How the pandemic helped blow up Low Cut Connie’s Adam Weiner
(Photo by Skylar Watkins)
When COVID-19 threw the world into neutral back in March 2020, the live music industry came to a screeching halt thanks to a highly contagious pandemic with no vaccination solution on the horizon. Adam Weiner, whose alter-ego is cult act Low Cut Connie, was stuck at home wondering what his next step would be, particularly given the fact that he was used to playing 120-plus shows a year.
With the uncertainty of the future looming and putting Weiner into a substantial funk, it was Low Cut Connie’s fanbase that inspired him to start live-streaming under the moniker Tough Cookies, a decision that quickly went viral.
“Just like everybody, I was laying around feeling fairly depressed during the first week of quarantining,” Weiner said. “Everything was canceled and it was scary. A bunch of our fans were sending me messages asking if I could go live. I’d never gone live from my house before. So I went, ‘[Screw] it. We’ll do it.’ We did three of them and there was no plan, no set list, no rehearsal. I didn’t know if people were going to watch. But at the end of the hour of the first one, we had 4,000 people. During the second episode, which took place on a Saturday, we had 40,000. More important than that, people started sending us pictures and videos of themselves watching the show. There were people in hospitals in ICU beds watching the show. There were nurses watching the show. There were people in quarantine situations alone doing watch parties with their families. I decided I was going to do this for as long as this COVID-19 situation lasts and we’ve done 105 of them.”
Broadcasting from his home in South Philadelphia, Weiner is often accompanied by guitarist/collaborator Will Donnelly during this weekly one-hour broadcast. Weiner quickly expanded it into more of a variety show format where he juggled shows with themes based on someone’s birthday (Tina Turner and Willie Nelson’s birthdays were recognized), the passing of a notable artist (Little Richard) or any of the myriad artists he started interviewing. Guests have included members of Sly and the Family Stone, Frankie Valli, Joan Osborne, Matthew Sweet and one of the last interviews Mike Nesmith of The Monkees did before his recent passing. That facet of Tough Cookies grew out of recent social turmoil.
“It was back in spring 2020 after the George Floyd murder,” Weiner recalled. “I was speaking to my friend Patty [Jackson], who is a very prominent black DJ here in Philadelphia. She’s been on the radio for 40 years and said it was hard to go on the radio at that time because she didn’t know what to say, because we had riots outside of our house and all over the city. I was supposed to go on camera live and I instead decided we should go on together and talk to each other about this moment and how challenging it is to say the right thing. So we did the interview and talked about the moment. She talked about her neighborhood and I talked about my neighborhood. And then I decided to just keep it going and every week I would have another person. I used these interviews to talk about different issues, especially in the entertainment business. I interviewed Darlene Love about racism and sexism she faced in the ‘60s, working with Phil Spector. It just went from there. I ended up interviewing authors, politicians, musicians and actors. It grew into a proper interview/variety show.”
While Low Cut Connie’s origins date back to an impromptu 2010 recording session by Weiner and three other musicians (Weiner is the only original member left), the piano-playing frontman who counts Professor Longhair, Elton John and James Booker as influences, admits the band was only a part-time priority for the first handful of years. While he was supplementing his income by tutoring on the side in New York City, it wasn’t until President Barack Obama included Low Cut Connie’s “Boozophilia” on his inaugural Spotify list back in 2015 that Weiner’s attitude changed. It was the kind of affirmation he needed.
“We were working so hard, but we really weren’t getting any breaks in the music business,” Weiner explained. “[It was incredible] to have Obama pick the song while he was president and then get to meet him and have him be so encouraging. It didn’t necessarily change my career. It wasn’t that kind of thing. But it changed my attitude. I knew it was time to quit my day job and put the gas pedal down with the band. I knew this music was reaching people and I had to keep it going.”
Now that venues are opening and touring is slowly coming back, Low Cut Connie is getting back to promoting Private Lives, the band’s critically acclaimed 2020 2-CD release featuring Weiner and Donnelly along with the fluid contributions of roughly 30 musicians. Recorded over a four-year span from 2016 up until 2020, Weiner calls LCC’s sixth studio outing his “road album” as it was recorded in bits and pieces while he was touring and releasing other albums.
“Given that I was always traveling a couple of hundred days a year, there wasn’t time to sit down for a couple of weeks and go to the studio,” Weiner said. “I would grab a couple of days here and a couple of days there. If I was on tour in California or in Tennessee, I’d grab two days off here and there. It was a big mess. Sometimes I was by myself and sometimes I’d grab this or that group. I think I had five or six different engineers and I think we worked in six or seven different studios over the four years. As we were getting into 2020, it was a matter of making sense of the mess I’d made. I really buckled down and finished it in January and February 2020, which was right before COVID-19. Like a lot of people’s albums, it had nothing to do with the isolating of quarantining but as soon as we went into the quarantine, these songs all took on a different meaning.”
As a live performer, the piano-pounding Weiner is loud, sweaty, profane and passionate in a way that great rock and roll should be—sloppy, loose and fun. It’s something fans can expect when they come out to see Low Cut Connie.
“Anybody that comes to see me play knows that I give 125 percent every night and they’re going to get their hair messed up,” Weiner said. “They’re going to sweat and have a wild night. It’s a full-body, all-your-emotions and all-your-senses rock and roll show. Now we made some modifications because of the COVID-19 era, but that doesn’t mean we can’t give people the best night ever. That’s what I like to do and I just hope people will come check it out because we’ve waited long enough for this cross-country tour and I’m really ready to light some people up.”
