Kid Congo Powers & the Pink Monkey Birds

The man playing guitar in this two-hundred-capacity room on Sunday night came up through the Cramps, the Gun Club, and Nick Cave's Bad Seeds — three of the most influential bands of the last fifty years — and he's still out here with the Pink Monkey Birds, close enough that you can read his face. Kid Congo Powers helped teach everyone else what those songs could be, and he plays rooms like this because rooms like this are where it still means something.

The Casbah has booked bands like him for thirty-five years, in a converted Middletown rectangle that holds nothing fancy except the people who keep showing up. Shows like this sell out — not from marketing, but because the regulars text the regulars and the regulars buy the tickets.

Sunday night, 21+, doors at eight, openers at eight-thirty. Tickets through the Casbah's own site; they've always sold their own. Bring the friend who owns the first Gun Club record.