Venue Review: Cheap, Live Music at Cake Shop
Searching For Music on Manhattan's Lower East Side
Jan 27, 2009
Cake Shop is a music venue, record store, bakery, and bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It functions on two floors of a long, narrow building on Ludlow Street, between Stanton and Rivington-the bakery, records, and first bar are on street level-another bar and live music are in the basement. The operation is within short walking distance of several other, ostensibly better, music venues including The Living Room, The Bowery Ballroom, and The Mercury Lounge. The downstairs bar at Cake Shop is sometimes less expensive and usually more crowded than the one upstairs, and entry to the downstairs bar requires payment of a cover charge. Most shows at Cake Shop are 21 plus and cost 5-15 dollars.
Bad Acoustics
If all the options for listening to live music in New York City on a given night were surveyed, Cake Shop would rank near the bottom in terms of sound quality and venue design. The space is a dark tunnel, and if a person stands in the rear 2/3rds of the room during a show he or she will not see the band, whose performing space is a single step above the floor. The amps at Cake Shop are generally turned up too high, and the micing of instruments is invariably off-balance. In a band with a singer able to out-perform everyone else, a background tambourine might be turned up to a deafening level while the vocals wash away in static.
Lower East Side Music Venue Comparisons
For all its faults, there is something wonderful about Cake Shop. While most other venues in New York have better sound quality and more reliably professional bands, Cake Shop may be one of the last, great places to stuff in for a night of too-loud, too-eager, too-poor youthful camaraderie. Cake Shop brings in bands not often heard elsewhere (for better or worse), and its dank, underground reality means no one there is too successful (yet) and no one there is too prissy (unlike crowds at both established midtown concert halls and the semi-private loft shows of Williamsburg.) At Cake Shop, the music on a given night might be terrible, or it might be wonderful, but hearing it will be an intimate, community experience by and for people trying to do something out loud in New York.
Reasons to Avoid Cake Shop
If an established band is playing at Cake Shop, skip it. Wait until they play where the audience has a chance to hear them clearly. If a person has new clothes, a new job, or a firm grip on adulthood, that person should not go to Cake Shop. A person like that should consider instead The Blue Note, Joe's Pub, or The Iridium, and leave the basement to the kids with guitars.
Cake Shop, 152 Ludlow, NY, NY, 10002
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