The Tris McCall Report
"This Is The Town"- Larchmont Rock City
"That's my Larchmont. Loose supervision, commuter trains to New York City and music and asphalt and this clean little woodsy place full of preppy white families, stucco and pine when you got home and took some leftovers out of the fridge. A lot of lonely cigarette smoking and longing for girls. A pretty Harbor and familiar faces." -- Milton
Richard Thompson, that fatalistic guy, wrote "Meet On The Ledge" when he was just a kid. I remember listening to it in high school -- not much younger than Thompson was when he wrote it -- and wondering how he could be so pessimistic. Even then, I didn't make it a practice to identify with pop lyrics, but the first three lines resonated with me and my aspirations for my peers at Dayton Regional: "We used to say", he sang "that come the day/we'd all be making songs/or finding better words". And so I said, not only for my little group of aesthetically-inclined friends, but for everybody in the school who I respected. I wanted us to hang together, reach levels of staggering aesthetic achievement as a collective, be known as a movement, see each other on the pop charts, or, even better, join together in an underground movement that achieved critical success on its own terms.
It was an insane expectation. None of us even played instruments. I suppose I should have taken Thompson's words of caution to heart; "those ideas", he offered "never lasted long/ too many friends… blown off this mountain in the wind." Of course, he might have been talking about the death and infirmity that stalked Fairport like a shadow during the late sixties. The people I knew weren't exactly blown off the mountain; they just sort of slid down the scree. They're all okay, more or less -- nobody suffered the fate of Martin Lamble. But my implausible fantasy of the collective aesthetic achievement of our graduating class, well, that didn't happen. Over the years I'd hear "Meet On The Ledge" and feel pretty stupid when I did. A group of friends from the same high school, all sticking (more or less) together, sharing musical ideas and pushing each other to greater achievement? That never happens, right?
Initially, my interest in current Larchmont musicians in NYC had nothing to do with their town, or Mamaroneck High, or any relationship they shared. For instance, I dug Milton's music and I dug the Vitamen, and I didn't realize there was any connection between the two acts until I already knew most of their first albums by heart. I'd seen Girl Harbor drummer Gregg Altman play with Vitamen guitarrist Jesse Blockton in Cover Me Badd, but I had no idea they were both from the same planet, let alone the same high school. But once I recognized that they'd all known each other for years -- that they'd come, usually individually but sometimes in groups, to Williamsburg to refine musical visions conceived in Larchmont ages ago, their projects began to take on an extra resonance. I began to look for similarities -- both in form and intention.
They weren't tough to find. Williamsburg's notorious peer review seems to beat expatriate musicians (and since nobody currently playing music in Williamsburg was actually born and raised in Williamsburg, everybody around here is an expatriate) into the same rudimentary garage-rock shape. But the Larchmont kids appeared to have arrived in Brooklyn with a stronger sense of musical identity. They weren't doing Iggy rips or Stones rewrites -- they seemed to have extremely broad classic-rock record collections, and a willingness to draw from them with great respect for rock history, and without apology for unfashionable sources. Better yet, in a borough where the fashion among highly educated musicians is to pose as working-class mooks and sing stuff like "get ready/ get set/ what you get is electric sweat", the members of the Larchmont crew wear their literacy proudly.
Imagine you're a talented kid from Omaha, or Toledo, or Basking Ridge; you're a musical star in your high school, and of course you want to rock. You come to Williamsburg because here is where all the real rockers are, but you feel immediately out of place. In high school, you liked Phish records, Stone Temple Pilots records; your classmates though you were the strange one for grooving to the Flaming Lips. But here, everybody knows the Flaming Lips, and your other influences are considered absurdly declassé. What do you do? Unless you are immensely self-possessed, or simply suicidal, you adopt the beliefs and attitudes of those who surround you. When you return to Omaha, Toledo, or Basking Ridge (to visit, mind you), you will appear to be a Brooklynite and a hipster, and your old friends will wonder when you got too cool for them. And so the big city homogenizes its cultural production, and pounds the edges out of the musicians it attracts.
Presuming this is an outcome you'd want to defy, or at least challenge, how would you set about bucking your natural propensity to conform to expectations? I'd imagine your best bet would be to arrive in Brooklyn and the New York music scene in tandem with pals from your hometown -- not as part of a collective project, but a collective of projects, drawing from similar sources and mutually reinforcing each others' departures from convention. It's my strong surmise that the Larchmont groups and solo performers have unconsciously helped each other fight the pull toward homogeneity, and this accounts in part for the quality of their output and their collective willingness to ignore trends.
