Anarchy in Cooper Square

I'm not sure if you'd call Karaoke a piece of Japanese culture or not but no other ethnicity can claim such an attachment to this strange past time. Personally, I feel that karaoke can be fun but it's not something worth doing more than once a year, if that. As a town with a significant Japanese cultural presence and a fair amount of Japanese ex-pats, New York City was also the home to myriad karaoke bars. The only one I really knew of during my years there was in the Cooper Square section of NYC. The name of this establishment escapes me, of course, but I remember where it was and what it looked like so names aren't important here.

The outside was fairly unassuming with a small selection of neon signs out front advertising its Japanese ownership and the fact that it was a karaoke bar. Inside was not designed for public embarrassment but only for embarrassment in front of your friends - or at least the party that you came with. The bar was divided up into two floors with roughly 5-10 individual rooms per floor for karaoke as opposed to a main stage where drunk post-college girls could get up in front of everyone and incoherently scream the lyrics to Jimmy Buffet's "Cheeseburger in Paradise".

I was lucky enough to be in attendance with my friend Jon Franks and a selection of his high school friends from the hamlet of Croton-on-Hudson; Amy, Ivan, Tarran, someone else and a slightly unstable fellow whose name escapes me but whose involvement in this night did not. Our reservation was for Saturday night at 11pm in a downstairs room. By this time, we could tell that people were already having a ball as you could hear the karaoke machines blaring the cheezy sanitized musak-versions of popular songs recognizable only by their basic melody and nothing else accentuated by loud drunken laughter that seemed to come from every room. We were eager to become as stupid as everyone else and given that this was a BYOB establishment there must have been 4 six-packs between the 6 of us.

Tentative at first, we performed most of the "numbers" without much personality. I suppose at this point though, it didn't really matter given how surreal the whole arrangement seemed. To be in a dimly lit room in the basement of a cramped bar in Cooper Square illluminated only by neon light fixtures with drunk twenty-nothings everywhere was not a nightly experience. After slobbering my way through the Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud" and consuming 3 beers I left our performance space and headed for the bathroom which was right across the hall. But before I could open the door to the bathroom the door itself opened and out came this completely "draked" guy with blooshot eyes who was still in the process of buckling and zippering up his pants. He didn't look directly at me (there's a chance he didn't actually see me even though I was right in front of him) and so instead of looking at him I looked over his shoulder to assess the bathroom and saw the remainder of his diarrehea swooshing away down the toilet. Apparently this guy was in such a rush to get back to the karaoke-ing that he didn' t have time to properly hitch up his pants and wait to see if everything was properly flushed. I entered the bathroom holding my breath and hoping he wouldn't try to come back - forgetting that he had to vomit as well.

Back in our room the group was going strong. Jon was screeching his way through the Who's "My Generation" and he was starting to look a little embarrased. Next up, the slightly unstable friend. The selection was the Sex Pistols' classic "Anarchy in the UK". I was surprised when the unstable friend began strong, sounding suitably angst-ridden, angry and punk. It was a tour-de-force and we cheered him on. As he rounded the bend in the song that leads to it's conclusion he growled into the mic "IIIIIIIIIIIIII wanna beeeee-ahhh An-archiiiiiist, get pissed, destroyyyyyyyyyaaaahhhh" with the Johnny Rotten coughs and hacks to boot and then he dropped the mic on the stained carpet with a thud and bolted out of the room. We laughed and applauded until after a couple minutes Jon astutely observed, "I think he really left!"
"No way,", responded Ivan while leaving the room to go look for him.
"That's so weird, why does he do stuff like that?", added Amy.
But Ivan returned and said, "I can't find him. I guess he left".
That's a hell of a way to end a night and a bit melodramatic. I mean, maybe he had somewhere else that he wanted to be. But, that's I guess the karaoke equivalent of "dine 'n dash" since we hadn't actually paid yet (the room was by the hour). I guess I didn't really care that much since he wasn't my friend but it was kind of funny to see someone do something that unexpected.

You Can Shoot a Cannonball Through Here

These tough economic times remind me of the music industry's technologically fueled meltdown of the late-90's. With the music industry undergoing moments of great upheaval, venerable labels and label-heads were seeing their days drawing to an ignominious close. This was of course driven by the rampant free file-sharing services like Napster with which the music industry had no idea how to deal, a statement that incredibly is still true to some extent today (itunes notwithstanding). For the purposes of this post, it's worth noting that EMI Records, a well-known imprint of the record label EMI, had ceased operations in the late 90's. A massive restructuring was taking place within EMI effecting all of its labels and imprint labels including Blue Note Recods the legendary jazz label.

At Arkadia Jazz we, of course, felt this industry shift as well but being a Jazz label (Jazz as a genre only represented 2.5% of the industry's sales) we didn't feel it quite that much. Jerrold, Arkadia's promotions man was a fairly well connected cat in the Jazz world. A former Duke Ellington band manager/gofer/administrator and adopted Grandson of legendary jazz bassist Milt Hinton, Jerrold was a man with notable chops in the jazz world. This stature and name helped carry him into the world of artist management, a nice side gig to augment the meager salary he drew from Arkadia. I, however, did not have any "cred" in the jazz world or in the New York City music scene for that matter. With interest in having side gigs of my own, I found myself riding Jerrold's coattails deeper into Jazz in order to perhaps get some artist management business of my own started. With Jerrold welcoming me along (probably thinking that he was already expanding his "staff") we left the Arkadia offices on 23rd street for the lush Blue Note offices around the corner on Park Avenue South. Blue Note, celebrating it's 60th year of business at the time, was still a strong brand in jazz and in music but with the EMI restructing taking place they were a calm oasis amongst the turbulence of change. Blue Note/EMI's building entrance was not much to look at but once on their floor, the large sunny office with bright windows nearly took our breath away. The Arkadia offices only had windows in the front of the office with the back covered by industrial-strength metal window shutters that offered no glimpse of the building's courtyard or outside.

Mark Shim, a young tenor saxophonist, was Jerrold's property at the moment and our meeting was with Mr. Shim himself and a Blue Note/EMI label rep. After passing through reception we traversed the wide open expansive spaces of Blue Note/EMI to a small conference room in the back corner. This long walk took us through all of the former EMI Records areas that were now vacant save stray bits of office supplies and empty jewel cases. We navigated row upon row of vacant cubicles and empty desk chairs to find Mr. Shim and the young, attractive African-American woman who served as his label rep. The meeting went fine, but the atmosphere in that office made us feel like we were having a meeting in a desolate abandoned office furnitrue warehouse. Evidence of the EMI layoff casualties was like crossing a battlefield recently vacated by soldiers both living and dead. Upon leaving the meeting and heading for the elevators, Jerrold and I felt compelled to keep our voices down (no small feat for the loquacious Jerrold) in this large quite space which now reminded us of a library. At reception I looked back through the transparent doors into the office and could detect wispy shadows in the far ends of the office beyond the empty spaces.