Dear Holder of the Golden Ticket,

Below is an airtight case for why I am deserving of your ticket. But since the Felice Brothers are fairly awesome, and the accompanying demand undoubtedly pretty high, you've probably gotten a lot of these, so I'll do you the favor of a condensed version, in case you don't have time to read the whole thing. Basically, if you don't want me to suffer a fate of extreme envy, coitus interruptus, boredom, blind masturbation, and general dejectedness, you'd be doing the right thing by hooking me up with that ticket.

Read on for more details and answers to your specific questions...

About me: I was born a poor black child...

No, not really. I'm a boring Caucasian, though I've passed for Peruvian, Egyptian, and even, somehow, Cambodian. I live in DC, edit a newspaper, and sometimes draw archetypal sketches while on drugs. I enjoy playing music, listening to music, feeling music, and moving to music, but I hate tasting music. (See below for more on my culinary preferences.)

I used to get a lot of free tickets to shows when I lived with the arts editor of the City Paper. Now I get my tickets through essay contests, mostly.

Why I like the Felice Brothers: Cause they enhance sexual performance

It was a dark and stormy night — dark because all nights are, and stormy because I was in Berlin, where it rained nearly every day during my two-month visit. I was in my bedroom with a girl I'd been seeing. We'd introduced each other to a fair amount of music: I'd shared a lot of alt-country with her, since the genre hasn't really made inroads into Germany yet; she shared some crappy Europop with me, as well as the Dylan album "Planet Waves." But I'd made the mistake of telling her that I'd recorded some songs with a few friends in their basement, and so of course she wanted to hear them. At this point, we were partially undressed, and I had some sense of the impending danger, but I went ahead and double-clicked the track at the top of the iTunes playlist with a few of our songs.

After about three seconds of listening, the disrobing resumed, and then the lovemaking commenced. It was the first time, to the best of my recollection, that I'd boned to the sound of my own voice/guitar-playing/harp-blowing/drumming. And it was very, very distracting. I tried hard to keep my mind on the task at hand, but I kept noticing mistakes we'd made and nice little guitar fills by my friend.... I could feel that I was overcompensating by wearing a look of intense (probably comical) concentration on my face. Eventually, when the music got around to Wilco's "Via Chicago," and everyone starting pounding his instrument at random during that weird entropy section, I lost it completely and had to give up.

BUT: I recall very clearly that the track during which I performed best was "Frankie's Gun!" It's attached for your listening pleasure. Please note that the recording quality is poor, and that I'm playing drums, which I do not actually play.

Why I deserve the ticket: Cause all the cool kids have 'em

So, that track I gave you? All the other guys playing on it are going to the show. Seriously. I don't know how I missed out. But don't make me sit at home alone on Friday night, listening to "Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1," masturbating in the dark, and waiting for the tears to come.

My favorite food: Spaghetti-Eis

My dad's from Munich, and when I was a kid, we went there most summers to visit my grandparents. There was this cafe called Cafe Venezia (now closed) where my brother and I loved to hang out. Every time, we'd order Spaghetti-Eis, which translates roughly to spaghetti ice cream. They'd squeeze vanilla ice cream through a spaghetti maker and then top it with red fruit sauce and white chocolate shavings. I'd probably find it disgusting now, but back then it seemed pretty awesome.

If I could meet anyone in the world, it would be: YOU

On Friday night, ticket in hand. Pretty please with some red fruit sauce and white chocolate shavings on top?

Morning, folks!

The mysterious purveyor of the Felice Brothers golden-ticket essay contest named a winner Friday. I’ll share the winning essay here later today, but here’s a taste of the author’s pathos at work:

I don't know how I missed out. But don't make me sit at home alone on Friday night, listening to Adventures of the Felice Brothers Vol. 1, masturbating in the dark, and waiting for the tears to come.

As it turned out there were no real winners at the sold-out show at the Rock & Roll Hotel that night. The gig started out promising before someone in the front row teased the musicians that their beloved Yankees were about to be eliminated from the playoffs. The rest of the concert had a spiteful air; the band, visibly pissed, played a lot of uncharismatic new material and never got in sync with the audience. Kudos to the Felice Brothers for being unafraid of veering from their gothic folk-rock wheel house, but this was clearly not their night.

Comedian Louis C.K., by contrast, managed to give a packed Warner Theater an hour and sixteen minutes of new material without losing anyone for a second.

