SALEM’S LOT

I am waiting for mg case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to ready discover America and wail

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting” from A Coney Island of the Mind

In late July on Coney Island the air feels like a vape cloud and smells of indica and griddled onions, the nearby ramble of the Cyclone giving the illusion of a breeze. I wait for the sun to set beside the fan at Margarita Island, where bikinied girls with wilting lashes serve microwave pizzas and Bacardi daiquiris. Between mop buckets and boxes of cleaning solution, a broken Zoltar sulks in his plexiglass cell, tan and angry and frozen in unfinished prophecy. Busted speakers blare an endless stream of sullen rappers groaning interchangeably on the subject of their demons, all the drugs they hate to do. Outside a gang of cops pace lazy loops in the reeling shadow of the Wonder Wheel, pausing to inspect with comical diligence a ring-toss booth run by a chain-smoking lizard man in holographic shades. The block is hot, a bartender warns me, and Margarita Island is constantly persecuted for the simple matter of their nightly betta fish fights. He slides me a warm plastic thimble of tequila. His name is Sisqo.

The Eldorado Auto Skooter bumper car arcade is around the corner, and taped to its front entrance is a hastily printed sign: “FOG IN USE.” This is meant to deter a second visit from the FDNY, who screeched up in full battalion earlier this afternoon, having been informed of smoke wafting from beneath the gate and out onto Surf Avenue. A simple misunderstanding: Tonight the band Salem plays their first live show in 12 years here at the Eldorado, and for that they will need fog—like, more than you would think. Presently their sound check rattles the walls and leaks into the twilight, sounding like the echoes of a scary Catholic ritual and mystifying a few sundazed passersby. Around the back a line stretches past booths hawking pina coladas and sickly bags of goldfish, comprised of hot girls and frail-looking gays dressed in their best red-state cosplay.

It’s dark inside the mostly empty Eldorado, where in an hour perhaps 100 people will squeeze between parked bumper cars around the place’s small stage, another 50 or so in the arcade area nearer the exit. By now sound check is over and Jack Donoghue, one half of the duo, lumbers off stage and snaps open a Coors Light. He wears a Salem T-shirt tucked into the kind of starchy work jeans one’s wife picks out at Walmart, the crown of his Caesar haircut tamped to his forehead. His vibe is cheerful but visibly anxious, for no special reason besides that when it comes to Salem, anything that can go wrong probably will. For instance, they’d planned for Henry Laufer (also known as the electronic musician Shlohmo) to play guitar tonight, until one of his lungs spontaneously collapsed.

I first met Salem in 2020 profiling the band for The New York Times. Donoghue and his bandmate John Holland were preparing to release their second album, Fires in Heaven, a decade after their first one, having slipped from the public eye for most of the time in between. (They began as a trio with vocalist Heather Marlatt, though at some point during those years she left the band under vaguely contentious circumstances.) Our interview occurred on Zoom, it being 2020, with Donoghue calling from his mom’s place in Chicago and Holland crackling in and out on a glitchy network in Traverse City, Michigan. In setting up the interview there’d been some last-minute hurdles: The same week, Holland was sentenced to surrender himself to serve 30 days at the Grand Traverse County Jail, effective almost immediately. (He declined to share the reason for the charge.) We spoke the afternoon before he went in, and what I took from that day more than anything was a sense that Salem’s reputation as careless provocateurs was very much off base. “We deeply care and are deeply invested, but only in our own rules. I think from the outside that could be misinterpreted,” Donoghue told me back then. “In the past and still today, almost to a fault, I’ll be like, ‘If John likes this, then that’s it.’ And that’s the only rule that matters.”

