Hank & Cupcakes

I messed up. I thought the band we were hoping to see, The VeeVees, fronted by the incredible and astounding Sophia Urista, were opening for Hank and Cupcakes but it turns out it was another band. We were disappointed, and I felt like an idiot, but we had already bought our tickets so we decided to go anyway. As AR says, if it's great, then excellent, you just saw an unexpectedly awesome show. If it sucks, you get to make fun of it. So either way it would work out.

We stepped inside Le Poisson Rouge, which was wonderfully chilly with air conditioning and a welcome reprieve from the oppressive August humidity currently plaguing the city. In the basement of the venue, we found ourselves a spot and assumed our "New York music snob stance," arms folded in front of us, daring performers to just try impressing us.

I had never heard of Hank and Cupcakes, but apparently this was the New York record release show of their new album, Cheap Thrill, which debuted July 1. After the (rather forgettable) opening band departed the stage, setup for H&C began, which included a standing drum kit, a bass guitar, and network of interconnected stretched fabric painted over with hearts and eyes suns and moons in bold colors. I wondered what we had gotten ourselves into.

Shortly, the band came out. It was just two people: a slim, mohawked, shirtless man with a ruff of black chest hair who wore skinny jeans and black Chuck Taylors and a teeny little woman who had shaved sides of her head, her dark hair twisted up into a bun. She was shoeless, wearing only leggings and a minuscule crop top that read "Bitch Relax." Oh, and she was pregnant (about seven months in, she'd say later). Her naked-and no-fucks-given belly hung like some kind mystical orb above her hips as she took her place behind the drums.

And then they started playing. It was truly something electric to watch them, to watch Hank annihilate the strings of his bass and Cupcakes thrash her drum kit while her Beth Ditto-like voice gorgeously shrieks out of her mouth. I have never seen a pregnant woman rock so hard, and the experience of seeing her has reversed (well, let's be real, diminished is more like it) my fear of having children. With each song, the hard rocking escalates and I am moved to shake with abandon, untwirling my hair from its bun and banging my head to the beat, stamping my feet and swiveling my hips in time with the beat of her drum, the thrum of his bass. I love a good concert, but it takes a lot for me to be physically moved by it. But at a certain point I can't control it and my body is just moving independently of me. "TAKE ME TO CHURCH!" I shout through a smile as my arms fly upward. I am a congregant at the temple of rock and roll, possessed by the spirit of an unrelenting drumbeat. I am saved.

Cupcakes radiates energy and though Hank is playing that bass for his life I cannot stop looking at her. YOU ARE EVERYTHING! I think to myself. Has there ever been anything more punk rock than this petite Cupcakes pounding her drum kit while a life two months from beginning grows inside of her? What a way to start off in the world. I am almost jealous of this unborn baby: its home is a rock and roll machine, its blood pulsing to the time of a snare.

At one point Cupcakes climbs on top of the drum kit and sings an acoustic song about the importance of religious freedom and the crowd goes quiet, singing along and using only hands patting against chests as their instruments. I don't like to sing, but my hand beats against my own sternum in solidarity. The crowd is small but enthusiastic, their eyes not turned toward phones but to Hank & Cupcakes, the way concerts were when I was a teenager. The way I wished they still were.

Cupcakes speaks in an accent I can't quite identify, but I've learned now that it's not an Australian one as I had thought, but Israeli. The band formed in Tel Aviv in 2008 and are now currently based in Atlanta. They named themselves after Charles Bukowski's alter ego, Hank Chinaski, and the nickname of a lady friend, Pamela "Cupcakes" Wood. By day they are Sagit Shir (Cupcakes) and Ariel Scherbacovsky (Hank), and they met while serving in the Israeli Army. Cheap Thrill is their third album.

After the show, AR and I make a point of going to their merch table and making a purchase. For me, it's a t-shirt, and for him, it's their new album. "If you put on a show like that, I'm going to buy an album as a thank you," he says as we leave. I can't help but agree.

I Died and Went to Rock 'n' Roll Heaven

Let me be clear about one thing: I hate jam bands.  

Well, at least I thought I did.

