Without an album on the racks, or any upcoming tours outside of New York City, and no mainstream media interviews thus far, Community Gun remains an evasive indie rock band, offering the press nothing to hold with one hand and point to with the other. It's downright aggravating to try and part through a noisy crowd and into the cigarette smoke cluster of friends and fans of the band in order to obtain the fragmented attention of lead singer, Cove Aaronoff. But that's what I set out to do. I dragged Community Gun, kicking and screaming, into a series of unconventional interviews about this fascinating, weird little rock group that has developed an underground following in New York City over the past five years.

Part of the problem of marketing an interview with Community Gun is that mainstream editors, with tightening budgets, don't want to touch anything without a price tag stuck on it. The editors of the Brooklyn Paper told me outright, “We don't have the budget.” Meaning, the budget to run features on indie music, especially about bands like Community Gun. Because who the hell are they?

If the mainstream editors won't pick up this gritty indie band because the press can't promote an album on the shelf at Best Buy, the bloggers will dig it and say so. Loudly. Just a handful of Community Gun's online reviews have included the following:
Berkeley Place: “It reminds me of Bone Machine era Tom Waits.” Lucid Culture: “This is the real deal.” Tough Customer//Wire: “This scrappy band will shamble their way onto your stereo and win you over with an unexpected dash of style.” Blog of Sound: “4.5 stars. A great listen. Community Gun is a breath of fresh air.” For The Sake Of The Song: “Tom Waits meets the Mats. If I worked for a record label I’d sign ‘em up pronto.” Ivory Towerz Radio: "Raw talent. You can hear the band playing a bourbon-soaked barroom . . . and if you can rock there, you can rock anywhere." Guilt Free Pleasures: “A great deal of promise and talent. I can't help but rock out to them. Definitely a band to keep an eye out for.”

“Those aren't our friends, we don't know those people, the bloggers,” Cove Aaronoff says. Of the couple dozen or so chattering people surrounding him with smiles and cigarettes on Grand Street in front of the Trash Bar, after a show in Brooklyn, he waves an arm around and says, “Most of these people are our friends. They come out to the shows pretty reliably.” He turns around and begins to point at people. “I know that guy over there. Hey, man! But I don't know that guy, or that guy.”

I ask whether he would consider himself a Williamsburg artist. Aaronoff replies, “Are we even in Williamsburg? Really?”

“Some people might say so,” I laughed.

Aaronoff also works at one of the most popular restaurants in Manhattan, Amelia's on Broome Street, and brings at least thirty people with him to every show. He rarely travels without a legion.

Once you've attended a “Gun show,” or shared the stage with Community Gun, somehow the members of the band become your friends, spin charm and wizardry, and worm holes into your heart. Given there is no album yet, and just about a dozen songs you can rip from the Internet, the concert becomes the only reliable source for this kind of music. In order to listen to a Community Gun song, you have to put on your shoes, find your Metrocard, get on a train downtown, and stand among a boot-thumping sweaty crowd in a grotty bar. In a sense, by refusing to publicly release their recordings, they're keeping the scene tightly underground, at an old 70s-90s pace. People used to go out to see live music a lot more often over ten years ago, and in our orderly online modern world, we often forget the throwback chaos of “going out to a show.”

But the testy issue of not releasing an album has come up over and over again, and the band exchanges shifty glances before hesitating to answer.

COVE AARONOFF: We have tons of recordings, we have over 100 songs. Why are we not signed? I guess there are just bigger tides at hand. I'm a little neurotic. I'm never really happy with the end product. We don't think we're the best band on the block. And we're not the most convenient. We're not whatever it is.

JOSH BASS: At every show, we have people that want to buy CDs . . . I think, given that the audience wants an album, there has been significant delay in making any progress with that.

The five-piece plays at mainstream Bowery Presents venues, such as the Mercury Lounge, or in Zagat's rated venues like The Bitter End on Bleecker. But for the most part, they cast their web in the little pockets of the musician's bar scene in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Without the street-level crowd, bands often come and go in New York like a sigh. Community Gun is still hanging on to a firm position with a loud groan, somewhere between up-and-coming and established indie asphalt-carpet celebrities. Too often, they refer to themselves as still being just idealistic musicians inadvertently stuck within the context of New York City.

CA: We just play here. It's not so much about where everyone is coming from, but we like playing here. We've done tours, we've played blues festivals. Maybe we don't play outside the city enough because it feels safe here. And I don't know if that's a good thing. It becomes sort of like a job, you show up, you're in your little familiar environment, you know everybody. I hope it doesn't become too much of a routine like that. But we love each other, you know, so we love to get together. And sometimes I just say, well, hopefully we don't have to dodge cans one day.

A week later he told me, “I'm sorry I was so drunk when I said all that. I don't know what I said.”

