Bongwater: Most Underrated New York Band Gets the YouTube Treatment

Enjoy an entire concert from legendary NY band Bongwater, fronted by actress/artist/downtown icon Ann Magnuson.  If you manage to watch the whole video, you’ll see that Bongwater were so ahead of their time but also victims of it - being avant in the transitional period between the ’80s and Nirvana leave them sounding simultaneously singular but dated.  Odds are there will never be another neo-psychedelic band that sends up ’70s classic rock with spoken word pop culture hallucinations and wigs!  At 61 minutes, the band plays a Led Zeppelin song in Chinese.  Click here for a better-quality example of their fringe NY-cool spectacle (note that here they’re joined by a Grateful Dead member, Screamin’ Jay, and April March). As an aside, I’ve seen Magnuson perform twice: once performing campfire songs with Phranc, and the other doing Halloween songs with a harpist.