Released into a late-2000s recession landscape of bloghouse, chillwave, and some of the worst club rap ever to hit the radio, Salem’s music stood apart: a fucked collage of Southern rap sludge, blownout shoegaze, deconsecrated church hymns, and recordings of accidents, disastrous and sometimes transcendent. Their divisiveness amplified their contrarian allure. (The Washington Post once hosted a roundtable debating whether or not they were “the stupidest band on earth.”) The music seemed to be getting at something I couldn’t then put into words, which I identify now as the feeling of being young and alive at the end of history: no culture, no future, no going forth in glory, but maybe a good party now and then. New York media types wrote about Salem as if they’d invented Traverse City, Michigan, as a concept, a sinister Midwestern backwoods populated strictly by OxyContin addicts. (Among the merch sold with their second album was a sweatshirt that declared “I SURVIVED THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC U.S.A. 2012-2021,” with a dozen pharmaceutical company logos stamped on the back.) It’s true that they embody a certain backwoods chic: camo, construction gear, gas-station sunglasses, the odd flash of a gold tooth or tasteful handgun, products of their upbringing sometimes confused as based posturing. The pair’s individual Instagram accounts, a mix of found images and personal snapshots, feel like artfully crafted Tumblr pages that Ethel Cain might follow—a bloodstain on a carpet, a sunset behind a gas station, the back of Julia Fox’s head inside an old sedan. (A photo book the actress published in 2016 documented her six months living with the duo at a Louisiana fishing camp.)

Tonight, post-sound check, Holland slumps quietly on a bumper car chained to the wall. Until his arrival at LaGuardia yesterday, it was unclear whether he’d make it to the show at all, lacking as he is a valid form of ID; yet somehow he made it through security unquestioned. There’s a fragileness about him, a sense of being built for a different sort of world, and across one cheek a tattoo is scrawled in shaky letters: “CRYME.” When I ask him where he’s living now, he whispers, “Minneapolis,” then corrects himself a moment later: “No, I’m sorry. It’s Milwaukee.” His preferred mode of expression is not the spoken word, though weird profundities can slip through the cracks. “Maybe there isn’t really good or evil, and what people think that is is just, like, interchangeable,” he’d told me years ago, the day before he went to jail, sighing deeply as he unknotted his thoughts. “There probably are words I don’t know to describe what I’m trying to say...but there’s, like, a big church that makes people cry, and that’s how to get to heaven.”

In a room at the Coney Island Best Western, Donoghue and Holland choose their stage clothes, including evil-looking batting gloves and a custom belt buckle that renders “SALEM” in a tangle of silver stars. A 30-rack of Coors Light is excavated from the mini-fridge while Hood by Air founder Shayne Oliver sprawls across the bed in peacock-blue stilettos and Holland’s skittish boyfriend fusses over him in the locked bathroom. A man with a video camera enters, having run into Holland’s dad and sister in the elevator. “Everyone’s nervous,” he relays, and Donoghue says with a laugh: “Well, they should be.” Standing behind Holland in the mirror, Donoghue clasps a thin chain engraved with their logo around his partner’s neck. “Here, Johnny boy.” “Love you,” says Holland, doing a little jig at his reflection and humming softly, “Yes indeed!”

The only one missing is Lana Del Rey—a thought I have often on summer nights, though in this case it’s within the realm of plausibility. When a photo appeared last year of the singer and Donoghue posed outside Chicago’s Cook County Jail like a manic twink’s take on American Gothic, it felt as if I’d shifted reality with my mind. (Pop bloggers spoke of Donoghue’s Instagram like they’d found a sinkhole to hell: “Lana Del Rey’s new boyfriend made out with his cousin and his dog,” whimpered one headline.) Here were two of their generation’s most potent exponents of a decaying American sublime, spinning its trash into something exalted from star-crossed corners of the industry. But tonight Del Rey, erstwhile Coney Island Queen, doesn’t show. “She has a migraine,” Donoghue offers, deadpan, before changing the subject.

