Gene Casey & The Lone Sharks

Gene Casey & The Lone Sharks
"All By Myself/Tear It Up/Guitar Boogie"
Rodeo Bar, NYC 3/7/09
Gene Casey (guitar, lead vocal)
Chris Ripley (drums,vocals)
Tony Palumbo (upright bass, vocals)
Paul Scher (sax, marracas, vocals)

By the beginning of last Saturday's second set, tables had been cleared and NYC's Rodeo Bar was transformed from chips 'n salsa/beer 'n Bar-B-Q dive into a full-on, barnstorming, honky-tonkin' juke-joint thanks to primo rockabilly/western-swing/rhythm & twang combo The Lone Sharks rare foray into the city to show them how it's done. Their rowdy, pulchritudinous East End/S.I. fans think nothing of traveling the 90 miles there and back to get their fix of Cash, Diddley, Alexander, Burnette and Elvis covers along with killer Gene Casey originals like 'It's A Free Country', 'Bad Baby', 'Dirty All The Time', 'That's What Cheaters Do' and others pulled from their 3 and a half albums, 'Aqua Western', 'Fire Theft & Casualty', 'What Happened' and 'Six Pack'. Hell, they even made 'Cry' by Johnny Ray sound great. Go on, take a look at their large and very tasty repertoire.
I arranged to meet some friends at the show, and each of them was very impressed. One - an a&r vet with 30 years under his belt - said the band "restores my faith", a sentiment I feel every time I see them. Another said "my kind of band...good guitar, they swing old school style and the pretty girls shake their their booty to the beat" which, at the end of the day, is really all you need.
Any of you who found this blog by googling "North Fork" + "Long Island Sound", looking for a nice rental for the summer should be pleased to learn that one of the bonuses we get out here is the Sharks play 2 or 3 different places every weekend, all summer long. It may not quite be the new Memphis, Austin or Nashville but, along with the mighty Blaggards, who are also making a great noise in this corner of the world, the Greenport/Riverhead/Amagansett axis is beginning to look like a cool stopover for any pilgrim looking for the real rock & roll.