Trio Plays at Bay Ridge Pub
Featuring Artifacts from Monastery
By David Pambianchi
Special to the Eagle
BAY RIDGE — When you mix an Irish pub called The Wicked Monk and a band of two Brooklyn schoolteachers and a friend named “3 Sheets To The Wind,” then add lovely barmaid Maria wearing a Santa Claus hat, you get one cheerful, nostalgic night of classic rock from the Beatles to ZZ Top.
Throw in a little Hendrix and Dylan influence, and memories soar.
Yes, teachers can be cool! Amid the pub’s Gothic arches and stained glass windows brought from Ireland, a ceiling mural, pulpit, brick and stone, Fort Hamilton High School art instructor/ tennis coach Andy Sachs (guitar and lead vocals), who grew up in Canarsie; Parsons teacher/art director Mark Kaplan (drums and vocals), who went to New Utrecht High School; and Tim Farrell, construction, (bass and vocals), shake up the place.
The pub at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue, by the way, also includes a phone booth confessional, gargoyles and a stuffed wild boar and bull’s head. Many of the artifacts come from the Green Mount Monastery in Ireland.
Andy Sachs and Mark Kaplan are first cousins, and the group got together in 2003. Their songs include three-part vocal harmony as well as instrumental rock. Each musician played in earlier bands “all our lives — we’re all in our late 40s or 50s,” Kaplan said. “I actually turned my cousin Andy on to music when he was a little boy and I was a teenager.”
Would the Wicked Monk himself find himself at home in Bay Ridge, here in the “borough of churches?” One thing is certain: memories are recreated, built upon with help, with the nostalgic music that bands like “3 Sheets to the Wind” provide.
A new generation of students will one day hear a familiar sound causing them to reminisce as they recall their own life and times, contemplate the Monk’s era past, or their teachers’ paths through the years, and that part of their own lives that includes their instructors.
The band goes over very well — especially since many of their fellow teachers come out to see them. Perhaps, in the end, it is all too simple, good music, and good times with friends.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2006
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