Wise Old Moon — playing the kind of music that would order a shot of bourbon with its beer, all cowboy chords and a telecaster twang — took the digital stage on Friday, presented by Pine & Iron, New Haven’s premiere axe-throwing venue, to raise money via digital tip jar for the Connecticut Food Bank, whose resources have been stretched thin after months of high unemployment and food insecurity on the part of many, many Connecticut residents.
Josh Kroscen, manager of Pine & Iron, is looking forward to reopening both the Hartford and New Haven locations on June 19.
“Our New Haven location opened up in mid-January of this year, so it’s not ideal,” he said. “We’re weathering this through savings.”
With time in the meantime, however, Kroscen and his friend, lead singer of Wise Old Moon Connor Millican, found common opportunity. Millican missed playing for people, and Pine & Iron wanted to find a way to help organizations directly helping Connecticut residents. Thus a concert was born.
“We were looking to reconnect with the community and do something good, and we thought, ‘What if we combined the two?’ We’re excited about it — I hope people like it, and at the least it’ll be fun and provide some good to the community,” Kroscen said.
Viewers could donate what they wished through a link posted in the concert’s Facebook live comment feed. This also might be just the first foray of “Pine & Iron Presents” into the world of concert production.
“It hinges on how well this goes, if it’s received well. It’s not something Connor and I are focusing on heavily, but hopefully this goes well and hopefully we can keep doing this, and we structured it with that in mind.”
Wise Old Moon — Millican, Sam King on drums, Ian Meadows on lead guitar, and Greg Lake on bass — started its set heavily charged, playing in the brilliantly multicolored hatchet throwing gallery of the New Haven location of Pine & Iron. The wood and metal aesthetic matched nicely with the band, which was amped up more than the average self-described Americana outfit. Driving guitar licks and a variety of pedal effects colored a set that ranged from good ol’ boy anthems to more sensitive nihilistic ballads, including a new song, “Dream I’m Living In.”
The music brought to mind, with startling peanut-shell clarity, the whiskey-and-PBR-soaked atmosphere of a dive bar, coated in that gold-tinged Instagram filter of nostalgia that has a specific and powerful resonance in these times of closed bars and ever-present threat of infection. Covid-19 has been a sabbatical from many leisure activities — not to mention societal function — but seeing a band play a crowded bar, with all the rowdy carousing, sloppy dancing, and whiskey shots that that entails, has never felt so far away. The vibe of a band crooning lyrics about how “they don’t make ‘em like the used to” and peddling in a southern-tinged nostalgia for a (wasted?) youth pursuing romance and altering psyche hit harder sitting in a living room, where normal is just out of reach. Doubly so as this band exuded huge energy into the void of the internet, with one member donning a mask that served as an unintended reminder that Covid-19 is still with us.
The root of the word nostalgia is the greek word nostos, a desire to come home, and Wise Old Moon sang aptly: “All you want to do is come home / I’m not coming home / I’m not coming home.”
As society reopens, one cannot help but wonder how much the ease of stepping into a packed dive bar to hear a band exude raw energy and drawl will feel like an option. Whither the packed bar?
Pine & Iron will be reopening in both its Hartford and New Haven locations on June 19, following CDC guidelines for safe operation, should months of self isolation result in a strong desire to throw sharp objects.