i’m a feminist but… I’d happily be a groupie for Jesse Malin
That’s the lightning bolt realisation I had half way through his set at Newport’s Le Pub.
It came hard, and fast, like this:
I want to runaway with the band, with this circus.
I could call in sick, follow the UK tour to its conclusion, it’s just 7 days!
What a perfect tester period, a week to see if I could quit everything and hot tail it back to NYC with him.
All going well, I could get work at one of his venues, I loved Bowery Electric when I visited, that one time.
I could do a Lucinda Williams, use the bar as my writing desk between pouring drinks, finish a cult classic.
Be part of a scene that feels like kin.
Stay up late, sleep through the days and be the friend that’s always ‘in the know‘ and sending that link to a bone cut track. Hanging with the cool.
What kind of alchemy does this mop top fuck with, that he can render me this way?
It’s not the first time either, I have seen Jesse Malin live about ten times in the last couple of decades. Every. Single. Time. He stands there, enunciating so hard he’s spitting, barely able to keep his hands on the mic for the energy he is controlling, and somehow makes me ache for a new life.
RIP Pontypridd and work and security and predictability.
Bye bye reason and reliability.
I don’t want to be a safe bet, or moderate, or any semblance of whatever it is I am; no longer the woman who dresses like a primary school teacher but will never have kids.
Why would I? Jesse Malin has me convinced that I could be jaw aching brilliance if I just hung around rabble rousing with him. We could be up late night gabbing, about the manic and the panic and the politics and the sucker punches. Fizzing with life. And, I bet he loves Ginsberg and gets the beats poets too.
The opening line, of the first track, of Jesse Malin’s debut album told me straight, “you say you want a revolution, Something you can touch, Like an age old contradiction, With alcohol and lust” and I knew he was my kind of buzz.
If the album name (The Fine Art of Self Destruction) didn’t give it away, then the lyric hit it home: There’s a specific kind of struggle bus out there reserved for the restless but relentless romantics, the people who want so badly to drift off within their bubbles but can’t ignore the world tearing at the seams. He’s gonna be on that bus, helping you with your placard, chanting something acerbic and witty. Wishing and a hoping that it’s gonna be better than this, but desperately fearful that it won’t.
This kind of earnest can go either way, you can die young, and many do, so it’s dizzyingly exciting to see a bleeding heart become an NYC icon. Jesse Malin owns four clubs in New York: Bowery Electric, Berlin, Lola, and Niagara, and between them, nearly 100 gigs a week were unfolding pre-pandemic, as he told Rolling Stone.
Yes, the same man, with a 40+ year history of performing, who, just a few weeks ago, was playing the tiniest venues in the UK (which you could still buy tickets to on the door) has the kind of clout to record a single with Bruce Springsteen, and another with Green Day’s Billy Joe Armstrong (he also released albums on Amstrong’s now defunct label Adeline Records). He’s such a well respected musician, that during lockdown, Debbie Harry appeared on his ‘Fine Art of Self Distancing‘ YouTube series. Of course I’m hooked.
Malin makes me want to be better and do more. But in a good way. Singing along as he plays, it somehow all feels possible. He drips the kind of intent that I try to subdue, lest it makes others uncomfortable. He’s talk and action. He got into the club scene because he found it “offensive“ as a kid when charges were so high on doors that he couldn’t afford to watch bands. How many people with high ideals actually follow through with them later on in life, when it’s more than hypothetical, when it means they will physically take less money? When they are in NYC?
A true troubadour does that, because material wealth isn’t going to create community. He pedals songs and stories as priority number one, and those open dialogues and break down barriers across generations and classes. In his 50s now, Malin is still releasing music steadily, still the man who isn’t too good to perform anywhere if it means the chance of making connections.
“We’ll be M.I.A. In the USA
My black haired girl
Gimme gimme a kiss
With your apocalypse
At the end of the world
Baby baby be my
Miss American pie
Black haired girl”
Nearly 20 years ago, I saw him perform at Bar Academy in Birmingham, there was, at maximum, 100 people there. He rallied such a response from us, talking about the invasion of Iraq and the rampant patriotism making it hard to voice dissent without being branded a traitor; growing up with his mum working multiple jobs and being a divorcée; and how punk saved his life, that when he climbed over the barrier into the crowd and lay down on the beer soaked floor, we all did too.
He was touring his debut and was pretty much a nobody from New York, and we all lay down!
Why? Because when he said, “I’m not too good to sing anywhere and I never will be, I’ll sing in toilets and from the floor“ all while strumming the chords from Neil Young’s Helpless, we believed him. It was because, as a New York native, he knew the void left from the towers intimately, the war was only adding to the feeling of things coming untethered, and it was breaking him apart, but we all felt it too.
We connected over how futile it had felt marching against the invasion, being part of a record breaking number of protesters and it still unfolding before our eyes. This stranger, wearing braces on his trousers, talking with a Queens accent we only knew from films; was not so strange. He was the raw parts of us that we were mourning too.
Being aware of how disenfranchised you are, in the face of things so beyond your capacity to change, is a unique kind of terror. Lying down with Jesse Malin, as he gave us space for the weight of that grief, while using another person’s words made it feel somehow lighter, “Helpless, helpless, helpless, helpless. Babe, can you hear me now? The chains are locked and tied across the door. Baby, sing with me somehow.”
Because we could sing. And we did sing. And we will sing.
