An exclusive interview with the founder of Antifolk

This is the first in what I hope will become a series of MOG-only feature interviews. The plan is to spotlight artists with interesting stories and interesting work...without having to clear things with editors. Let me know what you think. This first one features Lach, the Antifolk renaissance man who has blessed the careers of a whole generation of antifolk artists, run a series of clubs and performance spaces and put out five eccentric and wonderful albums, the latest of which The Calm Before comes out next month on Fortitude Records. Okay, enough blabbering, here's the pieceWhat the heck is Antifolk anyway? What sort of aesthetic could encompass Beck, Jaymay, Langhorn Slim, Hammell on Trial and Kimya Dawson? Ask most of these artists what Antifolk means, and you’ll get a long pause. Then perhaps, after some thought, they will venture, “It means that you play at the Sidewalk Café.” That’s the current headquarters for the scene’s common denominator, an elusive artist, nightclub impresario and label head named Lach. Since the early 1980s, Lach has gathered and promoted artists under the Antifolk name. His Antihoot, held every Monday night at the Sidewalk Café in the Lower East Side, draws upwards of one hundred artists, and an equal amount of spectators, per session. Not surprisingly, Lach himself has no difficulty defining Antifolk. “Antifolk is to folk what punk was to rock and roll,” he says, in a recent phone interview. “What I mean by that is, both genres had gotten stale and commercialized and overblown and were no longer telling the truth. The subgenres came in to explode that myth, to say that the emperor’s new clothes didn’t exist.” He adds that many of the early Antifolk players were as much influenced by British punk as American traditional music. “Some people call it punk on acoustic guitars, but I think it’s more than that,” he says.A former child prodigy reared on classical music, Lach discovered British punk via the news magazine show 60 Minutes, and became enamored of its brash energy. Working backwards, he discovered the Beatles and 1960s folk artists like Dylan and Phil Ochs. But when he began to visit and play at the clubs that had given Dylan his start, he found them hidebound, conservative and not at all receptive to his abrasive, urban music. Even now, he has very little good to say about commercial folk music. “Folk as it became known in the early 1960s was basically just a bunch of college white kids playing their diary entries to three slow chords on an acoustic guitar,” he state. “I have no time or patience for it.”Tossed out of the mainstream clubs in Greenwich Village, Lach started his own scene in his Lower East Side loft, at an after hours club he called The Fort. “The Lower East Side was much different than it is today. It was a difficult place to get to, and it was very dangerous, which was why rents were cheap,” he remembers. “You had to really love this art and music and philosophy that we were involved in to come. Basically, you had to have been kicked out of everywhere else. We were your last hope. We were like the island of misfit toys.”The Fort got shut down eventually, and Lach took his Antifolk aesthetic to other venues, the Chameleon where a young Beck honed his craft, Sophie’s Bar where Michelle Shocked made early appearances and, finally, about 15 years ago, the Sidewalk Café. “Since then, the Sidewalk Café has been the center of the scene in the way that, I guess, CBs was the center of punk or The Cavern was the center of Mersey Beat,” says Lach. But in addition to providing a venue for several waves of Antifolk musicians, Lach has also pursued his own music, releasing five critically-acclaimed albums. His first, The Contender came out in 1990 on a label run by Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg. The label went bankrupt almost immediately after the record came out, and Lach found himself without marketing or tour support. The album dropped from sight (it is still out of print), and Lach swore off the commercial side of the music business forever. He moved to San Francisco, working construction and listening to Led Zeppelin. He played his guitar, but only for himself. Then he became a fan of a local radio show and, on a whim, sent a demo tape of a song he’d written about Hillary Clinton into the DJ. “A friend of mine had given me a four-track and I wrote this song called ‘The Hillary Clinton Song’ and I recorded it on a four-track using pots and pans for drums and stuff, and the next thing I knew, they started playing it on the show,” he says. The song became a surprise hit, and Lach was suddenly fielding offers for its release. “So the next thing I knew I was sort of back in the music business,” he says. He started an antifolk open mic at a local coffee shop and began playing