THE NEW BOSSES

Two 12 or 13 year-old kids sitting next to me in a pizza parlor in Hell’s Kitchen doing homework, one wearing a black VU shirt (who kind of reminds me of Danny Tamberelli from the old Adventures Pete & Pete show) the other with jeans covered in a plethora of ball-point pen illustrated peace symbols. They’re getting excited about some new band that sounds like “a cross between Zappa and Tull” and then I hear this:

VU Kid: “Dude, guess what I got tickets for.”
Peace Symbol Kid: “What?”
VU Kid: “Allman Brothers”
Peace Symbol Kid: “You’re lucky.”
VU Kid: “The were so hard to get.”

Commercial on the radio comes on for Phantom of the Opera, the musical.

Peace Symbol Kid: “My brother loves Phantom. The first song is great, the rest all sound the same.”

When they start talking about what a great drummer Ginger Baker is I have to chime in and the first thing I try to say (trying not to sound like an asshole), is they’re having the most interesting and sophisticated dialogue for anyone their age I think I’ve ever heard, which has more to do with how often I hang around kids than anything.

Like most conversations about music it’s immediately all over the board, and these two are perfectly comfortable making references not just about classic rock, but world music, jazz, The Dead (which are kind of their own category) and just about anything that’s happened in the last 40 years. It makes me a little nervous for some reason.

They’re both drummers (I recommend the Rumblefish soundtrack) but Peace Symbol Kid has been buying bamboo flutes in Chinatown in an attempt learn their mysterious way while VU Kid tried to learn the sitar but found them hard to find, and even harder to find a teacher. I can’t keep up. They get ready to leave and I write down Bob Log III and Bob Weir’s Rhythm Devils Apocalypse Now Sessions for them to check out.

VU Kid: “No names, we don’t know if you’re the music police or not.”