Beyond the Barge: Barely Living on a Prayer
by Adam Peltz

Former Bargewatcher Adam Peltz feels the noize as Five Finger Discount rocks the ruins of Judge Perez Drive.

“You live for the fight when it’s all that you’ve got.”
-- Jon Bon Jovi

July 22, 2006, Chalmette, Louisiana: A few Saturdays ago, despite heavy rains and perhaps to honor the end of an extreme drought, a group of 60-or-so mostly Chalmatians and Jefferson Parish ragamuffins took over the dance floor at the New Orleans Daiquiri Company along Judge Perez Drive.

The impetus: Five Finger Discount, a talented and tight 70’s-90’s cover band playing the good stuff – Van Halen (from David Lee Roth’s heyday), Whitesnake, Bon Jovi, Run DMC, Aerosmith, Cheap Trick, Guns‘n Roses, Def Leppard. Clad in cutoff shirts and with their unique medleys breaking the silence of “The Dead Zone,” Five Finger Discount stole the evening and was the act to see, taking the title, as well, as the only act gigging downriver, across the Industrial Canal, beyond Plaquemines, and all the way to where the land ends.

In quick-thinking celebration of the outdoor summer concert series, Five Finger Discount, having hauled its gear inside and reset the stage, opened with Georgia Satellites’ “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” and energetically moved through a battery of songs -- Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets to Paradise” and Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” among other numbers -- then returned to the first tune in the medley, a trademark move. At this point, we were all smiles; we existed in an electrified oasis led by hard-working musicians, daiquiri-slinging entrepreneurs, and the accents of ‘da Parish and the suburbs, all in high-volume, tearing up the desolation and ghost land with tough, loud call and response. From song to drink order to “here’s your change, baby” to another round, the crowd became more and more raucous. Its voice – united in Michelob Ultra, rum, and memory of “Smoking in the Boys’ Room” amplified through the emptiness: “…Teacher, don’t fill me up with your rules.”

I emerged from Motley Crue’s notorious pisser and into the beginning of Toni Basil’s “Oh Mickey,” a number I associate with the local Hot Skates back in New York. From out of that piece, the band grew Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” into Dee Snyder and Twisted Sister’s war cry “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and back into “Oh Mickey” – incredible. The people went wild in what some critics and musicologists might call the artists’ creative confusion, but what is more accurately Poundian: “Making it new.” The band had read the crowd.

Along the formerly busy thoroughfare named for “the political boss” and racist Leander Perez and later renamed for an allegedly less unfair judge, the late Melvyn Perez, the only traffic of note was a St. Bernard sheriff in a white Explorer, no doubt roused from his post to embrace the fact of this party. We should have been issued a downtown-hub noise violation, with the Chalmette cultural center and shopping plazas in mud-throwing distance; the duo I showed with looked at each other, fondly remembering Mi Cinema, the oil-slicked cheap-seats movie house a block away. Some of us stared fuck you/ join us, when the copper, just doing his job, pulled into the rain-glazed lot. He let the group off, probably figuring we needed our fun, and really, out there, who gives a shit. We had entered the nonexistence for some tunes in support of the local economy. We had waded through the thunderstorm and sewer-streamed streets for a taste of, and in, our own Quiet Riot. Turn it up.

A most powerful musical moment in the evening came through in the cover of Van Halen’s “Panama.” The band hit it deep, with full, loud, all band vocals, Dario Campo’s rapid guitar chops, Steve Pizzolato’s thumping bass licks, the syncopation of Tim Olsen, Bobby St. John’s rich keyboard filler, and lead singer Kevin Diggs’ flashy gyrations. The male concert-goers, frenzied and swarming the floor, had stumbled into the part of the evening when they yell how much they love each other. They raised their white Styrofoam cups like torches of camaraderie, almost Whitmanian in drawn out decrees of affection; the ladies, grinding on knee caps, barstools, and the array of denim, golf t-shirts, and backwards baseball caps, did the same.

“I can barely see the road from the heat coming off.” I knew we all would travel to see these guys again, perhaps in “God’s Country” – Mandeville - as the group’s founder Bobby St. John eloquently poeticized. (The group recently played the Seafood Festival, and they gig regularly in Metairie.)

Of the bar itself, the 30-or-so daiquiri mixes swirled around like a kaleidoscope to the drunken eye. I could actually taste the liquor in my piña colada blend, something I had experienced only at Pepto-painted Gene’s on Elysian Fields, where the Everclear burns a hole in the pit of one’s stomach. Delicious.

But more everlasting than that feeling was the buzz in the ears -even now - that comes from a solid show, the smoke lingering in the clothes and hair, and the realization that parties such as Five Finger Discounts’, with Judge Perez Avenue, the scattered lights, the din of bullfrogs just out of reach, and the colony of trailers as backdrop, are only available in certain parts of the world.

Upon departing, quickly the set and highball fantasy faded. We crossed into Arabi, Jackson Barracks, and over the dark curtain of the parish line. We passed beside the shadows of splintered homes, the roof parts, the collapse, and returned to our solemn, quiet thoughts continuing in a vigil along Jourdan Avenue and the graveyard surrounding outside the window -- just before crossing the septic canal water and back into the eventual light.

Five Finger Discount and the crowd, in a tiny way, tried to bring life, and even the sheriff was thrown for a spell. But after nightfall, any small progress goes unnoticed, with the exception of the frail line of defense -- the concrete levee wall. It stands out as a scar on the opaque reality. The death of the neighborhoods, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes, remains undeniable, its citizens irreversibly wronged. We can’t pour sugar on that, but we can try singing in its wake.


Adam Peltz files on matters downriver for NOLAFugees.com

photos courtesy Five Finger Discount.