Lenny Kaye Joins New York Country Band, Victoria Shaw Plays Birdland

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Music Row Magazine

May 1, 2007

Vocalist/guitarist Elena Skye and lead guitarist/vocalist Boo Reiners are the key figures in New York country/bluegrass act the Demolition String Band. But they also lead an occasional off-shoot, the Deciders, at Banjo Jim’s, the neighborhood bar at 9th Street and Avenue C that used to be called 9C when it was the home of Greg Garing’s Alphabet City Opry—of which Skye and Reiners were featured performers. ...

... “I often hear from musicians that there’s a warm, welcoming vibe here—not like other places, they say,” Zwier-Croce related. “But there has to be incredible music to have an open, inspiration-fostering environment where the players feel appreciated and noticed, for there to be a place like this.”

Steve Rambam must have felt welcome, too. The “technical adviser” and major character in country outlaw Kinky Friedman’s murder mysteries, who is a top private investigator in real life, enjoyed the Deciders—and the “Kinky Friedman for Governor” Texas campaign poster up on the wall.

“Forget the percentage,” Rambam said (a distant fourth in last fall’s election, Friedman tallied 12% of the vote). “He only lost by a million votes.”

So Rambam predicted that Friedman would give his gubernatorial quest another go. Meanwhile, Rambam, whose recent HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) lecture Privacy is Dead—Get Over It has been issued on DVD, has his own book forthcoming (with Rick Dalean), "Stealing Your Own Privacy".

Moving uptown, Victoria Shaw brought her latest installment  ... ...