There are two uses for 777-BARS. The first is when you’re home planning an evening, with a pad and pencil, and you treat it like MovieFone. It’s quite effective then. The second is when you’re drunk on the streets at 2 a.m., desperate for someplace warm–it’s not as good then. The best voice-recognition system in the world would have trouble with the diverse accents and slurs of late-night NYC bargoers; 777-BARS tries valiantly to handle spoken requests, but misinterprets "Manitoba’s" as "No Malice Palace," "The Bitter End" and "i," depending on how you say it. (Yeah, i is a real bar; 277 Church, betw. Franklin & White.)
Further kinks in the system: there are no entries under "gay and alternative bars," listings skip for no reason, and sometimes the entire service is busy. But once the Shecky’s people get their act together, like they did years ago with the terrific Shecky’s Bar, Club and Lounge Guide and, more recently, with www.sheckys.com, 777-BARS will be a staple.
...Interior rhyme is interesting and all, but sometimes what you need from rap music is good A-A verse. That’s what you’ll find at Irving Plaza (17 Irving Pl. at 15th St., 777-6800) this Friday at 9 as S.O.B.’s sponsors The Revolution Is Hiphop, a night of 80s hiphop with non-dead icons Slick Rick, Dougie Fresh, Kurtis Blow and your host, KRS-One. The artists are subject to change, which means not all of them will show up, but it’s still a night of music and dancing worth $35 for all the old freaks you’ll see.
I got the chance to talk with one of them, the Kangol Kid of UTFO. If you don’t remember him or his group, you should remember his song: "Roxanne, Roxanne," the seminal rap hit of 1984. It was an hilarious paean to a girl who refused the charms of the UTFO crew, with lyrics like: "’Cause I’m Kangol, Mr. Sophisticata/As far as I’m concerned ain’t nobody greater/From beginning to end, end to beginning/I never lose because I’m all about winning."
Yeah. Put it in interior rhyme and have a white guy do it; you might end up on the Grammys with Elton John. "Roxanne" spawned around 30 "answer songs" from various artists, as well as "Roxanne Part 2," "The Real Roxanne" and "Calling Her a Crab," the angry version where UTFO railed: "Roxanne when I see your nasty face it makes me sick/So if I see you onstage, I’ma hit you with a brick."
The Kangol Kid had this to say: "There are lots of people in Middle America who think ‘Roxanne’ is the first rap record, because it’s the first one they heard. It’s one of the biggest rap records in history! And the record company claims it didn’t even go gold, because the fans couldn’t tell which version was the real version.
"But it’s no beef. It’s all love; it’s crazy love. We opened doors for people. Just like Dr. J opened the doors but he didn’t see the Michael Jordan check, UTFO opened doors for the white kids who kept our records hidden in their house."
...At Roseland this Monday is Weezer, headlining the Yahoo! Outloud tour. Tickets aren’t available, and they haven’t been for weeks, but you can try your luck with scalpers on Broadway if you’re desperate to hear skinny white guys sing about love. The fact that Weezer sold out Roseland so fast is a testament not only to the band, which has incredible resonance among a 10-year swath of nerds, but also to the power dotcoms wield in the live music business. The Outloud tour was conceived and marketed exclusively by Yahoo!; the Get Up Kids were picked as the opening band through a vote on Weezer’s website, and 90 percent of tickets were sold online. Napster and MP3.com have run similarly successful tours; it seems like Internet companies are more willing than some record labels to put bands on the road. Guarantee in the next few years you’ll see forgotten artists like Fiona Apple and Guns N’ Roses touring under a big, friendly Amazon banner.
...The New York Underground Film Festival gets under way next week, but for those who can’t wait, this Friday we get a pre-festival party in Williamsburg. Over at Galapagos (70 N. 6th St., betw. Kent & Wythe Aves., 718-782-5188), Latvian-American punk act Macitajs on Acid will play in the concrete back room, which rocks when it has enough people to absorb the sound.
Macitajs on Acid bill themselves as the world’s only Latvian-American punk band; they sing in Latvian and spend time in the West Virginia-size nation, which lies on the Baltic Sea and is accessible from Sweden by ferry. I spoke with drummer and singer Laris Kreslins about music in this backwater peasant country.
"Regular radio is all Euro-disco. A lot of it is preformatted; it selects the songs automatically from a giant database, like the same 10 songs every day. I think a lot of American radio is like that too. Fortunately there are socialist musical collectives. We had a lot of friends in this organization called ‘Tornis’; basically it was a recording studio in this water tower, and if you practiced there, you had to help record the bands. It turned into a pretty awesome cooperative. The water tower itself provided giant reverb; you could put a mic down the stairs and the whole thing would shake."
Macitajs on Acid do melodic punk with weird samples thrown in, and vocals that are almost English, but not quite (that’s how Latvian sounds). It’s good stuff. Also at Galapagos on Friday are the Boston band Neptune and "ambient projections" by KinoSonik. 7 p.m.
