Graffiti and Grace Notes on the Lincoln Highway
Writer Frank Barry is crossing the country in a Winnebago to find the spirit of America. This week’s destinations: Trenton and Philadelphia.
By Frank BarrySeptember 26, 2020, 8:00 AM EDT
Waking up in a parking lot for the first time is a little jarring. But peering out the Winnebago’s window and seeing a line of shoppers outside Trader Joe’s brings a sense of normalcy, even with people keeping their distance from one another. It’s morning in America, amid mourning in America.
Driving the Lincoln Highway south to Trenton, we pass JoJo’s Steak House — “Famous for Cheesesteaks & Hoagies Since 1950,” the sign still reads — boarded up and abandoned for the better part of the decade, after Joseph “JoJo” Giorgianni pleaded guilty to paying an $8,000 bribe to former mayor Tony Mack in JoJo’s back room. It was all part of a sting concocted by FBI agents claiming to want to build a parking garage downtown, though there was no shortage of parking when we drove through the city’s quiet streets.
The old Roebling wire plant — the city’s largest employer for decades — closed in 1974 and still sits partly vacant, as do many other buildings. The boast that local officials posted on a bridge in 1935 in big block letters — TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES — hangs as an albatross over the entrance to the city.
Yet the legacy of innovative industry still lives here. Two miles from the Roebling site, a local company called TerraCycle is trying to take what the world makes and repurpose it, with the goal of making a zero-waste economy profitable. Investors welcome. Today the company is host to the 15th annual Jersey Fresh Jam, a graffiti and hip-hop festival organized by Leon “Rain” Rainbow that has in the past attracted big names like Cappadonna from the Wu-Tang Clan and Masta Ace. This year is smaller for Covid, and since there are no major headliners, the community of aerosol artists Rainbow has fostered from the region and far beyond takes center stage, with TerraCycle’s walls serving as the canvas.
Rainbow has lived in the city for two decades, and he’s become a civic booster — the rare graffiti artist who has made a partner of government. He’s received support from the state and a local business group to paint murals around town, including on a parking garage. (Not JoJo’s — it was never built, and JoJo got 6 1/2 years.)
After the killing of George Floyd, Rainbow joined a peaceful protest that was coopted by looters, which sparked an idea: a project called “Rock the Boards.” With donations from Sherwin Williams and a local nonprofit, “We painted lot of the boarded up windows that were smashed — and then some that were like precautionary,” Rainbow says. “What we try to do is just spread positive messaging.”
Graffiti is usually the bane of business owners and city officials. In Trenton, they have supported and subsidized it. And far from being a sign of decay and disorder, it has been a visible rejection of neglect and an affirmation of the community’s support for local businesses. Graffiti will always have a subversive element: “I’ve had my run-ins with the police,” Rainbow told me. But cities have more to fear from JoJos than Rainbows.
Driving into Philadelphia, murals guide our way to downtown: There’s Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, a Salvation Army trumpeter, a message: RISE. Driving by the country’s largest city hall, we pass a bride and groom on the steps of the Union League, founded as a patriotic society during the Civil War. Its members dedicated the building in May 1865, in a ceremony that Lincoln might have attended had he lived to see it.
Four years earlier, Lincoln visited Independence Hall on his way to Washington for his inauguration and said in an impromptu and introspective speech:
Liberty — the word appears only once in the Declaration of Independence, but in its most important phrase, connecting life and the pursuit of happiness and giving each meaning. Those looking for a symbol of liberty in this city visit the Liberty Bell. Those seeking to feel and hear the real thing during this time of quarantine are better off turning their attention to Adam Weiner’s South Philly home. After picking up an Italian hoagie from Cosmi’s and finding parking in an Acme supermarket lot — thank goodness, because I had no Plan B — that’s where I head.
Weiner leads the band Low Cut Connie and plays piano with uninhibited abandon — standing on his bench, kneeling on the floor, stripping down to underwear. He sings about “people that are on the edges of society, underdogs and subcultures,” celebrating their defiance and asking all comers to let loose and feel joy. His twice-weekly livestream shows — “Tough Cookies,” he calls them, after the name he gave his audience — have become a Covid hit, and the small room on his second floor serves as a revivalist tent for spiritual uplift and renewal.
