The First Voyage of The Bel Fucking Argosy

Bel Argosy played our first show on Saturday the 11th at a not-quite venue (read: some guy's apartment) in Bushwick called Cheap Storage. We'd booked a performance at the venerable Cake Shop for the following week, but Billy and Beau are friends with a guy named Doug in a band called MiniBoone, and he got us on the bill, which included an assortment of other guitar-oriented Brooklyn indie rock bands. We practiced like crazy, set up a bunch of promotional web sites, and made some tentative invites. I had to gently dissuade my mom from making the trip out to Wyckoff Ave.: "There's no working toilet," Beau warned us. "So the landlord's been cutting them a break on the rent and they've been going to the bathroom in a bucket up on the roof."

My perennial friends at Lincoln Pl. were throwing a holiday party the same night, so in my typical, neurotic way, I had to not only show up, if only for an hour, but also bake a pie. I managed to do it, too -- another of the Winter Fruits variety, slightly burnt -- and walked it over to their apartment from mine balanced on top of the snare drum we were asked to bring to the show, carrying the hi-hat and kick pedal in a tiny pink vinyl bag in my other hand. I made it without any upsets, and spent a glorious hour hand-decorating Christmas cookies (baked by Colleen into a million different shapes: Snowman, Christmas tree, the outlines of the states of New York and New Jersey) with flavored, food coloring-colored icing and a satisfyingly varied menagerie of nonpareils: Sprinkles, little pine trees, little snowflakes, shiny little edible beads. Pro tip: It takes very little blue food coloring to make white icing sufficiently blueish; it takes a bleeding gallon of red to make it red enough.

I left, somewhat reluctantly, and hopped the R to the N to the L to the Jefferson St. stop in Bushwick, lugging the drum equipment behind some much younger and hipper types who I suspected might also be performing at the same place we were. The guy's house was pretty much right outside the station, and it was clear why he called it Cheap Storage -- that text was emblazoned on the big building's northern tower. The screen on my trusty LG clamshell phone finally bit the dust a few weeks ago -- the dialer and keypad still work, but the video card was just displaying a blank white image. So I'd taken to writing down phone numbers I didn't know by heart on a little index card and punching them in to make calls as necessary. I tried to reach our contact at the venue, but got no answer. Luckily, the young turks I'd been following managed to get the front door open and held it open. They introduced themselves as "douchebags," but I think they were listed as "Hep Cats" on the bill. Cheap Storage was actually a pretty cozy place. It definitely looked like the storage facility it used to be: Concrete floors, big plaster columns throughout, exposed fiberglass insulation. There was a big industrial looking furnace right in the middle of the floor that kept things nice and warm, and there actually was a working bathroom. One corner of the big open living room was set aside for the bands. Each roommate in the loft had a little cubicle-like room; I asked a big Australian-sounding guy if I could deposit our stuff outside his. "As long as you're not depriving me of access to food or sex, you can do whatever you want," he said.

Chris and Beau showed up after a short time, although not so short a time that I was spared the experience of being the weird guy who knows nobody and whom nobody knows. "Are you okay?" asked the girl from Hep Cats. ("I'm fine," I explained. "I'm just an orphan.") Beau, Chris, and I deposited the equipment and then went to stuff our faces a few blocks away at Tortilleria Mexicano Los Hermanos, which was very good.

The first guy to go on was called Yoni Gordon, and he seemed to be sort of an alt-country indie rock troubadour. He had a sad, yelping voice not entirely unlike Jonathan Richman's. He was accompanied by a drummer who looked like The Edge with a full beard and who had a big, beautiful, expensive-looking orange sunburst drum kit that he played very sparingly. Yoni was a pretty good guitar player and had a good sound, but he seemed a little out of place -- people weren't really moving around, and the Hep Cats were bordering on heckling him. He had this little clip-on lamp that he'd affixed to his mic stand and that he was using for dramatic effect, but one of the 'Cats kept turning it on and off while he was singing, to Yoni's obvious irritation. And as he was tuning up between songs, one of them called out to him, "Tell a funny joke," which sounded to me like a bit of a provocation. There was a moment of tension (I thought), but Yoni defused the situation: "I'll do you one better, friend," he said. "I'll take you on an adventure of the mind." And then he gave weird but earnest introduction to the next song, which had something to do with roadhouses and The One That Got Away.

Once they were finished, there was a scramble to get our drums set up. It was briefly proposed that we ask Yoni Gordon's drummer if we could use his fancy and largely untouched kit, but he packed it up before we could muster the courage. Instead, Taylor, the drummer for MiniBoone, brought over some of his equipment and helped me and Chris set it up. He was very nice and patient, even donating extra cymbal felts to the cause (I cannot abide a flapping crash.) The residents of Cheap Storage had suspended a piece of plywood with chains from the ceiling near the area where we were playing, and before we went on they'd put a digital projector on it. When we started, somebody put a movie in and it (or at least the DVD menu) played on the wall adjacent to us. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that it was Le Samouraï. Which is pretty cool.

Our set was very short. We only played the six songs we were sure about, which amounted to around fifteen minutes. I don't know what it's like for other drummers, but for me, playing the drums is an absorbingly passive exercise. I see the job as being kind of like an insect's nervous system -- inhibitory as opposed to excitatory. So I was paying attention, but sort of zoned out as well, staring at an enormous Alain Delon. And I was so scared! But I managed to avoid pulling what Billy and Chris refer to as "a Continental," in reference to my frightened-rabbit tempo at the Headliners show I wrote about a while ago.

"Who are you?" hollered the girl from Hep Cats, towards the end of our set. "We're Bel Argosy," said Billy.

The band after us was called Boom Chick; they were a White Stripes-y collaboration between Frank Hoier, who plays guitar, and his girlfriend Moselle, who plays drums. They played a very long set, but they were actually pretty great. We were all dancing and stomping along to their songs. As Boom Chick played a slow song, I danced with Patrice. Billy danced with Sarah. He tried to dip her, at an opportune moment, but she demurred. "I'll do it," I said. He dipped me and poured Miller High Life into my mouth -- and nose and ear as I tried to turn my face away.

Their set finally ended and MiniBoone started to set up. Le Samouraï rolled its closing credits, and the projection went dark. ...And so did the lights in loft. MiniBoone played a raucous, noisy, dark, sweaty set that belied their math rock-y underpinnings. The crowd pressed in around the band, dancing and clapping.

After MiniBoone finished, we all kind of resolved to head out. I was exhausted from dancing, and pretty drunk, to the extent that I wondered a few times whether I would have to upchuck. We gathered up our stuff. I agreed, perhaps unwisely, to take home an additional cymbal, our twelve-pound heavy ride, tucking it under my arm as Beau and Patrice and some other hanger-on Amherst alumni lurched our way to the subway, and then to 14th St., and then back to Brooklyn, singly. When I finally got above ground at 4th Ave., it was deeply cold and a light rain was falling. I had stop several times to adjust my grip on the bag of hardware and the cymbals, which were digging painfully into the joint-creases of my fingers. A very drunk woman appeared in the entryway of the building as I was struggling to open the door to the lobby without knocking over the ride. "Do you live here?" she asked. "Okay, I'll let you in." In the elevator, as I leaned against the wall, barely conscious, she said, "Did you take a cab home? I took a cab. Too tired to take the train."