Heaven Knows They Do a Good Smiths Impression
Photos by Alexis Maindrault
Words by Stephanie R. Myers
Flattery, it’s been said, will get you everywhere. And if — to conjure up another adage — imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, Sons and Heirs are geared up to, well, go everywhere.
The group, which has set out to recreate the experience of seeing the The Smiths play in their ’80s heyday, bills themselves as a “tribute band” as opposed to a cover band. One would be forgiven for not initially knowing the difference, but after seeing Sons and Heirs take the stage, it’d immediately become clear. Within their tribute act, which stopped by the Bell House in Brooklyn on Saturday night, no detail is spared. How close to reality did they really come? Lead singer Ronnissey, who plays the role of goth’s fearless leader Morrissey, throws gladiolas into the crowd from his perch onstage, just like Moz himself used to. The garb worn onstage is down-to-minutiae period costumery. But if you’re still not yet convinced, try this on for size — former Smiths bassist Andy Rourke, DJ’ing on the bill for the night, even came onstage to join the band for a song (much to the utter shock and delight of the crowd). Not many tribute acts of any ilk can claim the blessing (or involvement) of actual members.
If it’s not yet apparent, seeing Sons and Heirs play is watching pure theater — good theater. Certainly, there are many impressionists and/or impersonators in the rock world, but if you’re going to stand out to Smiths fans — some of the most rabid devotees on the planet — you had better be good. Thankfully, Sons and Heirs don’t have a problem in this department. If New York audiences get the occasional bad rap of being passionless, you’d never know it from the crowd response to the band. From the constant dancing and lyric-shouting going on, you would have been forgiven for confusing the Bell House with a particularly raucous karaoke bar.
In an era where commentary on art is itself art, the Sons and Heirs truly manage to epitomize the concept.
Sons and Heirs throw down like it’s 1985 (above) before original Smiths bassist Andy Rourke joins the tributeers onstage (below).
When South Williamsburg was “A Neighborhood of Struggle”
Note: The documentary Los Sures, released in 1984 by WNET and Terra Productions with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is not available for online viewing or outside of limited view-only locations in New York City, including New York University’s Avery Fisher Center. Thus, all photos are physical screenshots, and quality is accordingly poor.
by Ben Fuchs
A quarter-century ago, several years after New York City’s flirtation with bankruptcy and societal collapse but well before Giuliani and broken windows, Abner Louima and the jailhouse broomstick, the Hipster Grifter and Sunday brunch on Bedford, south Williamsburg was a ghetto. Forget the abandoned factories and blown-out industrial blocks that begat the schizophrenic skyline of Williamsburg’s modern-day waterfront. Long before developers lampooned city zoning regulations in drowning the northern reaches of the neighborhood in condo towers — many now paralyzed as steel skeletons, rusting in the subprime hangover — the tenements of “Los Sures” served as the heaving, pulsing epicenter of the area’s residential core.
Labeled “the poorest section of New York City” by Diego Echeverria in his 1984 documentary Los Sures, south Williamsburg became the first mainland destination for many Puerto Ricans during the 1960s and 1970s. The film, available for public viewing upon request at NYU’s Avery Fisher Center, profiles five residents of Los Sures — five people whose places in life, while highly divergent in fact and form, are similar in that each arrived there through desperation born of abject poverty. There’s Tito, for one: With a mother, wife and two young children depending on him for financial support, Tito spends his waking hours smoking pot and masterminding myriad petty criminal endeavors. Stoic and centered beyond his 20 years, he appears committed to a life of hustling. “I used to work,” he states. “I was proud…but like I say, eh, if you can (get) faster money out in the street, I’ll stay in the street and make a faster buck, as long as I don’t get locked up, you know, and be a sucker.”
With a friend in tow, Tito takes the filmmakers along as he dives into one of the cornerstones of his considerable portfolio — chopping a stolen car on the fly. Future self-styled repo men of the world, take note (and remember to account for inflation): “We drive (the recently-jacked car) over here in the garage, take everything out right there, and (be) careful, having guys looking out left and right,” Tito explains, describing the process in the matter-of-fact tone of an insurance salesman. “Then we’ll get (to haggling) on the prices: Here, gimme 50 (dollars) for that. Gimme 200 for four brand-new tires. Gimme 15 for the battery. The radio go for 30, with speakers. The interior go for 175. Depends — if it got t-tops, 200 dollars. You want the roof? We’ll cut it off, give us 100 and it’s yours. Cars bring you money, man. It’s a lot of people out there with cars. It’s a lotta cars in the world. Yep.”