Still, that raises more questions than it answers. My hometown of Springfield, New Jersey is roughly analogous to Larchmont, New York -- it's about the same size, the same distance from Greenwich Village, even the same general ethnic composition. You could say the same thing about forty or fifty Jersey suburbs in Union, and Bergen counties. Livingston, for instance, is a relatively affluent suburb in Essex County; I remember going to Livingston High School to see their musicals, and sitting in the audience absolutely stupefied at how much talent I saw onstage. Yet there's no Livingston contingent of musicians in New York City. How did the Larchmont gang manage to make good on the promise Richard Thompson made in "Meet On The Ledge"; the one I had written off as unfulfillable? How are the outlines of their collective achievement still visible against the patch-quilt backdrop of Williamsburg music?
I had my theories. Nobody's institutional education is idyllic, but could Larchmont/Mamaroneck High have been particularly supportive of aspiring musicians and artists? Might there have been inspired teachers there, or other role models? Superficially, Larchmont seems like a standard upper-middle class commuter suburb -- could there be odd undercurrents beneath the placid exterior? A long tradition, for instance, of romanticizing and celebrating dissent? Did the town jealously guard a sense of neighborhood pride, distinctive area traditions, or common rituals? What of the fact that almost all the Larchmont musicians in Brooklyn are Jewish? Has a sense of ethnic identity -- or, more specifically, a distinctively Jewish-American style of literary play, ironic humor, and intertextual referents -- - consolidated the Larchmont contingent and helped it keep its shape and contour?
Ask any Larchmont expatriate in Brooklyn about his upbringing, and you get a sense of a school system awash in musical expression and experimentation. Here's Vitamen drummer Dave Rozner (and vocal champion of offbeat, un-hip NYC-area perfomers like Call Florence Pow and the Liquid Tapedeck) on Mamaroneck High: "Everyone had a rock band. I think twenty bands might have played at the annual high school band night. It was hi-tech, with a light show and everything." But while the school system seems to be viewed affectionately, you don't get the sense that young Larchmont musicians were following role models or being inspired by their faculty -- the band instructor, for instance, is often described as "sweet and encouraging", but never brilliant. The schools are commended for making space for creativity, but that's about where the influence seems to stop; most are just as willing to credit the material conditions of the town for the abundance of rock. "The main thing about why there are so many musicians from Larchmont", says Altman, "is that we all had these basements in our parents' houses that allowed us to bang away after school. We did lots of jamming. We all played together in different formations and we would feed each other ideas. Because there was so much freedom in rocking out in the basements, and because of how intelligent everyone was musically, we pushed our boundaries at a young age." Other Larchmont rockers, including Rozner, concur: "There were an abundance of drummers with houses to rehearse in. There was also a trend, in some circles, of instrumental outfits. Mine and Jesse Blockton's merged from two power trios into a five-man discordant rock fusion machine: kind of like King Crimson meets Bitches Brew."
Again, I'm given pause. Springfield certainly had its share of basements, too, and I even remember attending jam sessions with my little Casio synthesizer in tow. But mainly those were Turnpike metal guitar contests, more athletic than musical. Everybody was trying to be Eddie Van Halen, or at least Richie Sambora; I was a King Crimson fan at the time, but attempting to approximate that kind of harmonic sophistication on my instrument would have boggled my mind and set my peers at my throat. I can't imagine my experience was unusual. Unless the kids are budding virtuosos, a bunch of high school boys jamming in a room will either be painfully derivative, or cacophonous, or both. The Larchmont contingent consists of very fine musicians, but no instrumental world-beaters. How did they manage to pitch their musical ambitions so high? Here's the respected Marc Levitt on his hometown's progressive proclivities:
"Mamaroneck High School was very much an art rock haven (emphasis his). I believe this to be the crucial point -- the avant garde elements of this scene were very advanced. We weren't merely jam-oriented, we had meticulously worked-out parts. Other times it included breakneck improvisation. Drenched in the Mahavishnu Orchestra / Zappa / Bitches Brew realm, the music was often instrumental. Only later in college, when I met others my age, did I realize Larchmont was unique. Most outside musicians were very into the grunge scene, or classic rock. Larchmont musicians always seemed to embrace complexity."
