2/4: Save the Roller Disco!

TRAGEDY returns to Asbury Lanes, as the ONLY metal Bee Gees tribute you’ll need see this weekend puts on their bowling shoes for a bit of Saturday Night Kegler — while lensman Mike McLaughlin is among the vibey visionaries represented in PINK NOISE, the 3rd Anniversary group show opening at Parlor Gallery.

All in all, it wasn’t the best week in which to be PINK.

Between the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s face-reddening “Pink-Gate” PR debacle, and the viral backlash against the infamous McNuggets “Pink Slime” photo, the once-proud color of Barbie and Elvis and Quisp was looking a beat-up and pulpy shade of purple by Friday. Which is why Pink Noise, the official Third Anniversary group show installation at Asbury Park’s pop-art paradise Parlor Gallery, could not have arrived with better timing to pull the PINK back from the BRINK.

A chance to feel “In the Pink” is especially needed here in a week with the news that Asbury Lanes — that Cold War-era tenpins taproom turned kitschy-cool alterna-arts odditorium — had been sold by its longtime owner to local developers Pat Fasano and Vince Gifford. It’s a bit of news that set off brain-alarms in anyone for whom the Lanes has served as everything from Fellini-esque corner bar, to a destination worth crossing several state lines to reach — and, justified or not, it was a potential tragedy that put many of us on a reflexive “Save the Roller Disco” alert straight out of 80s movies like Xanadu and Lunch Wagon.

Of course, the Lanes is no stranger to Tragedy, having hosted this hemisphere’s premier all-metal tribute to the music of the BeeGees many times over the years. Tonight, February 4, the 2012 edition of the continent-crossing metalizers (brothers Barry Glibb, Mo’Royce Peterson, and Robin Gibbens, with little brother Andy Gibbous Waning on bass and family patriarch The Lord Gibbeth, on drums) retakes the center Lanes in a late-skewed setsnack for which your award-winning DJ Jack the Ripper will serve as “amuse bouche.”

Before that, however, the windows of the Cookman Avenue arts bloc’s Parlor Gallery will be steaming up like an electric casserole dish, as First Saturday rages in downtown Asbury and some dozen music-minded artists (including DEVO poindexter Mark Mothersbaugh) team up for a de-waxing blast of Pink Noise.

ARCHIVE: Don’t Cry, Baby, It’s Parlor Time

By TOM CHESEK (First published on Red Bank oRBit February 3, 2009)

We first met “Juicy” Jenn Hampton at The Asbury Lanes — that retro-politan rec-room repository of anything that’s just a bubble off-plumb in American life and lore — where she serves as one of the managers. That is, when she’s not serving up recession-busting Blue Ribbons behind the bar of the club’s cozy atom-age lounge.

Ever since the legendary artist and auto customizer Meldon Von Riper Stultzconvinced the owners of the Camelot-era bowling alley on Fourth Avenue to try something new, ART has played an important part in the evolution of this one-of-a-kind nightspot. Mel imported some “alternAmericana” design elements that worked with the naturally vintage vibe of the neighborhood landmark to create a monument of casual Cold War cool — a zany zen hepster hangout unlike any other; a bomb shelter you’d want to spend a Twilight Zone half-life burrowed within.

The Fellini-meets-Flintstones trip was crystallized in the post-Stultz era, with the visual arts (including film screenings from the wild side of weird) bolstered by features ranging from displays of hand-decorated bowling pins that drew the participation of some hot and hypercurrent talents, to the hot-rod homage and pin-up pastiche of the myriad flyers. To say nothing of the performance art — we know not what else to call it — that regularly graces the center lanes.

So you could imagine our pleasant surprise when it was announced a little more than a year ago that Juicy Jenn would be among the owners of Crybaby Art Gallery, a new two-story space for forward-thinking artstuffs at 717 Cookman Avenue in downtown Asbury. The gallery quickly impressed us as an attitude-steeped alternative to the glorified diner art that defines so many Shore outlets, with its painstakingly curated exhibits spotlighting the works of such local/global creatives as Kirsten Easthope, Sunny Buick, Mitch O’Connell, Bethany Marchman, Kukulaand the poster-art pope known as Porkchop — media-drunk, sugarbuzzed graphomania that pops like the most raucous rock and roll.

Beginning this week, the artspace formerly known as Crybaby is no more. But baby dry your eyes, as Juicy Jenn — in cahoots with new partners Jill Ricci and Michael Walker — has simply rethought and rebranded the enterprise as Parlor Gallery, a resource designed to ensure the continued health and wellbeing of the city’s tightly knit artistic community. It’s a mission that begins in earnest on Saturday evening, when the new Parlor space presents an opening reception for its inaugural show, a little thing they like to call Glamour Bomb.