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Out of Print and Unavailable
8PM in New York City (2011)
This was a follow-up to the movie Band Forever that I had made earlier in 2011, similarly released as a limited edition DVD for some very early fans of my music – it’s a movie of me continuing to perform as a singer/songwriter in NYC doing the “prime-time” 8-10pm slot, as Jesse Statman, before I changed my artist name to Cannonball Statman the following year.
So many of the songs I was playing back then were never even released on an album – I was having a lot of fun with the idea of surprising my audiences with new songs at every show, because I was just writing so many songs all the time, and I didn’t want to bore people by playing the same songs at every show.
It’s interesting looking back at these movies, because there’s a lot that I would’ve done as Jesse Statman if I hadn’t become Cannonball Statman – but I’m not sure if I would’ve done it on the NYC scene.
The big thing for singer/songwriters in NYC was still the old West Village/East Village divide that had been going on since the 1980s – the West Village being all about this gentrified, commercial “folk” music that stripped all the substance and life out of what had gone on there in the 1960s with artists like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs – as documented by Joie DBG in his classic antifolk song “Bleecker Street”:
“they’re makin’ a killin’ / livin’ off Bob Dylan / let’s burn Bleecker Street to the ground”
And the East Village, of course, was about antifolk!
Which took off where the West Village folk scene of the 1960s left off, and carried the life of that scene into new generations that expanded on those roots into something that embraced punk ethics, lo-fi music, and performance art, giving it a sense of humor and turning it into something more populist than “pop” – but antifolk was always more about being a scene around that specific neighborhood, and a kind of extended family for all kinds of musicians and other kinds of artists like poets, playwrights, comedians, and illustrators, than it was about any specific style or genre.
When I performed as Jesse Statman, my music fit in with the West Village “folk” crowd just enough to get me on stage, but not enough to build a serious audience, because that crowd was looking for something more commercial than what I was interested in doing.
And as a sober artist, that scene was also a bit weird for me – a lot of the clubs I was performing at as Jesse Statman in 2011 and 2012 had people with serious substance abuse problems involved in running things, to the point where when I showed up for sound check, half the time they didn’t even remember they’d booked me – they often ended up shutting down after getting a reputation for this kind of mismanagement.
When I became involved with the antifolk scene in 2012 and started performing as Cannonball Statman, one thing that really stuck out to me was how antifolk is built around music and art – a lot of “music” scenes at the time were really just about drugs and alcohol, and there is a big difference.
Addiction is a problem in every scene – and, really, in every occupation – musicians are actually a lot more sober than, say, lawyers and politicians these days – but there’s something really beautiful about a scene like antifolk because of how the focus is on the art, not the addiction.
So I always wondered – if I’d been in a different time and place, where the “folk” scene wasn’t so corporate and druggy that we had to have a whole other scene called “antifolk” just to have a place for the kind of thing we do – maybe I’d have kept on performing these more “folky” songs as Jesse Statman after 2011-’12.
It’s something I might revisit in the future – but I’m glad I did what I did at the time, because being the New York antifolk singer Cannonball Statman was a great thing to be in my 20s, and antifolk was a great thing to be part of.
Also worth noting that some of the scenes in this movie aren’t of me performing folk music or antifolk music, but experimental music! In November 2011, I did a one-time performance of new experimental pieces inspired by The Scarf, using audio samples from that movie combined with live electric guitar, looping, and vocals – so we used some of the footage from that concert in 8PM in New York City.
That experimental gig was also noteworthy for being my first time performing at Goodbye Blue Monday in Brooklyn – as I’ve talked about elsewhere, that venue would soon become a profoundly important place for me, as it was for so many others in the NYC scene – in fact, Goodbye Blue Monday was where I found out about antifolk!
from Out of Print and Unavailable Filmography (as Jesse Statman)
8PM in New York City (2011)
Band Forever: Live @ Perch Cafe (2011)
Cannonball’s Party (2010)
A Place That Doesn’t Exist (2009)
Exhibits 1-7 (2009)
(or, go to the beginning for the full list of out-of-print and unavailable projects)