Welcome To The Indie Rock Boat Show

When New York power pop powerhouses Charly Bliss announced that they were playing a show aboard the Liberty Belle, I knew I had to be there. A band I’ve loved for years who never fail to put on an electrifying live show, this time on a boat? With a stunning view of the New York skyline?? On 9/11 for some reason??? Sign me up!

Part of my motivation was to make up for being out of town during all three of Water From Your Eyes’ annual boat shows, a tradition that’s become a huge hit with the experimental pop duo’s fanbase. Boat shows are nothing new — Rocks Off Concert Cruises, responsible for putting on most of the New York nautical concerts, has been around for over 20 years — but recently, the company’s founder has noticed an uptick in indie rock acts in the New York area taking to the seas (or more accurately, the rivers).

Is this related to the Yacht Rockissance? Or the meteoric rise of one MJ Lenderman after the release of his critically acclaimed album Boat Songs? In these troubling times, has life on land become so stressful that people can’t help but yearn for the open water?

I reached out to Water From Your Eyes member and Stereogum correspondent Rachel Brown for commentary. “[The first boat show] was our manager Nik Soelter’s idea,” they tell me over Zoom. “We had a show scheduled in New York in July [2023] when Everyone’s Crushed came out, so we couldn’t actually have a release show, so Nik was like, ‘Let’s do it in August, but on a boat!”

The prospect of playing a show on a riverboat was daunting and hard to imagine until they were actually out on the previously uncharted waters. “Until we actually got onto the boat I was like, that’s not real.” They add that for a band with “water” in the name, it made perfect thematic sense.

I’ll find out for myself once I board that the room where the show actually happens is relatively small compared to the rest of the boat itself, which is a multi-tiered labyrinth of staircases and decks. “It’s kinda like a maze,” says Brown. “You can somehow be on the boat for like three hours and just not see people that supposedly were there.”

Both the Charly Bliss boat show and the Water From Your Eyes boat shows are hosted by Rocks Off, an independent live music booking company that specializes in concert cruises on the East and Hudson Rivers. Their roster of boat show alumni boasts big names like Alabama Shakes, M.I.A., Built To Spill, Yo La Tengo, Laura Jane Grace, and many, many more. I contacted Rocks Off founder and promoter Jake Szufnarowski, who was thrilled to talk about the company’s history and why seafaring and live music go so well together.

Back in 2002, Szufnarowski was managing a band called RANA, regulars on the New York indie rock circuit, playing venues like the Knitting Factory, Mercury Lounge, and Brownies, and wanted to try something a little different. According to Szufnarowski, the lightbulb moment came one day while he was walking along the East River.

“I saw a boat come by with music blaring out of it — salsa and merengue music — and was like, ‘Ooh, that would be cool!'” he says. “So I reached out to a bunch of boat companies and had a really hard time finding a boat owner who would be willing to do bands on boats. Most of them were like $10,000 to rent, like you were throwing a wedding or something. It was crazy money. Eventually I found this operator who owned one boat at the time. I went to see it and he was working on it by himself and he was like, ‘You have a band that’ll play on my boat?'”

The boat’s owner was a man from Queens named Marco Tempesta, who agreed to host a concert priced at $20 per ticket on the condition that he get half the ticket sales, plus the cash bar. In exchange, Szufnarowski made sure that the show sold out.

“I remember saying to him, ‘Can you sell Pabst Blue Ribbon on your boat?'” says Szufnarowski. “He was like ‘No one’s gonna wanna drink that bullshit beer!’ I was like, ‘Trust me man, you can buy it for like 35 cents a can and sell it for $3′ which in 2002, $3 was like, money. He made me promise to buy any PBR he didn’t sell off of him, he bought 480 cans, and he sold all of it before the boat even left the dock.”

Following the smash success of the first boat show, Tempesta was quick to have Szufnarowski book more shows: “I was like yeah, but the next time I want a Wednesday night, and I wanna keep $12 and you keep $8. And he was like, ‘Deal!'”

The following year, Rocks Off booked 26 shows, and the next year, 55. According to Szufnarowski, they hosted 100+ shows a year from 2005 to 2020, the first year with no boat shows, for obvious reasons. At the time of our conversation, Szufnarowski approximates that they’ve done 73 shows this year across boats with capacities of 200, 400, and 600. Reigning returners are New York ska band the Slackers, the one band who’ve played a show every year since the inception of Rocks Off’s concert cruise series.

“We’ve seen a rise and fall in popularity as far as different scenes go,” says Szufnarowski. “For a while it was hard to get indie rock fans to wanna do it, because it felt like a lot of indie rock bands and fans were very precious and weren’t really into, like, fun. But they’ve really come around.”

He tells me that one of the craziest shows he’s ever seen on the boat was when Bad Brains played in a room with open windows. (On some of the boats, the windows in the main room can be opened, while others have windows that stay sealed shut so the room stays air-conditioned.) “People started crowdsurfing and they were getting close to the windows and I almost had a heart attack,” he says. “I literally went into panic mode because I was afraid something really bad would happen and somebody was gonna go overboard. So that was very interesting.”