Tito (above, at left) and a friend chopping a stolen car, and at home with his wife and children (below).
Among Tito’s 20,000-odd, largely-Latino neighbors is Evelyn, who shares Tito’s embrace of self-sufficiency, if not his interpretation of morality. Vaguely described as an employee for a local women’s nonprofit, Evelyn effectively serves as a one-woman, mobile triage center, coordinating logistics for local families in need (helping one family find temporary shelter, for example, after a fire races through their run-down apartment building). The only subject with any apparent grasp of the city’s municipal structure and bureaucratic shortcomings — as well as the only one, in fact, with a reliable job — Evelyn admonishes the city for its perceived indifference toward the neighborhood’s plight: “You stay with your family, you’re safe. You stay with the system, you’re fucked. There’s no two ways about it.” At the same time, though, she harshly criticizes her own community for failing to police itself as the crack epidemic reaches Los Sures and alters the character of entire buildings and blocks.
“You have to say excuse me to the junkies so you can walk out of your own door,” Evelyn complains, adding that the community’s inaction equates to acceptance in the eyes of the impressionable. “All the little ones are seeing (that this) is easy money…it’s change, and it’s sad. Because it was a joy once. There was a sadness, but there was a joy. There’s no joy anymore. There’s only a lot of pain.”
Not everyone interviewed in Los Sures shares Evelyn’s absolute sense of despair: Marta, a single mother to five children from three different men, espouses the virtues of living in a close-knit community, a place where she’s spent years with virtually every soul in a five-block radius. “I know this neighborhood. I know the people. I know I could walk around; I know I could ask. I know that, to an extent, I’m safe here. I could say I’m among friends, y’know? I don’t find the need to leave Williamsburg to move to another area so that I can solve my problems. I’m gonna deal with my problems here.” She soon admits, however, that she’s got no choice in the matter — conceding that, in effect, her earlier bravado merely masks the fact that she feels trapped in Los Sures: “When you live in an area like this all your life, and this is all you know, how do you get out of it?”
In employing a spectrum of perspectives to bring the full extent of the area’s deprivation into focus, Echeverria also spends time with Cuso, a 43-year-old general contractor who struggles at times to break even on jobs amid fierce bidding wars. Installing a floor’s worth of windows in a tenement fronting Sternberg Park (just across the street from present-day Dunce Cap headquarters), Cuso calls Los Sures “a neighborhood of struggle. We’ve been struggling since we were kids. If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle. You’re always fighting. You gotta fight.”
For Ana Maria, who reared seven children in Puerto Rico before bringing the whole clutch to south Williamsburg, her battle was with one of her sons’ attraction to gangs. Dance competitions among neighborhood b-boy crews became more intense, eventually leading to physical confrontation, retaliatory violence and, ultimately, the calcification of these groups as rival street gangs.
“People would call me saying, ‘Ana, they are going to shoot your son,” says Ana Maria in her native Spanish. “And I would drag him away from the sticks and the guns. All this I fought alone.”
As for Tito, the small-time street hustler, he arguably lost his fight, winding up in cuffs and prison blues as the film’s credits roll. With his brother already gone — shot and killed at the corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets years earlier — Tito says he’s resigned to the fact that, however unlikely in a neighborhood full of lifelong acquaintances, he is alone.
“Nobody is my friend no more,” he says. “I just hang out with a couple of guys…and that’s it. I can’t call nobody my friend no more…it’s hard, bro. And it gets harder every day.”
The corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets, 1984 (above); Tito in the kitchen with his family (below).
Cuso, (above, at left) and one of his workers in Sternberg Park after finishing a job near the present-day headquarters of Dunce Cap Quarterly.
Tito in his new confines (above); looking south through the neighborhood toward Broadway and the elevated J/M/Z subway line (below).
