When I saw the line wrapped around the block at Asbury Park, the first question I asked myself is: "Am I too old to be here?"
They were young people, ones so dedicated to Michael Todd Gordon, the South Jersey musician known as Mk.Gee, that they wanted the first shot at being front and center at the Stone Pony, the beachside venue made famous by Bruce Springsteen. The second thing I noticed was that the parking lot was not as full of cars from New York as I expected—this was a local crowd. "Is this my hometown or what?" Mk.Gee called to the crowd when he got on stage. (He was born and raised in Linwood, further south in Atlantic County).
Mostly local. Eventually I did see a few city slickers—other music journalists who had driven down, publicists, and industry types like the three people next to me in line, a trio that included two young men with mullets and moustaches, and a graying man who sounded like an executive, or at least was talking about who he knew that was getting passive income from their song popped off on Instagram Reels. There were indeed musicians in the crowd, hungrily scoping out Mk.Gee's famously elaborate live rig, which looked to include Eurorack modular synthesizers, racks of studio processors, guitar effects pedalboards, and a laptop running a visible autotune plugin shamelessly.
In another lifetime, Mk.Gee would be trapped the ghetto of YouTube gear freaks, but the force of his persona—mulleted, enigmatic, taking a wide stance on stage in combat boots with the unsettling energy of an ROTC obsessive—it just works. When Timothée Chalamet needed a gimmick for his Saturday Night Live performances of Bob Dylan songs, he visibly pilfered the white boy swag Mk.Gee had brought to that stage just months before.