funds anyway) and the steel gate was most of the way down. Looking in the
window and turning to leave, Manny suddenly appeared behind the metal shutter
and asked me “What are you looking for? I know every record I have in here.” I
was taken aback and said “Ummm… Fred Frith I guess?” He asked what my favorite
album of his was, since Frith covered so much territory in his music. The
instrumental album Gravity was my answer, and Manny quickly countered
that he preferred the subsequent (and more challengingly spiky) album Speechless
then rattled off about a dozen in-stock titles off the top of his head,
including the just-released Naked City EP Torture Garden. It was the
only thing under ten bucks, so I bought it. I might have bought more over time
at the store, but Manny made me a little nervous. So for the time being I stuck
to Gravity and (less-frequently) Speechless and the pure WTF-ness
of the Naked City record.
And there’s no question about it - whatever Frith’s
reputation as experimentalist, as avant-gardist, and no matter how many
different types of records he releases - Gravity is something special
and very different in his catalog. Where much avant-garde is challenging,
deliberately off-putting, humorless, here was a record that had hallmarks of
experimental music - odd time signatures, dissonance - but was also catchy,
danceable, and just plain fun to listen to. It kicks off with Frith’s
high-pitched laugh at the beginning of “The Boy Beats The Rams,” as if to
signal his intentional break with the seriousness and intensity of Henry Cow,
then an insistent drumbeat starts to fill in the space between the ambient
noises and Frith’s fiddle. This drives forward into the light, gentle “Spring
Any Day Now,” which disguises its tricky bossa nova –inspired rhythms with a
catchy guitar melody that sticks in the craw. The (album) side progresses
through the deliberate rhythmic shifts of “Don’t Cry For Me,” the speedy tempos
and gypsy violin improvisations of “Hands of the Juggler,” and the heavier
guitar riffing of “Norrgården Nyvla” before closing out on the show-stopping
drumming and oddball circus feel of “Year of the Monkey.” This is not the
avant-garde that’s difficult and off-putting, this is the kind that welcomes
you in, that invites you to enjoy song structures and melody rather than
eschewing them. And even though Frith switches bands for the second half of the
record, it’s still of a piece with the first, giving us some more challenging
art rock in a vaguely Beefheart-ish mode a couple times, a tune that sounds
like the theme for a late 60s TV cop show, and a playfully disrespectful cover
of “Dancing In the Street” before taking in another fiddle tune with a heavy
Scottish influence and a lovely and calming piano solo with light percussion
that closes out the record on an almost lullaby-like feel.
The whole thing is catchy, rhythmically propulsive (even
when they go for more challenging meters), and very user-friendly. And if
someone like Manny has intimidated you into thinking that experimental music is
inaccessible or over your head, I’m here to tell you that Gravity is a key to accessing a lot of different things: art-rock,
largely improvised music, international musics of varying stripes, and the
variety of Fred Frith’s work as well. It did that for me, pushing me off in a
dozen directions at once and opening a lot of doors for me, musically speaking.
Manny’s right, Speechless is great
too, but Gravity is the easier in for
sure. And we can talk about Naked City’s Torture
Garden another time.
(Note: Manny closed
Lunch For Your Ears in the early 90s and joined up with another Lower East Side
guy, Bruce Gallanter, to open the similarly-stocked Downtown Music Gallery,
which still operates in Chinatown. Check ‘em out if you’re there!)
-
Patrick Brown
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