What may come as a surprise about the Eldorado bumper car arcade is that it is loud—like, louder than you’d think. Most of the specialty analog sound systems of the NYC club scene circa Studio 54 have long since been dismantled, but not the one at Eldorado, which opened in 1973 with one of the best custom sound setups in the city. Built into the arcade’s wood-paneled walls are state-ofthe-art speaker stacks designed by fabled disco-era engineers for, among other things, the kind of bass that makes your womb vibrate. Into a sea of fog stabbed through with strobe beams, Holland, Donoghue, and their last-minute guitarist, Ludwig Rosenberg (the Swedish musician and Drain Gang affiliate known as Whitearmor) take the stage as three violet silhouettes lit by 100 phone screens. “Ask me what I’m doing with mg life, ain’t shit to tell g’all,” Donoghue rumbles over the lurch of a mangled Russian ballet, growling about wrapping cars around trees as Julia Fox shrieks into her livestream on my right and, to my left, Holland’s sister apprehends the teeming room with what looks like low-grade panic.

I’d be awfully remiss not to mention that the show, which sold out within minutes of its announcement the week before, was presented by Pornhub—a fact that’s hard to miss given the size of their logo on the flier, or the T-shirt for sale at the bar printed with a foot pic from Stella Barey, a creator you may also know as @AnalPrinc3ss. A handful of household-name porn stars coolly prowl the room, draping themselves over bumper cars and nodding languorously along to the squall of sound; Asa Akira slips through the crowd wearing the aforementioned T-shirt. Pornhub was bought by a private equity company this spring and recently appointed a female exec to oversee the site’s creative direction in a bid for something like respectability. Pegging Salem to assist such a mission is an excellent joke, but then again, I see the vision: A powerfully seamy energy radiates from the combination of “Salem x Pornhub,” a perfectly abject spectacle in the wasteland of the free.

It occurs to me later that most of the crowd, thrashing along to 15-year-old songs (as well as several unreleased tracks that will likely never see the light of day), has no memory of a time when “Salem live” was a punchline (specifically, the iconically wretched SXSW set that got the group heckled off stage in 2010, though they didn’t realize it till they read the comments). Back then Salem gave the impression of half-conscious dirtbags unprepared to translate their sound to the real world, but tonight’s 45-minute performance hints at a secret perfectionist streak or, at the very least, a good amount of practice. What was once a niche sound, obscuring its anguish in reverb, rave stabs, and gratuitous vocal effects, now registers as standard. (It’s worth remembering that Donoghue has coproduction credits on Kanye West’s Yeezus, a candidate for the most influential album of the past 10 years.) Presently there must be hundreds of artists who commit to an adjacent bit, antisocial perma-teens who dabble in occult imagery, borrow from hip-hop, and wallow in their vices. But Salem’s case feels different. Its members created a world, and now they live in it whether they want to or not, teetering on the rim of a void that’s always been there.

They close with a pair of 2010 songs that get at the whole Salem thing—“King Night,” a hellish rework of “O Holy Night” with an undercurrent of ’90s trance yearning, and “Trapdoor,” a derelict rap over squeals of car crashes, the lyrics of which they declined to explain in a New York Times interview around the time of their debut. The crowd streams out into the arcade section and the boardwalk beyond for

the after-party, and in the winking neon of Skee-Ball machines I’m aware that the place is crawling with generations of NYC It Girls. Fox makes the rounds in boot-cut jeans and a camo-print Salem cap, while Cat Marnell dances with the Pornhub girls and Chloe Sevigny, barefaced in a basketball jersey, strikes poses with Donoghue in front of the claw machine. A middle-aged man who claims to own several Buffalo Wild Wings franchises across the Midwest offers me a key bump, which I take as my signal to leave.

The next morning a new photo of Donoghue makes the rounds. In it he’s shirtless on the Coney Island boardwalk being handcuffed by two NYPD officers with Fox at his side, clearly arguing on his behalf. It started off wholesomely enough with a late-night migration to the beach, and the next thing you know he’s spent whatever was left of the night in a Brooklyn holding cell. I don’t expect the next Salem show to be happening anytime soon.