The Mercury Lounge (Venue Partner)
217 E Houston St
212.260.4700
This event has passed.
- When
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Saturday Aug 22, 2009 (8pm)
- Where
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Directions: F, JMZ at Essex and Delancey or F, V at 2nd Ave
- Price
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$10 adv / $12 dos
- Links
That said, here, in a nutshell, is the story as most would agree it took place:
Four young noblemen met one sunny spring day in 1730, or thereabouts — accounts differ as to the actual location, at a chamber music concert by the shores of a beautiful lake or river or perhaps by the seaside? and being bored, impatient and given to the Dionysian antics and diversions of youth, decided to commission their artificers to make for them ingenious contraptions that would produce musical sounds amplified, as it were, by the application of the then-new technology of steam power, combined with advances in mechanical engineering such as the invention of the vacuum chamber and the flush toilet, the several felicitous discoveries in the field of chemistry and alchemy that provided a grateful humanity with ether, laudanum and the various modern alcoholic distillations, as well as the discovery of electricity with its sad train of attendant disasters, and that of gravity itself, which, while never previously identified as a principle of the physical sciences, had in fact been utilized from time immemorial, and observed by Archimedes himself, who shrewdly noted that a fall from a great height was very often fatal.
The result, which at the time was truly — and I use the word with the greatest circumspection — revolutionary, was an entirely new species of music: no less, in fact, than the very birth of Rocque and Roll.
While their contemporaries looked with scorn upon the "infernal racket" produced by the Duc d'Istortion (lead guitar, mezzo soprano), Count Bassie (bass guitar, castrato), Jackie Kickassis (drums) and the Lord Bendover (guitar, basso castrato), time has proved the still-vibrant and irrepressibly vital Upper Crust entirely and triumphantly right and their critics, never well favored in the best of times, completely and quite idiotically wrong.
The Upper Crust have thus far, in the modern age, released four recordings, "Let Them Eat Rock", "The Decline and Fall of the Upper Crust", "Once More Into the Breeches", and "Entitled" — a catalogue that exemplifies their quest for perfection in the field of Rocque and their quite natural preoccupation with the travails of a life of privilege and the many misunderstandings — at times humorous, at times tragic, but always infuriating — that invariably accompany it.
Many have reveled in the passionate, furious and yet strangely tender caress their music bestows upon the most intimate fibres of their listeners' beings, likening it to the sensation experienced by a female cat when mounted by the male; a utterly absorbing experience wherein pure poetry lends its gentle seductions to the stirring, barbed rhythms of the Rocque genre, causing the listener to shriek with what we may well suppose to be delight.
But we have gone on at perhaps too great length, and rather than further try your patience, gentle reader, we herewith formally invite you to join the legions of the Upper Crust's admirers and discover for yourselves the truth of the above.
Your Devoted Friend in Rocque,
Count Frederick of Hollywood
