Ten years ago today, we played a fundraiser for John Kerry’s presidential campaign at the unsurprisingly defunct Spirit New York nightspot. It was quite the eclectic bill–music from the artist formerly known as John Wesley Harding and French Kicks; comedy from Lewis Black, Demetri Martin, Rachel Dratch and Paul Scheer; not to mention–are you getting a feel for how long this event was?–Jonathan Lethem, before-the-fall Eliot Spitzer, then-Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields, and the candidate’s stepson Chris Heinz. We dug deep for some hard-hitting political material and came up with Bobby Marchan’s “Rockin Behind the Iron Curtain.” I’ve managed to block pretty much this whole night from my memory, and just in case Georgia or James remember it better, I’m not asking.
Finally for today, a PS to our post of August 10, courtesy of Bob Bannister: Ah – a marvelous YLT history post because, as current bass-player in TSIN, I know Chris Nelson well enough to report that the tail-bone tumble actually cracked a vertebra which, tough guy that he is, was not revealed until an X-ray for an unrelated problem a decade later. Also I was at the 1990 Maxwell’s show and, tough guy that he is not, the bottle smashing was amazing in a “true punk-rock moment” way. The fact that a “true punk-rock moment” could still be had in 1990 is testament to Chris’s genius.
