Rock-a-Ways Beach – The sun begins to set on the crusted rim of Brooklyn and the gutter boys and girls gather around a stage layered in domesticated tools of audio experimentation. Like an invasive scare about to open and leak southern melodies along the sun stained faded boardwalk, a crowd of young people dressed in truck driver swag meets Hawaii Five- Oh fashion have wondered from the nuclear blue ocean, and over the boardwalk, recognizing a stir that speaks to their mixture of savage and sexual nature. A tribe with no ranks but with free living idols has gathered in a nook of the boardwalk, not blocked off by ropes or chains but sequestered by the string of stairs of those who don't stop, to see and hear Nashville's JEFF the Brotherhood. But this tribe does not share a common ideal or tattoo or habit for vice (most of us have a few of our own and we don't like to share), only a common lust for a sound to accompany their lives as individuals trying to make this industrial world a little more like the Tropics As the lines for booze and food rap around the outer edges and the oval crowd and the salt and sun sticks red to the slurred movements, giving red necks to northern articulations, a hush falls off the ocean and unto the crowd. One man stands apart from the rest. From yards below he walks out of the ocean like a Red Octopus, a guitar attached to his chest, and a look of blitzed concentration in his eyes, ready to further feed after the show on the carcass that stained his trunks. The crowd parts as he climbs onto stage and leaves his eight legs behind . Besides for being the center of attention on stage, the brothers are easy to spot out among the crowd. They don't seem to know a thing about New York fashion but in swimsuits and no shirts they are the most fashionable of them all. As the first song begins, a fast paced fifties era grunge tune that Buddy Holiday would enjoy getting stoned to, the beer lines empty and all eyes are on the duo.
"The next forty minutes were physical proof that southern music belongs everywhere under the sun." one stranger said into his suds. As the light eventually retreated toward the horizon, the brothers finish up their set, and the crowd begins to clear, and as from the nowhere from that they came, they vanish into the night, toward Brooklyn hideouts to "rest" before making the trip back home toward the poetic hills of Tennessee.
The boys will be playing at the Exit in in Nashville, TN, on August 17th before starting a tour of the East Coast. If you are able to experience JEFF the Brotherhood, get your ass to a show and instead of pregaming it at home, stuff your back pockets with all the fixing, because from what i can tell they play when they want and that is at every chance they can get.
