East Village Idol

Lach, host of the Sidewalk’s antihoot series, at Studio G in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where he’s recording his new album.

East Village Idol

Musicians still flock to the city’s most open-minded mike

By Sarah Elizabeth Feldman

It’s open mike night — “antihoot,” as the regulars call it at the Sidewalk Café on Avenue A, and Lach, the café’s proprietor, is in high spirits. He plays the role of game show impresario to the hilt, improvising commercial patter for imaginary sponsors like “The Air Guitar Centre” and “The Patented Dribble Condom” in his high, pinched voice, then, sometimes in the same breath, promoting and poking fun at his performers. He interrupts singer-songwriter Niall Connolly, whose wispy vibrato and wistful tales of drunken disappointment invite comparisons to his fellow Irishman Damien Rice.

“Niall, this is your second antihoot, right?”
“Uh…..sixth or seventh I guess.”
“Would you like to play a gig here?”
“Yes,” says Connolly, looking more bewildered than pleased.
“Guys, do you want him to play a gig?” The audience cheers.
“Now you have the gig,” Lach says, with “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” gravitas. “Do you want to stop? Or do you want to play another song and risk losing the gig?”

The Sidewalk is a cross between the Algonquin Round Table and an episode of “American Idol.” At the center of the scene is the antihoot, a Monday night institution that runs from seven-thirty in the evening into the small hours. The night begins and ends with Lach, who plays a couple songs at the beginning, then finishes off the show with a full set. In between, more than 50 performers will grace the Sidewalk’s apron-sized stage, with the first dozen or so honoured with a two-song slot, and the rest relegated to the “one-song wonder round.” A hotbed of talent, ideas, and creativity, the antihoot has been credited with helping to springboard the careers of several singer-songwriters in its twenty-odd years of life, including international stars like Nellie McKay, as well as hardworking professional musicians like Don McCloskey.

It’s also been the site of a lot of preening and hot air. Take Lach’s possessiveness of the word “antifolk,” a term he invented in the early eighties, back when he was a Ramones-worshipping twentysomething with a knack for pissing off the purists at venerable institutions like Folk City and The Speakeasy. Recently, the term has cropped up in scenes as far-flung as England and North Carolina, earning an investigation in Timeout London last year, and an “Antifolk Extravaganza” in Durham, N.C. last month. But what exactly is “antifolk”? At Sidewalk, the term is synonymous with whatever music Lach likes (“If it doesn’t speak to me, it doesn’t speak to antifolk,” he says).

But a quick look at some of the more prominent artists to pass through the club’s open mike — Regina Spektor, Nellie McKay, Beck — suggests certain common characteristics. All three are smart, articulate singer-songwriters with a knack for balancing humour and heartbreak. One could even draw connections between such songwriters, whose traditionalism is continually tempered by irony and spontaneity, and the recent explosion of freak folk groups like Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective, and Akron/Family, with their sweet, catchy melodies thrown off-kilter by nonsense lyrics and home-made instruments. Though Lach would prefer you didn’t confuse the two. He believes that freak folk doesn’t speak to antifolk’s gritty urbanism. It’s too carefree, too oblivious of the darker side of human nature. Or as he puts it, “I hate that hippie dippy shit.”

A gawky, balding fortysomething with Buddy Holly glasses and the charm of an overgrown class clown, Lach (who refuses to give his full name because an artist must “let go of his ego”) doesn’t radiate darkness either. He arrived in Manhattan from a small town in nearby Rockland County in the early eighties, bent on playing mythic West Village clubs like Folk City and Speakeasy, places where Bob Dylan and Joan Baez had made their names. Expecting to find the Village alive with all the fresh ideas and vibrant characters from the old songs about Bleecker Street, he instead discovered a scene holding desperately to the last shreds of its sixties glory, more interested in imitating old icons like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs than in forging something new. Rather than admit defeat and return to the suburbs, or tone down his brand of aggressive, punk-inflected folk, Lach started his own club, an illegal after-hours joint he called the Hidden Fortress, because it provided a safe haven on a particularly dangerous stretch of Rivington in 1983. After the cops shut The Hidden Fortress down, “The Fort” became a mobile institution, inhabiting clubs like the Chameleon, Sophie’s or Nightingale’s for short periods before moving on. In 1992, The Fort took up residence at the Sidewalk Café at 6th and A, and eventually “The Fort at Sidewalk” became simply “Sidewalk.”

Lach says he started The Fort because he needed to find a place where he would feel challenged musically. “I knew that I couldn’t get better as a songwriter unless there were people better than me around,” he says. But one shouldn’t get the impression that Lach is overly modest. “Or at least as good as me. Or at least every once in a while near as good as me,” he adds quickly.

The club became a second home for cocky misfits like Joie Blaney, who arrived in New York from San Francisco in 1997 and has been attending antihoots on an almost weekly basis since. He worked his way through the West Village clubs, quickly establishing a pattern of finding one he liked, only to get drunk, heckle the performers and get thrown out.

He arrived at the Sidewalk expecting more of the same, but found, to his shock, that Lach was happy to put up with him and his crowd of rowdy, obnoxious friends. He’d even join them at the end of the night, chamomile tea in hand, ready to pick over the details of the show or just talk shop for an hour or two.

Not everyone who plays the Sidewalk gets an instant welcome. “[Lach is] kind of a love him or hate him kind of guy,” says Curtis Eller, a long-time friend who started attending antihoots in the mid-nineties. “I’ve had friends who wouldn’t even come see when I played the Sidewalk, because they’d gotten on Lach’s bad side.” Chelsea La Bate, a regular since July, says that it seemed to take months of open mikes and off-night gigs before she could get him to so much as remember her name. “With Lach, I always felt like there was this brick wall. I can’t decipher whether it’s on his side or mine.”

Still, both agree that it’s worth dealing with a few inscrutable whims to play a venue where talent take precedence over number of beers sold. “Lach always said to me ‘I like your tunes, you get a gig. I don’t care if anyone comes,’” says Eller. “This is the one place in town where you’re either going to get a show or get turned down based on someone’s honest musical opinion, instead of economic stuff,” says Eller.

The system certainly worked for Niall Connolly, who played his first full set at the Sidewalk a couple weeks after winning the jackpot in Lach’s impromptu version of “Who Wants to Win a Gig?” A newcomer on the Sidewalk scene, Connolly is also a veteran of performing circuit who is not afraid of a little heckling, even when his heckler happens to be running the show. He says he didn’t mind Lach’s antics at the antihoot a few weeks back, but adds that he still hasn’t quite figured the guy out. “Is he funny? Rude? Kind? Patient? Impatient? Respectful? Disrespectful? He seems to be everything you’d need to be to survive those open mike nights.”