The band's one-sheet describes their genre as blues/rock/folk/punk, which is entirely deceiving. The Scott Fuller Show called it, “Like Beck with a blues riff. You gotta love it.” But that isn't exactly right either. In fact, it is futile to try and use one-sheet genre descriptions. When pressed, Community Gun admits to being a blues-rock band with a punk “attitude” and folk influences.

Aaronoff begins the set by lining up three glasses of some kind of liquor on the stage amps, during the performance takes a shot between lines, and belts out a gravelly low pitch that is too often compared to the vocal rasps of Tom Waits (I prefer a comparison to the gravelly low pitch of Phil Mays from The Pretty Things). Yes, he might throw the microphone stand on the ground at the end of the show. Yes, he wears sunglasses in a dark bar sometimes. Certainly there is an attitude, a way of humbly kicking the stage and shrugging, throwing back a whiskey and saying, “Well, that's our show. We're Community Gun.” Take it or leave it.

Joss Bass, songwriter, lead guitarist, the talented nice Jewish boy from Sheepshead Bay who attends law school during the day, talked about the music writing process with me while driving through Manhattan traffic on a Thursday afternoon. He apologized ahead of time for his tendency to use Bob Dylan references to answer nearly every question. We tried to come to some sort of solid conclusion, with a little help from Dylan, about what the hell Community Gun is really all about.

REBECCA CHANCE: Too often in your reviews, I've seen Community Gun compared to Tom Waits.

JB: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

RC: I think a lot of that is due an overzealous approach by the reviewers and the audience primarily to the voice of Cove Aaronoff.

JB: His voice is less Waits-y than it used to be. He used to have a lot more of a growling thing.

RC: What is he starting to sound like now?

JB: I don't know, you'd kind of have to listen to it. It's more like him, I guess.

RC: To compare your band to Tom Waits is not entirely accurate. You lack some of the problems Tom Waits had with his occasional Disney-esque fluttery piano ballads. You have an abrasive edge. People dance to your music, and no one has ever attempted anything that could be called “dancing” to Tom Waits. So, what the hell kind of music should people expect from a Community Gun concert?

JB: Well, I don't know, what do you think?

RC: Please do not attempt to interview me. Don't be weird.

JB: Aha, okay. Where we're coming from, I do see it as very close to Waits and Dylan more than anybody. That's the only thing I could list as a primary influence in the songwriting. . . I've been thinking about the punk thing, and I think that is more of a way that we play, that we use punk but we're not a punk band. Not just influences, but the way we write songs, the kind of songs, the style, everything is affected by that. To be honest, I don't follow that many popular bands; I wouldn't be able to say whether we sound like the White Stripes or something.

RC: You don't sound like the White Stripes. Let's establish that. How do you write your songs?

JB: Every song we ever wrote, me and Cove, began on the acoustic guitar. We never wrote on anything else. So whether it’s a blues song or a rock song really depends on whether we're playing acoustic or electric. The song “Radio,” which is maybe the most upbeat song we have, more pop or whatever it is, I remember when we first wrote that. It was on acoustic, and I had the progression. It started to sound like a Romanian folk kind of thing, which maybe it still does in a way, but it became totally different once the drums were there.

RC: Teddy's drums do seem to add that harder element to your music. You can tell he's a metal head at heart.

JB: Exactly. And just putting it on electric, and the way the sing-over is changes it. If it doesn't sound good in acoustic, then we don't do it. We had a couple songs that we wrote when the band was jamming, and some songs came out of that, but we consider those songs to be more lightweight.

RC: So you feel the leap from acoustic to electric is easier for songwriters?

JB: I think it's essential, because that's how we've come upon every song we've liked that we've written. That's what matters, the progression and the lyrics.

RC: You're one of very few musicians who are not shy to admit that the lyrics really do matter.

JB: Well, in a more abstract and philosophical way, the music really is the lyrics. In No Direction Home, the documentary film, Ginsberg was saying Bob Dylan was like a column of air. All of his energy and his focus were channeled into this one single column of air coming out of him. Songs like “It's Alright Ma,” are extremely musically sophisticated, but when Dylan was doing that song at the time, in the 60s, it was more in the form of spoken word, with a stream of air to it. It's hard to explain, but I think we're obsessed enough with the lyrics where we'll have the music thing down, but then spend two months getting every word right. It should be able to stand on its own as a written thing. I can't see from the outside what distinguishes us in musical terms. But we've always kind of felt that way, that the reason we even started to write together was more about the lyrical approach to it. It's so vital. But I don't think people care that much. People who play music, it's not about poetry for most of them.

RC: And that's the Bob Dylan influence, to be poets.

