BY JIM MELLOAN | Back in the mid-aughts, New York’s Art Star scene of quirky Downtown performance artists had its own version of a supergroup. The New York Howl brought just about everything you could want to the party — a real rock & roll group with driving beats; danceable, tuneful, bizarre, and fun.
Fronted by Andrew Katz, a tall Detroit native with a Mick Jagger mouth, and with soulful songs by Katz and playful, catchy songs by longtime busker and scenester Brer Brian (a Binghamton, NY native), the group rocked then-key club venues such as Bowery Poetry Club and Mo Pitkin’s, toured locally, and had a couple of tours of England. On their second English tour, every stop attracted more than 2,000 people. Leaping around the stage and into the audience, native New Yorker Stefan Zeniuk brought a maniacal energy to the group (his saxophone often literally spouting fire), and Adam Amram supplied the energetic rhythm. Adam comes from New York arts scene royalty. His father David is a well-known composer who scored the original version of “The Manchurian Candidate,” one of his sisters is a singer-songwriter, and the other is a writer, performance artist, and actress.
The New York Howl put out a well-received CD in 2006 called “People Will Come to See Us Ride.”
Brer lived with his wife in New Jersey, but I often let him crash on one of my couches (I had two!) at my 400-square-foot studio apartment at E. 30th St. and Second Ave. We had similar tastes in music, and spent a lot of time listening to my new and burgeoning iTunes collection and exploring the nascent YouTube. In the apartment, I had an inexpensive but versatile and decent-sounding Yamaha keyboard, an old 8-track cassette recorder suitable for mixing, and an iMac equipped with Audacity, the free editing software — everything the band needed for its second, DIY album.
In the first part of 2007, while I was working at Inc., busy overseeing the expansion of the magazine’s venerable Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies to the Inc. 5000, the band spent a lot of time in my apartment recording a large part of its second album, consisting of what Brer calls “B-sides.” Some of the tracks were recorded on the road live, and some at another guy’s flat in England; the rest were done at my place. They “released” the second album “Live From Spaceship: Your Mind,” a decade ago this week (or depending on where you look, maybe it was in early May.) “Spaceship: Your Mind,” I’m proud to say, was essentially my apartment.
Brer recently told me, “It was very comfortable. We had a whole lot of space and time to do whatever we wanted.” After a brief intro called “The First Day I Met You,” the album kicks off with “Good Thing,” which is all Brer. It’s a bouncy hoedown of a song, with Brer on guitar and multiple vocal overdubs. It’s a good thing, says the song, that white people can’t dance, or drive, or see. As to why that’s a good thing, the reasons are somewhat garbled in the lyrics, but the track is just too much of a good time to worry about that. “Let’s Make Love” is a mournful/joyful European-sounding waltz by Andrew, with Brer on harmonies and Stefan on sax. “Baby Baby Baby” is an improvisational-sounding track by Brer and Andrew, and “Train Dispatcher,” with its sweet harmonies, sees the upside of the situation known to all New York subway riders of being held by a train dispatcher. It’s a collaboration between Brer and Stefan. “It’s Raining in England” is a plaintive, minimalist, hypnotic track by Andrew recorded in England, and the album ends with “Oh My My My,” a masterful droning work by Brer that sounds like something out of Appalachia by way of Nepal, with Lewis Carrollesque nonsense lyrics.
Around this time, Art Star scene veterans Master Lee and Rick Patrick started a monthly series of events at the Himalayan Asia-focused Rubin Museum of Art on W. 17th St. called “Talkingstick,” in which museum staff traded reflective riffs with performers on items in the museum’s collection. At one of the first “Talkingstick” events, Brer and Andrew led a group of people doing this chant parading around the Rubin. Those were glorious times.
The band never sold many copies of “Live From Spaceship: Your Mind.” They didn’t make many copies of the physical CD; those they did make they mostly gave away free at shows. The album is available, free to stream or $5 to download, at Bandcamp.com. They did make a fair amount of progress on recording a “real” second album, but Andrew began to drift away. He eventually decided it was best to relocate to Nashville, where he remains today, heading up a band called Clear Plastic Masks. Their latest album, “Nazi Hologram,” was released late last year. Many of Brer’s share of the songs recorded for the next Howl album wound up on his next solo album, “Ghettastrophe,” also available at Bandcamp. He has continued to put out albums via Bandcamp; there are now a total of 13 available at his site there.
Brer and Stefan head up a fun-times descendant of The New York Howl called The New York Fowl Harmonic. In January 2016, they released an album called “Rubber Poultry” on Bandcamp. The tossing around of a rubber chicken is essential to their live performances. Stefan also heads up a Latin-flavored instrumental band called Gato Loco, and has performed with various lineups several times on “Saturday Night Live.”
From 2011 to 2014 Adam teamed up with Japanese singer-guitarist Ken Minami in Ken South Rock, a Tokyo-meets-Brooklyn high-energy outfit that played both sides of the world. Last year he joined a 10-year-old New York-based major label band called Psychic Ills, and they have done multiple tours of Europe and South America in support of their latest album.
The good, howling times continue to roll.
