"I Wanna Be Your Salty Dog"

Walking through Washington Square Park Saturday afternoon I find a band playing authentic New Orleans Dixieland blues pomp and stomp under the shade just west of the fountain. They must've just started, and shortly after I plant myself in front of them a larger crowd begins to gather around, attracted by the full spectacle of their sound. It smells like sweat and heat and a little bit of booze around me in the breeze that slinks between the freckle-faced girls in dresses and the curious tourists overdressed for the sneak attack of NYC heat. This is when I love this city the most: I was looking for a place to sit and read Richard Hell's "Go Now", instead I find this raucous band.

Rarely do musicians in the park or on the street or in the subway capture my attention as overwhelmingly as this band does (the last time I was so riveted to an act was the guy on the West 4th Street subway platform who beatboxed through a flute), but this is like walking straight into Mardi Gras, and I'm instantly enamored.

The band's name is The Loose Marbles, as I learn from the guy in charge of announcing such things as their name and that they have cds for sale which were recorded in New Orleans two weeks ago. He does this in between punctuating the effect of the band's authenticity by jitterbugging with a pale-skinned redhead in a blue flapper dress, which is apparently a regular part of their act, and one that the crowd just eats right up. I willingly hand over my ten dollars for one of their cds--a burned disk slipped into a plain white sleeve with the band's e-mail address rubber-stamped on the back of it and bearing no indication of album name or song titles. They also do not have a website or a MySpace page. Gentlemen, your marketing strategies should not be of the same era as your music.

They are mostly young guys. The percussionist looks like he's the youngest, in his mid-twenties and wearing a Sonic Youth "Washing Machine" t-shirt. The clarinet player looks the oldest, but it's not so much that he looks old as it is that his slicked-back salt and pepper hair and black suspenders over a madras shirt open to the chest give him an air of sophistication that makes him look like he just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Two acoustic guitarists, a bassist, a trumpet player and a Morrissey-looking accordion player round out the band. The trumpet player keeps the beat with a high hat on a tiny pedal he operates with his left foot. The bassist uses a broomstick bass with the string leading to a wooden box instead of a bucket (though on their cd he plays an upright). The percussionist plays a washboard with a cowbell, tiny cymbal and bent tin lid attached to it (he plays a regular kit on their cd, which I am somewhat disappointed to hear). No one is botching the beauty of the stylized music they're playing by making a point to show off their technical prowess. They leave it to us to figure out how goddamned good they are, and we do. Or at least I do. To hell with everyone else, I'm the one with the blog.

At this point they've earned a larger and more consistent share of the crowd than any of the park's current acts, with onlookers ignoring a low-budget hip-hop video being shot at the fountain's 5:00 edge and a guy at the base of the Garibaldi statue blowing blues harmonica over an instrumental backing track. I could listen to The Loose Marbles play their carnivalesque melodies and gleeful multi-instrumentalism all day. A lot of this traditional, early-to-mid twentieth century music--Dixieland, bluegrass, jazz or even 30s and 40s pop (which is amazing and highly recommendable, all the Irving Berlin stuff and the like)--evokes in me this feeling that everything was simpler and a lot more glamorous back then, and that therefore had I been alive back then I would've been simpler and a lot more glamorous, while the reality is that I'd probably have been that era's equivalent of the procrastinating, noncommittal misanthrope, with little interest in marriage and even less interest in breeding, that I am in this era.

The other thing I love about this kind of music and that I realize as I listen to a heavily-tattooed lady lend her bluesy and blaring vocal styling to a lovelorn duet with the guitarist/vocalist, is the moonshine-and-humidity-soaked lyrics, usually confessing either heartbreak or longing for something which of course almost every song ever written does in some way and so in the end it comes down to your personal preference of how you want those messages presented to you and there's just something so wonderful and innocent about how it's done here. There's a sense of confidence in the simplicity of lyrics like "I don't wanna be your man at all/I just wanna be your salty dog" and this feeling like even if you don't get that woman in the end, you'll still have your friends and your music and your whiskey.

The Loose Marbles take a five-minute break. Most of the crowd disperses, heading off to continue whatever their original plans for the day were before they were drawn in to watch a free concert by a band that should be playing well-paid gigs at established venues instead of briefly displacing drug dealers to play for tips and cd sales. Few people opt to take in the man fifteen yards to the left who is doing handstands and balancing a bike on his head. A park official orders a man to remove his dog from the fountain under threat of fine, but takes no issue with the diaper-clad babies which are certainly as much if not more of a health hazard. The hip-hop video shoot has wrapped and the blues harp blower is gone. It's still too hot for early June. I love New York.