JB: I really hope so. That's the goal. When we're writing, especially together, we're able to revive each other and be on the same page when we want to do poetry. I mean, it's all subjective, isn't it? Great lines or great songs? But when you're on that same page, you can work on it until you come up with some great lines. Just something in the world that is an excellent line. That's what poetry is. I think in music, and rightfully so, most people aren't really approaching it like that. Besides Dylan, I don't think many people have come from that angle.

RC: It's always seemed that in New York City, the secret to success is very hard to define. There is something that makes bands work, and something that makes bands fail. What do you think it is that makes certain bands so attractive and what do you think are some of the mistakes bands make that reflect poorly on the current indie music scene?

JB: It's a tough question to ask me, because I don't like any bands. I try not to be that hard on other musicians, because who am I to be critical? And sometimes I think that every band plays better than me. From a technical standpoint, I think most of these bands now are fluid and polished, and we don't necessarily want to sound like that.

RC: As you know, a lot of shit has been thrown on the Brooklyn scene lately, describing that area as the headquarters of phony rich entitled white kids who try too hard to be ironic. Bands in Williamsburg are getting a terrible reputation of generally trying too hard.

JB: We don't try hard enough, probably.

RC: Does Community Gun fit into this Brooklyn hipster scene as its being portrayed now?

JB: Oh God. I hope not. The hipster Williamsburg kind of thing? No . . . and I don't have a lot of experience with that, I've just read about it in articles. I just hope people appreciate our songs. Some of our songs, I think, were able to get through to people, and I hoped that we'd be able to transcend all of that, the Brooklyn hipster [scene]. I know I'm mentioning Dylan again, but in the 60s when they called him the voice of a generation, when you just looked at the songs, there was nothing in there that belonged to anything, to any genre or period of time in folk rock. If the songs are good enough, then all that other stuff just goes on around it. You can call it anything you want.

RC: You are of the opinion that time and place has little to do with your music. Yet I think your band would be quite different had you met and developed in Nicaragua. You are a New York phenomenon, and yet you shy away from the title.

JB: I think you're right, maybe if I had grown up in Nicaragua, my band would be different.

RC: So, after all these years, is there something that Community Gun is doing right?

JB: We're not capable of being dishonest, because there's no gimmick. I couldn't play a flashy solo really. Maybe we're developed and people say we are. Like, Teddy [Marsh, drums] was a guitar teacher. I still have trouble tuning. There isn't much pretense to that. It's pretty straight up, you know?

RC: Has there ever been a moment, the right time and the right place and the right people, where you could feel that this is a band people really care about?

JB: Yeah, every show we have moments like that. There's always moments within the song when it slows down and a particular line stands out, or the moment when the audience is locked in a certain way, and receiving that song securely. I also think that as musical as we can be, it really shouldn't get in the way, which sometimes I think it does.

Said Los Angeles music blog Rollo & Grady, “I expect big things from these guys.” The trouble seems to be in the peculiar humble stance the band members take as musicians rather than as a musical act. Promotion falls behind their priorities to simply play those songs that the audience receives “securely.”

Ted Marsh, Community Gun drummer, the guitar teacher, more often referred to as “Teddy,” explained, “Rock music isn't ever really inventing anything. Jazz and country and blues gave us all we need, musically. It's all in the technical backbone of the music.” A few moments later, he was telling me about how one can connect music to martial arts, too.

Teddy talks about metal bands while rolling a cigarette outside of a Bar 4 in Park Slope. He reminisces about his first introduction to the love of music when he heard Judas Priest live. “It was like everything I heard before that was suddenly bullshit,” he said.

I asked Cove Aaronoff about the band's four-year-old song, “Think of Me,” a ballad with sad, sweet keyboards by Angelo Miliano, which was released as a music video last year (directed by Kayla Atherton). Aaronoff's meager beginnings, as just a regular guy who graduated from Vassar with an English Literature degree and a guitar, cause him to harbor the dull feeling of being still just an amateur compared to the influences that drove him.

CA: “Think Of Me” was a great song, but I never really thought anyone would hear it. Now that it's getting more reception, I think, well, it's really just a break-up song. But there was this one line, “Strange fruit swinging from the trees.” And I think it's, well, if you heard a band that sounded like . . . ah, no, fuck that.

[“Strange Fruit” refers to a poem, later turned into a song made famous by Billy Holiday referring to black lynchings during a particularly disgusting time in U.S. history.]

RC: I will hit you in the face with this voice recorder if you don't finish that sentence.

CA: Well, it's more that I feel ashamed. Being a white guy playing in a place that matters to people, I don't know. Never mind, fuck that, too.

RC: Is this some kind of white guilt thing? For trying to play the blues?

CA: Maybe it's a white guilt thing. Yeah.