Altman also mentions Miles Davis and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. It's evident that a discursive community existed around a certain set of highly adventurous records, and that this same discursive community took the ideas from records into the jam room with them collectively. Perhaps more importantly, the community took their discussions about those records into the jam room, and the music generated there was a natural expression and extension of those conversations.
Perhaps it'd be useful to step back now and assure you -- in the event that you're reading this and you don't know anything about Larchmont musicians -- that none of the current members of the contingent are making music that sounds anything like Mahavishnu Orchestra. As a matter of fact, one of the most characteristic things about this group of expatriate rockers is their commitment to pop-song traditionalism. But there's something about the intricacy of art-rock that lends itself to in-depth discussion and serious discourse, so it was no doubt crucial to the long-term survival of the Larchmont contingent that their initial aspirations were jazz-fusion sophisticated rather than heavy metal or alt-rock rudimentary. Art-rock invites encyclopedic engagement, lengthy conversations about minute details, close headphone listening and cross-genre comparison; it invites listeners to exercise their critical muscles.
An anecdote from Marc Levitt illustrates how jamming, musical experimentation, and the discursive framing provided by the discussion of "complicated" records, were, to young Larchmont artists, all associated points along a commonly traveled daily trajectory. "I was a freshman when I was playing with Ben Rosenthal (now frontman of Benjamin Cartel) in the Rosenthal family attic", remembers Levitt. "I was very lucky to play regularly with Ben for a year or two, even though it never really materialized into a band. We would play for hours, then go and hang out with "younger brother" Marc -- who was terrifyingly older than me by one year. It was those two that convinced me that John McLaughlin was God. It should be noted that at the time, Marc was only known as a serious music aficionado, not a musician. It wasn't too long ago, actually, that I found out Marc was a musician at all."
Marc Rosenthal, best known now as Milton, writer and singer of the formidable 2003 folk-rock release Scenes From The Interior, is frequently remembered best at Mamaroneck High as a critic or curatorial figure. The younger Rosenthal's expertise made him a full and equal participant in the subculture. That's testament to the intelligence of the nascent Larchmont contingent, and a tacit recognition that the connections they were making were made of words as much as notes and rhythms.
"We talked a lot about Hendrix and Miles and Jimmy Page and Santana", remembers Milton, "we were all living in the Sixties. Who was the best guitarist ever? Jimi Hendrix or John McLaughlin? We'd fight about that. Every weekend I'd go into the city and buy stacks of used classic rock and jazz out of the bargain bins. I liked folk and blues too. It was all old stuff and the occasional punk record that my brothers showed me, and then Prince and De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest." Note the startling repetition of names from reflection to reflection -- most Larchmont musicians, when pressed, will refer to Miles Davis, McLaughlin and his Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, and a few other highly intricate, ornate cross-genre rockers. Milton, in self-deprecating fashion, deems the obsession with old artists "living in the Sixties"; to me, it looks more like an attempt to construct a present discursive community out of past artifacts, much as the builder makes a house out of quarried stone. As an important ombudsman and supplier of raw material, Rosenthal wasn't an archivist, but an architect -- and he was treated as such by his peers.
Of course the young Marc Rosenthal spoke from a position of some authority; his elder brothers had made names for themselves in the rock world outside of Larchmont city limits. The story of the Rosenthal family adventures in music spans several continents and countless cities, and is an article in itself. All three Rosenthal brothers played for a spell together in a heavy group called Samson; their album together is a punishing slice of NYC rock mania about as far from the Mahavishnu Orchestra as it's possible to get. Milton attempts to summarize:
"The first Rosenthal band was The Plague, a punk cover band that became the Hardcore Band Zombie Squad circa 1987. That band was formed by (brothers) Tom and Ben Rosenthal with our neighbors. Larchmont rocker Tim Hughes played with them and formed Target 19 after he was kicked out of the Plague for his bad attitude. Those bands played at CBGB Sunday matinees and had a big following amongst Westchester and Connecticut youth. They played for hundreds of enthused kids, and they were thrown off the stage at the Mamaroneck High School talent show for being punk rockers. After college Ben formed The Heartdrops, who played Ramones-y rock all over the place and made records. Meanwhile Tom was in Minneapolis playing in the Twin-Tone band called Magnatone. One time The Heartdrops were playing in Minneapolis with Magnatone and I asked Tom to book me as the opener with Tom and Ben backing me up and Samson was born (around '96 or '97). They backed me up on a solo record and we played and recorded between our other gigs and even played weddings and parties. We made a full length one spring in Minneapolis but only released three numbers, we had some really heavy stuff that we never released but I liked it. We were brothers and we fought all day and night about dumb things so we stopped trying to be an active band."