shows again. A few years later, he returned to NYC and revived the concept of the Fort. Seven years separated Lach’s first album and his second Blang, and he says he might not have recorded again at all, except for the intervention of a close friend. “We were going out for lunch, and this friend said that we had to stop by the studio, because he had to pick up some stuff,” Lach explained. “So we stopped by the studio and then, the engineer was saying how they had a client who cancelled on them, and they had this new equipment they had to test and there was no one to test it. And Robert was like, ‘Well, Lach is a musician. Maybe he could play some songs.’” Lach played, not knowing that it was all a set up. There was no cancelled client, no new equipment, and left the studio with a tape. Later that night, he ran into the Bongos’ Richard Barone at his club and gave him a copy. Barone offered to produce the record, which was released on Lach's own Fortitude label. Billboard called Blang a wholly enjoyable voyage through a strange and brilliant musical mind,” while Splendid (my old stomping ground) described it as “a work of impeccable antifolk craftsmanship.” The follow-up Kids Fly Free, also drew raves, including TimeOut New York’s observation that “Lach is so what the East Village used to be all about. He’s a gruff-and-tough punk turned poet with a heart o’ gold, singing jangly, funny pop punk.” The record, through, was hampered by bad timing. Because it was released on September 11, 2001, there was no tour to support it, and even in New York, few shows to promote the songs. Two years later came Today , and in March 2008, Lach will release his fifth and latest record The Calm Before.Lach says that The Calm Before is the album where he finally realizes the Antifolk ideal of all acoustic instrumentation. The liner notes observe that no electric guitars, synthesizers, samples, loops or pitch correctors were used in its recording. His previous albums fed acoustic guitar sounds through pedals and amps, but this one is all mic’d, just the sound of real people playing real instruments. Lach says that he sees The Calm Before as the start of a new phase in his artistic journey, perhaps a second trilogy to set alongside his first three albums. Lach’s band on this album includes drummer Billy Ficca, who best known for his work with Television and bass player Matt Visceglia who has played with Suzanne Vega for decades. Lydia Ooghe of the Antifolk duo the Analogues steps in for vocals on three of the songs (Richard Barone and Chris Baron of the Spin Doctors also step in for backup vocals), and Tony Maimone, the bass player for Pere Ubu, served as the recording engineer. The songs from The Calm Before are culled from material Lach has written over many years. The oldest tune on the disc, “Positions of Power,” is, he says, a bit of homage to Phil Ochs, as well as the 19th century utopian novel Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. And though Ochs is known for incorporating topical situations and political issues into his work, Lach says that his own song is more general. “The song is sort of saying it doesn’t matter what your politics are. There will always be a struggle to get at the seat at the top,” he says. “You’re trying to unseat the person who’s in the seat at the top and then when you get the seat at the top, you become just as much of a bastard as the people who were there before.”But the best song on the album may well be “George at Coney” a happy-go-lucky tune that Lach wrote during the early hours of the morning one Monday, at the tail end of one of his Antihoot gatherings. “I traditionally play a set after everyone else has played. I play a three in the morning set to whoever’s left,” he says. For the first half hour, he performs songs from his repertoire, and then, like an improv comedian he asks for subjects from the audience and constructs a song around these topics. Lach is a little hazy on what happened this particular night. Either someone yelled “George Harrison” or someone shouted “Coney Island” or, perhaps, two people piped up with both at the same time. In any case, Lach began improvising a song about a fictional side trip that Harrison might have made during the 1964 Beatles invasion, ending up on the beach at Coney Island, playing his guitar. He is astonished when I ask him who the song is about, because he has littered the lyrics with clues – black Beatle boots, George’s love for jelly beans and, of course, the name. The album The Calm Before comes out March 22nd on Lach’s own label, Fortified Records. He is celebrating its release with not one but two CD release parties on that evening. The plan is to play a 7:30 set at Philadelphia’s Tin Angel, then drive like a madman to NYC for an 11:00 show at the Sidewalk Café. “I can do it,” he says impishly. “I ain’t scared.”