Deep in the heart of Philadelphia, a man; the Reverend Leroy Montana,

blows up in a messy but beautiful way. He’s an acid refugee from some

Revival-era battle we’ve never heard of; someplace and some time in

the back pages. He rants for minutes and minutes about his method

for adding good karma to the universe while brushing one’s teeth (!)

before slipping into a dark and strangely effective paranoiac ballad

about the FBI and free speech and presidential assassination. Shortly

after the Reverend drifts away, a work-shirted tangle-haired kid plays

sans microphone. It’s a gesture he declares to be a defense of the folk

tradition. He volley’s a challenge regarding the host’s belief in the

Tradition. The host doesn’t miss a beat in reply:

"I love folk music so much that I put you on late; so we can hear you,"

he says.

The comeback is not a lie. The man’s name is Adam Brodsky. His manager

and business partner will tell you this: "Adam … was recently

named Best Folk Performer by the Philadelphia City Paper and he

spends his mornings in schools teaching children about cowboy

songs, work songs and train songs - all with a healthy dose of Woody

Guthrie and the Harry Smith Anthology. This is not a guy who dislikes

folk music."

Adam closes the night with a semi-improvised rave up about relationship

infidelity. The lyrics are unprintable; the music summons Ed

Hammell’s machine gun right hand and leaves strings dangling from

the neck of Adam’s brand-name obscured guitar ("They’re not paying

me anything to advertise," he says.").

This is a night of Antifolk. This is an Antihoot.

Meanwhile, tucked against the back end of New York City’s Alphaville

is The Sidewalk Café. The stage is draped in royal purple

scrim and nearly dominated by a hulking, improbable baby Grand.

Lach sits stage right. He’s three-quarters

surrounded by reverbs and compressors and effects racks. He’s just

finished a piece on that banged up baby Grand; one line of which

declares "The crowd talks through every song but stays silent during the sing-a-long".

His next step is a phone call from his offstage station. He orders Chinese food on a gar-gantuan scale; accommodating the whole room to compensate for the

Sidewalk’s under renovation kitchen. An hour later; the open mic performer

on stage shakes her head and relaxes her hold on her Alvarez. She

laughs and allows for the Pu Pu Platter delivery

man’s arrival. Lo mein is distributed; pork

is passed around. the girl on stage; the girl-interrupted,

is followed by a hulking metalhead

with a thick Germanic accent. He chugs through

an abrasive, industrial, touching, funny celebration

of existential living (including such clumsy/honest

expressions as "Get your smokes on/ Get your laughs on/Get your

parties on/Yeah!). Lach looks pleased. This seems to be an example of

what motivates his work at the Sidewalk. His promotion of fusion and

new sounds starts twenty years back, when: "the West Village folkies

were holding their New York Folk Festival featuring the same old crew

of people left behind when Dylan went electric. "If that’s Folk … Then

I’m Antifolk!"

This, then, is also a night of Antifolk. This too is an Antihoot.

It’s an amazing amalgamation of the familiar and the strange; the

expected and the innovative. The abrasive and the engaging. The questions

are, then: what kind of music happens at these Antihoots? Is it

good? Is it worth exploring? Who attends? Is it a community? Is it an

environment?

Antifolk; sometimes the Antihoot, is a reactive phenomenon. The

musicians and audience that make up the Antifolk scene are men and

women with a full appreciation of the hard-living, traveler- p o e t

philosophies of the "Old Guard" and sixties Revival heroes: Woody

Guthrie, Jack Elliott, Odetta, Dylan. They also admit that they grew up

on the MC5, Patti Smith, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Dead

Kennedys, Public Enemy and Nirvana. They seem to reject the notion

that Art always need be Entertainment. They are not interested in your

diary or your therapy. But they might like to hear your personal reaction

to things that affect your community, your commonwealth or your

country.

Which all sounds like folk music doesn’t it? So what’s with the

moniker? This is the start then of a two-part exploration of the environment

that is AntiFolk (or Not AntiFolk at All). Here, an exploration

of the events that make up its core; next a look at the guiding personalities

and operating theses. It’ll cover two distinct communities …

Philadelphia and New York City. There is also a scene growing, it is

said, in Baltimore. I haven’t been there, yet. More words next time as

well, from Brodsky and Lach … who seem to be at ground zero in both

of their environments.