The conventional indie rock success of the Rosenthal family must have made them a semi-legendary force within their suburban milieu, and living proof that the wages of music are paid out in adoration and respect, camaraderie and cheers. If any aesthetically-inclined kids in Larchmont were entertaining the notion of following a muse unrelated to popular music, the example of the Rosenthals (coupled with the endless "history of rock" narratives they surely must have tossed around during their discussion sessions) must have stood to remind them that being part of the great rock tapestry was a reward worth pursuing. "There's no doubt in my mind that we all thought playing music in bands was the coolest thing to do back then -- and I think we still do", says Ben Rosenthal. He's still playing music in bands, and so, it seems, is everybody else from those jam sessions, right here in Brooklyn, New York.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nevertheless, all that establishes is nearly tautological: Larchmont kids cultivated a sophisticated discursive collective based on old, artful records because they did, and they pressed forward with their rock projects because others had. A group of high school students seriously listening to and engaging with cosmopolitan records, as a community, might be remarkable in itself, but it's only part of the story. How did that gang of Hendrix-loving teens and jazz aficionados metamorphose, seemingly en masse, into highly literate, tight pop song constructors; out of step with current NYC trends, but almost unquestionably parallel with each other? Again evoking the long shadow of John McLaughlin's seminal jazz-fusion act, Vitamen singer and principal songwriter Jesse Blockton attempts an explanation: "We were in odd time-signature Mahavishnu Orchestra-type instrumental prog-rock bands; after high school we got even weirder. I don't know why we all write short pop songs. My only guess is that we're collectively a little older, and we've gotten that other stuff out of our systems. All the new prog-rock/jam bands will be writing songs with chords and melodies in a couple of years; it's inevitable."
Nonetheless, the literary irony and narrative form common to the Larchmont contingent doesn't feel like an inevitable natural evolution from art-rock underpinnings. It's not the chords and melodies that distinguish these songs, but their use of language, and to some degree, their subject matter. Milton, for instance, writes poetically about the trials and pathos of traveling performance, and couples these with elegant story-songs set in a suburban town that's most likely a figure for Larchmont. The Vitamen, with wry, succinct humor, have been chronicling the pathos of the urban/suburban expatriate metrosexual male, and have written at least one song (the hilarious "The Richer My Dad Gets") that even other members of the contingent suggest is an allegory about Larchmont. Benjamin Cartel is harder-eyed, but the middle Rosenthal is fond of urban images and unfortunate narrators; Altman finds himself drumming for garage-rock ironists who take as their implicit subject the fundamental absurdity of rock posturing, and the pathos of the out-of-control rocker. And so on. There's a writerly detachment common to all of these projects; a warm-hearted, graceful cynicism and a craftsmanlike approach to drawing character, scene, and story. Did the music-art simply mature into word-art? Has the Larchmont contingent collectively redirected their prog-rock tendencies into a sophisticated use of language and lyric?
The short answer is yes, but there's more to it than just that. A subculture that coalesces around discursive engagement will (if it doesn't fall apart) eventually turn its attention to metadiscourse: discussion of itself, and its place in the world. I think that's what we're seeing here. The writers in the Larchmont contingent are far too talented to be indulgent, but tight, epigrammatic reports about their situations, well, that's self-effacing enough to be received as quality craft. And prog-rock and indie-rock don't really suit the job; in order to be proper reporters, musicians must adopt some version of folk-rock form. Hence, all the Larchmont expatriates have gravitated toward traditional modes of representation. What began as discussion of their relationships to classic records -- and perhaps more importantly, the relationship of their world to those classic records -- became an active attempt to continue that discussion through music. But romantic illusions aside, you can't actually discuss anything by playing tones on an instrument; you need to use words. Age has changed the tenor of the discussion, but didn't mute the importance of it. After the guitar solos and noise and effrontery have fallen away, you're left with the same desire to continue the conversation, and it finds its expression in straightforward song forms.
