Tip the Band, Kiss the Cook

In New York, you walk to the back of the deli, order your chicken cutlet or your chopped cheese, wait, receive it, then pay at the counter. In New Orleans, the cashier at Verti Marte returns from her 5:00-5:15 AM smoke break, unlocks the door, and chides you not to bother the kitchen. Order at the cashier, she says. 

I grew up in a house of arcane rules such as these, many of which governed seafood. No sushi on Sundays, because the fish market was closed. No cooking of fish in the house, which over time morphed into what if we just limit in-house cooking altogether. Pickled herring should be eaten promptly, if at all, and never stored for 15+ months if possible. Avoid shrimp at school, favor pizza over fish on Fridays, etc. 

Breakfast fish had better be smoked. Last summer, I cooked grouper in my parents’ kitchen, burned the pan, and heard about it for a couple days more.

At the cashier, I ordered oysters at 5:15, 45 minutes before sunrise. This was against the rules, in a few ways. They were out of oysters, so we subbed fried shrimp on our po’ boys. Tails off. Cash or credit, I asked. Depends how much you want to give to our lizard overlords, she replied. Well, I work for them, so it’ll come back to me, I countered. 

The sandwich was huge, sauced to the nines, terrific. The latest in a line of surreal meals I ate in New Orleans over a buddy’s bachelor party a couple weeks back. 

We had landed on New Orleans so we could go to see some music at Jazz Fest and on Frenchmen Street, all while eating well and behaving poorly. A friend who went to Tulane had always encouraged me to go to Jazz Fest rather than Mardi Gras, but at the time I thought they only played jazz, and I didn’t think jazz was cool. Luckily, they also had the Blues, Gospel, and Vampire Weekend. 

So Friday night I was among the last in and caught the group at dinner at Galatoire’s. The waiter lost patience with our lack of focus, but the room was made of tiles, hard surfaces, and birthday parties. Among the loudest I’ve been in. During our meal, we sung happy birthday for somebody turning 85, somebody turning some 50-something, and somebody turning an unconvincing 21.

I ordered turtle soup—real turtle?—and a knockout duck, plus n Sazeracs. The custard dessert, which should have been called flan, really came to play. They pour their Sazerac over ice, which they claim harkens back to the time when they were the first restaurant in town to have ice at all. The cocktail is pretty old, but there’s a reason everybody else around serves them neat in a chilled glass. 

After a few too many minutes on Bourbon Street, we hobbled over to Frenchmen Street, where the real music plays. One bar on Bourbon had a vaguely cursed cover band, while another had a boothless DJ forced to queue songs on his phone and dance on an otherwise empty stage. On Frenchmen, they had horns, multiple drummers per band, and the rest of it. 

Because of reasons, I have been trying to do my thing more unapologetically. Once, in high school, I sawa the goalie of the JV hockey team watching a 30 minute goalie fight compilation on YouTube. I want to be like that.

A corollary of this is that I am here to announce that I like Vampire Weekend. I like them a lot. I don’t think they’re totally uncool, because people seem to recognize the music itself can rip, but going around yapping about them in this day and age, well.

A few weeks ago, I was looking for an innocuous place around flatiron to grab dinner with a colleague. Something sort of good, or good enough, and not cheap but not too expensive. I read the Infatuation review of Upland, a California clean place on 26th or something. The writer notes, sheepishly, that the site gave Upland a 9.1 in 2014, but that the game has changed, and California-generic is less praiseworthy and more people pleasy. Now, they get a 7.9.

This restaurant came from a time when avocado was cutting edge, quinoa felt novel, and a boat shoe band really was doing good things. One bite of 5:20 Verti Marte Po’ Boy contained as much flavor as has been served over a decade at Upland.

I’ll note, though that there was still a two hour wait. The next day, Vampire Weekend’s latest album, Only God Was Above Us, came out. The thing it does best is remind the listener of the special songs from prior albums, but the music is good. Ripped then, rips now.

The band has been with me through a lot. I can place myself on 73rd street while one middle school classmate mocked another for liking the eponymous debut because the band’s name was stupid. I remember revisiting “I Stand Corrected” in the shower of my high school dorm. I remember lounging in the school newspaper room while another friend smugly announced how, even though people thought Modern Vampires was annoying, he liked it a lot. As it was 2013, we scoffed at him for being a hipster. In 2019, I biked through Lincoln Park singing along to the first two tracks of Father of the Bride, and two years later I begrudgingly acknowledge Modern Vampires as important enough to me to download it and sing every word while on a backpacking trip.

The band, they’ve been there for me. Would I buy a t shirt? No fucking chance. I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a t shirt in the wild, but I think they're way better than The Strokes.

And so on Frenchmen Street we danced and enjoyed some electrifying rhythm sections. Saturday afternoon, after some heroics from Bomba Estereo, among others, we deciphered the map and gathered for Vampire Weekend, only for Ezra Koening to announce the band’s longtime bassist, Chris Baio, would miss the day’s show due to undisclosed but assuredly severe illness. He hadn't missed a show since 2006.

Koenig said something along the lines of “I know some of you are probably wondering why we don’t just play without a bass.” Though at this time I hadn’t yet heard the Jason Neville Funky Soul Band play a 20 minute blend of The People’s Court into “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” it offended me he tried to explain the point of the bass, or the rhythm section at all, in New Orleans. I mean, I get that the crowd wasn’t exactly full of regular jazz musicians, but the condescension! 

So they had some ground to make up as they played a solid opening four songs, but they had earned a short leash by the time Koenig’s none-too-funny stage banter got them into a corner with half-baked renditions of “Hungry Heart,” their own song “Bryn,” and “Peggy-O.

