Wearing her signature beret, Rickie Lee Jones performed a moving version of the Sinatra classic “Cycles” and later boogied with Santa Claus to the Ramones’ “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” The nearly unrecognizable actor Matt Dillon took the stage — Where’s he been? hundreds of audience members asked each other — to introduce a super-charged Willie Nile. Lucinda Williams, with her raw grace, brought yet another dimension to “New York Comeback,” a song she had written with Jesse Malin when returning to the stage after her 2020 stroke.
Williams and the others were just a few among numerous luminaries at the Beacon Theatre on December 2, but the night was all about Malin, the beloved 57-year-old NYC rocker who himself, last May, had a spinal stroke, a rare blood disruption to the spinal cord. This was a benefit concert, the second of two, to help him pay medical expenses that included costs for cutting-edge (and more affordable) stem cell treatment in Argentina, where he spent six months, starting in September 2023.
For Malin to lose the use of his lower body was almost unthinkable to his friends and fans — a dynamic performer, he’d jump onto your table, mic in hand, as quickly as he’d buy you a beer. His plight brought out the heart in New York’s music scene and beyond: musicians from Spoon to Springsteen showed up for him, culminating in a Malin-covers album, Silver Patron Saints, and in the Beacon concerts.
At Monday’s show, with testimonials about Malin’s outsize generosity, his friends all but declared him NYC’s own patron saint, one who grew up in Queens with a single mom, helped form the punk bands Heart Attack — at the age of 12 — and D Generation, 12 years later, then went on to a solo career writing and singing songs bursting with hometown references (the Bronx, the Hudson River, the Bowery). On top of that, Malin co-owns several East Village bars and clubs, including Niagara and 96 Tears.
“A great man, a great artist, and a mensch,” Adam Weiner, of Low Cut Connie, called Malin, before launching into a plush rendition of “When You’re Young,” from the Silver album (“When you’re young and you run / And you’re burning like a star / And it’s fun and it’s done / And it leaves you with a scar”).
“I think there’s a lot of love here, it’s not as hard as everybody says.”
Other Silver contributors performing their covers at the concert: Butch Walker, with a plaintive “Aftermath” and a wild, kicking “In the Modern World” (“We’ve been hangin’ on forever / By the radio with the afterglow”); Willie Nile, a kindred spirit to Malin, who tapped his heart when he spoke his friend’s name (“All the Way from Moscow”); the always manic Hold Steady (“Death Star”); J Mascis, of Dinosaur Jr., with glittering sleeves and a hot guitar, on “Brooklyn” (“You started out with nothin’ but lonely days”); Tommy Stinson, putting across the edgy “Riding on the Subway”; Danny Clinch, going from gruff to delicate and back again on the poignant “Almost Grown”; and Jakob Dylan, dapper in a beige fedora, doing “Don’t Let Them Take You Down (Beautiful Day).” “The thing that makes this work is that we’re playing Jesse’s songs,” Dylan told the crowd.
But who better to sing Jesse’s songs than Malin himself? We were not kept waiting: Malin appeared early in the program, after film director Jim Jarmusch, unmistakable with his shock of white hair, introduced his longtime friend: “Here is the remarkable Jesse Malin.” Sitting in front of his band (also seated) with his guitar, curly dark hair peeking out from under his familiar newsboy cap, and wearing sunglasses, Malin began with the musically understated “Room 13,” written with Lucinda Williams, in a tenor voice whose strength belied any physical difficulty.
Later, before doing his new song “Argentina” — available on (blue) vinyl for the first time at the Beacon concerts — he was understated again, talking to the audience this time: “It’s been a crazy 20 months or so.” But then he opened up: “I don’t like to go above 14th Street, so to go below the equator, it was heavy.” His lyrics reflected that: “I’m going to South America / I’m going without a band /… And I hope you remember me like I remember you.” His harmonica sounded melancholy, and the guitars seemed to sway, strings bending — perhaps an allusion to the subtropical climate or the slight vertigo induced by being far from home.
