Had a flashback a week ago Saturday night, a good one, that serves to define why staying up with music, with good musicians themselves, is so important , a non-musician myself. By staying up, I mean not only staying on top of what’s happening in music, but in staying up late enough to actually experience it. GET UP WITH IT, I have to tell myself, as Miles Davis himself once titled one of his later albums. In my frenzied youth, no matter what kind of work I had to do the next day, I could push the limits and burn both candles at both ends, as we used to say. These days I apply the fire more sparingly, as now I’d rather get up at 5 a.m. than crash at 3, so my robust party nights are at a premium. And it’s not SUMMER anymore, so what was my (our) excuse? We had a three-way decision to make– so I asked my wife– “Should we go downtown and see a great sax player’s band at Druthers with Caz & his friends on Broadway, or should we drive over to Amsterdam to a bowling alley??”
This was a choice I had never posed before, in our roughly 24.5 years together. The third possible choice involved inertia: staying where we were, in the boondocks with a large screen TV. The Yankees were on but I hadn’t gotten involved with the game yet, and I was flipping between that and the Notre Dame/Michigan football game. “Or we could stay home and chill….” Jeter was batting, for the 12 thousandth time, it seemed.
“No,” she asserted, wanting to deflect the inert option: “Let’s go see Four Down.”
It’s good to have a complicit partner in these matters, especially when she likes to dress up and dance, and still looks good doing it. “OK” & I jumped out of the seductive recliner, and we went.
It’s not often we head out of our driveway, our road, and head WEST on a weekend night– Saratoga Springs is the other direction. Mind you, the only time Amsterdam had ever been a destination for us before was when Miles was playing hoop in the Big 10, and Catholic Central was playing the Rams. He always did well in that gym for some reason– to the point where their crowd would moan and hold their foreheads when he started hitting shots at the end of those games. I loved that part, of course. I don’t believe their home team ever won when his team played there. But that was 3 years ago or more, fading into the rearview, and his hoop playing was no longer a viable entertainment option. He was off to college, up to his ears in business courses and English lit, studies and coeds and buddies and weekends of his own devising. Our daughter was staying in-town with her friends on this particular eve, while Daryn was in his studio/BR filling up sketchbooks with storyboards. All was quiet on the home front, so we could go get loud elsewhere.
We had kind of adopted Four Down as a favorite band, like surrogate parents, over the past year or more. Had seen them at Bailey’s Cafe (corner o’ Putnam & Phila, the back veranda) several times, and Dango’s, outside once last summer, the I-Go-Inn at least twice this summer, but had not been to the Imperial Lanes on Wallins Corner Road in Amsterdam before. (They had also appeared at Saratoga Prime twice, SIRO’S once, and a place in Glens Falls a couple times up this way, but hey– we couldn’t see every gig. We were, however, overdue.)
So with apologies to Brian Patenude & friends, and the excellent beer garden at Druthers, we motored 23 miles southwest on slightly rainy roads, and when we got there had no idea what to expect. Grizzled old smokers were in one or two groups, a klatch of teens were in another, with one of the tee-shirted scruffy young bucks saying, “yeah I like MOST of those kinda songs, but I don’t like RAP!” Inside I saw kids younger than that playing pool in a game room, and there was a slender bouncer with a John Deere cap, older than me, who just nodded, no matter who was going in or out. We strolled into the central, squared-off bar, where one single barista was busy pulling drafts and chatting with the regulars, I guess. It took about ten minutes to get her attention, which is not the norm at a place like Bailey’s, where Adam takes care of us pronto, or The I-Go-Inn, where they all do. Thus I had plenty of time to look around and get my bearings. The Yankee game was there above us, again, and a couple of college football games prevailed as well– Notre Dame was stifling Michigan at that point.
In the back of the building through a wide opening we could see the lanes flashing and crashing in all of their Saturday night glory. Kids and adults of all ages were mingling and having a blast, like an all-ages arcade. Not your average bar scene, unless you’re in a pub in Ireland, I’m told. I was beginning to think that downtown Saratoga might have been the more mature choice on this night… but it was still early.
Meanwhile, off to the right, Four Down is playing to a largely vacant expanse, like a high school cafeteria where no one is on the dance floor yet. I thought I heard the final strains of a ZZ Top tune I love, dubbed “Jeezus Just Left Chicago”, which I’ve heard Justin Metz just kill on the guitar a couple of times before. Could not hear the details while standing at the bar waiting, and did not have a beer in my hand just yet, so not a good time for a student of the blues. The sound of the bowling pins in the back cavern, the ballgames above me, and the hubbub of those clustered at the bar made me feel like I was in an A.D.D. pinball machine. Finally I got my right hand around a Corona, and milady chose a Blue Moon.