RC: Sort of like when Eric Clapton said he couldn't play acoustic anymore after hearing Robert Johnson's shapes?

CA: Fuck Eric Clapton.

And that is generally the sort of dialogue I could expect from Cove Aaronoff about anything at any given time. Josh Bass later said that he felt “Strange fruit swinging from the trees” was just a throw-away line that didn't fit in with the rest of the song, and that was the only problem with it.

An editor at the Albany Student Press turned down my initial pitch to run a Community Gun interview because they didn't have an album, they didn't have any upstate shows scheduled, and the comment about Strange Fruit seemed racist.

JB: If there's some editor out there who thinks we're being racist, then at least someone's out there talking about our lyrics. Whether it's negative or not. That's still kind of cool.

On a warm April evening, Teddy pulls up to the corner of 269 E Houston Street in his shiny vintage gray Cadillac, taking up a parking space suitable for a yacht, and the members of Community Gun emerge hauling amps and dangling cords and cymbals along the sidewalk, lighting cigarettes, chatting through whatever group of people has gathered nearby. They're playing The Local 269, which Aaronoff describes as, “Just a dive bar. But that doesn't mean I'm putting it down or anything.”

They begin the set with a grungy blues song, “Santa Maria (It Ain't the End of the World)” and end with the popular ballad, “Think of Me.” It's a small, narrow bar, but the audience fills up the tables, stools, and the rest squeeze together up in a high corner on top of a pile of boxes. Cameras flash. This time, there is no room for any dancing. The crowd bounces a little with the beat, tapping shoes and nodding their heads to the rhythm. The air conditioner is broken, and the audience is peeling off layers of clothing.

After the set, I wait about half an hour to let the crowd disperse so I can talk to the band members. Sam Wolk, bassist, disappears. Angelo Miliano, on keys, takes off deeper into Alphabet City with a pretty girl, who is yelling at him about something that seems important. Aaronoff, Marsh, and Bass wander to another bar, accompanied by two actors, and Steph Allen, the gorgeous young powerhouse singer from the Third Wheel Band.

A tall, thin guy who goes only by the name “The Captain,” is, as usual, also in the company of the band. He comes to every show, and has been bequeathed as an “honorary band member.” They proceed to throw back Brooklyn Lagers while looking through the song list on the jukebox.

The only free publication in the bar is a copy of a newsprint indie magazine with Iron Maiden on the cover. The band decided to play a trivia game, passing the magazine around the table, asking each person to name as many of the members of Iron Maiden as possible. Whoever loses the game has to buy a pitcher of beer for the table. Teddy identifies Bruce Dickinson. The Captain wins, naming all five members. Aaronoff doesn't even want to try. He loses with a score of zero.

“Does anybody have any money for the pitcher?” Aaronoff is breaking the rules of the game. He'll retrieve the pitcher, but he doesn't want to pay for it. He's been buying random people drinks all night, and it's nearly 4 a.m.

I hand him a twenty, begrudgingly reminding him that he was the one who had a gig that night, and he wanders off to the bar. I ask him to at least return my change. Later, when Aaronoff goes outside for a cigarette, I see him giving my last six dollars to a homeless person.

Aaronoff handles the band's finances. He pays for recording and books his own shows. He's not only the frontman, the singer, the songwriter, but also the band manager. Whether or not he handles the band's funding wisely is unimportant to the other members. As they've said many times, they're best friends and they love each other. Community Gun began as a project between Aaronoff and Bass, who met in Poughkeepsie at a Bob Dylan concert five years ago. But unlike many frontmen who birthed an indie band, Aaronoff doesn't refer to Community Gun as “his” band. It belongs to all five members, a communal operation. He refers to it as “our” band.

CA: It all started when I met Josh. Then we met Teddy, he played drums. Then we met Sammy, and he played bass. Then we met Angelo, and he played keys. And it all sort of came together somehow.

In the end, that's what the hell Community Gun is all about. Often in popular culture, we expect that everything can be written on bumper stickers. But Community Gun isn't in the bumper sticker business. It's more complicated than that.

The blog Snob's Music wrote, “Something special. I for one can't wait to hear a full length from the band.” The unidentifiable blob of an underground audience may wait a long time for that full length album from Community Gun.

They just don't think their music works on a record. Though there is some debate about that. Josh Bass, for instance, thinks that some of their recordings from five years ago are just fine. Aaronoff is worried nothing is ever going to be good enough to put into a physical, permanent form. But he has said that he intends to release an album on vinyl sometime in the near future.

JB: Cove always used to say, for years, that he wanted something he could hold in his hand, a product. But it's never really been the priority. Fame, labels, radio? That's all secondary. We just want to be good musicians, and I hope people will appreciate that. I don't think that we'll ever make it to that studio polished sound. Why would we want to anyway?