But the tone changed on the next number. “You guys ready?” Malin asked his “exquisite band,” as Jarmusch called it. Fists pumped the air, and a piano run turned into a rousing “Turn Up the Mains.” When the song ended (“I’m alive / I’m alive / I’m alive …”), a stage worker, introduced later as Harry, moved a mic stand in front of Malin. Malin looked down, gripped his knee with one hand and the stand with the other — we were all on our feet, some shouting “You got it, Jesse!” or just “Yeah!” — and then suddenly hoisted himself up. The audience roared, but Malin demurred: “It’s kind of a magic trick,” he told us, but then spoke of how many attempts he had made before he could do it. After that, still standing, he launched the band — declaring, “Now I’m at home, with my boys” — into the infectious “She Don’t Love Me Now.” At the end, he slyly asked, “Isn’t that a Springsteen song or something?” (Springsteen did a full-throated version for Silver Patron Saints, released as a single.)
Malin would rise like this two more times during the concert: First, after the popular “The Way We Used to Roll,” with its honky-tonk piano — telling us beforehand, “I’m not gonna do back flips but I may stand up.” (He also explained why he was wearing sunglasses; they served as a reminder not to throw himself around — or off — the stage.) Then later so he could stand for his rollicking, horn-heavy — and timely — song “You Know It’s Dark When Atheists Start to Pray.” With that one, after Malin spoke of his great-grandfather coming from Kyiv, Ukrainian musician Eugene Hütz, of Gogol Bordello, brought his anarchic spirit on board to do backup vocals for Malin. (Gogol Bordello recorded the song for the Silver album.)
Appearing almost tireless, Malin did 18 songs in all, including his own “Shining Down,” “Silver Manhattan,” and “Meet Me at the End of the World,” as well as two covers: the Rolling Stones’ “Sway” and the Pogues’ “If I Should Fall from Grace with God.” An entertaining raconteur, Malin told stories rooted in New York — about attending a quixotic high school called Quintano School for Young Professionals, finding his sound (in 1980, a club booker tried to tell him punk was over), and seeing the Pogues at Danceteria (years later Shane MacGowan would “show up on my stage drinking bourbon out of a Pringles can.”). He said of his hometown, “You’re forced to deal with people from all kinds of different cultures…. I think there’s a lot of love here, it’s not as hard as everybody says.”
Throughout the concert, many of the song lyrics took on new meaning with Malin’s new state of being. Adam Duritz, of Counting Crows, did an affecting rendition of his own song “A Long December,” singing of “the smell of hospitals in winter” but holding out hope that “maybe this year will be better than the last” (and giving the most emotional “na-na-na”s I’ve ever heard). Malin’s “Greener Pastures” — performed at the start of his second set, with his former manager Diane Gentile providing soulful harmonies — asserts, “You can make it if you try.” Introducing his tender song “Revelations,” Malin, bathed in velvety purple light, said he likes “those songs that say everything’s going to be all right.”
That would not include “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” But at the close everyone came out for that one, Santa included, and damn if a Ramones song didn’t sound like a way-out-there, horn-laden, anything-goes freakin’ Christmas carol. Malin advised us to “keep the PMA” (positive mental attitude) and gave us a peace sign, then moved to the front of the stage with the walker Harry had brought over, blowing us a kiss before he went offstage to the cheers of the crowd. Somewhere in there, he said, “I can’t thank you fuckers enough” — an amalgam of a statement, street kid meets sentiment, as all night the waves of feeling had been going back and forth.
A bit later, at the afterparty — at Blondie’s, a no-frills bar — Santa, aka DJ Uncle Mike Schnapp (his white beard was natural), suddenly sidled into my booth, and I felt as though I were in a Jesse Malin song. Like New York itself, with all its heartache, not a bad place to be. ❖
Mary Lyn Maiscott, an NYC-based singer-songwriter, has written about music for Vanity Fair and other publications. Her song “Mild December,” inspired by a Christmas evening with a friend of John Lennon’s, was just released as a digital single.
