One Thing You Don't Know About Lord of the Rings; Scarecrow Collection and Wannabe Wetlands; No Matter What You Call It, Goth Lives; 200 Gay Men Sing in Carnegie Hall; One Drag Queen Spits Bile

Realize also that this movie's soundtrack features one of today's hottest female artists, a woman whose odd clothes and devotion to trees have not kept her from tearing up the pop charts: Enya, the Celtic queen of new age. She releases one album every five years and outsells just about everybody on the planet. Her latest, A Day Without Rain, has moved seven million copies worldwide and refuses to leave the Billboard 200; it currently sits at #7 after scoring a 22-percent sales boost last week.

What is the deal, people? Are there hushed moments at office water coolers across America?"Hey, have you heard that new Enya album?"?followed by unauthorized uses of CDNOW on company computers? I don't mention this for any particular reason; it's just weird, and I figured by now you'd want to hear something that you hadn't heard about Lord of the Rings. The two Enya songs on the LOTR soundtrack are "Anrion (I Desire)" and "May It Be."

...Since Enya's near the top of the charts, it can only be Christmas in New York, and, as usual, most locals are opting to see the big movie and order Chinese food and not do a damn thing else. (This is a Jewish tradition that's catching on.) There are a some worthwhile events to ferry yourself to, though, if you can make it out, starting with Wednesday's Scarecrow Collection show at Tobacco Road.

Scarecrow Collection is a jam band from New Jersey. They have real chops and a real future as long as they stay together; they recently replaced their bassist, but the core of the group?guitarists Gerard Fee and Nick Sette and mandolin player Rob Csapo?remains intact. Anytime and anywhere that these three play, they work out 10-minute improvisational wonders that scruffy followers capture on tape, hand-label and sell for $5. I caught up with soft-spoken Nick Sette to find out where Scarecrow Collection have been the past few months and where they're going.

"Things have been different since September. We played at Bitter End [174 Bleecker St., betw. Thompson St. & La Guardia Pl., 673-7030] and it was just weird...but we're doing all right. It's coming together one head at a time. We're playing with two other bands on Wednesday that are kind of getting their act together too."

Those would be local groups Mindface ("They do some Zappa tunes," says Nick) and Dante's Lament ("They're from Staten Island or Long Island or some...island"), both competent practitioners of jam music. Dante's Lament will go on at 9 p.m., Mindface at 10; Scarecrow Collection will take the stage around 11:30 and "do one really long set," says Nick. "We'll see what happens. We don't have a setlist, but who the hell knows what's going to happen in the middle of your set anyway, you know?"

Tobacco Road (355 W. 41st St., betw. 8th & 9th Aves., 947-1188), meanwhile, is a bar with a very impressive stage and sound system hidden in back. The owners seem desperate for Wetlands' old crowd, but they refuse to take up Wetlands' old door policy, the one that let you in as long as you looked 13. What they end up with is Wetlands' old crowd, as in all the grizzled hippies without the nubile hippie-ravers. However, the place wins big points for having $5 pizzas at the bar. These aren't chintzy Pizza Hut personal pies either; we are talking six slices of real, oven-baked Elios-type scrumptiousness. "That's awesome, they ought to advertise that," says Nick.

Squarely opposite jam in the musical color wheel is goth/industrial dance; that's around this Christmas too. AlbionBatcave, the party promo company that formed when Albion merged with Batcave (whoa), hosts a get-together this Saturday at Downtime (251 W. 30th St., betw. 7th & 8th Aves., 695-2747) that is 18+ with two floors of DJ entertainment and live music.

The "live music" seems a little contrived, since bands like Matrix do their best to create the same mechanical beats DJs worship, but AlbionBatcave organizer Hal says that a live act is always good for business. "Over at Limelight [47 W. 20th St. at 6th Ave., 807-7059], we were doing bands. It was a great place for bands, like Kittie and V&V Nation... Without the live acts you just can't get enough people."

The bands at AlbionBatcave's Christmas Party (no one just calls it "Albion" or "Batcave," for fear of offending the other part of the conglomerate) are EBE (9 p.m.), Matrix (10) and GASR (11). The DJs are Ian Fford (upstairs), Patrick (upstairs) and Hellraver (downstairs). The crowd, although open to under-21-ers, will not be saturated with high school kids, according to Hal.

"I'd say about 10 percent of the people are under 21. One thing that really surprises us is how regular our crowd is; they are constantly, you know, the same people come back, which is rather nice for us so our numbers don't fluctuate too badly." Hal is English. "The only thing probably that will happen to goth is it will change a little bit. Obviously the industrial-techno thing has somewhat taken over a bit. Musically, there are fewer goth bands out there now and the goth bands that are there are just the real old-time official ones."

So there you go. Goth, whether under its official title or billed as "industrial dance," stays strong. We'll check in on it next year. The AlbionBatcave party starts at 8:30 p.m. this Saturday; admission is $15.

...If you don't like jam or goth, try Holiday Flourish!, 2001's set of multicultural Christmas music from the New York City Gay Men's Chorus. The Gay Men's Chorus has 200 real gay men in it and has been around for an amazing 22 years; it is one of the largest gay choruses in the nation, of which there are many (including one in Texas called "Turtle Creek Chorale"). Holiday Flourish! opens at Carnegie Hall (W. 57th St. at 7th Ave., 247-7800) this Thursday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $20-$75.

Finally, if you're just pissed off about Christmas altogether, head to Fez to get offended, excoriated and taken advantage of by Jackie Beat, one of many NYC drag queens putting on shows this holiday season. Jackie's show is called Merry F***ing Christmas; in it, she sings 13 parody songs like "How the Bitch Stole Christmas" and "I'm Afraid Now to Fly" (patterned after R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly"). She claims, however, that music isn't the focus of her show.

"The focus is me."

Jackie is also very specific about the sort of people she wants at her show.

"People with $15... I don't even see people in the audience, I just see $15 sitting in each chair. I'm like a cartoon with the dollar signs in my eyes."

Merry F***ing Christmas plays at Fez (380 Lafayette St. at Great Jones St., aka 3rd St., 533-2680) Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at midnight and Sunday at 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Any special messages, Jackie, for the New York public?

"Bring $15.