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Cannonball at Sidewalk
Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A in NYC’s East Village was the home of the Antifolk movement from 1993 until its closure in 2019.
While the Antifolk movement began in the 1980s in response to the gentrification and commercialization of the NYC folk scene, it really took off when it found a home in the back room at Sidewalk Cafe, and there was always something special about our connection with Sidewalk that gave an added layer of magic to that whole community of artists who were each already magical in their own right.
I was only born in 1993, and had never heard of the Antifolk movement until 2012, despite the fact that I grew up in NYC and was involved with the music scene since childhood – it was a pretty obscure movement within the US, and when I became part of it in 2012 along with a number of other artists of my generation (including The Grasping Straws, Becca Florence Moon, Bob Black, and a bunch of other people who got involved right around that time), the initial response from a lot of people in that scene was “how did you even find out about this?!”
Though the Antifolk scene is something music fans tend to be aware of in the UK and mainland Europe, largely thanks to Rough Trade Records in the UK releasing a lot of music from that scene in the early 2000s, it just wasn’t something people knew about in the city where it was actually born.
And yet, Sidewalk – and the Antifolk scene more broadly – was really where I learned to be a performer, and to be part of a living artistic community.
It’s true that before I even knew about Antifolk, I’d been writing, playing, singing, recording, and releasing my own music and collaborating with other artists for over a decade, since I started when I was 8 years old – but I had never been able to connect what I was doing with the world of the living, until I started performing at Sidewalk in 2012 – even moreso than Goodbye Blue Monday, Sidewalk is where I became who I am in the world of the living, and it likely played a significant role in the fact that I’m still among the living.
I became part of that scene during an incredibly difficult time in my life, in my late teens, when I really didn’t know if I still wanted to exist, and I really wasn’t sure what I was doing here – sure, I can play guitar and sing, I can write songs, but I can surely do all that when I’m dead! And you can still hear all these recordings of me on Earth when I’m dead. So this was a time when I often asked myself, why was I still around at all?
And I attempted to take my own life a number of times, throughout my childhood and teenage years – the notion that I wouldn’t live to adulthood was something I was intimately familiar with, and I didn’t expect to live much longer by the time I graduated high school – I grew up in a time and place that told me over and over and over again that I had no right to live, simply because of who I am – and that was the message I internalized from the world around me, especially as a kid and teenager.
Being part of a living artistic community at Sidewalk (and ultimately all over the city and around the world, taking off from my roots in the Sidewalk scene) was what gave me a reason to stay alive in a time when I was seriously considering not being alive. And when fans tell me that my music saved their lives, I look to how being part of the Sidewalk scene saved my life and I’m honored to be passing that along through my own work.
As I’ve also said about Brooklyn’s Goodbye Blue Monday (and some of this is copied word for word from what I said in the page for that venue, as it’s equally true for both places) – Sidewalk was a place where anyone could go any night of the week and see affordable live music (the gigs were always free, with a suggested donation for those who could afford to put something in the mandolin tip jar, as seen in this incredibly goofy video we made at Sidewalk to promote our 2013 tour) and find themselves as part of a real live artistic community, befriending and collaborating with any number of brilliant and talented artists – and it was an indescribably incredible place.
In addition to the nightly gigs and bi-annual Antifolk Festivals that went on there, Sidewalk was known for the Monday Night AntiHoot open mics, which is the longest running open mic series in NYC, and has since moved across the street to the Knitting Factory at Baker Falls, with the legendary NYC antifolk artist Joe Bendik hosting them now – the original host was Lach, who was really the ringleader of the scene from its inception in the 1980s until he moved to Scotland in the early 2010s.
My generation of antifolk artists came along after the departure of Lach, so we were there in a time of flux, when Ben Krieger was running the open mics, gigs, and festivals for some years, followed by Somer Bingham – a lot of artists of our generation also worked as gig organizers, sound engineers, and in other areas of the scene in addition to making music – I organized monthly events at Sidewalk, covered the scene as music editor for Boog City Press, and did some website work for the venue and for some artists on the scene, back when I was also working as a website designer!
The Antifolk scene was always centered around the Monday night AntiHoot open mics (and the Tuesday Teacup open mics at Goodbye Blue Monday), because that was where artists got their first gigs, made their first friends on the scene, and tried out new material – while often derided as unprofessional or “lower class” by some of our peers across the pond, open mics have always been an important part of the NYC performance scene, and Antifolk was no exception in that way – you were just as likely to find full-time professional musicians performing at the AntiHoot open mics as you were to find an amateur, and you were far more likely to meet professionals at open mics than on a university campus or on social media.
All the same can be said for street performers and subway buskers in NYC, as a lot of professional gigging musicians can be seen performing in subway stations around the city when they’re not on tour or on a “proper” stage – in fact, they make a lot more money from performing on the street than they do at a “proper” NYC gig or from touring around North America.
