If you’re lucky enough to live in live music strongholds like New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston or Chicago, there’s something good to go to literally every night of the week. It isn’t always the national headliners, of course, or indie-blog buzz acts that make the rounds, either—it’s the tireless musicians who form the backbone of every local music community and the tireless music hounds who come out to see them week after week.
With that in mind, welcome to Soul of the City, where we’ll be checking in on city-specific scenes and getting the lay of the live music land from local correspondents from time to time. To kick things off, here are a few dispatches from the unslept city. If you want to wax on a bit about your local music scene—NYC or otherwise—and give us a scribbler’s tour of local haunts, drop Chad a line at cberndtson[at]gmail[dot]com.
Shayni Rae’s Truckstop (Mondays at the National Underground, Lower East Side)
I first heard Kevn Kinney the same way a lot of folks in the Northeast do: through his longstanding association with Warren Haynes and other heavyweights of the jam scene. His catalog of honky-tonk-ready, folk-blues nuggets includes at least one great (and regionally iconic) song, Straight to Hell, and every time you see him you’re hard pressed to figure out why he’s a well-known quantity in the southeast but nowhere else.
Anyway, Kinney’s in New York often—he splits his time between the Big Apple and Atlanta—and apart from one-offs, opening slots and scooting back down South for gigs with Drivin ‘n’ Cryin’ and others, he holds it down every Monday night with the weekly (and recently revived) honky-tonk series Shayni Rae’s Truckstop. The titular Shayni Rae, of course, is Kinney’s wife, and the National Underground is a kind Houston Street nook, co-owned by Gavin DeGraw and his brother Joey.
This, friends, is a greasy slice of Monday night country-soul nourishment, and apart from the regular contributors, which include Kinney, drummer Anton Fier, and the wily Madison Square Gardeners, the Truckstop has played host to impromptu appearances from Norah Jones, Audley Freed, Cat Popper, Gov’t Mule’s Andy Hess, and Gavin himself, and members of the Drive-By Truckers and other big guns have also been spotted there. Good scene. Sob into your beer a bit but come out feeling better than when you went in.
READ ON for more of the debut edition of Soul of the City…
