Monday, January 23, 2012
The Court Tavern
New Brunswick's Court Tavern closes.
I read poetry at The Court Tavern maybe three times I remember, once upstairs in a conventional reading, & twice in the basement as part of lengthy poet & band benefits for literary 'zines. I was only peripherally connected to the poetry scene in New Brunswick. Having resided in & around New Brunswick for a few years, after I moved away I developed an intense distaste for the city in both its unimproved & improved versions & only ventured down there for the occasional poetry reading or a band I wanted to hear. I don't feel nostalgia for The Court the way I do for Maxwell's & other bar venues in Hoboken in the '80s.
The stage downstairs at The Court was so cramped & the ceiling so low that even I felt claustrophobic standing on it. But it was fun reading at The Court. The audiences were drunk & smelly, & since I was neither punkified nor especially political, I was a sort of change-of-pace poet - I usually wore a tropical shirt for those events, not the dark faux-working class costume - & after reading a couple of flip, flat- voiced poems rather than ranting on about something in the news the crowd was stunned into a manageable din. To get to the stage from the stairs you usually had to step over a few patrons in drunken comas. But I was always received in New Brunswick with reasonable respect if not enthusiasm.
It's sad how far New Brunswick has a fallen as a music town. For 20 years, New Brunswick had the liveliest, most diverse live music scene in Jersey. In the '80s Hoboken was perceived as new wavy, twangy, even twee, on the way to being smugly hipster (it's since surrendered that rep to various Brooklyn neighborhoods. Now Hoboken is just affluent professionals of no special distinction). I suppose I was a proto-hipster. I could be insufferably conceited & there are artsy people who met me in the '80s who still don't like me, although they've long surpassed me in every way creatively. Asbury Park was a wreck, obsessed with Springsteen & its own decay, pretending to an importance it didn't have. * A.P. didn't even have a reliable small venue for new bands until The Saint opened in the '90s, & the Saint was modeled on the New Brunswick scene but with less puke in the bathrooms, & pretty much ignored the whole Springsteen thing. But you could do a night hopping clubs in New Brunswick without going completely broke or feeling under-dressed.
* The Asbury guy I respect is Southside Johnny, who survived his moment as the Next Big Thing from Asbury (it turned out to be Bon Jovi) & is now the model of the working musician.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I read poetry at The Court Tavern maybe three times I remember, once upstairs in a conventional reading, & twice in the basement as part of lengthy poet & band benefits for literary 'zines. I was only peripherally connected to the poetry scene in New Brunswick. Having resided in & around New Brunswick for a few years, after I moved away I developed an intense distaste for the city in both its unimproved & improved versions & only ventured down there for the occasional poetry reading or a band I wanted to hear. I don't feel nostalgia for The Court the way I do for Maxwell's & other bar venues in Hoboken in the '80s.
The stage downstairs at The Court was so cramped & the ceiling so low that even I felt claustrophobic standing on it. But it was fun reading at The Court. The audiences were drunk & smelly, & since I was neither punkified nor especially political, I was a sort of change-of-pace poet - I usually wore a tropical shirt for those events, not the dark faux-working class costume - & after reading a couple of flip, flat- voiced poems rather than ranting on about something in the news the crowd was stunned into a manageable din. To get to the stage from the stairs you usually had to step over a few patrons in drunken comas. But I was always received in New Brunswick with reasonable respect if not enthusiasm.
It's sad how far New Brunswick has a fallen as a music town. For 20 years, New Brunswick had the liveliest, most diverse live music scene in Jersey. In the '80s Hoboken was perceived as new wavy, twangy, even twee, on the way to being smugly hipster (it's since surrendered that rep to various Brooklyn neighborhoods. Now Hoboken is just affluent professionals of no special distinction). I suppose I was a proto-hipster. I could be insufferably conceited & there are artsy people who met me in the '80s who still don't like me, although they've long surpassed me in every way creatively. Asbury Park was a wreck, obsessed with Springsteen & its own decay, pretending to an importance it didn't have. * A.P. didn't even have a reliable small venue for new bands until The Saint opened in the '90s, & the Saint was modeled on the New Brunswick scene but with less puke in the bathrooms, & pretty much ignored the whole Springsteen thing. But you could do a night hopping clubs in New Brunswick without going completely broke or feeling under-dressed.
* The Asbury guy I respect is Southside Johnny, who survived his moment as the Next Big Thing from Asbury (it turned out to be Bon Jovi) & is now the model of the working musician.
