The Turn It Up music festival is more than just two days of music, it’s a family reunion of artists from the burgeoning music scenes of Hoboken and New York City in the 1980s, spearheaded by Jared Michael Nickerson.
The festival takes place on two Thursdays, Aug. 18 and 25 at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Nickerson was introduced to the Manhattan club scene in the 80s when he joined the Cleveland, Ohio, band Human Switchboard. He got to know CBGB, Danceteria, the Peppermint Lounge, Irving Plaza, and Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and more.
He decided to put together this two-part event of headliners as a tribute to the rock scene at that time with the people who were there.
“When I joined Human Switchboard, they were already headliners,” said Nickerson. “They were already playing at places like CBGB’s, Peppermint Lounge, and Maxwell’s. Through that I made a lot of friends with people like Hilly Kristal and Louise Parnassa-Staley of CBGB and Jim Fouratt from the Peppermint Lounge.”
When Human Switchboard would come to Hoboken to play Maxwell’s, Nickerson would sleep on Steve Fallon’s sofa in his apartment right above the former Hoboken club. The Fallon family owned the building that housed Maxwell’s and Fallon opened the club in August 1978. One of the DJ’s at Maxwells, Guy Ewald, passed down his own Hoboken apartment to Nickerson, where he has now resided since 1984.
“In Switchboard, we would come up here and makes some East Coast money before going back to the Midwest due to the cost of living there,” says Nickerson. “When record label interest began to grow, the band moved closer to New York so we could be closer to everything that was happening on the scene. I lived in a number of places, but when Guy gave me his apartment, that’s when I became a Hobokenite.”
While acting as curator for this show, Nickerson will also be performing electric bass on stage with Ivan Julian & The Magnificent Six. Julian is best known as one of the co-founders of the punk group Richard Hell & the Voidoids, which he helped find through a classified ad.
“Guitarist Robert Quine called me up to play music in a rehearsal studio on 30th Street one day,” said Julian. “It was the epitome of what I thought New York would be.”
Alongside Hell and Quine, Julian played on and wrote for Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ landmark 1977 album Blank Generation. He also performed on The Clash’s 1980 album Sandinista!, as The Voidoids opened for The Clash on tour. He also played on the tracks “Someone to Pull the Trigger” and “Life Without You” from Matthew Sweet’s 1993 release, Altered Beast; and even performed a cover version of “Blank Generation” with punk supergroup Osaka Popstar in 2006, which at the time featured John Cafiero, Dez Cadena of Black Flag, Marky Ramone of The Ramones, and Jerry Only of The Misfits.
Ivan Julian & The Magnificent Six also features Debby Schwartz and Judy Ann Nock on background vocals; Al Maddy on electric guitar, keyboards, and vocals; James Mastro of The Bongos on electric guitar and vocals; and Stephen Goulding on drums.
Some of the bands performing at the Lincoln Center for the two shows this month include Hoboken’s own power pop band The Bongos, who have the distinct honor of being the first band to ever perform at Maxwell’s when they were formerly known as “a.”
“A lot of the bands that are appearing on this lineup are an extended family,” says Bongos front man Richard Barone. “We’ve had very long relationships with these bands, who we love, and the goal here is to share our community that we’ve formed over the past few decades with the community at large.”
Among a handful of other bands, The Bongos are considered the founders of the Hoboken pop scene of the 1980s and the progenitors of the Indie Rock movement that would soon follow. Alongside Barone, who had vocal and guitar duties in The Bongos, were guitarist James Mastro, bassist Rob Norris, and drummer Frank Giannini.
The Bongos would record their debut album, “Drums Along the Hudson,” in England when it was released in 1982. Following this, they released “Beat Hotel” under RCA in 1985. They performed more than 300 concerts that year. While each member of the group began to pursue solo projects and other collaborations, performances by the band became increasingly rare. The Bongos have come back together in 2022 for select concert appearances to celebrate four decades of Hoboken pop.
“We were always proud to come from Hoboken, and we would announce that at the beginning of each show when we’d introduce ourselves with ‘Hi, we’re The Bongos and we’re from Hoboken,’” said Barone. “It was a badge of honor, and we were this band from this little community that was bringing music around the world.”
Barone will also be doing guest vocals with another group on the bill, Gary Lucas’s God’s and Monsters, which draws its name from a line in the movie Bride of Frankenstein: “To a new world of gods and monsters.” A Grammy-nominated guitarist, songwriter, composer, and lecturer, Lucas draws on the blues and also includes other styles in his music such as psychedelic rock, world music and jazz, and even classical works.
Gods & Monsters originally began as an all-instrumental jazz ensemble with two bass players while Lucas began writing songs and inviting singers to perform at an ad hoc basis in 1990. Also joining Lucas on stage for the first night of Turn It Up includes long-standing Gods & Monster members Ernie Brooks on bass, Richard Dworkin on drums, and special guest vocalists Alison Clancy.
Also hitting the stage are NYC Art-rock supergroup Tape Hiss, which was formed in 2021 by Ernie Brooks of the original Modern Lovers and Arthur Russell, and Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth and Cat Power. The two had toured Europe together in the 2010s.
During a block party concert in Brooks’ neighborhood of Long Island City, Shelley recruited David Nagler on keyboard and vocal duties This was soon followed by the addition of Pete Galub on guitar and vocals along with another longtime colleague of Brooks’, Peter Zummo of Arthur Russell and Lounge Lizards on trombone.
Another 1980s group that’s joining in on the fun is The Veldt from Raleigh, North Carolina. The band, which lifted their name from a Ray Bradburry story, features Daniel Chavis, Danny Chavis, Marie Cochrane, Martin Newman, Hayato Nakao, and Dale Miller. The Veldt signed to Capitol Records in 1989 and would record their classic album “Afrodisiac” in 1994, which was recently included on Pitchfork’s top 50 shoegaze albums ever released.
Rounding out the show are the Bush Tetras, with founding members Cynthia Sley and Pat Place joined by new members including bassist R.B. Korbet and drummer Steve Shelley. The Bush Tetras were part of the New York no wave/post-punk era in the early 1980s and remained active in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s as they continue to add to their legacy in 2022.
The show times for night one on Aug. 18 and night two on Aug. 25 are at 7:30 p.m. The shows will take place in Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium, 61 W 62nd St., New York, NY. This event is free and open to the public. Seating and entry are first-come, first-served; the line will form at the Atrium’s entrance on Broadway, between 62nd and 63rd Street.
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