Feeling mighty conspicuous amid a sparse audience, we floated stage-right, toward the band’s own room, and had our choice of tables. Even the girlfriends and entourage of
the band were hanging at the bar it seemed, so for the end of that first set, we had a virtually private show. And this is where I had my flashback…
We were going to see Carl Landa and Scott Smith’s group play down at The Triple Crown Tavern, on the west side of Broadway, where Bruegger’s Bagel’s is now… Carl, at age 21, a lunch cook in the tavern by day, was on keyboards, as you might imagine– a Fender Rhodes his tool of choice in that era, while Scott played a banged up brass sax with the fervor and sass of a bad-ass white boy with a slightly squeaky ax and a lot of semi-sloppy chutzpah, and I loved hearing it, hearing the two of them together with a rhythm section, wishing I could blow a reed instrument like that myself. (Scott, wherever you are, 34 years later, do you hear me, man??–I’m giving you plaudits here, belatedly! You were Saratoga’s only Coltrane-follower back then, and there haven’t been many since…).
Let’s say it was late 1977 or early ’78, wintertime with not many pedestrians about, and we were hoping some hip Skidmore girls would come in to listen, but they hardly ever did. It was mostly just me & Rick & Fred Doyle & Brian Smith and if we were lucky, one or two others hangin’ with us in the room– we had previously, to no avail, slapped up paper posters touting the event like they do on Caroline Street to this day, a mini-Greenwich Village tradition– but Caroline Street with The Tin-N-Lint and perpetually Desperate Annie’s were the popular places to be, on the other side of Broadway, and it seemed no one but us wanted to truly hear jazz in those days. The owner, a guy named Nick Warner who was depressed that Elvis had died that year, always seemed bitter and pissed that he’d agreed to hire Carl’s band, and had to give them the money he’d promised whether anyone came in or not…. he listened ruefully at best as he smoked his Chesterfields in his own damn place, and tried to shrug off the loss.
And we would whupp it up as best we could, and call out YEAH in all the right places,
encouraging their duelling solos, their melding together back on the chorus, and we’d
buy as many drinks as we could with our minimum wage paychecks in those days, and we had a damn good time even when the members of the band outnumbered the crowd…
..which is how I felt for a minute that night at The Imperial Lanes in Amsterdam. As the first set ended there was still almost no one but us in the room, though they didn’t seem to mind at all. The singer Eric and Mike the drummer were comparing notes about a change they had put into the last tune, and joking amongst themselves. The bass player, Randy McKinley, who had not been with them last time I had written about them, seemed stoic and just started checking his phone for messages once the set was over. Justin Metz was fiddling with some controls on his amp. I went up and shook hands with all of them saying it reminded me of nights in Saratoga 34 years ago before downtown really took off, and I commended them on their professionalism. Eric Schwerdt just laughed and replied, “That’s how we roll– 6 people in the crowd or 600, we play the same!” Mike Caputo just nodded his head in sardonic agreement, took a chug of his well-deserved beer.
There was nothing sad about it– they all had good day jobs, weren’t desperate for this or any other gig, and loved what they were doing. It was the first night of fall for this place to be featuring music and might take a while to catch on, they figured. Pizza was being served for the band, regardless, and they carried on.
The first set, once we sat down, featured a ska version of “Message in A Bottle” (Police),
a cool Steel Pulse tune named “Our House” I hadn’t heard them do before, and then a staple of their repertoire that rivals the original– “Santeria” by Sublime, which I’ve come to love. Then it was one of their powerhouse mash-ups– Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” started out then morphed into a segue with a Doors tune: “Roadhouse Blues”– with the immortal verse “Roll Roll Roll, let me thrill your soul, awll RIGHT!” in a manner that would make Jim Morrison proud, and its subsequent line “Well I woke up this morning and got mySelf a BEE-YER!!”– which makes it a great drinking tune any time of day. The suddenly they slam into a Chili Peppers’ manic finish, back to “Higher Ground” in the fashion of another L.A. band they show great respect for. I felt the need for a pitcher of Blue Moon at that point– their music makes me stay thirsty, my friends. By that time I knew we had made the right decision.
Eric noted someone at the bar he needed to talk to while I invited Justin over to our table to meet my wife and regale us with the history of the bands he’d gotten together and played with prior to this– he and Mike Caputo had put in years with a group called Wag, and toured the east coast in the 90’s, before he took a hiatus in 2002 to focus on his other business. The performing bug returned and he formed a reggae/ska band dubbed I-M-I, which thrived locally for years, although they went through a couple of different singers. This band’s incarnation was clearly a labor of love, and his guitar solos consistently show passion for the wide range of tunes he has crafted into their extensive set lists.