Anyway:

The discordant guitaring of D.C.’s ‘90s hardcore punk scene is apparently not the District’s only six-string legacy; turns out the DMV is also something of a classical-guitar mecca, reports WaPo. Writer Anne Midgette traces the lineage back to Greek immigrant Sophocles Papas, who built the scene back in the ‘20s. Tally another point for the Greeks in the canon of D.C. music—you’ll recall it was another Greek, John “Johnny Boy” Katsouros, who launched erstwhile Washington R&B legend Terry Huff back in the early ‘60s.

Arena Stage opened in its new home. It tweeted all the relevant coverage.

Finally, New York magazine has an article about the death of early 21-century hipsterism—a condensed version of an investigation by the literary journal n+1. The music piece figures most prominently in what the author calls the “Hipster Primitive moment,” when we all grew beards, donned flannel, and pretended the Industrial Revolution never happened. From the article:

Music led the artistry of this phase... Here are the names of some significant bands, post-2004: Grizzly Bear, Neon Indian, Deerhunter, Fleet Foxes, Department of Eagles, Wolf Parade, Band of Horses, and, most centrally, Animal Collective. (On the electronic-primitive side, LCD Soundsystem.) Listeners heard animal sounds and lovely Beach Boys–style harmonies; lyrics and videos pointed to rural redoubts, on wild beaches and in forests; life transpired in some more loving, spacious, and manageable future, possibly of a Day-Glo or hallucinatory brightness.

The n+1 book version, by the way, has contributions by City Paper columnist Moe Tkacik, who, speaking at a Symposium, blamed neo-hipsterism on the era’s big movers: the Internet—for breaking down the barriers to subculture—and China, for enabling the sort of credit flow that would let American Apparel open 200 stores in two years. (She does not venture to explain where the Hipster-primitive animal fetish came from.)

Me? I blame the Internet for how little I am being paid to write this.

Bye!

It was a good year to be young and bearded. A good decade, really. The aughts kicked off with the release of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, whose soundtrack opened the eyes of at least one generation to the pleasures of underproduced plucking and simple melodies; and ended with three harbingers of the so-called "indie folk" genre joining hands beneath the unqualified Monsters of Folk moniker, using half-century-old gear to produce a beautiful mess of surf pop, spaghetti westerns, and ethereal lullabies. Confusing!

Anyway, whatever folk is, there was plenty made in 2009 that is worth a listen. Here's my top five, in alphabetical order:

The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You

With the addition of Rick Rubin at the switches and a lot of piano, these North Carolina sibs evolved from a twangy string band to what Ben Folds might have sounded like if he grew up listening to Gram Parsons instead of Elton John. This record might be corny if it weren’t so canny.

Best Tracks: “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise”; “Ten Thousand Words”

2. Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound

With Justin Vernon’s sojourn into the wilds of Wisconsin still fresh in the minds of flannel-clad twentysomethings and NPR music critics, you might say Blind Pilot’s Israel Nebeker was under some pressure when he dusted off the dog-eared script of self-exile and absconded to an abandoned cannery to pen the songs that would become 3 Rounds and a Sound. The record isn’t as intense as Vernon’s lauded 2008 opus, but it’s small, intimate, and sneakily spellbinding.

Best Tracks: “One Red Thread”; “3 Rounds and a Sound”

(Update: It has occurred to me that 3 Rounds and a Sound was actually released in 2008, and was included here due to the author's cultural jetlag. The plug stays because the album is awesome... but for the purposes of maintaining a full list, I am obliged to give its spot to Townes, Steve Earle's album of Townes Van Zandt covers. Best tracks: "Lungs"; "To Live is to Fly")

3. The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love

To listen to the Decemberists' fantastical folk-rock opera is to observe frontman Colin Meloy in his element: Maidens on horseback and lustful shapeshifters; envious forest queens, murderous drifters; dark magic, tragedy, verbose writing—these are a few of his favorite things.

Best Tracks: “The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)”; “The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)”; “The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)”; “The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)”

4. The Felice Brothers, Yonder is the Clock

The Felice Brothers’ first release as members of the Team Love label was slightly more subdued than its self-titled 2009 album, but this posse of backwater yankees still brings the firewater rain on a few tracks. As for the slower stuff, is there any tool more tastefully emo than a well-deployed cello? Yes: a well-deployed accordion.

