Gutter Rock Girl

The Laura Pepitone Show

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, August 27, 2007

“No, like this. You have to hold the ball up high, like this.”

It’s an unexpectedly busy Monday night at Kingston’s Hoe Bowl on the Hill, and Laura Pepitone is offering lessons in Lane 8.

“Look down here, on the floor,” she tutors, her Noo Yawk-tinged voice cracking above the clatter of falling pins and two noisy busloads of after-school program kids. “Line yourself up with the middle dot,” she continues, “and then just go like this—all one motion.” Her gangly frame bends low and glides forward to release the ball. Strike!

Flash back a few frames to an earlier Monday night, this one in April 2007 at Oasis Cafe in New Paltz, and find Pepitone crouched low and locked in a very similar pose, only this time she’s holding a microphone, not a bowling ball. Sweating and decked out in a pair of garish, candy-striped tights and loud socks pulled up to her knees, she’s on stage with her one-woman “band”—The Laura Pepitone Show. “This next song is off my new CD,” the 31-year-old singer announces before releasing the pause button on a CD player set up next to her, “and it’s called ‘If You Are from Upstate, Be Proud.’”

The backing track kicks on and so does the songstress. In between hopping up and down, running in place, punching the air, and straddling the stage to rock side to side, she belts out the two-chord tune’s downstate elitist-baiting treatise. Like pretty much all of Pepitone’s music, the raw cut was recorded on her home four-track using basically just an electric guitar and her ubiquitous Casio keyboard/rhythm-keeper. It’s lo-fi pop magic, a crunchy bubblegum mix of two faves, Guided by Voices and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Standing still for a rare second during the next number, she points to an imaginary spot on the floor of the stage and deadpans, “Guitar solo.” Sure enough, the one-note solo plays, and then it’s back to the jumping around. Weird isn’t the word for this spectacle; the namesake artist and her infinite energy are almost too much—dizzying, inspiring, funny, and extremely entertaining, in one surreal serving. It’s safe to say that on a Monday night—or any night, for that matter—in the Hudson Valley, you’re not likely to catch another act quite like The Laura Pepitone Show.