“We have a couple of people who are clergy who watch, different religious backgrounds,” — people, Weiner says, who would be never be drawn to a band with songs like “All These Kids Are Way Too High.” But when they tune in to the livestream, “They’re sending these incredible messages,” he says. “Then, we have these nurses and social workers — all these people that work in hospitals that watch regularly. I don’t know if they would listen to our music or come see us at a concert, but they’re all about it. And now, because I have focused so much attention on racism and discussions of race, not just in America, but specifically in the entertainment business and music business, and I’m talking about these issues, I’ve got people that are really into the show who are in it for the discussion aspect.”
Long before the livestreams, Low Cut Connie was building one of the most diverse audiences in the music industry. “My agent said, ‘You’re the only band where, when you see the line on the street outside the club, you have absolutely no clue who’s inside,’” he says. “We get booked on country, Americana festivals, Pride ... We've done R&B events … We have fans that are Black and White.”
That’s noticeably uncommon in the music industry, and not by accident. When the band signed with the William Morris talent agency, Weiner recalled, the agency asked him what William Morris acts he would want play with on tour. They were baffled when he said he’d love to open for Janelle Monae. “And we got offered a Kings of Leon leg of a tour, opening — and I said no. And the agency was so confused,” he recalls.
“I said, let me like break this down for you. One, from an artistic standpoint, I don’t want to look like a mini-Kings of Leon,” he recalls. “And who needs another package of just like White rock bands? And I had done all this work to change Low Cut Connie and by this point, the band I would perform with was men and women, Black and White, gay and straight. And I said, ‘I want to do a tour within the next two years where we co-headline with a hip-hop act, because I want to play the clubs and the festivals that the hip-hop acts play in. I want to perform in front of Black people and I want White rock ’n’ roll fans to watch a hip-hop show.”
Rock ’n’ roll began in Black America, and a half century ago, it seemed music might help unite and integrate the country. The reverse happened — music became a segregated affair, like so much else in American life. Weiner talks about his parents’ generation: “Motown, Stax — that was White and Black kids listening to the same music. And that was White and Black kids going to the same clubs, listening to the same radio station. It doesn’t happen now as much. That’s sad.” Weiner blames the industry, but also puts some onus on artists.
“Reid my manager and I put together this plan to do the co-headline with Big Freedia. And it was like a dream come true for everybody. Freedia made a lot of new fans, we made a lot of new fans. There were tense moments where both of us were somewhat rejected by the other’s fans. And then there were these ecstatic moments. Especially the end of every show where we would play together. When everybody was just grooving together and it was rock ’n’ roll, it was soul, it was balanced. It was hip-hop. It was R&B. People would lose their minds when they felt like we’re all part of something special. And you have to make the decision to do that kind of thing.”
In building a racially diverse audience, Weiner has also faced the challenge of holding his politically diverse fanbase together. In February, after he released the song “Look What They Did,” about the decline of Atlantic City, which referenced Donald Trump and included the line “Dark features get you shot in the head,” he heard about it.
“We have a lot of conservative fans,” Weiner says. “Some of them not only didn’t like ‘Look What They Did,’ but they didn’t like some of the things that I've talked about, on the show. … I had a bunch of messages where people said, ‘I’ve been with you up till now.’” He says one fan asked, “Is there still room for me in your tent?”
“I responded to everyone with respect, and basically said, ‘I’m proud of the song, so I’m proud of the performances, but guess what? There’s room for everybody here. And we’re allowed to disagree on things.’” He adds, “That’s the nature of any meeting and collection of people, whether it’s religious, political or artistic — there’s a lot of energy bouncing around the room. And not everybody is in sync always. So I said, ‘If you’ll stick with me, I'll stick with you. You don't have to love everything I do.’”
And the response? “Great,” he says. “Not in every case, but most.”
Tonight he’s paying special tribute to Toots Hibbert, the reggae star who died that morning, and kicks off the show by belting out “Pressure Drop” — a song about the weight of justice coming down. His band has a new album, “Private Lives,” out in October, and for Weiner there will be no returning to a pre-Covid world. He’s found his calling through the livestreams, not so much as a musician but as an entertainer, healer, bridge-builder and fighter for others. “It feels like such a purposeless endeavor to be a rock and roll performer usually, and then all of a sudden you got purpose.”
That purpose, it seems to me, is what we are all called to do by the Constitution, and it is the same purpose Lincoln vowed to defend with his life that night he spoke in Philadelphia: to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Maybe we should paint that on more walls.