Best Tracks: “Penn Station”; “Ambulance Man”

5. Monsters of Folk, Monsters of Folk

I sure hoped indie darlings Conor Oberst, M. Ward, and Jim James (Yim Yames?) wouldn’t disappoint with their long-anticipated collaboration. They sure didn’t.

Best Tracks: “Whole Lotta Losin’”; “Temazcal”; “The Sandman, the Brakeman, and Me”

“Hey, there’s an interview goin’ on in here, asshole!” James Felice calls out the door of the Winnebago in the direction of guitar music. His brother Ian is strumming outside with a wild-eyed, fu-manchu’ed man named Searcher, who is singing along in falsetto.

Searcher pokes his head through the passenger’s side window. “Hey, you don’t need to call people ‘asshole,’ douchebag!”

Ian’s nasal voice arrives with the crown of his head at the side door. “I had to get the secret cigarette I keep here.” He produces a cigarette from somewhere.

“There’s only one? Ah, fuck.” says James.

“Yeah, and you don’t get one, you know why?” says Searcher through the front window.

“There’s an interview goin’ on in here!”

These are the Felice Brothers at home. They’ve lived in the beat-up Winnebago for the duration of their summer tour opening for Old Crow Medicine Show—the two brothers, their bassist, their fiddle player, two drummers, and their tour manager. It’s a crowded little cavern, with every surface buried beneath clothes, books, and miscellaneous clutter. There’s a tub full of beer, wine, and ice on the floor inside the door. James has poured us Delirium Nocturnum ale in plastic cups.

“Even though I specifically asked him to get a cigarette for you and I, do you know why you don’t get one now?” says Searcher.

“No, I was calling Ian the asshole,” James explains, grinning.

“Let’s smoke a cigarette, then!”

“I’m doing an interview here!”

“Yeah? Maybe he wants to interview me too.” Searcher has climbed in and is now kneeling backwards on the front passenger’s seat. Ian, meanwhile, has begun smoking the cigarette. “I’m in the band, does he even know who I am?”

I know he’s the drummer, but only because James told me a few minutes earlier. (The third Felice brother, Simone, had been the drummer before he left the band in June to start a new project.) I feel I should speak.

“You’re Searcher.”

“See!” Seacher says triumphantly. “Apparently some people know who I am. Who are you? James Felice? The fuck.”

On stage, the Felice Brothers aren’t much different. They drink, they smoke, they stumble into one another, they laugh and fuck around and improvise. They invite the audience in on the party; then sometimes they’re so preoccupied with their own shenanigans they seem to forget the audience is there. These moments of exclusivity are as seductive the band’s gregariousness. You want to be in on the joke.

In the beginning, the Felice Brothers were just playing for themselves. The sons of non-musical parents in upstate New York, the three oldest boys were a band—playing at their father’s cookouts—long before they had achieved any level of mastery on their instruments. “We were really the only ones listening to us,” says James, who ditched piano for the accordion when the brothers trekked south to busk in Manhattan subway stations. Now he plays both.

One of the more appealing aspects of the Felice Brothers’ music is its intimacy. Dancing and clowning around to their own music, they tend to look like jubilant (read: drunk) members of their own audience who happen to be holding instruments. Now, as they’ve started getting picked up to tour with acts like Conor Oberst and Old Crow, the audience has gotten bigger and farther away.

“The last two weeks, we’ve been playing these huge places with Old Crow and Gil and Dave [Gillian Welch and David Rawlings] and stuff,” he says. “The show changes a little bit, you know? It’s less—like, when you’re playing a little bar with a 150 people, they’re right there, and you can grab beers from them, or yell at them, and they can yell at you, or they come on stage and fuck around with you, and there’s no security or anything so it’s all very free-flowing, and the only reason you’re still playing is because they haven’t come on stage and fuckin’ stopped you yet, you know what I’m saying? So there’s like a push-and-pull with the audience when you’re right down there with ‘em. ‘Cause if they’re not having fun then they don’t fuckin’ care, they’ll leave, or they’ll throw beer at you, or trash the stage, you know? So when you’re playing these big places, and there’s all sorts of security and shit, it’s much more of a show. Much more of a theatrical thing, I guess. So the playing has to be better—you can’t get away with anything anymore, ‘cause not everyone’s drunk.”

“Do you have to drink less before the show?” I ask.