I thought jam bands played pseudo-Grateful Dead covers and plucked a lot of bass while audience members with varying degrees of dreadlocks spun in circles and stared toward the sky (sorry JAL, I still love you). It’s not so much a roller coaster as, unsurprisingly, an acid trip. One drop and you’re off on the music’s whim. Not to get dark, but it makes me feel trapped: WHEN WILL THIS SONG END ALREADY?!?

My best friend, JAL, mentioned above, has taken me to a few of these kinds of shows before. (Though, to be fair, she is not so much a dirty hippie as a clean one. That is, she is happiest barefoot but still shaves her armpits.) But my tuneage is more than a little different.

Like many angst-ridden youths, I began raising myself on punk in middle school. Not thrashy, yell-y kinds of things, but loud, fast guitars purred over by deep-voiced men. Old school goodness like The New York Dolls, the Ramones, and The Velvet Underground; new school stuff like The Pink Spiders. Then there was also my never-ending love for The Rolling Stones, instilled in me by my father. To this music, there was a reckless abandon that I so desperately wanted to duplicate in myself. It was the sound of streaking, of making out in the backseat of cars, driving really fast, and smoking cigarettes, all of which were deliciously taboo to me as an adolescent. In punk and in good old blues-infused rock and roll, I was able to liberate myself from myself and pretend that I was just a little bit dangerous. You know, like Sandy at the end of Grease.

I went out of my way to learn a lot about my music, but JAL’s I have not really touched too much—it was too soft, too smooth. It was not until two weekends ago, actually, that I realized all jam bands do not fit the aforementioned description and perhaps I just dislike endless funk. I learned that it is, in fact, possible to jam and simultaneously rock your face off.

Photo by Carlos Henriquez, www.chenriphoto.com

Enter Iced Ink, the brainchild of St. Paul, MN native Mike Krenner. Krenner has spiky dark hair with matching beardy business and thick, goggle-like (but in a cool way) black-framed glasses. Krenner writes in the band’s biography that the idea for Iced Ink arose when:

“Suffering from severe M.A.D.D. (not the moms/drunk driving one but the Musical Attention Defecit Disorder one), he wanted to be in too many different styles of bands at once – metal, funk, surf, pop, rock, jazz, rockabilly…. It was decided that in the interest of time and not lugging guitars and amps all over the Twin Cities that it would be most efficient to just cram all of his desired genres into one sole cohesive glob of sound.”

Iced Ink has gone through a few lineups since it began in 1998, along with a move from the chilly depths of Minnesota to the mostly less chilly Brooklyn in 2009. Krenner (guitar) found his two current bandmates, Gregg Mitchell (bass guitar) and Ethan Meyer (drums), in Spring 2011. Fast forward to February 2012, when CH invited me to see them them play in a small, two-room bar on the Lower East Side.

The fellas picked up their instruments and I realized there would be no singing. Oh no, I thought. Is this really going to be another of JAL’s bands? But then…the thrilling squeal of electric guitar, the thumping crash of drums, the heat of a perfectly necessary bass. My feet started moving independently of themselves, followed by my hips, my arms, and my neck. B, Mike’s delightful pixie wife (who also makes the band’s gig buttons…I now have a full set proudly tacked onto my bulletin boards) grabbed my hand. “Come on!” she said. “Let’s go dance!” To the front of the room we went, and everything but sound fell away.

My body followed the band’s fantastic lack of pattern, a surprise in every new and different chord.  I didn’t know when it would end, but I didn’t care; I didn’t want it to. My feet stomped, my hair flicked back and forth; it was like I had been possessed and dear god if this is what the devil felt like then please let me go to hell.

Iced Ink was all of the things Mike had wanted it to be. It was rockabilly, it was surf, it was punk, it was rock and roll. I heard all of these familiar twangs and beats from my adolescence—Brian Setzer Orchestra, Dick Dale, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC—but all smushed together in an incredible music sandwich—it was like when you don’t think a Fluffernutter will be the most amazing thing ever but then you eat it and you can’t imagine your life without it.

“Yes, I’m alive!” I heard my brain say. “Please never stop lusting for life!” All of the recklessness I wanted as a teenager I heard in this music and for once I was able to cut myself loose. In Iced Ink, there was electricity and life and energy and bright red blood bleeding from rock and roll hearts onto dirty punk shoes and it was one of the most beautiful things I had heard in a long time.

I left, converted. 

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