Pizza-filled, they started their second set slowly, hypnotically, with Pink Floyd’s “TIME”–
and drew in some recalcitrant leftover hippies from the bar for that one– they toasted each other with shots thru that one– but were not open minded enough to hang on in quiet desperation for a 90’s shot of Sublime, again, when “The Wrong Way” began, and eventually took a new, ironic twist with “Same In The End.” (Eric’s girlfriend Meredith had to give me the name of that one.) Energy rose more fervently with the cranking martial beat of Franz Ferdinand’s great singalong: “TAKE ME OUT!” In a world of often frivolous love, it features the reassuring line: “I know I will be leaving here ….” (repeated 3X), “with YOU!” and my wife and I are grinning and bouncing our skulls like Beavis and Butthead. From the heavy masculinity of that tune, there is then the fey humor of The Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun”, also a great singalong for any audience that can handle Four Down’s quicksilver blending of genres: “High as a Kite, I just Might, Try to Check You Out”– taken down to a whisper, and then blasted back to the chorus. Nice.
Normally we are dancing by now, but in this almost-empty room, it was more appropriate and less conspicuous to treat it as a private concert. From there it’s a great staccato jam on Marley’s classic “JAHM-MIN'” with its Rasta incantation to “Ho-o-lee Mount Zion!”,
followed by the ferocious grunge of “Gorilla Rock” by Rage Against The Machine– from the 70’s to the 90’s seamlessly, and then back to the classic rock era with the sledgehammer rhythm of “The Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin. When they then pay tribute to the late Adam Yauch with the Beastie Boys’ chestnut “NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN” we are bathed once again in the best of the 90’s, which I largely missed the first time around, while raising kids. I’m wondering meanwhile who is the guy sitting with the band’s entourage– a bit older than me, perhaps, and just as much into it.
Well I found out that the guy Eric had gone to talk to turned out to be his dad, a surprise visitor from New Jersey, up for this gig from a stay in Albany. As a youthful looking 64 year-old retiree from At & T, he told me how he had been in bands back in the 60’s, playing bass and singing, but also had performed in Barbershop Quartets continuously for a few decades since–interesting combination! I commended him for raising a multi-talented son with great stage presence, and he said he hadn’t really ever seen him sing with this band before. I clapped him on the back and told him I was glad he had gotten up here to see him. Four Down then proceeded to rip up another half-dozen songs in rapid fire fashion, showing Eric’s dad George Schwerdt as broad a cross-section of their chops as possible:
1) Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy!”; 2) Maroon 5’s: “Harder & Harder to Breathe”; 3) Citizen Cope’s excellent blues tune: “Sun’s Gonna Shine” with a typically amazing blues solo from Metz; 4) “Caress Me Down” by Sublime again, featuring some highly suggestive if not outright dirty lyrics; 5) “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black-Eyed Peas, a guaranteed butt-shaker, and last… the Aerosmith set-closer, “Walk This Way.” Three songs from 3 diverse segments of the last decade, sandwiched around some 80’s and 90’s gems as well…this is how they roll.
The last set a pleasant blur, finally getting to our feet to dance to, of all things, Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” This came after The Police, “Driven To Tears” which featured a wicked bass by the stellar hands of Randy McKinley, another Led Zep tune, “The Ocean” from the Dancin’ Days album from my last year in high school, followed by a hip-hop classic from House of Pain, dubbed, simply enough “JUMP AROUND!” Somewhere in there, still dancing like it’s an aerobic beer-fueled workout at midnight– comes the slinky sleaze of Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body” and stellar wise-ass anthem “Be My GIrl” by JET, which I swear this band does better than the original. My scrap paper notes begin to lose their continuity.
There might’ve been some more Sublime (“What I Got”), some Young MC (“Bust A Move”– dangerous for a guy my age), Cee-lo’s nasty recent national radio hit, euphemistically titled “Forget You”– and then the slow rasta soul of Bob Marley’s masterful “No Woman No Cry”– a tribute to the band’s reggae roots. Finally, it was approaching 1:30 in the morning and there had been a loose dozen of folks dancing for the last hour, in and out, till Mike Caputo’s crispy sticks start up a tune this band turned me onto a year ago and I can’t get outa my head now– I first thought of it, wrongly, as a Bobby Brown creation and vocal, but later discovered it was a hip-hop classic from Bel Biv Devo– “(That Girl is…) Poison!” Eric sings the shimmering lines that ride the top of that funk/dance locomotive, and on this occasion Justin Metz stepped forward for a guitar solo that the original artists never saw coming– shredding that tune for ten minutes to climax the night– when Eric comes back in with the line– “It’z driving me outa my mind…”
By that time, I had reached ecstatic satisfaction, and danced away most of the beer. We congratulated them on another fantastic , though ill-attended, performance, and I heard that song in my head all the way back to our plateau west of Toga-town. In my career of entertainment-seeking, it was the best time I have ever had in a bowling alley after all…
Postscript:
Four Down The Band have a few more gigs scheduled before Thanksgiving– check Facebook for the particulars, or their website. The most immediate date on October 13th at The Bayou Cafe on North Pearl Street in Albany, one of the few remaining band-supporting bars deep downtown in the Capital City. Check these guys out, and tell me if you think I’m exaggerating…
That’s it for now,
More to come soon, of a different nature altogether…
Wayne