“Eeeee no,” James says, and laughs. “Yeah, kinda, you want to. And it’s more responsibility. Playing in small shows is probably funner. It’s definitely funner. But I think you can express yourself more with the big shows, ‘cause there’s lights and stuff, and the sound is usually like a hundred times better. You get to play rockstar”—he refills my beer, adding, “—kind of, in a weird, sad sort of way.”

He mutters these last few words under a grin. I don’t pursue it, but I think about it later while transcribing my tape of the interview. I can’t decide which he finds weird and sad: the idea that they could play rockstars, or the concept of ‘playing rockstar’ in general. It might have been the former—a token nod to the self-deprecation you’re supposed to exhibit in interviews. But then, the Felice Brothers’ entire act does seem to mock the rockstar pose. It’s messy, unglamorous, unadorned; there’s an overwhelming sense that hey, these are just regular folks. It’s no coincidence that their albums are relentlessly compared to The Basement Tapes—recordings made by Bob Dylan and The Band in the basement of a house about 20 miles from where the Felice Brothers grew up. One of the most critically acclaimed compilations when it was eventually released, The Basement Tapes were distinctly anti-rockstar: recorded desultorily and, at least originally, for the sole pleasure of the players.

James Felice claims that he and his bandmates have never listened to The Basement Tapes. “I don’t even really feel like it,” he says, chuckling. “First of all, I don’t know why we sound like that, ‘cause I never heard it. But you know I don’t really give a fuck. Who fuckin’ cares, you know, we play the kind of music that we want to play, and if people think it sounds like fuckin’ Bela Fleck, or Beethoven, or fuckin’ mystery jizz, I don’t really give a shit.”

When the Felice Brothers aren’t busy not listening to The Basement Tapes, they often listen to musicians they sound absolutely nothing like: hip-hop artists. This might seem surprising, but it makes more sense than you’d think. “The similarities between country and hip-hop are amazing,” James says. “Coming up in poor places, you sing about the same sort of things, like money, about girls, about guns, about your ride, your mother—the whole gamut’s the same. You know, Jimmie Rogers was, like, the father of modern country, you know, and he’s always singing about his ‘gat’—he used the word ‘gat,’ that’s where it came from!”

Outside of music, the Felice Brothers’ influences, James says, are largely literary. “We read a shitload,” he explains. “If we just wrote about how we live, our songs would be pretty boring. They’d all be about riding around in a Winnebago, or sitting around at home not knowing what to do, or going to a bar, feeling really awkward for an hour, and going home.” A quick survey of the Winnebago turns up a litter of dog-eared paperbacks—The Sun Also Rises, The Portable Nietszche, Tales of Ordinary Madness. “Faulkner, Hemingway, McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon. Russian literature… Just anything we can get our hands on.” One particularly influential muse has been Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men, whom James says he has been reading since he was 15. He says he’s glad for McCarthy’s newfound fame, but can’t help but feel protective of what had been, until, recently, his own personal discovery. I begin to understand his frustration about being pegged as a derivative of The Basement Tapes.

“When we started, we didn’t even think about it,” he says. “We played that kind of music because we loved that kind of music—but also all we had was an acoustic guitar. You know, what other kind of music are we going to play?”

As for the next record, James says anything is game—synthesizers, orchestral arrangements, whatever. “It’s going places that are weird and scary, probably. Hopefully. You can’t play the same music your whole life.”

When Levon Helm and The Band hosted a five-hour send-off concert in 1976, it was a musical event of mythic proportions. The Band and its guests—among them Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell—were torchbearers of the American folk revival. And though it might be overly dramatic to say the movement “ended” with The Last Waltz, it was just a few years later that folk, blues, and gospel-soul began yielding pop to the second British invasion, arena rock, grunge, and hip-hop.

It would be likewise overdramatic to equate Sunday’s Route 29 Revue at Merriweather to The Last Waltz—certainly in terms of importance. But those attendees who’ve made a religious custom of watching the eponymous Scorcese film could not deny the aesthetic similarities. Old Crow Medicine Show, Iron and Wine, the Felice Brothers, and Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are very much torchbearers of the second folk revival, the one that began in the mid-’90s and has broadened in the new millenium thanks to the Web revolution and the consequent fragmentation of pop. Presiding over Sunday’s festival was Helm, the godfather.