I’ve melted face while Christone Kingfish Ingram and friends covered “Hey Joe,” and when Phish opened with “Loving Cup,” and I arguably didn’t get “Layla” until I heard a Tedeschi Trucks cover of it live. I love covers. These stunk. No two ways about it.

These people are talented enough to cover nearly whatever they want, but that’s just not the thing they’re here to do. A couple hours earlier, Bomba Estereo tore through a set of hard drums and electronic beats, coupled with bizarro bird noises that made my friends turn to one another and ask, holy shit, is she making bird noises? Bomba Estereo kept the esoteric fun and danceable. I got the sense that if Vampire Weekend tried it, they would say something along the lines of “everybody be quiet now, it’s time for us to make bird noises. This is very serious.”

And yet they pulled me back in. I love this band! They played my favorite song from the latest album, “Prep School Gangsters,” which culminates in a line saying, “somewhere in your family tree / there was someone just like me.” I like to imagine he’s saying dressed, though, as in somewhere in your family tree, you’re related to a boat-shoe asshat with a popped collar. And there’s nothing wrong with that! He’s doing his thing. Ezra’s thing happens to be speaking with a weird transatlantic accent and referring to the owner of a thrift shop as its proprietor. But you know what? He’s good at his job.

Vampire Weekend invite you over for dinner, but it just so happens they’re fresh out of Aleppo pepper, and no the paprika or crushed red pepper or certainly not Fresnos will do. The dish is ruined. They’re recipe cooks. To be fair, losing your bassist is more like running out of rice, but their musical fridge is full of ingredients they bought for one Serious Eats recipe but that have long since expired. 

There are bands who throw together some garlic, onions, olive oil, salt, white wine, and then they see what’s lying around and where it can take them. These bands we saw on Frenchmen Street each night. Highlights included very long jams, taking inspiration from standards—as with Jason Neville—and a smooth song that went, “Why don’t you tip the band / you like the way we play / and we got bills to pay / so won’t you tip the band.” I don't know the chord progression, but it's a good one. 

Songs like “Hey Joe,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” or even Ms. Lauryn Hill’s “Killing Me Softly,” to say nothing of the Bo Diddley Beat become outlines more than songs, they are so in our fabric. Either you play the blues, or you don’t, there’s no recipe. 

But Vampire Weekend floundered around Peggy-O, one such standard, and I couldn’t help but marvel that despite their prowess in the kitchen, they found themselves hopeless without their pacojet. 

I love their music, and I’m almost always sitting down when I listen to it. 

Nonetheless, it was a danceable set. Two guys in front of me had taken acid and wouldn't shut up about it. They were elated to find their friend Ian.

They had waited for beer with a nice lady, chatted a while, bought her a drink. They tapped a stranger on the shoulder to take a photo with the nice lady, and it turned out they knew the stranger. The non-stranger, Jessica, took them back to her friends, they shared loudly, where a friend of Jessica’s spritzed liquid LSD into Rosencrantz’s mouth and then some into Guildenstern’s. The duo then took their matching Alohas and captain's hats and made it their personal mission to try to remind the crowd that music is fun, shouting "You’re part of the song!" at people. 

It started annoying, but I warmed up. A guy who looked like David Foster Wallace had figured it out dancing with his wife and teenage daughter, warmly bumping fists with Rosencrantz. They looked happy. Ezra tried less and less crowd work. He’d told us to do our best not to notice what was missing, as they could never recreate their elaborate studio arrangements live, a man down. But the best live music I’ve ever seen emphasizes not what’s missing but rather what nobody expected to be there. Where did those horns come from? Is that an electric bagpipe? That’s what causes facial melt. 

They tend to conclude sets with “Walcott,” a bop about traffic on Cape Cod. This rendition accelerated and bounced and just felt amazing. I winked at somebody wearing a matching Jazz Fest bandana, with some designs heavily borrowed from the estate of Keith Haring. 

I thought about the band, how they read the New Yorker unapologetically, and I apologetically listen to them. A few months ago, that magazine published what was in effect a hit piece against Keith Haring, the gist of which was that the art is unsophisticated, uninteresting, but watching young Keith make a cave drawing on a subway wall in fifteen seconds, wearing a nice little smirk behind his wireframe specs, that was the real art. 

Haring, some journalist argued, is best considered a performer first and an artist second. All over town, at Bomba Estereo, at the Batiste Brothers, at Café Negril, at DBA, we watched bands who were performers first. No matter what they played, we grooved, and magically knew the words. For Vampire Weekend, I danced and knew all the words, but I own a thesaurus. 

They whisked us out of the grounds promptly after the set, so we wandered around and bought some sausage from a woman selling it out of a truck-towed smoker. For an hour, I was the only guy in New Orleans who couldn't find a drink. At last, we made our way to Sauvage Street, where a band played in front of a house with large signs saying it’s a No Balloon Zone, as in Whippits are banned. An officially licensed New Orleans cab driver claiming to be named Bad Ass took us home, driving so fast he cut off an ambulance. 

Before our early morning trip to Verti Marte, we saw Nels Cline, an accomplished guitarist lately of Wilco, play a jazz and funk set with some local musicians, fully improvised. Nels and friends managed to remind us of the rules, tee up our expectations for where the song would go, and then shatter them with something as delicious as a fish sandwich at 5 AM.

A couple of wook ladies complimented me on my dancing as we walked out, not expecting an encore. But then they came back, and for an indeterminate number of minutes, they riffed the very end of “How Many More Times” off Led Zeppelin I. I’ve had it stuck in my head since, but I can't find something that ephemeral recorded anywhere. So, right now I’m looping through all of Vampire Weekend’s discography, because I like them.