Jokingly, but with serious undertones, I said, if you cut the curls you're out of the band. He told me, he wanted to move in with me and he wanted to cut the curls. The one point he was going to cut the curls. And this is like how I proceeded from that point on. So I just like put chords like directly to the vocal line.
It looks like the sun came down to earth. So I was like, OK, that's the first verse. So he's like, OK, here's the first verse. Welcome to the Millennium was the first song that we ever wrote together. I said, sing some of those lines to me there. And I wanted to make it as easy as I could on myself. Yes, I'll definitely write some music with you. That's when I said, I was like, this is the moment. And I kept putting him off and putting him off. I'm definitely addicted to the television and I need to do something about it.Īnd he had been pestering me to write music with him. All right, all right, I've got to admit it. I said, if I didn't have a TV, would you be coming over here? Is it my friendship that you're totally looking for or are you looking to watch some tube here. Because he was coming around every day for no less than six hours a day and watching TV. But what intrigued him the most, was something found in about just any den in the US. If he'd been searching for the polar opposite of his Hasidic life, he couldn't have done better. Into this chaos walked Chaim wearing a buttoned up black suit and a rabbinical beard. Rock and roll manager named Mary Mayhem who dealt cocaine from her purse was a regular. People's with video cameras came and went. In any given moment, musicians with names like Trance Pop Loops or Saturn Missile could be jamming on the couch. The Vic Thrill's Salon is sort of a thrift store version of Andy Warhol's factory.
Sci-fi pop with lots of hooks, deadpan humor. And if I can editorialize for a moment, it's really superb, one of the best albums of 2003. It's here that Vic Thrill's musical debut, CE-5 was recorded. The here that Billy's talking about is a converted industrial garage, which served as the apartment, recording studio, prop warehouse, and party headquarters for Billy and a group of his friends. And he tells the story of one of those occasions. David Segal is a staff writer and the former rock critic at the Washington Post. They hardly even acknowledge each other except on very rare occasions. These two Williamsburgs don't interact much. All the men wear identical black suits, white shirts, black hats, and they have that hair thing, you may have noticed, something called payes, the long curls that fall near their sideburns down their face in front of the ears. The women all wear long dresses, most of them wear wigs. These are the religious Jews who shun just about everything modern. You've probably at least seen pictures of the Hasids at one point or another. And then there's Hasidic Williamsburg, which is pretty much stuck in the 19th century. There's hipster Williamsburg, which is filled with galleries, and studios, and restaurants, and night spots, and lots of aspiring artists and musicians. This story takes place in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where different worlds collide, or at least wearily orbit around each other. Act One, That's Funny, You Don't Look Jewish.