Knitting Factory Line-up Reunites Veterans of Indy Pop Scene
A musical celebration of the old and the new, the great and the eclectic will take place at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday, August 23. The four superb bands will be Tara Key and her rousing Antietam, The Martinets, Ruby on the Vine, featuring Myrna Marcarian from the Human Switchboard, and Glenn Mercer and Vinnie DeNunzio. Mercer and DeNunzio represent one-half of The Feelies, a group that reinvigorated, if not re-invented, the spirit of American independent popular music. Indeed, the entire line-up features musicians, who in the aggregate have two dozen or so superior albums to their names, and helped to forge idiosyncratic, powerful and moving testaments to the spirit of indy pop.
Key remembered meeting Marcarian at Trax on the Upper West Side in 1981 when Key’s Babylon Dance Band was on a double bill with Human Switchboard. Marcarian, who at that point was longer in the music scene than Key, counseled, “If I was your mother, I'd tell you to quit this business!"
Twenty-four years later, Key said she’s glad neither of them took Marcarian’s advice. “The feeling of August 23 is less like a reunion,” she said, “and more like running into each other at a way station, catching up and wishing each other well on continued travels.”
The concert is scheduled in conjunction with HOWL! Festival. Produced by the Federation of East Village Artists, the annual arts festival is a week-long celebration of the neighborhood as the cradle of counterculture.
The Knitting Factory is located at 74 Leonard Street, phone: 212-219-3132. Tickets to the concert are $12 and doors open at 7 p.m.