Szufnarowski recalls a few other highlights: a Fishbone show where Angelo Moore sang while hanging upside down from a balcony, a George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic show that packed 19 people onto the stage. “I had been trying to get George Clinton on the boat for a while, and after the show when I was paying him and settling up, he was like, ‘This has been one of the best shows I’ve played in my whole career!'”

Despite the success of Rocks Off’s business model, not every band is on board (pun intended). “When I first started this, everyone told me I was insane and that bands would never want to play on boats,” says Szufnarowski. “To this day, I reach out to a lot of agents and managers, and we get way more nos than yeses.” The ultimate one that got away? The Flaming Lips. Szufnarowski has tried to book them “every year,” and still, no dice. Maybe next time.

When I ask Brown what bands they’d like to see play on a boat, their wishlist includes bands like Sweet Baby Jesus, Deerhoof, and Geese.

It’s a question I find myself asking other attendees once I’m actually on board. Even after the show, when I mention in conversations that I’m working on a piece about concerts on boats, people are quick to offer up their dream boat show lineups.

An abbreviated list: Metallica, Björk, Paramore, Turnstile, Militarie Gun, Mannequin Pussy, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, the Strokes, Steely Dan.

I ask both Rachel Brown and Jake Szufnarowski if they have any guidance for a boat show virgin like myself. Per Brown’s advice, I eat beforehand, which makes it easy to pass on the $20 buffet available on board. Haunted by a childhood memory of a Boston Harbor whale watch in which I spent most of the ride puking into a plastic bag and saw exactly zero whales, I arrive armed with a full stomach and a pack of Dramamine tablets in my purse. As an extra precaution, the strongest thing I order from the bar is a ginger ale. I heed Szufnarowski’s wise words: “Pace yourself, don’t drink too much, charge your phone ’cause you’re gonna wanna take pictures, and come with a good attitude.”

The rockiest part of the cruise is the half hour while we’re still docked; it’s smooth sailing once the boat takes off. Since it’s 9/11, the New York skyline includes the Tribute in Light, two searchlight columns projected upwards in the place of the Twin Towers. Still more stunning is the moon that night, which hangs low, almost full, and bright orange.

I’d learned from Szufnarowski that the cruises are timed so that the boat gets closest to Liberty Island between the main support act and the headliner. “The only way to get closer to the Statue of Liberty is to be out on that island,” he says.

After taking in the views of the Statue, we flow into the main room for Charly Bliss’s high-energy set featuring a good mix of tracks from across their three-album discography, plus an unreleased cut from their — confirmed in person — fourth album. For the encore, they cover Yellowcard’s “Ocean Avenue” — technically on-theme for tonight’s nautical festivities, as it’s got the word “ocean” in the title.

Throughout their set, I find myself periodically forgetting and then remembering that we’re on a boat. Everything feels pretty stable, though at one point frontwoman Eva Hendricks, dressed in a fabulous Sailor Moon-inspired getup custom-made by stylist and fashion designer Kelsey Randall, remarks how strange it is to watch the crowd slowly shift back and forth. From my spot in the sea of people, the motion is less apparent — this is water, I guess.

The best thing about being a music fan in a major city can also be the worst — when there’s a wealth of great concerts on any given night, there’s always something to miss out on. I’m no stranger to catching a set at one venue and then running across the city (or just across the street) to another show, but with a boat show, you know exactly where the night is going to take you. There’s a real sense of presence at tonight’s show that you don’t get at traditional music venues, perhaps because playing or attending a boat show requires an extra degree of commitment.

“You go out for three hours and you kinda forget that the rest of the world exists,” says Szufnarowski. “Nobody’s getting on the boat who wasn’t there when it left and nobody’s getting off early and everybody’s just there celebrating the music and the band and you’re sort of lost in the moment. In the early 2000s that wasn’t too different from how you’d go to shows, because there weren’t cell phones and social media, so you never knew what other people were doing.”

It also explains why tonight’s Charly Bliss show is full of more people dancing and singing along to every song than I’ve ever seen at one of their sets. Other more traditional shows might attract more casual fans or curious newbies, but the boat show is a real-heads affair.

In the case of Charly Bliss, a New York Harbor tour seems especially appropriate, given that the frontwoman of this mostly-Brooklyn-based band has spent the past five years living on the other side of the world. COVID lockdown forced Eva Hendricks to extend her 2020 visit to Australia indefinitely; she ended up finding a day job, a group of close friends, and the man who’d end up becoming her husband there. Now when she’s not touring, she lives in the Land Down Under full time, so New York Charly Bliss shows always feel like homecoming celebrations for Hendricks. Seeing her and her band rock the waterways of the city that made them just feels right.

In this particular city, seeing any show on the water seems appropriate. “I’ve learned a lot about the harbor and the rivers in New York City just from being on the boats so frequently and talking to the captains,” Szufnarowski tells me proudly. “New York City is an archipelago. It’s over 50 islands that make up New York City. It’s kind of the original maritime metropolis of America, so what better way to celebrate that than to go see concerts out on the water?”