24 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
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SONGSOFTHEDAY
THECRUNCHIEST
E
arlier in the summer, Jenny Lewis,
the singer and songwriter, performed
her new song “Wasted Youth” on “The
Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” She
and her band wore a matching getup of
white Nikes and Mets-blue sweatpants
and sweatshirts, chests adorned with an
image of a skull smoking a joint. The
look said stoner slumber party meets
cult of Heaven’s Gate. So did the song,
maybe. The next afternoon, Lewis was
still in her blue sweats, drinking natural
wine and picking at a plate of cooked
carrots at Café Mogador, in the East
Village. “I’m proudly wearing my own
merchandise,” she said. She had reddish
bangs and serious eyelashes.
Mogador had been her food go-to
when, a few years ago, she’d lived in a
nearby apartment that belonged to Annie
trotted out in a Hide-It Holster, which,
Toomer said, “allows him to completely
hide any size handgun with his shirt
tucked in or left out!” The man model-
ling the holster—its inventor, Steve
Wiesner—put his hand into his pocket
and magically pushed a gun up and out
from behind his belt. The crowd roared.
“That’s good,” Ann Pugliano said,
from the front row. “I’d like to see my
husband do that.” Pugliano describes
herself as a “purse person.” She held a
colorful cloth bag that she’d bought on
vacation in St. Thomas. “It’s nice, but
not gun-friendly,” she said. “My husband
taught me all the safety issues, so I don’t
shoot my foot off. ” She didn’t love the
Aegis bags, but she liked the ZAP Light
Stun Gun—“for gun-free zones”—which,
Toomer told the crowd, “boasts one mil-
lion volts, instantly incapacitating attack-
ers!” On the runway, the model activated
it, and the air briefly buzzed.
Three products, including the Hide-It
Holster, tied for audience favorite. Wies-
ner demonstrated his product again. “Do
I look like an armed threat?” he asked.
He shook his head. “I just look like an
old bald guy.”
—Charles Bethea
Clark, who records as St. Vincent. (“They
have the world’s crunchiest salad,” Lewis
said a few times, with a giggle that sug-
gested it was an old inside joke.) She
had fled Los Angeles, her lifelong home,
to get away from some “post-breakup
vibes,” and had found rejuvenation in
the company of her friend Tennessee
Thomas, who had a little shop, on First
Avenue, called the Deep End Club. “I
went there every day,” Lewis said. “It
was a space for young women to come
hang. Make friendship bracelets, regis-
ter to vote, whatever.” She and Thomas
and another friend formed a one-off
low-fi band that they named Nice as
Fuck. They wrote an album in the shop.
“I was channelling whatever you’re chan-
nelling when you’re turning forty and
in a new city and out in the world for
the first time,” she said.
Her latest record, “On the Line,”
which features guest work by Beck, Don
Was, Jim Keltner, Ryan Adams, and
Ringo Starr (who showed up in the stu-
dio one day), channels, among other
things, the recent death of her mother,
from whom she’d been estranged for
twenty years. Liver cancer, hepatitis C.
Her mother had been a longtime her-
oin addict. Her father was never around.
The two met at an audition in Las Vegas
and, in the seventies, formed a lounge
act called Love’s Way.
“Harmonica, drum machine, bass gui-
tar,” Lewis said. “They lived in hotels,
paid in cash. They were doing live cov-
ers of the songs of the day. Sonny &
Cher, the Carpenters. Family bands,
man! That shit is bananas. I come from
a family band. My dad was a virtuoso
harmonica player. He could play Brahms
on a chromatic harmonica. His story is
interesting, in a ‘Big Fish’ kind of way. I
don’t really know what’s true, but, in a
way now, it doesn’t matter. According to
my grandmother, there was a program
at the end of the Second World War
where you could basically check your
kids into an orphanage and join the
workforce, so my father lived in an or-
phanage in Philadelphia while my grand-
mother worked. She was a Busby Berke-
ley dancer. My grandfather was a Golden
Gloves boxer who got into vaudeville.
He had an act with Bert Lahr, and when
Bert Lahr blew up my grandfather was
very bitter about it. Supposedly. He ended
up working in the crime world and going
to jail, I don’t know where. Never met
him, don’t even know his name. So my
father was in this orphanage, and there
was a famous harmonica school there.
He wound up going on the road as a lit-
tle guy, a harmonica prodigy. He never
drove a car, didn’t have a bank account,
sort of lived in his own twilight. For a
while, he was in a prison in central Cal-
ifornia. Just something silly. Fraud or
something. A lot of my family has gone
to prison or jail. My mom was at Lin-
wood when Lindsay Lohan was in there.”
Lewis grew up in the Valley, amid the
turmoil of her mother’s addictions. When
she was three, she began acting. Ads,
then TV shows, then film. At ten, she
played Lucille Ball’s granddaughter in
thirteen episodes of “Life with Lucy.”
“We were on welfare, and it pulled us
out of poverty,” she said. “It was too much
money, it turned out.”
Her music career, anyway, has been
just modest enough to be survivable.
“Any other trajectory, and I would have
spiralled out on drugs. The access. I never
got invited to an orgy. In my entire life,
not one goddam orgy invitation. And
that says something about me.”
“Does everyone else get invited to
orgies?” she was asked.
“They must, because orgies happen.”
Lewis doggie-bagged her food and
headed for another favorite haunt, Flower
Power Herbs & Roots. At the counter,
she asked for a potion she’d got there
before, called Come to Me Oil. The
cashier said they were out: “The owner
Jenny Lewis