For me, the Larchmont contingent's ability to hang together and stay coherent is further proof that while subcultures that aren't founded on verbal exchange fall apart at the slightest jostle, subcultures based around language, discussion, communication, and collective cultural production can weather almost anything. Here you have a bunch of kids who are neophytes, really; but who have nonetheless convinced themselves they were aspirants to the most advanced musical tradition. How did they do that?, not through encouragement from their institutional structures, but because they reinforced each other, cast each other as heroes in their own revised versions of rock history. A bond that strong might be insular, but its powerful -- powerful enough to survive a transplant to Williamsburg and its thousands of counterexamples, conflicting advice, and peer pressure to jettison lyrical sophistication and indulge in mindless stomp-rock.
Yet there's still one critical question left unanswered -- what accounts for the strength of the discursive bond? It's usually a fragile one, and one that most musicians pretend to disregard. In Northern New Jersey, for instance, rock discussion is frequently considered anathema to rock action. You'll be told "not to talk about it but do it", to "let the music speak for itself", not to get in the way of reception by overanalyzing, to be emotionally charged rather than diagnostic, literary ironic and critically detached. Where did the Larchmont contingent get the ideological strength to implicitly reject -- and continue to reject -- this wrongheaded but altogether seductive logic?
I'll let Vitamen bassist Matt Hyams answer this question in archetypically amusing, tellingly circuitous fashion: "There's a common sense of humor among Larchmont people. All the kids I grew up with were (and still are) caught up in an endless loop of "what if..." ironic scenarios. Our English teachers were just OK; I don't know what it is. Maybe the water? Judaism?" I, too, believe the Jewish identity of the major players in Larchmont rock has been indispensable in imparting a permanence to its contingent. Jews, after all, have always constituted a parallel discursive group, detached from the mainstream but united by a cultural code; one they've defiantly clung to despite encouragement to assimilate, and outright coercion. Likewise, a peculiar relationship to language games, irony, satire, and self-reflexive writing has characterized Jewish culture for centuries. Famously, Hebrew has no vowels, so the slightest inflective change can radically alter the meaning of a phrase; hence, punning, slippage between words, and general heightened consciousness of language has been part of the cultural inheritance.
Now, Larchmont is hardly the only Jewish suburb of NYC; in New Jersey alone, there's a belt of sophisticated suburban communities that are clustered around Newark. Yet Jewish-American expatriates from these towns tend either to disguise their ethnicity (fearing it's un-rock) or to overindicate it. The Larchmont contingent seems perpetually conscious and proud of its Jewishness without ever feeling the need to fly the flag, or play the "Mayim". Milton modestly spurns comparisons to Jewish-American lit, but then rattles off a list of authors that betrays his obvious erudition; Rozner mentions in passing that "going to a Samson or Cover Me Badd show is like going to temple on Rosh Hashana, but much better". Blockton, without a trace of disingenuousness, adds "for some reason, I never put it together that this whole Larchmont group is Jewish, but I guess it pretty much is. I think", he continues, "it's more a sensibility than an actual musical influence, but we do know all the same songs from temple… I, personally, feel very Jewish a lot of the time. Whenever we're in a club, watching a band, I suddenly feel we're the Jew band by comparison."
From my perspective, that comparison can only be positive, but I'd understand if he meant (and I'm not sure if he did) that the realization caused him some misgivings. To be the Jew band by comparison means to be visibly marked as an outsider, a commentator, a dealer in clever intellectual gamesmanship rather than raw emotional impact. Again, only through mutual reinforcement and an unswerving commitment and desire to continue the discourse begun in attics and basements in Larchmont have these musicians persisted in performing their marvellously unfashionable music to NYC audiences. The example of the Jewish expatriate-commentator is an instructive and helpful one, a site of pride in difference and brain-over-brawn, a token of persistence in hostile territory.
After all these years, do the Larchmont rockers still conceive of themselves as a contingent? Most do, some don't; what's indisputable is that consciously or not, they've continued to buoy each other and carry on their projects and adventures in discourse with each other. "I think we are a group, and we kind of have a sound, and we all support each other's bands.", says Ben Rosenthal. "We also still all hang out together and still keep tabs on each other. I think being from Larchmont is small and weird -- there aren't many of us, so we do stick together. No, you are not just making this up; It's Larchmont against the world!"
Smart money never goes against the world, but Larchmont ought to continue to hold its own.