Most of those intimately familiar with Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A' Train" are still unaware that the jazz classic's full title is "Take the A' Train After Seeing Modest Mouse." Harlem's United Palace Theatre is an excellent, slightly oddball, profoundly large venue, an old movie theater recast as a cavernous shed for indie-arena big shots like Modest Mouse or the Arcade Fire. Let's just say that the vast majority of the crowd is imported. Thus, immediately afterward, a full-scale American Apparel casting call spontaneously invades the 175th Street A-train station, as refreshed concertgoers flee south to the Lower East Side or Williamsburg or Red Hook. This makes for a fascinating though somewhat crabby bottleneck: After a springtime Björk show, restless mass-transit fans got fed up with waiting at the turnstiles and booted open the emergency-exit door—an act of ultra-violent civil disobedience in this crowd. Wear riot gear, and maybe a black hoodie.

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