Author: Jason Lee
Photograph by Stephen Perry
Sometimes it takes a little Nite Music to help you make it through the wee small hours of the night and into the next day, and no we’re not talkin’ Mozart or Sondheim but more like Lloyd and Verlaine, and as a longtime city-dwelling insomniac there was a period where I spent many a late night (and more than a few days) mainlining local public access TV much like James Woods waiting for Debbie Harry’s next guest spot on Videodrome…
…so in other words I found it to be totally transfixing, addictive even, a medium where it felt like characters from classic NYC-based indie movies like Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens or Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky or the opening segment of Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise were given cameras and told to tape themselves for a proto-reality TV show with zero budget to spend…
…given that practically anyone could sign up to host a show on one of the four nearly entirely uncensored stations (only penetration was restricted, obscured by a large blue rectangle) run by MNN (Manhattan Neighborhood Network) but in reality they must’ve made prospective show runners pass some sort of “eccentricity test” of something…
…cuz the MNN airwaves were dominated by an array of weirdos, oddballs, and exhibitionists ranging from the satirically-minded and the self-aware to the proudly stoopid (D-U-M-B everyone’s accusing me!) which made it maybe the most perfectly distilled manifestation of true New York-ness that I’d experienced up to the present day…
…and sure of course I’ve come to know plenty of eccentrics in the meantime (who hasn’t?) and maybe turned into one myself but on MNN you could experience NYC street hustle and hassle in in the comfort of your own cramped, cluttered studio apartment, which granted one could simply go outside and if you were lucky encounter some of these characters walking the street of NYC…
…but as a nascent New Yorker at the time, public access was the perfect gateway for voyeuristically interacting with some of the city’s more interesting denizens (a surprising number of shows aired live and took live phone calls on the air with reckless abandon) willfully, often gleefully, putting their secret fantasies and neurosis on full display and that’s exactly what the best rock ’n’ roll should do too innit…
…taking the B-side of life and making it the A-side of your record via nothing more than the raw power of music and gutter poetry and whether you consider this to be “voyeurism” or “community building” depends on your perspective and on your past I suppose…
…but either way if you’re looking for someone who can convincingly puts across this kind of unadulterated adult NYC rock n roll animal energy then look no further than Jamie Frey for here is a man born and raised in Kensington, Brooklyn, a R’n’R lifer slogging it out at local clubs and dive bars cuz he just wants to be your dog and in our book there’s nothing much more dignified than that…
…as exemplified by his past work in widely respected bands such as NO ICE and The Brooklyn What—the latter band having first formed in protest against the Atlantic Yards Project and the encroaching gentrification that it foresaw but it appear Jamie may be pivoting slightly on his new material with new band Nite Music and their newest (second) single “(I’ve Got To Make) The Call”…
…a song which appears to acknowledge the difficult position of a grown-ass man “who’s an expert on Hüsker Dü and a moron about love” as Frey acknowledges in a recent think piece on his love of romantic comedies and how they may have steered him wrong in matters of the heart and other assorted organs…
Featuring Maria Lina from Frida Kill
…and while lines like “can’t you hear me all alone / standing by the telephone” are appealingly anachronistic (to wit: are you constantly “standing by the telephone” if the phone’s in your front pants pocket most of the time) calling back to such mid-to-late ‘70s classics as ELO’s “Telephone Line” and Blondie’s “Hanging On The Telephone” and Foreigner’s “Love on the Telephone”…
…except, rather than sounding like any of these bands, on “(I’ve Got To Make) The Call” Jamie & Co. evoke another strain of mid-to-late-70s music namely the proto-punk, or more like “once was called punk but doesn’t scan as punk to modern ears,” of classic New York bands like Television, the Heartbreakers, and even The Patti Smith Group with an honorable mention to Brit musicians of the era like Wire and Elvis Costello…
…which even though it’s an “older” sound than Hüsker Dü and their many disciples and disciples of disciples it actually ends up sounding more contemporary jj it’s not as ever-present with Jamie Frey and co-guitarist Bryan Thornton spinning out intertwined proto-post-punky-funky spiderwebs of sound around the stable center of Even Berg’s in-the-pocket drumming and Russell Hymowitz’s Fred “Not Sonic” Smith-reminiscent bass lines…
…which brings us back at last to this article’s opening gambit cuz the music video for “(IGTM) TC” is full-band-&-friends affair that deliberately hearkens back to the roots of New York City’s underground-music-meets-underground-video culture as exemplified most of all by period NYC public access shows like Glenn O’Brien TV Party (1978-82) which featured such fabled gusts as Blondie, David Byrne, James Chance, Klaus Nomi, and Jean-Michael Basquiat and dang they really nailed the vibe and the look…
…and guess what Nite Music itself is named after yet another legendary cult music program but I’ll let Jamie take it from here cuz he sent over nice good copy re: the song/video/band/etc that I should’t let go to waste thusly quoted below and may it hopefully herald a new golden age in old school New York City public access television-style programming and video work by the cutting-edge cult bands of today, huzzah!
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CREDITS: “(I’ve Got To Make) The Call” single
Recorded by Paul Blackwell
Jamie Frey- vocals, guitar
Bryan Thornton- guitar
Russell Hymowitz- bass
Evan Berg- drums
Maria Lina- vocals
MUSIC VIDEO:
Filmed at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn, NY 2023
Director- Joe Wakeman
Filmed by / featuring – Maria Lina, Gabriela Canales, Matthew Canales, Mars Pimintel, and Raji Pandya
Makeup- Kelly Canales
Special thanks- Preston Spurlock
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Named after the live music TV program Night Music (1988-1990), Nite Music was formed by Jamie Frey recruiting three vital members of the NYC music community: guitarist Bryan Thornton of Holy Tunics, bassist Stuart Solomon of Mean 2 Me \ drummer/vocalist Jamie Williams of Phil From Accounting.
Nite Music is a NYC-based band established in 2022. Our goal is to bring the original thesis of rock n’ roll: two electric guitars, bass and drums, into the 21st century, an expression of freedom and ecstasy, The Beatles and The Stones for the post-apocalypse.
“(I’ve Got To) Make the Call” has this 70s New York sort of sound, and during that time NYC was also this epicenter for video art, where punk bands and video people would utilize public access TV. If you look you can find all kinds of archival videos of awesome artists in these great low-rent TV settings, and I wanted to kind of tie it to that aesthetic.
We did a few things to make it authentic to that idea—first, we worked collectively—video was a collective endeavor back in the day since it was necessary to pool resources to get access to equipment. So the people you see in the video are also shooting the video on four analog video cameras (2x Hi8 and 2x VHS-C).
Secondly, I edited the video only using analog methods as well—no computer at all, just two CRT monitors, 4 VCRs an Edirol Video Mixer and lots of tapes, although the version you see here was filmed digitally while the tape played back on a CRT since the video looks best on its native screen format. Working this way blew my mind–it was such a different way of thinking about editing—a crazy and counterintuitive thing to commit to for sure, but then so is rock n roll!
Millennium Film Workshop, where the video we filmed, is a cool DIY movie theatre in Bushwick that’s about a year old. The director, Joe Wakeman, is also a musician. He was in Bodega Bay (the band that preceded Bodega) and Toyzanne. He currently plays in Acrylic Gesso. Maria and Gaby from Frida Kill feature in the video too. His analog approach to this video was meant to compliment the track which was recorded entirely on tape.