There was a massive amount of spontaneity on the Antifolk scene – I can’t count the number of times I went to a friend’s gig and was unexpectedly invited on stage in the middle of their set, or the number of people I met and the collaborations that ensued, or the sheer number of interesting, fun, and bizarre things that happened in these places and that I was part of in some way – we were all part of it, really, and it was such a crucial aspect of our lives and identities in those years, as it still is, in a different way.
People often ask me how I know so many people in the music world, or how I get paid to perform on stage without having millions of followers on social media or streaming services or spending thousands of dollars on a university degree or publicity campaign – and almost all of that comes down to the fact that I spent so many hours on stage (over 1,000 hours!) at clubs like Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk in my late teens and early 20s, and became an integral part of the scene by also going to other people’s gigs, also making friends and supporting the scene, also having real life experiences and making memories with people in the real world.
The older I get, the more I realize the importance of this and how valuable it is – for all artists, really.
Ultimately, those real life experiences that we share with our fans are where the value of our work actually comes from, and why every human artist is completely irreplaceable, and why fundamentally, each of us stands on our own in that sense that no one could ever do what another does, and we’re never truly in competition for each other’s places in this world – to facilitate those real life experiences, it’s essential that there are real live artistic communities in this world, and brick-and-mortar cultural spaces like Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk that open their doors to these communities without expecting much of a profit (in fact, most of these places lose money every year, but they stick around because they know they’re providing an essential service to the community and to human culture).
The closure of Goodbye Blue Monday and Sidewalk, and countless other clubs like these all over the world that I’ve had the honor of performing in, has been truly sad for so many of us – Rocks in Kaohsiung, Le Pop In in Paris, The Central in Toronto, Cal Biure in Biure, La Nueva Babel in Oaxaca, Number 39 Bar in Darwen, and any number of others I forgot to mention here – needless to say, we’ll keep going and we’ll keep finding ways to make art in this world regardless.
In the meantime, we also have some photos and videos to remember what some of us were doing at Sidewalk in the early 2010s!
Cannonball performing 3 songs with “Dexter” Dan on harmonica at Sidewalk, January 2013
Cannonball’s NYC Antifolk Fest Debut, February 2013 (Full Set, Full 5-Piece Band)
Illustrations and Collages by MG Hartley chronicling some of Cannonball’s early Sidewalk happenings
Cannonball performing at Sidewalk as a 7-piece band on Hand Night 2013
Cannonball with K-WAK the Nomad performing “Tiger” at the Monday Night AntiHoot, 2013
Cannonball quintet performing at Phoebe Novak’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Birthday Bash at Sidewalk, 2013
Photos of Cannonball collaborating with: Jane LeCroy, K-WAK the Nomad, Leora Mandel, Kyle Stersic, Killy Dwyer, Brandon Perdomo, Ria Boss, and Caroline Cotto at Sidewalk
Songs of Experience (a compilation album of songs recorded at William Blake’s 257th birthday celebration at Sidewalk, featuring Cannonball and several other antifolk artists of that time)
Cannonball quintet at the Summer 2013 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set)
The Dick Jokes play “The Wandering Star” at the Summer 2013 NYC Antifolk Fest
Cannonball solo at the Summer 2014 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set)
The Dick Jokes at the Summer 2014 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set, Introduction by Becca Florence Moon)
Cannonball solo at the Winter 2015 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set, Introduction by Somer Bingham)
The Dick Jokes at the Summer 2015 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set)
Cannonball solo at the Summer 2015 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set)
Cannonball with Brandon Perdomo on flute at the Winter 2016 NYC Antifolk Fest (Full Set)
“Cannonball Becomes the One Armed Man” at Sidewalk, 2013
Cannonball trio at Sidewalk, Halloween 2013 (Full Concert)
The Dick Jokes play “STATMAN” and “There Is” on Halloween 2013, introduced by Satan
Photos of Cannonball drumming in The Dick Jokes at Sidewalk: 1, 2, 3, 4
Cannonball performing with Jeffrey Lewis for Lou Reed tribute events at Sidewalk and Jalopy, 2013
Photos of Cannonball performing at Sidewalk: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Cannonball plays “Pyro vs. Poison Cat” at Sidewalk, 2014
Cannonball with Kyle Stersic on alto sax at Sidewalk, 2015
Cannonball plays “Hunger Strike” at the AntiHoot, 2015
Cannonball plays bits of “West Coast” and “Serendipity” at Sidewalk, 2015
Dogs vs. Cats 2013 Tour Promo Video, filmed in the back room at Sidewalk
Love Letters, a 2014 short film using some archival footage of Cannonball’s early Sidewalk gigs
Cannonball quartet performing “Mud Therapy” at Sidewalk, from the same gig that some of the Love Letters footage was drawn from
Sidewalk Video Bits and Bobs (a random fan clip from an early Sidewalk gig and a late night jam on a Led Zeppelin cover with Cannonball and several other artists from that era)
Note that a secret admirer left for Cannonball at Sidewalk in 2013
A couple gig lineups from the Sidewalk bulletin board
Photos of Cannonball offstage in and around Sidewalk: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9