Local boy (well, Virginian) Justin Jones opened with a set that was more modern country-pop than throwback country-folk, but that gave way to the barn-burning bonhomie of the Felice Brothers, an outfit of Yankee good ol’ boys from upstate New York. The Felice Brothers honed their chops in juke joints and subway stations and recorded their first two albums in a chicken coop, so they seemed out a bit out of place on the Merriweather stage. But it was clear right away that we were to play by their rules. Everybody was out of their seats by the second song, clapping and singing along to “Whiskey in My Whiskey,” “Run Chicken Run,” and Townes Van Zandt’s “Two Hands”—struggling all the while to match the energy of the band, whose members would run in circles, crash into each other, and take turns dancing on top of the kick drum (occasionally whaling on the cymbals with a washboard).

Grace Potter and the Nocturnals assumed a more formal stage presence—with the mic stands adorned with rose bouquets and Potter herself fit for the prom in a pale-gold gown—but their set was no less boisterous. Grace and the Nocs, who intersect with American roots music at the corner of Raitt and Joplin (oft-cited analogs, but undeniable ones), played a mostly uptempo set culminating in the title track(s) from the band’s first major-label (re-)release—a high-energy organ jam bookended by an a cappella intro/outro that would be called gospel if its lyrics didn’t eschew God and the Bible in favor of Water. Call it green gospel. Did I mention the band’s from Vermont?

Poor Sam Beam (aka Iron and Wine) came on next to play what was effectively an intermission between two halves of a hootenanny. Dressed neatly in khakis a white button-down—which, combined with his trademark beard, made him look like Happy Gilmore’s caddy—Beam seemed a little embarrassed to follow Potter’s dam-bursting water anthem with his gossamer lullabies. The result was a lot of grace notes and a chest-voice croon that gave whispery cradlesongs like “Upward Over the Mountain” and “The Trapeze Swinger” a more soulful presence in lieu of a backing band. (Where are the Calexico boys when you need them?)

Levon and his entourage—among them his daughter, Amy, and fellow Dylan collaborator Larry Campbell (who produced Helm’s new album, Electric Dirt)—came on next to remind the audience where all that second-wave folk stuff had come from. In the night’s only real disappointment, Levon declined to sing, per orders from his doctor. But, as City Paper Web editor and fellow concertgoer Ted Scheinman aptly put it, “Thank God for Larry Campbell.” Campbell led the band (which also featured Levon’s Midnight-Ramble horn section and E Street Band/Conan O’Brien multi-instrumentalist Jimmy Vivino) in a set that included four Band classics—“Long Black Veil,” “The Shape I’m In,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Chest Fever”—the last featuring Campbell in a spine-chilling guitar imitation of Garth Hudson’s diabolical organ intro. With Levon’s vocal chords out of commission, they stayed away from songs such as “The Weight” and “Ophelia,” a wise and respectful choice (to sing “The Weight” without Levon would have been sacrilege, even with his blessing).

Levon kept time on drums and played a bit of mandolin, but his primary function at the Revue was to preside over the celebration of a tradition he and his contemporaries helped shape. In the middle of his set, the 69-year-old icon took a breather while his daughter, Campbell, and Campbell’s wife Teresa Williams sang a three-part harmony to the Grateful Dead ballad “Attics of my Life.” It was, perhaps, the unlikely highlight of the set; reverly turned to reverence as the trio sang, “I have spent my life seeking all that’s still unsung / Bent my ear to hear the tune, and closed my eyes to see / When there was no strings to play, you played to me.” In the shadows offstage, Levon was sitting with his eyes closed, rolling his head in slow circles, smiling.

Old Crow Medicine Show closed the six-hour circus with a typically charismatic hoedown, frontmen Ketch Secor and Willie Watson filling the song breaks by yammering back and forth in a schtick that harks back to the snakeoil salesmen from whom they drew their name. The Felice Brothers, who had been touring with Old Crow all summer, slipped on and off stage intermittently throughout the set, which reached a pitch with heel-stompers “Shack #9” and “Minglewood Blues.”

The restless ticketholders had left the back half of the pavilion empty by the time the concert was approaching its eighth hour, and those who remained pushed in toward the stage. Before the musicians closed with “Wagon Wheel”—very much the missing link of post-WWII folk, co-written by Old Crow and Bob Dylan—the day of solidarity culminated as Ian Felice joined Secor at the mic for the slow-paced ballad “We’re All In This Together.” One sensed they were not just singing to their bandmates.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user PZAO.