Pinch me I gotta be dreamin’ – the Ledge plays Greenpoint! Whoaaah Nelly, and I still got time to see The Jewish open for RTX at Club Midway before crossin’ back over the river.

The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, perhaps best known as part of David Bowie’s inspiration for Ziggy Stardust, and one of the more unique figures in American music history, is in our li’l ol’ humble burg to play the Bowie-curated High Line Festival. A psychobilly pioneer, cruder than Hasil Adkins, with a more pronounced sci-fi obsession than Styx circa 1983, the Ledge is a wobbly ol’ train comin’ round the bend howlin’ with the passion of our country’s finest eccentric traditions.

While most folks only know the Ledge for the song that originally brought him notoriety in 1968, the wild Doctor Demento novelty “Paralyzed!” (featuring the pounding of a young T-Bone Burnett), he’s written and performed a number of other exceptional compositions, including one that Bowie recorded, “Gemini Space Craft,” and my favorite, “Standing in a Trash Can (Thinking of You).”

Despite an appearance on Laugh-In immediately following “Paralyzed!,” the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s career rapidly derailed – not to roll again until his rediscovery in the mid-1980s. In the New York Night Train oral history feature with a section dedicated to The Ledge, guitar legend Kid Congo Powers, who, along with fellow Gun Clubber Patricia Morrison, backed our hero on his triumphant 1985 European tour, offers the following description:

He’s the real thing. It’s not an act – what he’s doing. It’s him and he’s this persona and he is it. He was very much in his own world. He just would expound his theories about everything – about outer space mostly and the space programs… And he just hoped and hollered. There was no following what he was going to do. Jeffrey Lee Pierce could have never have prepared us for what kind of following of a singer we would have to do with that because he had no sense of timing at all or anything. He would just go and we would just go with him. It was often really hysterical…. And he was super-popular and he always had lots of ladies afterwards giving him massage on the shoulders and buttoning up his shirt for him.

Stretch your fingers and bust out the oil ladies! He’s on his way.

Tonight the Ledge appears in an ideal setting, amidst the smoke and laser lights of Polish disco-cum-venue Eruopa backed by Dead Kennedys’ bassist Klaus Fluoride, and drummer Mike Burns. This brass rainbow’s gonna walk a hot wind as sure as eastern Greenpoint smells funny…