By Henry Lipput
If you type Gramercy Arms NYC into Google one of the results
will be a co-op building of that name. Built in 1959, it was no doubt an
apartment building between the time the president of the United States told the
city to “drop dead” and the whole turning-apartments-into-co-ops started to
happen.
It’s also the time period when young people -- artists, writers,
actors, filmmakers, musicians – flocked to the city. And this period of creativity is
reflected in the songs and sounds of Deleted Scenes (Magic Door Record Label), the
wonderful new album by Gramercy Arms – not the co-0p but a collective led by
Dave Derby. (How much do I like this album? I’m disappointed it’s only
available as a download and would really like to have a CD copy or, even better,
have it on vinyl.)
Derby, among other things, was a member of another collective of sorts:
The Negatives was a band led by Lloyd Cole resulting in 2001’s The Negatives, a
now mostly (and wrongly) forgotten disc that’s full of terrific performances
and Cole is at one of the peaks of his songwriting game (“Impossible Girl”
anyone?). This one-time only collection of musicians included Derby and Jill Sobule
as well as long-time musical partner and Commotions guitarist Neil Clark and
New York rock staple Robert Quine in what may have been his last time on a
record.
Lloyd Cole, it turns out, is also part of the Gramercy Arms
collective. He sang a duet with Joan As Police Woman on “Beautiful Disguise”
from 2014’s The Seasons of Love album. Cole also co-wrote and plays on the splendid
“Yesterday’s Girl,” the first single from Deleted Scenes. Having worked with Cole
for more than 20 years, Derby has, especially on this song, picked up some of
the former’s vocal mannerisms. This isn’t a criticism as I’ve been a Cole fan
since I bought Easy Pieces in 1985 so the more Cole the better I say. (But it’s
interesting that Derby sounds less like Cole on his work with The Norfolk
Downs.)
Although the Bandcamp page for Deleted Scenes mentions the
album was inspired by the 70s and 80s artistic heyday, I initially thought it
referred to the burgeoning punk and new wave music of that period and so really
didn’t catch the connection. But the more I thought about it, the more I
realized it was instead the singer-songwriters of that period and the one I
latched on to immediately was the 1974 self-titled solo debut of New York-based
singer-songwriter Tim Moore. Moore’s great “Second Avenue” is a song of lost love
and, for me, is in many ways, both lyrically and musically, a template for what
Derby and company have achieved with Deleted Scenes.
