John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants dig Moon Hooch so much, they’re bringing them on a national tour. (Getty Images)
Singer/songwriter Mike Doughty heard Moon Hooch and chose them as openers. (Tex Jernigan)
New York City’s wealth of subway performers is intrinsic to the city’s character but, as most seasoned commuters know, they’re not all worth hearing. Some are painfully bad, and others are only entertaining enough to pass a few minutes before the next L train to Brooklyn shows up. But the sassy sax-beats of Moon Hooch have the power to make you secretly wish that the short wait becomes an indefinite delay.
The trio, comprised of Wenzl McGowen (23, saxophone/contrabass clarinet), Mike Wilbur (23, saxophone) and James Muschler (24, drums), have earned a strong following from playing on the MTA’s platforms over the past 2 1/2 years. They’ve also begun to attract the attentions of the wider music world. Last year, the band was spotted by Mike Doughty (formerly of ’90s band Soul Coughing and now a solo artist) who liked them so much, he asked them to open for him on a national tour.
“They were obviously driven,” Doughty tells The Post. “I thought they’d decline [the tour] because there were insanely long drives between each show. But they blew every audience away.”
Since then, Moon Hooch landed a management deal, had a successful residency at Williamsburg’s Knitting Factory and, tomorrow night, the band will open for the electronic jam-band Lotus at Best Buy Theater for what will be their biggest NYC gig to date. It’s a far cry from their humble beginnings at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Greenwich Village, where the members met and started playing around the city.
“The first time we played together was in the summer of 2010 in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” McGowen explains with a unique accent that derives from growing up all over Europe. “That was pretty much just jazz, but I noticed we got more of a reaction and made much more money if we played dance music.”
After the museum, they realized they could play for a captive audience in the subways.
Quickly developing a knack for catchy melodic hooks and funky rhythms while leaving room for plenty of jazzy improvisation, the instrumental three-piece quickly hit their first milestone that very same summer by getting banned from the Bedford Avenue subway stop. “There was a Modest Mouse concert, which got rained out in Williamsburg,” recalls Muschler, who was raised in Cleveland. “So there were a ton of people who wanted to see music but couldn’t, and because of that, we ended up with a huge crowd. It was actually pretty dangerous. People were dancing on the yellow lines, and so the cops said we were a hazard. But we made $350 each that night.”
It’s easy to understand how they could create such a commotion.
Like any subway performer or act worth their salt, Moon Hooch knows that weekends are the best time to hit the platforms, and always draws quick responses.
At a recent Saturday night gig at the Union Square station, it took them just seconds to win the attention of passengers, if only because of the booming sound of McGowen and Wilbur’s twin sax-attack. After a couple of minutes, a crowd formed — and a few new fans began tossing $10 bills into their basket for a copy of “The Moon Hooch Album” (which they self-released last year). Before long, their grooves inspired a couple of impromptu dance parties that made some riders forget to catch their trains.
Some New Yorkers go underground just to watch them play.
“There was one girl from Poland who was visiting New York. She saw us and loved us so much, she would just come to wherever we were playing and watch us for hours and hours,” says Wilbur, who was raised in Massachusetts.
Not all fans are content to just watch. The band members frequently find dirty notes and suggestive fan mail left for them by wannabe groupies.
“One time somebody wrote: ‘I want all three of you at the same time,’ ” recalls Wilbur. “We didn’t call the number, but we thought about it for a long time. It could have been a 90-year-old obese man. But it probably wasn’t . . .”
A few more superfans and sordid proposals could be in the band’s future. Although they all still live in the same building off the Morgan Avenue stop in Bushwick, Moon Hooch’s ascent from the grime of the subway to bigger, and, presumably, more fragrant stages will continue in the spring when they head off on yet another national tour, this time with local stalwarts They Might Be Giants.
They still rock the platforms at Union Square (their favorite stop) whenever they can, but as McGowen notes, Moon Hooch also seemed to have spawned their own throng of copycat bands on the subway. “I hear saxophones all the time now. I even saw an ad on Craigslist once. It said something like: ‘I’m looking for a saxophone player to create a really unique band — kind of like Moon Hooch’!”
Beware, inferior imitators, because there ain’t no platform party like a Moon Hooch platform party.